Хеннинг Манкелль - Italian Shoes

We helped her up to the house. I asked Jansson to see if he could start my old tractor. Harriet lay down on the bed. She was breathing heavily and seemed to be in pain. Louise gave her a pill and fetched a glass of water. Harriet swallowed the pill with great difficulty. Then she looked at me.

‘I haven’t got much longer to live,’ she said. ‘Hold my hand.’

I took her warm hand.

‘I want to lie here and listen to the sea and have you two close to me. That’s all. The old lady promises not to give you any unnecessary trouble. I shan’t even scream when the pain becomes too much to bear. When that happens, I shall take my tablets or Louise will give me an injection.’

She closed her eyes. We stood watching her. She soon fell asleep. Louise walked round the table, contemplating the expanding anthill.

‘How many ants are there?’ she whispered.

‘A million, perhaps more.’

‘How long have you had it?’

‘This is the eleventh year.’

We left the room.

‘You could have rung,’ I said.

She stood in front of me and took a firm hold of my shoulders.

‘If I had you’d have said no. I didn’t want that to happen. Now we are here. You owe it to my mum and me, especially to her. If she wants to lie listening to the sea instead of to hooting motor cars when she dies, that’s what she’s going to do. And so you can be grateful that I won’t need to harass you for the rest of your life complaining about what you did.’

She turned on her heel and went outside. Jansson had managed to start the tractor. Just as I had suspected all these years, he was pretty good at starting difficult engines.

We tied a few ropes to the caravan and managed to unload it from the cow ferry. Jansson was in charge of the tractor.

‘Where do you want it to stand?’ he shouted.

‘Here,’ said Louise, pointing to a patch of grass beyond the narrow strip of sand on the other side of the boathouse. ‘I want a beach of my own,’ she went on. ‘I’ve always dreamed of that.’

Jansson displayed great skill with the tractor as he manoeuvred the caravan into position. We placed old fish boxes and driftwood where necessary until it was level and steady.

‘It’ll be OK now,’ said Jansson, sounding satisfied. ‘This is the only island out here with a caravan.’

‘Thank you. You’re invited to coffee,’ said Louise.

Jansson looked at me. I said nothing.

It was the first time he’d been inside the house as long as I’d lived there. He looked inquisitively around the kitchen.

‘It looks just as I remember it,’ he said. ‘You haven’t changed much. Unless I’m much mistaken this is the same tablecloth as the old couple used to have.’

Louise brewed some coffee and asked if I had any buns. I didn’t. So she went to her caravan to fetch something.

‘She’s a very elegant woman,’ said Jansson. ‘How did you manage to find her?’

‘I didn’t find her. She’s the one who found me.’

‘Did you advertise for a woman? I’ve considered doing that.’

Jansson isn’t exactly quick-witted. You couldn’t accuse him of indulging in too much activity behind the eyes. But it was beyond belief that he could imagine that Louise was a lady I had somehow picked up, complete with caravan and a dying old woman.

‘She’s my daughter,’ I said. ‘I told you I had a daughter. I distinctly remember doing so. We were sitting on the bench by the jetty. You had earache. It was last autumn. I told you I had a grown-up daughter. Have you forgotten?’

Jansson had no idea what I was talking about. But he didn’t dare to argue. He didn’t dare to risk losing his personal physician.

Louise came back with an assortment of buns and biscuits. Jansson and my daughter seemed to hit it off from the start. I would have to explain to Louise that she could hold sway over her caravan, but when it came to my island, nobody but me was allowed to lay down the law. And one of the laws that applied was that Jansson must on no account be invited to drink coffee in my kitchen.

Jansson towed away his cow ferry and disappeared round the headland. I didn’t ask Louise how much she’d paid him. We went for a walk round the island as Harriet was still asleep. I showed her where my dog was buried. Then we clambered southwards over the rocks and followed the shore.

Just for a short time, it was like having acquired a little child. Louise asked about everything — plants, seaweed, the neighbouring islands barely visible through the mist, the fish in the depths of the sea that she couldn’t see at all. I suppose I could answer about half her questions. But that didn’t matter to her — the important thing was that I listened to what she said.

There were a few boulders on Norrudden, a headland on the north side of the island, that centuries ago the ice had shaped into throne-like constructions. We sat down.

‘Whose idea was it?’ I asked.

‘I think we both hit on it at about the same time. It was time to visit you, and for the family to get together before it was too late.’

‘What do your friends in the forest up north have to say about this?’

‘They know that I’ll come back one of these days.’

‘Why did you have to lug the caravan with you?’

‘It’s my shell. I never leave it behind.’

She told me about Harriet. Harriet had been driven to Stockholm by one of Louise’s boxer friends called Sture who made a living by drilling wells.

Then Harriet suddenly took a turn for the worse. Louise travelled down to Stockholm to look after her mother, as she had refused to go into a hospice. Louise had insisted on being authorised to administer the painkilling drugs Harriet needed. All that was possible now was palliative care. Every effort to prevent the cancer from spreading had been abandoned. The final countdown had begun. Louise was in constant touch with the home-nursing authorities in Stockholm.

We sat on our thrones, gazing out over the sea.

‘I can’t see her lasting more than another month at most,’ said Louise. ‘I’m already giving her enormous doses of painkillers. She’s going to die here. You’d better prepare yourself for that. You’re a doctor — or, at least, were one. You’re more familiar with death than I am. But I’ve realised that death is always a lonely business. Nevertheless, we can be here and help her.’

‘Is she in a lot of pain?’

‘She sometimes screams.’

We continued our walk along the shore. When we came to the headland reaching out towards the open sea, we paused again. My grandfather had placed a bench there: he’d made it himself from an old threshing machine and some rough oak planks. When he and Grandma had quarrelled, as they sometimes did, he used to go and sit there until she came to fetch him and tell him that dinner was ready. Their anger had always subsided by then. I had carved my name on the bench when I was seven years old. My grandfather was no doubt less than pleased, but he never said anything.

Eider and scoter and a few mergansers were bobbing up and down on the waves.

‘There’s a deep underwater ravine just offshore here, where the birds are,’ I said. ‘The average depth is fifteen to twenty metres, but there is this sudden abyss fifty-six metres deep. When I was a lad I used to lower a grappling iron from the rowing boat, and always imagined that it was bottomless. We’ve had visits by geologists trying to work out why it exists. As far as I can understand, nobody has been able to give a satisfactory answer. I rather like that. I have no faith in a world in which all riddles are solved.’

‘I believe in a world where people fight back,’ said Louise.

‘I assume you’re thinking about your French caves?’