Хеннинг Манкелль - A Treacherous Paradise

She had chosen to stand in the stern of the ship because that’s where the galley was — just as it had been on the Lovisa . Working inside the cramped kitchen, oozing with smoke and cooking smells, were an incredibly fat black woman, and two men who might well have been chosen because they were so thin. Otherwise there would never have been room for them as well as the wood-burning stove and all the pots and pans and chipped crockery.

There were not many passengers on board. Hanna had the best cabin, but every evening she had to wage war on masses of cockroaches, which she crushed with a shoe. Over her head she could hear the coughing and scraping noises made by the deck passengers as they wrapped themselves up in their sleeping bags to sleep.

She occasionally spoke to Captain Fortuna. Hanna gathered his origins could be traced back to practically everywhere in the world. On her second day on board he had asked her where she came from.

‘Sweden,’ she had said. ‘A country up in the far north. Where the Northern Lights illuminate the night sky.’

She had not been totally convinced that he knew where her homeland was, but she politely asked where he came from.

‘My mother was Greek,’ he said. ‘My mother’s father came from Persia and his mother was born in India, but she had her roots in one of the South Sea Islands. My father was a Turk, but his ancestry was in fact a mixture of Jewish, Moroccan and a drop of blood from distant Japan. I regard myself as an Arabian African, or an African Arab. The ocean belongs to everybody.’

Hanna took her meals in her cabin, served by one of the thin men she had seen in the galley. She ate very little, spent most of the time resting on her bunk or standing in the stern, tracing the contours of the dark continent through the heat haze.

At one point the steam engine broke down. They drifted for almost a full day before the mechanic managed to trace and repair the fault so that they could continue their voyage to Beira.

It was dusk when she walked along the gangplank and set foot in the unknown town. She was followed by two crew members who had been ordered by Captain Fortuna to carry her luggage and accompany her to the Africa Hotel. That was where she would stay while she was searching for Isabel’s parents.

As she entered through the illuminated doors, she was astonished by the splendour surrounding her on all sides. She had thought the hotel Pandre stayed in was the most palatial she had ever seen in her life, but the Africa Hotel in Beira exceeded anything she could possibly have dreamt of. She moved into the second-largest suite in the hotel as the marriage suite was already booked. That first evening she was served a meal in her room, and drank champagne for only the second time in her life: the first time was the evening when she and Senhor Vaz had married.

The following day she started looking for Isabel’s parents. She had been assisted by the hotel to recruit two African men who could show her around the slum districts where she assumed Isabel’s parents would live. With the aid of the two men she spent over a week combing all the outlying settlements around Beira. As she had never visited any of the African districts in Lourenço Marques, it came as a shock for her to discover the conditions in which black people lived. She discovered squalor and suffering way beyond her imagination. Every evening she would sit in her lovely rooms in a state of petrified horror. She almost stopped eating altogether while the search was taking place. At night she had a succession of nightmares, nearly all of which transported her back to the river and the mountains where she failed to find the home she had left so long ago.

But after a few days she noticed something else when she made her repeated visits to the black settlements. She discovered an unexpected lust for life among the poorest of the poor. The slightest reason for feeling joy was not tossed disdainfully aside, but seized with both hands. People supported one another, even though they had virtually nothing that they could share.

One evening she tried to note down in her diary what it was she thought she had discovered, once she had managed to dig down deeper under the surface of all the poverty and squalor.

She wrote: ‘Amidst this incomprehensible poverty I can see islands of wealth. Happiness that ought not to exist, warmth that should never really have survived. This discovery enables me to see in the white people who live here a different kind of poverty among all their riches and well-being.’

She read through what she had written. She thought she hadn’t quite managed to work out exactly what she had experienced; but nevertheless she felt that for the first time she had seen the reality of the black people and their lives. Until now, her perspective had been twisted.

Perhaps, coming from the most poverty-stricken level of society in Sweden, she had more in common with blacks than she had previously realized.

The next day she continued her search for Isabel’s parents. Every step she took, every person she saw, convinced her that what she had written the previous night had been correct.

For the first time she was struck by a totally unexpected thought: perhaps I might be able to feel at home here after all. She realized that she was not just searching for Isabel’s parents: she was also searching for an entirely new way of looking at herself.

During the days she was looking for Isabel’s parents, the hotel was making preparations for a major wedding celebration. A Portuguese prince was going to marry an English duchess. At anchor in the roadstead were several large yachts that had made the journey from Europe. Hanna was the only person staying at the hotel who was not one of the wedding guests. Needless to say, she received an invitation even so, seeing as she was on the spot. She accepted, and despite everything had to acknowledge that she felt safe and secure to be surrounded by white people after all the misery and squalor she had encountered in the African settlements.

She was on the point of giving up: she didn’t think she would ever be able to find Isabel’s parents and tell them that Isabel was dead. She paid her two guides, and watched them stare at the many banknotes she handed over with amazement, almost fear.

The wedding was due to take place that same evening. Hanna spent the afternoon in the shady part of the hotel grounds, so as not to disturb the intensive preparations.

She suddenly found an elderly man standing in front of her, a white man wearing a dark suit. He must have been about sixty. Hanna wanted to be left in peace, and at first found his presence importunate: but she noticed that his friendliness seemed to be genuine, and that he was simply looking for somebody to talk to.

They watched the colourful birds with long beaks flying around the bushes and flowers.

‘I’m on my way,’ said the man suddenly.

‘Aren’t we all?’ Hanna responded.

‘My name’s Harold ffendon,’ said the man. ‘I used to be called something completely different — I can no longer recall what. But my father was called Wilson, John Wilson, and was never known as anything but Jack. Now I’m on my way to what in his time was known as Van Diemen’s Land.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘It’s called Tasmania nowadays. But when my father lived there it was a notorious penal colony — England sent many of its worst criminals there either to die, or simply to disappear from the city streets in their homeland. My father had stolen a pair of shoes in the city of Bristol and for that he was exiled for fifteen years. When he’d served his sentence he chose to stay on there. He became a sheep farmer, but he also learnt the art of building organs. He’s dead now, but I intend to go out there and live close to where he did.’