After the Fire

by Henning Mankell

  I rowed home, moored the boat and made a dozen or so further attempts to start the engine. Still nothing. I sat down on the bench and called Jansson. He promised to be there within the hour. He asked a few questions about what the engine sounded like when I pulled the cord, in much the same way as I asked questions when he came to me with his imaginary aches and pains.

  ‘It won’t start,’ I said. ‘It sounds perfectly normal. There’s just one problem. It won’t start.’

  ‘I’m sure we can get it going,’ Jansson said.

  He arrived an hour later, to the minute. I went into the boathouse with him. He pulled the cord several times; the engine didn’t start.

  ‘I’m sure we can get it going,’ he said again.

  ‘Come up to the caravan if you want a cup of coffee,’ I said.

  Jansson probably wanted me to stay and keep him company. While I was grateful for his help, I couldn’t cope with the endless, unrelenting stream of his words, particularly if he started talking about macabre execution methods or something else that lay buried in his bizarre store of knowledge.

  I went through the drawers in the caravan and found a pack of cards. The only form of patience I know is Idiot’s Delight. I played a few games, and of course it didn’t come out. After an hour or so I went to see how Jansson was getting on. He had removed the protective housing, unscrewed the spark plugs, and was shining his torch on the internal workings of the engine.

  ‘Have you found out what’s wrong?’ I asked.

  ‘Not yet. But I’m sure it’s nothing serious.’

  I didn’t ask any more questions. He carried on working, and I watched him in silence for a little while. I was just about to go back to the caravan when I thought about my phone.

  ‘Can you set the clock on my mobile? I don’t trust these cheap watches.’

  Jansson switched off the torch, put down the tool he was using and took my phone. In less than a minute he had set the time, calibrating it with his own watch.

  ‘I’m not very good at the technical stuff,’ I said.

  ‘It’s very simple. If you like I can show you what else it can do.’

  ‘Thanks, but the time is really all I need.’

  ‘You can use it as an alarm clock, but maybe you know that already.’

  ‘I don’t need anything to wake me up.’

  I stayed a little while longer, watching as Jansson continued his meticulous examination of my recalcitrant engine. Then I went back to my cards.

  Even though Jansson insisted it was nothing serious, it took him another three hours to identify and fix whatever was wrong. I was having a cup of coffee when he knocked on the door.

  ‘All done,’ he said.

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘Nothing, really. But those are the trickiest problems to solve.’

  ‘Coffee?’

  ‘Thanks, but I’ll get off home. It took a bit longer than I expected.’

  We went down to the boat. The housing was back on, the tools all put away.

  ‘Start her up,’ Jansson said.

  I clambered down into the boat. The engine started straight away. I switched it off and tried again. Same result.

  I climbed out and walked along the jetty with Jansson. I asked how much I owed him. He looked offended and said I didn’t owe him anything.

  ‘There was nothing wrong,’ he insisted.

  ‘There must have been something – it took you hours!’

  He mumbled something unintelligible, got into his boat and started her up. I cast off his mooring ropes and he reversed away from the jetty, one hand raised in farewell.

  I wondered if he sang in his beautiful voice when he was alone in his boat, speeding across the waves.

  A bank of cloud was approaching from the south. I went over to the mainland to shop for food and also put an A4 pad of lined paper in my basket. The rain arrived when I was about halfway home, hammering against the boat. I was soaked to the skin by the time I reached the boathouse.

  Back in the caravan I changed into the remaining unused Chinese shirt. I had no dry trousers so I hung the sodden pair over the edge of the table and wrapped a blanket around my legs.

  I fell asleep early that night.

  The following day the rain had gone. I went over to the mainland again and bought more clothes from the same shop.

  There was no sign of Oslovski when I picked up my car, nor when I came back. I called in at the chandlery to ask if my wellingtons had arrived. They hadn’t.

