Хеннинг Манкелль - Italian Shoes

I switched on the engine. The headlights illuminated the darkness.

‘I wanted you to know,’ she said. ‘One thing at a time.’

‘Let it take as long as it needs,’ I said. ‘The best way to get to know another person is one step at a time. That applies to you just as much as it does to me. If you go too fast, you can collide, or run aground.’

‘As happens at sea?’

‘What you don’t see is what you notice too late. That doesn’t only apply to unmarked channels at sea, it applies to people as well.’

I pulled out and continued along the main road. Why hadn’t I told her about the catastrophe that had blighted my life? Perhaps it was only due to exhaustion and confusion as a result of the astonishing revelations of the last couple of days. I would tell her soon enough, but not just yet. It was as if I was still trapped in that moment when I’d emerged from my hole in the ice, had the feeling that there was something behind me, looked round and saw Harriet, leaning on her wheeled walker.

I was deep in the melancholy forest of northern Sweden. But even so, most of me was still in my hole in the ice.

When I got back home, if the thaw hadn’t started and the ice was still there, it would take me a long time to chop it away again and open up the hole.

The headlight beams and shadows danced over the snow.

We got out of the car without speaking. It was a cloudless and starry sky, colder now, and the temperature was falling. Faint light seeped out from the caravan windows.

When we went inside I could hear from Harriet’s breathing that all was not well. I failed to wake her up. I took her pulse: it was fast and irregular. I had my blood pressure monitor in the car. I asked Louise to fetch it. Both Harriet’s diastolic and systolic readings were too high.

We carried her out to my car. Louise asked what had happened. I told her that we needed to take Harriet to an A&E department where they could examine her thoroughly. Maybe she had had a stroke, perhaps something had happened in connection with her general condition: I didn’t know.

We drove through the darkness to Hudiksvall. The hospital lay in waiting, looking like an illuminated liner. We were received by two friendly nurses at the Emergency entrance; Harriet had regained consciousness, and it was not long before a doctor arrived to examine her. Although Louise looked at me somewhat oddly, I didn’t mention the fact that I was a doctor myself — or, at least, had been. I merely informed them that Harriet had cancer, and that her days were numbered. She was taking medicine to ease her pain, that was all. I wrote the names of the medication on a piece of paper, and gave it to the doctor.

We waited while the doctor, who was about my age, performed the examination. He said afterwards that he would keep her in overnight for observation. He couldn’t find anything specific that might have caused her reaction: it was presumably due to a deterioration in her general condition.

Harriet had fallen asleep again when we left her and emerged once more into the dark night. It was gone two by now; the sky was still cloudless. Louise suddenly stopped.

‘Is she going to die now?’ she asked.

‘I don’t think she’s ready to die yet. She’s a tough lady. If she has the strength to walk over the ice with her walker, I reckon she has a lot of strength left. I think she’ll tell us when the time comes.’

‘I always get hungry when I’m scared,’ said Louise. ‘Some people feel ill, but I simply have to eat.’

We got into the freezing cold car.

I had noticed an all-night hamburger restaurant on the edge of town, so we drove there. Several shaven-headed and overweight youths looking like Teddy boys from the distant fifties were sitting round one of the tables. All of them were drunk, apart from one — there was always one who stayed sober, and did the driving. A big, highly polished Chevrolet was parked outside. There was a smell of hair cream as we passed by their table.

To my astonishment, I heard them talking about Jussi Björling. Louise had also noticed their loud-voiced, drunken conversation. She pointed discreetly at one of the four men, with gold earrings, a beer belly falling out of his jeans and salad dressing smeared round his mouth.

‘Bror Olofsson,’ she said in a half-whisper. ‘The gang call themselves the Bror Brothers. Bror has a lovely singing voice. When he was a young lad he used to sing solos in the church choir. But he stopped all that when he became a teenager and a tearaway. There are those who are convinced he could have gone far — he might even have made it to the opera stage.’

‘Why are there no normal people up here?’ I asked as I studied the menu. ‘Why are all the people we meet so unusual? Italians who make shoes, or a retro Teddy boy who talks about Jussi Björling?’

‘There’s no such thing as normal people,’ she said. ‘That’s a twisted view of the world that politicians want us to believe. That we are all a part of an endless mass of normality, with no possibility, never mind desire to claim that we are different. I’ve often thought that I ought to write to Swedish politicians. To the secret team.’

‘What team is that?’

‘That’s what I call them. The ones with the power. The ones who receive my letters but never answer them — they just send pin-up photos. The secret team with all the power.’

She ordered something called the King’s Platter, while I made do with a large coffee, a small bag of crisps and a hamburger. She really was hungry. She gave the impression of wanting to stuff everything on her tray into her mouth at one go.

It was not a pretty sight. Her table manners embarrassed me.

She’s like an impoverished child, I thought. I remembered a trip I’d made to Sudan with a group of orthopaedists, in order to find out the best way of setting up clinics for landmine casualties requiring artificial limbs. I had watched those penniless children attacking their food in extreme desperation — a few grains of rice, a single vegetable, and perhaps a biscuit sent from some well-meaning country dedicated to assisting the Third World.

In addition to the four Teddy boys who had crept out from under a stone from another age, there were a few lorry drivers dotted around the restaurant. They were hunched over their empty trays, as if they were either asleep, or contemplating their mortality. There was also a couple of young girls, very young — they couldn’t have been more than fourteen or fifteen years old. They sat there whispering to each other, occasionally erupting into laughter before reverting to whispers. I could remember that atmosphere, all those confidential certainties one could pass on and feel informed about as a teenager. We all gave promises but broke them almost immediately, promised to keep secrets but spread them as quickly as possible. Nevertheless, they were far too young to be sitting there in the middle of the night. I was shocked. Shouldn’t they be in bed? Louise noticed what I was looking at. She had gobbled her slap-up meal before I had even taken the lid off my plastic beaker of coffee.

‘I’ve never seen them before,’ she said. ‘They’re not from these parts.’

‘Are you saying you know everybody who lives in this town?’

‘I just know.’

I tried to drink the coffee, but it was too bitter. It seemed to me we ought to go back to the caravan and try to get a few hours’ sleep before we needed to return to the hospital. But we stayed put until dawn. The Teddy boys had gone by then. So had the two girls. It hadn’t registered with me when the lorry drivers left: suddenly they were no longer there. Louise hadn’t noticed when they left either.

‘Some people are like migratory birds,’ she said. ‘Those vast distances they fly are always covered during the night. They just flew away without our noticing them.’