Хеннинг Манкелль - Italian Shoes

When I woke up, she was embracing me and was as naked as I was.

Deep down in my consciousness, the cold had been transformed into a sensation of burning. When I opened my eyes, the first thing I saw was Harriet’s hair and the back of her neck. My memory slowly returned.

I was alive. And Harriet had undressed and was hugging me under the blanket to keep me warm.

She noticed that I had come round.

‘Are you cold? You could have died.’

‘The ice simply opened up underneath me.’

‘I thought it was an animal. I’ve never heard a scream like that before.’

‘How long was I unconscious?’

‘An hour.’

‘So long?’

I closed my eyes. My body was scorching hot.

‘I didn’t want to see the lake only for you to die,’ she said.

It was over now. Two old people, naked on the back seat of an old car. We had spoken about such things earlier, of young people in the backs of cars. Making love then perhaps denying it. But we two, with a combined age of 135, simply clung on to each other, one because he had survived, the other because she hadn’t been left all alone in the depths of the forest.

After what might have been another hour, she moved to the front seat and got dressed.

‘It was easier when I was young,’ she said. ‘A clumsy old woman like me finds it difficult to get dressed in acar.’

She fetched dry clothes for me from the rucksack in the boot. Before I put them on, she warmed them up by spreading them over the steering wheel, where the heat from the engine was being blown into the car. I could see through the windscreen that it had started snowing. I was worried in case the snow should start drifting, and prevent us from driving back to the main road.

I dressed as quickly as I could, fumbling as if I was drunk.

It was snowing heavily by the time we left the forest pool. But the logging road was not yet impassable.

We returned to the guest house. This time it was Harriet who went out with her walker to fetch the pizza we had for our evening meal.

We shared one of her bottles of brandy.

The last thing I saw before falling asleep was her face.

It was very close. She may have been smiling. I hope she was.

When I woke up the next day, Harriet was sitting with the atlas open in front of her. My body felt as if it had been subjected to a severe beating. She asked how I felt. I said I was fine.

‘The interest,’ she said with a smile.

‘Interest?’

‘On your promise. After all these years.’

‘What are you asking for?’

‘A diversion.’

She pointed out where we were on the map. Instead of moving her finger southwards, she moved it eastwards, towards the coast, and the province of Hälsingland. It came to a halt not far from Hudiksvall.

‘To there.’

‘And what’s in store for you there?’

‘My daughter. I want you to meet her. It will take an extra day, perhaps two.’

‘Why does she live there?’

‘Why do you live on your island?’

Needless to say, I did as she requested. We drove towards the coast. The countryside was exactly the same all the way: isolated houses with their satellite dishes, and no sign of any people.

Late in the afternoon Harriet said she was too tired to go any further. We checked into a hotel in Delsbo. The room was small and dusty. Harriet took her medicine and painkillers, and fell asleep from sheer exhaustion. Perhaps she took a drink without my noticing. I went out, found a chemist’s and bought a pharmaceutical handbook. Then I sat down in a cafe and read about her medication.

There was something unreal about sitting in a cafe with a cup of coffee and a cream bun — with several small children shouting and screaming to attract the attention of their mothers, who were absorbed in well-thumbed magazines — and discovering just how ill Harriet was. I felt increasingly that I was paying a visit to a world I had lost contact with during my years on my grandparents’ island. For twelve years I had denied the existence of anything beyond the beaches and cliffs surrounding me, a world that had no relevance for me. I had turned myself into a hermit with no knowledge of what was happening outside the cave in which I was hidden away.

But in that cafe in Delsbo, it became clear to me that I couldn’t continue to live the life I was leading. I would return to my island, of course: I had nowhere else to go. But nothing would ever be the same as it was. The moment I noticed that dark shadow on the expanse of white snow and ice, a door had slammed behind me and would never be opened again.

I had bought a picture postcard in a corner shop. It depicted a fence covered in snow. I sent it to Jansson.

I asked him to feed the animals. Nothing else.

Harriet was awake when I got back. She shook her head when she saw the book I was carrying.

‘I don’t want to talk about my woes today.’

We went to the neighbouring grill bar for dinner.

When I saw the kitchen and breathed the smell of cooking, it occurred to me that we were living in an age of deep-frying and ready-made meals. It was not long before Harriet slid her plate away and announced that she couldn’t eat another mouthful. I tried to urge her to eat a little bit more — but why? A dying person eats no more than is necessary to sustain the short life remaining.

We soon returned to our room. The walls were thin. We could hear two people talking in a neighbouring room. Their voices rose and fell. Both Harriet and I strained our ears, but we were unable to make out any words.

‘Are you still an eavesdropper?’ she asked.

‘There are no conversations on my island for me to overhear,’ I said.

‘You always used to eavesdrop on my telephone conversations, despite the fact that you pretended to be uninterested and thumbed through a book or a newspaper. That’s how you tried to hide your big ears. Do you remember?’

I was upset. She was right, of course. I’ve always been an eavesdropper, ever since the time when I used to listen in to the angst-ridden conversations between my father and mother. I have stood behind half-open doors and listened to my colleagues, to patients, to people’s intimate conversations in cafes or on trains. I discovered that most conversations contained small, almost unnoticeable lies. I used to ask myself if that’s the way it’s always been. Has it always been necessary for conversations between people to contain barely noticeable elements of untruth in order to get anywhere?

The conversation in the next room had come to an end. Harriet was tired. She lay down and closed her eyes.

I put on my jacket, and went out to explore the deserted little town. Wherever you looked was blue light oozing out of barred windows. The occasional moped, a car travelling far too fast, then silence again. Harriet wanted me to meet her daughter. I wondered why. Was it to show me that she had managed perfectly well without me, that she had borne the child I hadn’t been privileged to give her? I felt pangs of sorrow as I trudged through the wintry evening.

I paused at a brightly lit ice rink, where a few young people were skating around with bandy sticks and a red ball. I suddenly felt very close to my own younger days. The crackling sound of skates on ice, of stick against ball, the occasional shout, skaters falling over only to scramble to their feet again immediately. That’s how I remembered it, although in fact I had never laid my hands on a bandy stick: I had been shunted off to an ice-hockey rink, where the play was no doubt a lot more painful than what I was watching taking place.

Get back on your feet as soon as you fall.

That was the message to be learned from the freezing cold ice-hockey rinks of my youth. A lesson to be applied to the life that was in store for us.