  Alexandersson and Hämäläinen didn’t turn up. I cleaned the caravan, thinking of very little apart from Lisa Modin. I avoided going anywhere near the site of the fire. However, I did dream about my grandparents for the next two nights. They were talking to me, and they looked exactly as I remembered them from my childhood. But in my dreams their voices were inaudible. They were talking to me, but I couldn’t hear a word they said.

  In the evenings I read the book from 1833, the one about the capture and care of songbirds. I still couldn’t work out the connection between my grandfather and the birdcage. I had put the jar of birdlime on the shelf above the kitchen sink.

  —

  I woke earlier than usual on the morning I was due to pick up Lisa Modin. The sun still hadn’t shown itself when I went down for my dip.

  After breakfast I got into my boat and tried the engine. It started right away. I was nervous about seeing Lisa. I tried to set aside any expectations. She was still a young woman, in contrast to the old man I had become. The omens were hardly favourable when it came to love.

  I moored by the petrol pumps an hour before she was due. I wandered around and saw that the repairs to the coastguards’ jetty had been completed. The big vessel was out; I knew that they had an extensive area to patrol.

  There is a noticeboard on the quayside by the bus stop. One of the things that brings home the passage of time most powerfully to me is the sight of old, peeling posters about summer festivals or outdoor dance parties. There were also handwritten adverts for smoked whitefish or live rabbits. The bus timetable was shredded, but I couldn’t tell whether the wind or an angry traveller was responsible.

  I walked up to my car. Oslovski’s door was closed, but the dead crow had been removed. I didn’t hang around; I didn’t want to risk Oslovski appearing and demanding that I take her blood pressure.

  A cat that I think belonged to the grocery shop was padding across the quayside. Its presence reinforced the sense of desolation. A graveyard of summer memories. I stared at the window display in the chandlery: rucksacks, tins of paint, a selection of anchors.

  I still had half an hour left before Lisa Modin arrived. I walked right to the end of the jetty, balancing on the rubble that made up the outer defences of the harbour, then came back again.

  It was ten past ten when her car appeared, by which time I had begun to think she wasn’t coming. She parked outside the chandlery’s storage depot, which isn’t actually allowed.

  She was wearing a bright yellow raincoat, with an old-fashioned sou’wester in her hand. A small rucksack hung over one shoulder.

  ‘I’m always late,’ she said apologetically.

  ‘No problem. It’s many years since I was in a hurry.’

  I took her rucksack and held out my hand to help her into the boat, but she put one foot on the step cut into the quayside and grabbed hold of the iron ring. I cast off and started the engine. The sound sliced through the silence. I caught a glimpse of Veronika at the window of the apartment next to the grocery store and waved at her.

  The weather was calm. We puttered slowly out of the harbour. Lisa Modin was sitting in the prow; she flung her arms wide.

  ‘Which way are we going?’ she shouted.

  ‘North-east,’ I replied, pointing. I increased my speed.

  Lisa seemed to be enjoying the fresh autumn air. She closed her eyes.

  I set my course towards the island of the poor people.

  CHAPTER 6

  The sea opened out
, the skerries grew sparser, smaller, barer, the low-growing plants cowering in the crevices in the rock. Bracken, crowberry, cotton grass, sometimes even dwarf cornel. Further out there was salt grass and sea spurrey, silver cinquefoil and violas. We couldn’t see them from the boat, but I knew they were there.

  Cool spray from the choppy waves blew in our faces. Vrångskär itself was quite isolated, at the far reaches of the archipelago. It was mainly composed of gneiss rock, its steep sides plunging into the sea. I slowed down as we approached the southern headland. Lisa Modin looked at me and smiled.

  We rounded the skerry, with its small deep-cut inlets and heather-covered areas of flat land. The bedrock itself was grey, mixed with serpentine streaks of dark red sediment. Towards the north there was a tumbledown cairn which had once acted as a navigation mark for one of the navy’s secret shipping lanes.

  ‘Where did the people live?’ Lisa asked.

