Хеннинг Манкелль - Italian Shoes

I phoned the coastguard. Hans Lundman answered. I used to play with him in the summers when I was a child. His father, who was a pilot, and my grandfather were good friends.

Hans is a sensible man. He knows people wouldn’t ring the coastguard in the early hours of the morning unless it was urgent.

‘What’s happened?’

‘I have a girl in my cottage who needs to be taken to hospital immediately.’

‘It’s foggy,’ said Lundman, ‘but we’ll be there within half an hour.’

It was thirty-two minutes before I heard the powerful engines of the coastguard boat. They were the longest minutes of my life. Longer than when I was mugged in Rome and thought I was going to die. I was powerless. Sima was on her way out of this world. I had no way of assessing how much blood she’d lost. There was nothing I could do for her apart from the pressure bandage. When it became clear that my shouting at her to wake up didn’t help, I pressed my mouth close to her ear and whispered that she had to stay alive, she couldn’t just die, it wasn’t right, not here in my kitchen, not now when spring had arrived, not on a day like the one that had just begun. Could she hear me? I don’t know. But I continued whispering in her ear. I told her fragments of fairy tales I remembered from my own childhood, I told her about the lovely smells that filled the island when the hawthorn and lilac had come into blossom. I said what we would be having for dinner, and described the remarkable birds that waded along the water’s edge before darting forward to snap up their prey. I was talking to save her life, and my own — I was terrified that she might die.

I heard Hans Lundman and his assistant approaching and shouted to them to hurry. They quickly transferred her into a stretcher from the bed, and we were off without delay. I ran down to the boat in my stockinged feet, carrying my cut-down wellington boots in my hand. I didn’t stop to close the door behind me.

We sailed into the fog. Lundman was at the wheel, and he asked me how things stood.

‘I don’t know. Her blood pressure is falling.’

We were off at full throttle, straight into the whiteness. His assistant, whom I didn’t know, was looking in anguish at Sima, strapped in the stretcher. I wondered if he was about to faint.

An ambulance was waiting on the quayside. Everything was enveloped in the white fog.

‘Let’s hope she makes it,’ said Lundman as we left.

He looked worried. Presumably he knew from experience when a person was close to death.

It took us forty-three minutes to get to the hospital. The ambulance woman sitting beside the stretcher was called Sonja, and in her forties. She set up a drip and worked calmly and methodically, occasionally communicating with the hospital about Sima’s condition.

‘Has she taken anything? Tablets?’

‘I don’t know. She might have been smoking pot.’

‘Is it your daughter?’

‘No. She simply turned up out of the blue.’

‘Have you contacted her relatives?’

‘I don’t know who they are. She lives in a foster home. I’ve only met her once before. I don’t know why she came to me.’

‘Ring the care home.’

She reached for a mobile phone hanging from the wall of the ambulance. I rang directory enquiries and was put through to Agnes’s house. When the answering machine responded, I explained the situation precisely, said which hospital we were heading for, and left a telephone number that Sonja had given me.

‘Ring again,’ she said. ‘People wake up if you keep on trying.’

‘She might be out in the shed.’

‘Doesn’t she have a mobile?’

I didn’t have the strength to phone any more.

‘No,’ I said. ‘She doesn’t have a mobile. She’s unusual.’

It wasn’t until Sima had been taken into A&E and I was sitting on a bench in a corridor that I got through to Agnes. I could hear her anxious breathing.

‘How is she?’

‘She’s in a very bad way.’

‘Tell me exactly how things are.’

‘There’s a risk that she might die. It depends how much blood she’s lost, how deep the trauma is. Do you know if she took sleeping pills?’

‘I don’t think so.’

I passed the nurse the phone.

‘It’s the girl’s guardian. Talk to her. I’ve explained that it’s serious.’

I walked along the corridor. An elderly man naked from the waist down was lying on a trolley, whimpering. The nurses were trying to calm a hysterical mother with a screaming infant in her arms. I continued until I reached the A&E entrance. An ambulance was standing there, empty and unlit. I thought of what Sima had said, about the telescope that could home in on an individual person standing on the moon. Try to stay alive, I whispered to myself. Chara, little Chara, perhaps one day you will become that person who went unnoticed here on earth, but got her own back standing on the moon and waving down to the rest of us.

That was a prayer, or perhaps an invocation. Sima, lying in intensive care and trying to stay alive, needed all the help she could get. I don’t believe in God. But you can create your own gods whenever you need them.

I stood there appealing to a place near Los Angeles called Mount Wilson. If Sima survived, I would pay for her to go there. I would find out who this Wilson was, the man who had given his name to the mountain.

There’s nothing to prevent a god having a name. Why shouldn’t the Creator have the name Wilson?

If she died, it would be my fault. If I’d gone downstairs when I heard her crying, she might not have injured herself. I’m a doctor, I ought to have understood. But above all else, I am a human being who ought to have recognised some of the enormous loneliness that a little girl can feel.

Without warning, I found myself longing for my father. I hadn’t done so since he died. His death had caused me great pain. Even though we had never spoken intimately to each other, we had shared an unspoken understanding. He had lived long enough to experience my success in training to become a doctor — and never concealed his surprise and pride over it. During his final days, when he was confined to bed with his excruciatingly painful cancer that had spread from a little black spot on the heel of his foot to become metastases all over him that he compared to moss on a stone, he often spoke about the white coat that I would be privileged to wear. I thought his concept of power being embodied in that white coat was embarrassing. It was only afterwards that I realised he envisaged me as the one who would gain revenge on his behalf. He had also worn a white jacket, but people had trampled all over him. I would be the means through which he got his own back. Nobody belittled a doctor in a white coat.

I missed him now. And that magical trip to the black forest pool. I wanted to turn the clock back, I wanted to undo most of my life. My mother also flitted before my eyes. Lavender and tears, a life I had never understood. Had she carried around an invisible sword? Perhaps she was standing on the far bank of the river of life, waving to Sima?

In my mind, I also tried to talk to Harriet and Louise. But they remained silent, as if they thought I ought to be able to sort this out myself.

I went back inside and found a small waiting room that was empty. After a while, I was informed that Sima’s condition was still critical. She was going to be moved to an intensive care ward. I shared the lift with her. Both men in charge of her trolley were black. One of them smiled at me. I smiled back, and had an urge to tell him about that remarkable telescope on Mount Wilson. Sima was lying with her eyes closed; she had a drip and was being fed oxygen through a nose catheter. I bent over her and whispered into her ear: ‘Chara, when you are well again you will visit Mount Wilson and see that there is somebody standing on the moon who looks remarkably like you.’