Henning Mankell - The Return of the Dancing Master

Now, in Wetterstedt’s stuffy apartment, that donation had caught up with him. He couldn’t close his eyes to facts. His father had been a Nazi. One of those who kept quiet about it, didn’t speak openly about their political opinions. It was incomprehensible, but true nevertheless. Lindman now realized why Wetterstedt had asked about his name, and where he came from. He knew something Lindman didn’t know: that his own father was among those Wetterstedt admired above all others. Lindman’s father had been like Molin and Berggren.

He closed the drawer, pushed back the desk lamp, and noticed that his hand was shaking. Then he checked everything meticulously before leaving the room. It was 1:45 A.M. He needed to get away fast, away from what was hidden in Wetterstedt’s desk. He paused in the hall, and listened. Then he opened the door and went out, shutting it behind him as tightly as he could.

At that very moment there came the sound of the front door opening or closing. He stood motionless in the darkness, holding his breath and keeping his ears pricked. No sound of footsteps on the stairs. Someone might be standing down there, hidden in the dark, he thought. He kept on listening, and also checked to make sure he’d remembered to take everything with him. The flashlight, the screwdriver, the jimmy. All present and correct. He went down one floor tentatively. The lunacy of the whole undertaking had now hit him like an ice-cold shower. Not only had he committed a pointless break-in, he’d also unearthed a secret he’d infinitely preferred never to have discovered.

He paused, listened, and then switched on the lights in the staircase. He walked down the last two flights to the front door. He looked around when he emerged onto the street. No one. He hugged the wall of the block of apartments to the end, then crossed the street. When he reached his car he looked around again, but could see no sign of anybody having followed him. Nevertheless, he was quite sure. He wasn’t imagining things. Someone had left the building as he was closing the damaged door to the apartment.

He turned on the engine and backed out of his parking spot. He didn’t see the man in the shadows writing down his registration number.

He drove out of Kalmar, on the Västervik road. There was an all-night diner there. A semi was parked outside. When he went into the café, he noticed the driver immediately, sitting with his head against the wall, sleeping with his mouth open. Nobody here will wake you up, he thought. An all-night diner is not like a library.

The woman behind the counter gave him a smile. She had a nametag: she was called Erika. He poured himself a cup of coffee.

“Are you a truck driver?” she said.

“Afraid not.”

“Professional drivers don’t need to pay for coffee during the night.”

“Maybe I should change jobs,” he said.

She declined his offer to pay. He took a good look at her and decided she had a pretty face, in spite of the stark light from the fluorescent lights on the ceiling.

When he sat down, he realized how exhausted he was. He still couldn’t come to terms with what he’d found in Wetterstedt’s desk drawer. He would have to face up to that later, but not now.

He drank his coffee, decided against a refill. He was in Borås by 9, by way of Jönköping. He’d stopped twice and taken a nap. On both occasions he’d been woken by headlights in his face.

He undressed and stretched out on the bed. I got away with it, he thought. Nobody will be able to prove that I broke into Wetterstedt’s apartment. Nobody saw me. Before going to sleep, he tried to work out how many days he’d been away. He couldn’t make it add up. Nothing added up.

He closed his eyes and thought about the woman who hadn’t charged him for his coffee. He had already forgotten her name.

He had disposed of the tools on the road home, but when he woke up after a few hours of restless sleep, he began to wonder if he’d only imagined it. The first thing he did was to go through his pockets. No sign of the tools. Somewhere not far from Jönköping, at the coldest and darkest time of the night, he had stopped to sleep. Before driving away from the rest stop, he’d buried the jimmy and the screwdriver under the moss. He remembered exactly what he’d done, but even so, he couldn’t help wondering. He seemed to be unsure of everything now.

He stood at the window, looking down over Allégatan. He could hear Mrs. Håkansson playing the piano in the apartment downstairs. This was a regular occurrence, every day except Sunday. She played the piano from 11:15 to 12:15. Always the same piece, over and over again. There was a detective inspector at the police station who was interested in classical music. Once Lindman had tried to hum the tune for him, and the inspector had said without hesitation that it was Chopin. Lindman had later bought a record with that particular mazurka. For some time when he was working nights and sleeping during the day he would try to play the record simultaneously with Mrs. Håkansson’s playing, but he had never managed to get the two versions synchronized.

She was playing now. In my chaotic world, she’s the only thing that is unchanging, he thought. He looked into the street. The self-discipline he had hitherto taken for granted didn’t exist any longer. It had been sheer idiocy to break into Wetterstedt’s apartment. Even if he’d left no trace behind, even if he’d taken nothing other than a piece of knowledge he would have preferred to be without.

He finished his breakfast and gathered the dirty laundry he was going to take to Elena’s. There was a laundry room in the basement of the apartments where he lived, but he hardly ever used it. Then he fetched a photo album he kept in a bureau, and sat with it on the living room sofa. His mother had collected the pictures and given him the album as a twenty-first birthday present. He remembered how, when he was very small, his father had taken photographs with a box camera. After that he’d bought more modern models, and the last pictures in the book had been taken by a Minolta SLR camera. It had always been his father taking the pictures, never his mother, although he’d used the self-timer whenever practical. Lindman studied the pictures, his mother on the left and his father on the right. There was always a hint of stress in his father’s face, as if he had only just come into the picture before it was taken. It often went awry. Lindman remembered once when there was only one exposure left on the film and his father had stumbled as he hurried away from the camera. He leafed through the album. There were his sisters side-by-side, and his mother staring straight at the lens.

What do my sisters know about their father’s political views? Presumably nothing. What did my mother know? And could she have shared his opinions?

He started over again and worked his way slowly through the album, one picture at a time.

1969, he’s seven. His first day at school. Colors starting to fade. He remembered how proud he was of his new dark blue blazer.

1971, he’s nine. It’s summer. They’ve gone to Varberg, and rented a little cottage on the island of Getterön. Beach towels among the rocks, a transistor radio. He could even remember the music being played when the picture was taken: “Sail along, silvery moon.” He remembered because his father had said what it was called just before pressing the self-timer. It was idyllic there among the rocks, his father, mother, himself, and his two teenaged sisters. The sun was bright, the shadows solid, and the colors faded, as usual.

Pictures only show the surface, he thought. Something quite different was going on underneath. I had a father who led a double life. Perhaps there were other families in cottages on Getterön that he would visit and get involved in discussions about the Fourth Reich that he must have hoped would come to pass sooner or later. When Lindman was growing up, in the 1960s and 1970s, there had never been any mention of Nazism. He had a vague memory of classmates at school hissing “Jewish swine” at some unpleasant person who wasn’t in fact Jewish at all. There were swastikas drawn on the bathroom walls at school, and the caretaker would be furious and try to scrub them off. Even so, he certainly couldn’t recall any symptoms of Nazism.