  ‘There are dips and hollows that can’t be seen from the sea,’ I explained. ‘They built their houses where there was some protection from the wind.’

  On the western side there is a natural harbour where the skerry divides in two, with a steep rock face on either side of the inlet. I switched off the engine and allowed the boat to drift towards the shore.

  In order to get to the large low-lying area we had to take the long way round, scrambling over slippery moss-covered rocks. I offered to carry Lisa’s rucksack, but she shook her head and looped it over her shoulder.

  We passed a dense thicket of wild roses. I broke off a late autumn bloom and gave it to her.

  ‘This was planted by people,’ I said. ‘According to someone who knows, it’s been growing here for almost two hundred years.’

  She tucked the rose into the breast pocket of her raincoat, and soon the hollow that had once housed a settlement was spread before us.

  Many years ago my grandfather and I had accompanied a group of archaeologists on a summer expedition to Vrångskär. I could still remember in detail what the team leader had said about the fishing community that had disappeared so long ago.

  I showed Lisa the remains of the foundations; at most six houses and the same number of outhouses had stood here. The possibilities for animal husbandry were limited because there was only enough fodder for one or two cows. People had moved out here in the eighteenth century, and the level of poverty they suffered is unimaginable today. The total population of Vrångskär was in the region of forty individuals, and their livelihood depended on fishing. Nets and rowing boats were the essential elements of their lives. If the nets were out when a storm suddenly blew up, they had to go and bring them in. There are many tales of men and women who failed to save their nets. I have never forgotten one story which took place in the 1790s. A storm swept in from the north-east with no warning. Nils Eriksson, a young fisherman, and his wife Emma immediately went out to rescue their nets, but their boat capsized. Neither of them could swim, and they both perished. Emma was later found entangled in one of their own nets. Nils’ body was never recovered.

  Five young children were orphaned that day. There is no record of what happened to them.

  I led Lisa over to the best-preserved foundation. According to the archaeologists, this had been one of the largest houses on Vrångskär. It consisted of a single room that may have housed as many as ten people.

  We sat down on a flat rock beside the place where the poorest of the poor must have constantly wondered if they were going to survive. God knows how they coped during winters when the ice was neither thick enough to travel over, nor thin enough to break through so that boats could be used.

  ‘But someone must have lain down in the grass on a summer’s day, looked up at the sun and thought: this is my home,’ Lisa said.

  I don’t know why I did it, but I got up from the rock and lay down in the sparse yellow autumn grass.

  ‘The people who lived here had neither the strength nor the time,’ I said. ‘Women gave birth out here; I expect they lay down then. Most babies died during the first few months.’

  Lisa looked at me.

  ‘Tell me more,’ she said. ‘Show me what else there is to see.’

  I rejoined her and pointed to a couple of stones in the grass that might also have been part of the foundations of a house once upon a time.

  ‘I come out here sometimes and sit and look at those stones. Occasionally I get the feeling that they are moving with immense slowness. I think perhaps they are on their way back to the place from which they originally came. This skerry is in the process of reverting to what it used to be, before the people arrived.’

  Lisa nodded, her expression pensive. I carried on talking although I didn’t have much more to add.

  ‘The last inhabitant of Vrångskär was an old woman; I think her name was Sofia Karlsson. She had come out here as a young serving girl, and had married one of the last resident fishermen. When he died, she stayed here on her own. That was in the 1830s. Many of the people who lived here had moved closer to the copper mine that had opened further out into the archipelago. I don’t suppose life was any easier there, but perhaps it was less lonely. Some emigrated to America, and others simply disappeared. Apart from Sofia. No one knows how she coped all by herself during those last years; her final winter must have been one long episode of protracted suffering. She was almost ninety years old. One day she slipped on an icy rock and broke her leg. She managed to drag herself back to her house, but of course there was no way she could contact anyone. Some time later a seal hunter turned up and found her dead in her bed in the bitterly cold house. She was buried in the churchyard on the mainland. No one has lived on Vrångskär since then.’

