Henning Mankell - The Return of the Dancing Master

And now it was all over.

As the rain pattered on the canvas, he ran through what had happened. First, the meeting with Höllner, whom he’d met by pure chance in La Cãbana. That was two years ago. Even then Höllner was showing signs of the stomach cancer that would soon kill him. It was Filip Monteiro, the old waiter with the glass eye, who had asked him if would consider sharing a table one night when the restaurant was very full. He’d been seated at a table with Höllner.

They knew immediately that they were both immigrants from Germany — they had similar accents. He had expected to discover that Höllner was one of the large group of Germans who came to Argentina via the well-organized lifelines that helped Nazis flee the Third Reich, which was supposed to last for a thousand years but now lay in ruins. At first Silberstein hadn’t given his real name. Höllner might easily have been one of those who entered the country on false papers; perhaps he’d landed in Argentina from one of the U-boats that were sailing up and down the coast of Argentina in the spring of 1945. He might also have been assisted by one of the Nazi groups that operated out of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Or he might have come later, when Juan Perón opened his political arms to welcome German immigrants without asking any questions about their past. Silberstein knew that Argentina was full of Nazis who had gone to ground, war criminals who lived in constant fear of being arrested. People who had never renounced their beliefs and still had a bust of Hitler in a prominent position at home. But Höllner was not one of those. He’d referred to the war as the catastrophe it was. His father had been a high-ranking Nazi, but Höllner himself was one of the many German immigrants who had come to Argentina in search of a future they thought they could never find in the ruins of Europe.

They had shared a table at La Cãbana. Silberstein could still remember that they’d ordered the same meal — a meat stew the chefs at La Cãbana made better than anybody else. Afterwards they’d walked home together since they lived in the same neighborhood, Silberstein in Avenida Corrientes and Höllner a few blocks further on. They arranged to meet again. Höllner explained that he was a widower whose children had returned to Europe. Until recently he had been running a printing business, but now he’d sold it. Silberstein invited him to visit the workshop where he restored old furniture. Höllner accepted the invitation, and then it became the norm for him to visit Silberstein in the mornings. He seemed never to tire of watching Silberstein painstakingly reupholster an old chair brought in by some member of the Argentinean upper classes. They would occasionally go out to the courtyard for coffee and a smoke.

They had compared their lives, as old people do. And it was while they were doing so that Höllner asked in passing if Silberstein happened to be related to a certain Herr Jacob Silberstein from Berlin, who had escaped being deported with his fellow Jews in the 1930s and then avoided all other forms of persecution during the war because he was the only person who could give Hermann Goering a satisfactory massage to ease his back pain. Feeling that history had caught up with him in one stroke, Silberstein told him that the masseur Jacob Silberstein was his uncle. And that it was thanks to the special privileges enjoyed by Jacob that his brother Lukas, Silberstein’s father, had also evaded deportation. Höllner explained that he himself had met Jacob Silberstein because his own father had also been massaged by him.

Silberstein had immediately closed his workshop and posted a notice on the door stating that he wouldn’t be back until the following day. Then he’d accompanied Höllner to his home, not far from the harbor in a badly maintained block of apartments. Höllner had a small apartment overlooking the rear courtyard. Silberstein could remember the strong scent of lavender and all the awful watercolors of the Pampas painted by Höllner’s wife. They had talked long into the night about the amazing coincidences, how their paths had crossed in Berlin so many years ago. Höllner was three years younger than Silberstein. He was only nine in 1945, and his memories were fuzzy. But he remembered the man who was fetched by car once a week to give his father a massage. He even remembered thinking that there was something remarkable about it, something remarkable and also a little dangerous, in that a Jew (whose name he didn’t know at that time) was still there in Berlin. And, moreover, a man being protected by no less a person than the terrifying Reichsmarschall Goering. But when he recounted what he remembered about Jacob Silberstein’s appearance and his gait, Silberstein knew that there could have been no misunderstanding: Höllner was talking about his uncle.

The key reference was to an ear, his left ear, that Jacob Silberstein had disfigured as a child, cutting himself on a shattered window pane. Silberstein broke into a sweat when Höllner described the ear he remembered so vividly. There was no doubt at all, and Silberstein was so touched that he felt obliged to embrace Höllner.

Now, lying in his tent, he remembered all that as if it had happened only yesterday. Silberstein checked his watch. 10:15. He changed identity again in his thoughts. Now he was Fernando Hereira. He had landed in Sweden as Hereira. He was an Argentinean citizen on vacation in Sweden. Nothing else. Least of all Aron Silberstein, who arrived in Buenos Aires one spring day in 1953 and had never been back to Europe since. Not until now, when he finally had an opportunity to do what he’d been longing to do all those years.

He dressed, broke camp, and drove back to the main road. He stopped for lunch outside Varberg. His headache had cleared up by now. Two more hours and he’d be in Malmö. The car rental company was next to the train station. That was where he’d gotten the car forty days earlier, and that was where he would return it. No doubt he’d be able to find a hotel nearby. Before then he would have to get rid of the tent and the sleeping bag. He’d dumped the camping stove, saucepans, and plates in a dumpster at a rest stop in Dalarna. He’d thrown all the cutlery into a river he’d driven over. He would keep a lookout for a suitable place to offload the rest of his stuff before he got to Malmö.

He found what he was looking for a few kilometers north of Helsingborg: a dump behind a gas station where he’d stopped to fill up for the last time. He buried the tent and the sleeping bag under the cardboard boxes and plastic bottles that already filled the dump. Then he took out a plastic bag lying at the top of his backpack. It contained a bloodstained shirt. Although he’d been wearing coveralls that he’d burned while still up there in the forest, Molin had managed to cover his shirt in blood. How it had happened was still a mystery. Just as big a mystery as why he hadn’t burned the shirt when he’d disposed of the coveralls.

Deep down, though, he knew the answer. He’d kept the shirt so that he could look at it and convince himself that what had happened was real, not simply a dream. Now he didn’t need it any longer. The time for remembering was in the past. He dug the plastic bag as deep into the dump as he could. As he did so, his mind turned again to Höllner, the pale man that he’d met at La Cãbana. Had it not been for him, he wouldn’t be here now, shedding the last physical traces of a journey to Sweden during which he’d taken a person’s life, and sent a final horrific greeting to the equally horrific past by means of some blood-soaked footprints he’d left behind on a wooden floor.

From now on the only traces would be inside his head.

He returned to his car and sat at the wheel without starting the engine. A question was nagging away at the back of his mind. It had been there ever since the night he’d attacked Molin’s house. A question regarding an unexpected discovery he’d made about himself. He had felt frightened on the way to Sweden. He’d spent the whole of the long flight wondering how he would manage to complete the mission he’d set himself. A mission comprising a single task: killing a man. So far in his life he had never been anywhere even close to harming another human being. He hated violence, he was scared stiff of being assaulted himself. But there he was, on his way to another continent to kill a man in cold blood. A man he’d met six or seven times before, when he was twelve years old.