Henning Mankell - The Return of the Dancing Master

Lindman went back outside and shouted yet again. The dog continued barking, running back and forth on its line. He walked towards it. The dog stopped barking and started wagging its tail. He stroked it cautiously. Not much of a guard dog, he thought. Then he went back to the car and collected the flashlight. He shone it around, feeling all the time that something was very amiss. Andersson’s car was parked beside a toolshed. Lindman checked and found it was unlocked. He looked inside and saw the keys in the ignition. The dog barked again; then all was silent. There was a rustling of wind through the trees in the darkness. He pricked up his ears, then shouted again. The dog answered him with a bark. Lindman went back to the house. He felt the burners on the stove. They were cold. A telephone rang. Lindman gave a start. The telephone was on a table in the living room. He picked up the receiver. Somebody was trying to send a fax. He pressed the start button and put down the receiver. It was a handwritten note from somebody named Katarina saying, “The Monteverdi sheet music has come.”

Lindman went back outside. Now he was certain that something was wrong.

The dog, he thought. It knows. He went back to the house and took a leash hanging from the wall.

The dog jerked at the line when he approached, then stood quite still while he attached the leash to its collar and released it from the line. Immediately it began dragging him towards the forest behind the house. Lindman turned on his flashlight. The dog was heading for a path into the pine trees. Lindman tried to hold it back. I shouldn’t be doing this, he thought, not if there’s a madman loose in the forest.

The dog turned off the path. Lindman followed, restraining it as much as he could. It was rough ground, and he kept stumbling in the undergrowth. The dog forged ahead.

Then it stopped, raised one of its front paws, and sniffed the air. He shone his flashlight among the trees. The dog put down its paw. Lindman pulled at the leash. It resisted, but the leash was long enough for Lindman to tie it around a tree trunk.

The dog was staring intently at some rocks just visible through a dense clump of pine trees. Lindman went towards the trees and walked around them. He made out a path leading to the rocks.

He stopped. At first he wasn’t sure what he’d seen. Something white, shining. Then, to his horror, he realized that it was Andersson. He was naked, tied to a tree. His chest was covered in blood. His eyes were open and staring straight at Lindman. But the gaze was as lifeless as Abraham Andersson himself.

When Aron Silberstein woke up he didn’t know who he was. There was a belt of fog between dream and reality that he had to find his way through to discover if he really was Aron Silberstein, or if at that moment he was Fernando Hereira. In his dreams his two names often switched. Every time he woke up, he experienced a moment of great confusion. This morning was no exception when he opened his eyes and saw light seeping through the canvas. He slid his arm out of his sleeping bag and looked at his watch. It was 9:03. He listened. All quiet. The night before he’d turned off the main road after passing through a town called Falköping. Then he’d driven through a little hamlet with a name something like Gudhem and found a farm road leading into the forest, and there he’d been able to pitch his tent.

And that was where he had just woken up, feeling that he had to force his way out of his dreams. It was raining, a thin drizzle with occasional drops pecking against the canvas. He put his arm back into his sleeping bag to keep warm. Every morning he was overcome by the same yearning for warmth. Sweden was a cold country in the autumn. He’d learned that during his long stay.

Soon it would all be over. He would drive to Malmö. He’d return his rented car, get rid of the tent, and spend a night in a hotel. Early the next day he would make his way to Copenhagen and in the afternoon board a plane that would take him home to Buenos Aires by way of Frankfurt and São Paulo.

He settled down in the sleeping bag and closed his eyes. He didn’t need to get up yet. His mouth was dry and he had a headache. I overdid it last night, he thought. I drank too much, more than I needed to, in order to get to sleep.

He was tempted to open his backpack and take out one of the bottles inside it, but he couldn’t risk being stopped by the police. Before leaving Argentina he’d been to the Swedish Embassy in Buenos Aires to find out about the traffic laws in Sweden. He had discovered that there was zero tolerance when it came to alcohol. That had surprised him since he’d read in a newspaper article some time ago that Swedes were heavy drinkers and were often drunk in public. He resisted the temptation to drink this morning. At least he wouldn’t smell of alcohol if the police were to stop him.

Light trickled in through the canvas. He thought about the dream he’d had during the night. In it he was Aron Silberstein again. He was a child and his father Lukas was still with him. His father was a dancing master and he received his pupils at home in their Berlin apartment. It was during that last horrific year — he knew because in the dream his father had shaved off his mustache. He’d done that a couple of months before the catastrophe. They were sitting in the only room that didn’t have broken windows. Just the two of them, Aron and his father: the rest of the family had disappeared. And they waited. They said nothing, just waited, nothing else. Even now, after fifty-four years, it seemed to him that his childhood was one long, drawn-out wait. Waiting and terror. All the awful things that happened outside in the streets, when the sirens sounded and they scurried down into the shelter, had never affected him. What would come to dominate his life was the waiting.

He crawled out of his sleeping bag. Took out an aspirin and the water bottle. He looked at his hands. They were shaking. He put the pill in his mouth and washed it down. Then he crawled out of the tent to pee. The ground was cold and wet under his bare feet. One more day and I’ll be away from all this, he thought. All this cold, the long nights. He crawled back into the tent, down into the sleeping bag and pulled it up to his chin. The temptation to take a swig from one of the bottles was there all the time, but he would wait. Now that he’d come as far as this he was determined not to take any unnecessary risks.

The rain grew heavier. Everything went as it was destined to go, he told himself. I waited for more than fifty years for that moment to come. I’d almost, but only almost, given up the hope of finding the explanation for what had ruined my life, and how to avenge it. Then the unexpected happened. By some totally incredible coincidence somebody turned up and was able to supply the piece of the jigsaw that enabled me to discover what had happened. A chance meeting that should have been inconceivable.

He decided that as soon as he got back to Buenos Aires he would go to the cemetery where Höllner was buried and put a flower on his grave. If not for him he would never have been able to carry out his mission. There was some kind of mysterious, possibly even divine justice that enabled him to meet Höllner before he died, and find out the answers to the questions he’d been asking for so long. Discovering what happened that day when he was only a child had put him in a state of shock. Never before had he drunk as much as he did for some time after that meeting. But then, when Höllner died, he’d forced himself to sober up and reduce his drinking so that he could go to work again and devise a plan.