  ‘And the stones began to move back? That’s a lovely thought.’

  Lisa rose to her feet and wandered around the site of the former settlement. From time to time she vanished behind a projecting rock, before reappearing. I stayed where I was, watching her. Perhaps I was like the people who used to live here, while she belonged to the new age?

  We unpacked our picnic and ate without saying very much. Occasionally our hands accidentally touched as we reached for the same slice of bread or a hard-boiled egg.

  After lunch we climbed to the highest point on the island. The wind blowing off the sea was stronger up there, but I didn’t think there was any reason for us to set off home right away.

  ‘An archaeologist once found a bear’s tooth up here,’ I said. ‘No one has ever come up with a sensible explanation as to how it got here. The odd wolf might have been spotted on the islands further in, but there are no tales of bears.’

  ‘Where’s the tooth now?’

  ‘I don’t know; in the vicarage, perhaps? There were a number of priests serving the archipelago who were interested in nature.’

  ‘Who’s the priest now?’

  The question took me by surprise.

  ‘I never go to church. I have no idea who the priest is.’

  ‘I’ll ring up and find out. I want to see the bear’s tooth.’

  We started to clamber down; I warned Lisa about the slippery moss, but I was the one who stumbled, not her. When we reached the boat I took her rucksack to put it on board but I wasn’t looking where I was going; I lost my footing on a rock at the water’s edge and fell in head first. I was soaked to the skin. I’m used to taking a dip every morning when it’s cold, but naturally I dry myself immediately afterwards. This was quite different. I started to shiver as soon as the water penetrated my clothes, and of course I didn’t have anything to change into.

  I was embarrassed, but Lisa was worried in case I had hurt myself.

  ‘I’ll survive,’ I said. ‘But I think we’d better get back. I’ll call in at home and put on some dry clothes before I take you to the mainland.’

  I shook with cold the whole way. I went as fast as I could. Lisa offered me her jacket, but I didn’t want it.

  I moored at the jetty and hurried up to the caravan while Lisa made her way to the site of the fire.
I stripped off, dropping my wet clothes on the floor, and rubbed myself dry with one of the dirty Chinese shirts. I didn’t have much to change into, but I got dressed and put on the raincoat I had rescued from the burning house.

  Lisa was standing by the ruins, bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet because she was cold.

  ‘Sorry about the sooty raincoat,’ I said. ‘It’s what I pulled on when I ran out of the house.’

  She looked at me, then gently stroked my cheek. It was so unexpected that I recoiled, as if I thought she was going to hit me. I fell over, and both of us burst out laughing. She reached out and helped me up.

  ‘I’m not dangerous,’ she said.

  ‘And I’m not in the habit of falling over.’

  I almost embraced her, pulled her close, but there was a hurdle within me that I just couldn’t get over.

  We went back down to the jetty and the boathouse.

  ‘I’m going to write about Vrångskär,’ Lisa said. ‘I’m going to ask my dopey editor to give me the space for a series of articles.’

  ‘I’d be more than happy to take you out there again.’

  ‘I’ll bring a camera next time. It will need to be soon; I don’t want to get caught out by the snow.’

  ‘You’ve got a month before you need to worry about that. At least.’

  We eased away from the jetty. Every time I pulled the cord I was prepared for the engine not to start, but Jansson had done a good job.

  Out in the bay I spotted Jansson and his boat in the distance. He seemed to have a passenger on board. He was heading in my direction, but no doubt his destination was one of the islands further north, Olsö or Farsholmen.

  I moored by the petrol pumps and walked Lisa Modin to her car. There was an angry little note tucked under one of the windscreen wipers: ‘Don’t fucking park here!’ She looked at me in horror as she passed it to me.

  ‘Who’s written this?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe someone from the harbourmaster’s office. But it’s nothing to worry about.’