Хеннинг Манкелль - Italian Shoes

It wasn’t long before we were all drunk, especially Harriet. She kept dozing off. Louise had an amusing habit of clicking her teeth whenever she emptied a glass. I tried hard to stay sober, but failed.

Our conversation became increasingly confused and bewildering, but I managed to glean something of the kind of relationship Louise and Harriet had. They were constantly in touch, often quarrelled and hardly ever agreed about anything at all. But they were very fond of each other. I had acquired a family that oozed anger, but was held together by deep-felt love.

We talked for a long time about dogs — not the kind you take for walks on a lead, but the wild dogs that roam the African plains. My daughter said they reminded her of her friends living in the forest, a herd of African dogs wagging their tails at a herd of northern Swedish boxers. I told them that I had a dog of such mixed race that it was impossible to say exactly what its ancestry was. When Louise realised that the dog roamed around at will on my grandparents’ island, she very much approved. She was also interested to hear about the old cat.

Harriet eventually fell asleep, thanks to a mixture of exhaustion, spirits and gooseberry wine. Louise gently laid a blanket over her.

‘She has always been a snorer. When I was a child I used to pretend that it wasn’t her snoring, but my father who came to visit every night in the form of an invisible but snoring creature. Do you snore?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘Thank God for that! Here’s to my father!’

‘And here’s to my daughter!’

She refilled our glasses carelessly and spilled wine on the table. She wiped it with the palm of her hand.

‘When I heard the car driving up, I wondered what kind of an old codger Harriet had brought with her this time.’

‘Does she often come visiting with different men?’

‘Old codgers. Not men. She always manages to find somebody willing to drive her here, and then drive her home again. She often sits in some cafe or other in Stockholm, looking tired and miserable. Somebody always turns up to ask if he can help her, perhaps give her a lift home. Once she’s in the car, with her walker stowed in the boot, she mentions that “home” is a couple of hundred miles or more north, just to the south of Hudiksvall. Surprisingly enough, hardly any of them refuse to take her. But she soon tires of the codger and ditches him for another one. My mother is very impatient. While I was growing up there would be long periods when there was always a different man in her bed on Sunday mornings. I used to love jumping up and down on them and waking them up, so that the men became aware of the unpleasant fact that I existed. But then there were times when she would go for weeks and months without so much as looking at a man.’

I went outside for a pee. The night was sparkling. I could see through the window how Louise placed a pillow under her mother’s head. I almost burst into tears. I thought perhaps I ought to run away — take the car and get out of there. But I carried on observing her through the window, with a distinct feeling that she knew I was watching her. She suddenly turned her head towards the window and smiled.

I left the car where it was, and went back inside.

We sat there in the cramped caravan, drinking and conducting a tentative conversation. I don’t think either of us really knew what we wanted to say. Louise produced some photo albums from a drawer. Some were faded black-and-white snaps, but most were poor-quality coloured pictures from the early 1970s, in the days when everybody had red-eye, and gaped at the photographer like vampires. There were pictures of the woman I had abandoned, and of the daughter I would have wanted more than anything in the world. A little girl, not a fully grown adult. There was something evasive in her expression. As if she didn’t really want to be seen.

I leafed through the album. She didn’t say much, merely answered the questions I put to her. Who had taken the picture? Where were they? The summer when my daughter was seven, she and Harriet spent some weeks with a man by the name of Richard Munter on the island of Getterön near Varberg. Munter was a powerfully built man, bald, and always had a cigarette in his mouth. I felt pangs of jealousy. This man had been together with my daughter when she was of the age I wished she still was. He had died a few years later, when his affair with Harriet was already over. A bulldozer had toppled over, and he was crushed to death. All that remained of him now were poor-quality photographs with the ever-present cigarette, and the red eyes caused by the camera flash.

I closed the album: I didn’t have the strength to cope with any more pictures. The level of the wine left in the flagon fell lower and lower. Harriet was asleep. I asked Louise who she wrote letters to. She shook her head.

‘Not now. Tomorrow, when we’ve slept off the hangover. We must go to bed now. For the first time in my life I’m going to lie down between my parents.’

‘There’s not enough room in that bed for all three of us. I’ll sleep on the floor.’

‘There’s room.’

She gently moved Harriet towards the wall, then folded away the table after first removing the cups and glasses. The bed was extendable, but it seemed obvious that it would be very cramped even so.

‘I’m not going to get undressed in front of my father,’ she said. ‘Go outside. I’ll bang on the wall once I’ve snuggled down under the covers.’

I did as I was told.

The starry sky was spinning round. I stumbled and fell down in the snow. I had acquired a daughter, and perhaps she would come to like, perhaps even to love the father she had never met before.

My whole life flashed before my eyes.

I’d managed to get this far. There might be a few crossroads yet to come. But not too many. My journey was nearly over.

Louise banged on the caravan wall. She had switched off all the lights and lit a candle standing on the tiny refrigerator. I could see two faces beside each other. Harriet was furthest away, and my daughter lay next to her. There was a narrow strip of bed left for me.

‘Blow the candle out,’ said Louise. ‘I don’t want to use it up the first night I’ve ever slept with my parents.’

I undressed, but kept on my vest and pants, blew the candle out and crept into bed. It was impossible to avoid touching Louise. I noticed to my horror that she was naked.

‘Can’t you put on a nightdress?’ I asked. ‘I can’t possibly sleep with you next to me, naked. Surely you can understand that?’

She clambered over me and put on something that seemed to me to be a dress. Then she came back to bed.

‘Time to go to sleep now,’ she said. ‘At long last I’m going to hear my father snoring. I shall lie awake until you’ve gone to sleep.’

Harriet was muttering in her sleep. Whenever she rolled over, we had to adjust as well. Louise felt warm. I only wished she had been a little girl sleeping soundly in a nightdress. Not a fully grown woman who had suddenly entered my life.

I don’t know when I finally fell asleep. It was a long time before the bed seemed to stop spinning round. When I eventually woke up, I was alone.

The caravan was empty. The car was gone.

I could see from the tracks in the snow how Louise had turned the car round and driven off. It occurred to me that all this had been planned in advance. Harriet had collected me, taken me to meet my unknown daughter, and then the pair of them had taken my car and vanished. I’d been dumped in the forest.

It was a quarter to ten. The weather had changed, and the temperature was above freezing. Water was dripping from the dirty caravan. I went back inside. I had a headache, and my mouth was parched. There was no sign of a message saying where they had gone. There was a Thermos flask of coffee on the table. I took out a cracked cup advertising a chain of health stores.