Хеннинг Манкелль - Italian Shoes

The hydrocopter vanished behind the headland. I had fixed a pair of old hunting clamps to my boots, so that I wouldn’t keep slipping on the ice.

My rucksack weighed nine kilos. I had checked the weight on my grandmother’s old bathroom scales. I walked quickly, but avoided working up a sweat. I always feel afraid when I have to walk on ice covering deep water. It’s nerve-racking. Just off the easternmost headland of my island is a deep depression known as the Clay Pit, which at one point is fifty-six metres deep.

I squinted in the dazzling sunlight, reflected off the ice. I could see some people on skates in the distance, heading for the outermost skerries. Otherwise, nothing — the archipelago in winter is like a desert. An empty world with occasional caravans of ice skaters. And now and then, a nomad like me.

When I came to the mainland at the old fishing village whose little harbour is hardly ever used nowadays, Harriet was sitting in my car, waiting for me. I collapsed the walker and packed it away in the boot, then sat down behind the wheel.

‘Thank you,’ said Harriet. ‘Thank you for this.’

She stroked my arm briefly. I started the engine, and we set off on our long journey northwards.

The journey began badly.

We’d barely gone a mile when an elk suddenly strode into the middle of the road. It was as if it had been waiting in the wings, to make a dramatic entrance as we approached. I slammed on the brakes and narrowly missed crashing into its massive body. The car skidded and we became stuck in a snowdrift at the side of the road. It all happened in a flash. I had screamed out loudly, but there hadn’t been a sound from Harriet. We sat there in silence. The elk had bounded away into the dense forest.

‘I wasn’t speeding at all,’ I said in a lame and totally unnecessary attempt to excuse myself. As if it had been my fault that an elk had been lurking around at the side of the road, and chosen that moment to take a closer look at us.

‘It’s OK,’ said Harriet.

I looked at her. Perhaps there’s no need to be frightened of elks that appear from nowhere when you’re shortly going to die?

The car was well and truly stuck. I fetched a spade from the boot, cleared the snow away from around the front wheels, broke off some fir branches and laid them on the road behind the wheels. I then reversed out of the drift with a sudden spurt, and we were able to continue our journey.

After another six or seven miles, I could feel the car starting to pull to the left. I pulled over and got out. We had a puncture in a front tyre. It occurred to me that the journey could hardly have started any worse than this. It is not a pleasant experience, kneeling down in snow and ice, messing about with nuts and bolts and handling dirty tyres. I have not been deserted by the surgeon’s demand for cleanliness during an operation.

I was soaking in sweat by the time I’d finished changing the tyre. I was also angry. I would never be able to find the pool. Harriet would collapse, and no doubt a relative or friend would turn up and accuse me of acting irresponsibly, undertaking such a long journey with somebody that ill.

We set off again.

The road was slippery, the snow piled up at the sides of the road very high. We met a couple of lorries, and passed an old Volvo Amazon parked on the hard shoulder: a man was just getting out with his dog. Harriet said nothing. She was gazing out through the passenger window.

I started thinking about the journey to the pool I’d made with my father a long time ago. He had just been sacked again for refusing to work evenings at the restaurant that had employed him. We drove north out of Stockholm and spent the night in a cheap hotel just outside Gävle. I have a vague memory of it having been called Furuvik, but I may be mistaken. We shared a room; it was in July, very stuffy, one of the hottest summers of the late forties.

As my father had been working at one of Stockholm’s leading restaurants, he had been earning good money. It was a period when my mother cried unusually little. One day, my father came home with a new hat for her. On that occasion she cried tears of happiness. That very same day he had served the director of one of Sweden’s biggest banks, who was very drunk even though it was an early lunch, and he had given my father far too big a tip.

As I understood it, being given too large a tip was just as degrading for my father as being given too little, or even no tip at all. Nevertheless, he had converted the tip into a red hat for my mother.

She didn’t want to come with us when my father suggested that we should go on a trip to Norrland and enjoy a few days’ holiday before he needed to start looking for work again.

We had an old car. No doubt my father had started saving up for it at a very early age. Early in the morning, we clambered into that selfsame car and left Stockholm, taking the main road to Uppsala.

We spent the night at that hotel I think might have been called Furuvik. I remember waking up shortly before dawn and seeing my father standing naked in front of the window, gazing out through the thin curtain. He looked as if he’d been petrified in the middle of a thought. For what seemed like an eternity but was probably just a brief moment, I was scared to death and convinced that he was about to desert me. It was as though only a shell were standing there in front of me, nothing else. Inside the skin a large vacuum. I don’t know how long he stood there immobile, but I clearly recall my breathless fear that he was going to abandon me. In the end he turned round, glanced at me as I lay there with the covers pulled up to my chin and my eyes half closed. He went back to bed, and it was not until I was sure he was asleep that I turned over and lay with my head pressed up against the wall, and went back to sleep.

We reached our destination the following day.

The pool was not large. The water was completely black. On the opposite side to where we were standing, cliffs towered up; but either side was dense forest. There was no shore as such, no transition between water and forest. It was as if the water and the trees were locked together in a trial of strength, with neither being able to cast the other to one side.

My father tapped me on the shoulder.

‘Let’s go for a swim,’ he said.

‘I don’t have any swimming trunks with me.’

He looked at me in amusement.

‘Who do you think does? Who do you think’s going to see us? Dangerous forest goblins hiding in among the trees?’

He started to undress. I observed his large body surreptitiously, and felt embarrassed. He had an enormous belly that bulged out and wobbled when he removed his underpants. I followed suit, nervously aware of my own nakedness. My father waded out and then flopped down into the water. His body seemed to be surging forward like a gigantic whale, causing chaos in every part of the pool. The mirror-like surface was shattered in his wake. I waded out and felt the chill of the water. For some reason I had expected the water to be the same temperature as the air. It was so hot in among the trees that steam was rising. But the water was cold. I took a quick dip, then hurried to get out.

My father swam round and round with powerful strokes and kicks that created cascades of icy water. And he sang. I don’t recall what he sang, but it was more a bellow of delight, a fizzing cataract of black water that transmogrified into my father’s headstrong singing.

As I sat in the car with Harriet by my side, it occurred to me that there was nothing else in my life that I could recall in such vivid detail as the time at the pool with my father. Although it had happened fifty-five years ago, I could see the whole of my life summed up in that image: my father swimming alone and naked in the forest pool. Me, standing naked among the trees, watching him. Two people belonging together, but already quite different.