After the Fire

by Henning Mankell

  A large, heavy bird flapped away in the darkness. From time to time over the years I had caught a glimpse of an eagle owl following a trail that no one else knew.

  I went up to the caravan but paused before I reached the door. The curtain wasn’t fully drawn across the oval window. I had never spied on my daughter before, but now I crept forward and cautiously peered inside.

  Louise had stripped to the waist and was sitting at the table, shuffling the pack of cards. She wasn’t playing patience; she seemed to be completely lost in thought. I had never seen her semi-naked. I moved back silently so that she wouldn’t notice me if she suddenly glanced at the window.

  I didn’t want to be caught out, but nor did I want to stop looking into her world. She must have turned up the heating; that was why she was only half-dressed.

  I contemplated my daughter. After a few minutes I knocked on the door. She didn’t react. I knocked again.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘It’s me. I saw you signalling with the torch.’

  ‘The torch?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Hang on.’

  The caravan rocked as she got to her feet. She had pulled on a sweater by the time she opened the door. She let me in, frowning at me.

  ‘What are you talking about? What torch?’

  I had just spotted the torch lying on the draining board. I pointed to it and said, ‘I was about to get inside the tent when I saw you standing on the jetty, flashing the torch in my direction. I tried to shout to you, but the wind was too strong and you couldn’t hear me. So I got in the boat and rowed over. Why didn’t you use the light outside the boathouse? You could have switched it on and off – it’s like a floodlight!’

  Louise didn’t say anything for a moment; she looked searchingly at me, then nodded towards the stool. I sat down and unbuttoned my jacket. It was very warm inside the caravan. She remained standing by the door.

  ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ she said eventually.

  I reached over, picked up the torch, pointed it at her and switched it on and off several times.

  ‘This is what I saw; you were down on the jetty signalling to me over on the skerry. What did you want? I was worried.’

  She didn’t answer. I realised that something wasn’t right, but I knew what I had seen.

  ‘I haven’t been down to the jetty with the torch.’

  ‘I’m not imagining things.’

  ‘You saw it flashing?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Was it Morse code?’

  ‘I don’t know. It was very erratic, like an uneven pulse.’

  She shook her head. I thought I could sense a vague anxiety within her; did she think I was going senile?

  The idea frightened me. I can’t think of anything worse than being physically healthy, and someone, perhaps my daughter, explaining to me one day that my brain and my memory are deteriorating. Even all those years ago when I was training to be a doctor, my fellow medical students and I would sit and discuss the worst fate we could imagine. Most of us felt the same: dementia was far more terrifying than physical pain.

  ‘You have to believe me: I haven’t been down to the jetty. Why would I lie about such a thing?’ Louise said.

  ‘But if it wasn’t you, who was it?’

  ‘Are there strangers creeping around on the island?’

  ‘Not as far as I know. Perhaps the arsonist has come back?’

  Once again she frowned. ‘The only person who’s come back is you.’

  ‘I haven’t been seeing things!’ I insisted.

  ‘In that case we’d better go outside and search for the intruder.’

  Silence fell; needless to say, we didn’t go outside.

  ‘Have you eaten?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Coffee?’

  ‘No, thanks – it would keep me awake.’

  ‘How about a glass of rum?’

  ‘Why would I want a glass of rum? You know I don’t drink spirits.’

  ‘That’s not true – sometimes you knock it back like nobody’s business.’

  ‘That’s a completely different matter – I’m drinking then!’

  ‘Is there anything I can get you?’

  ‘I ought to row back to my tent and go to bed.’

  ‘You’ll get lost, rowing in the dark.’

  ‘It’s not far.’

  ‘I want you to stay here. When darkness fell I was quite scared of being alone. I thought I could see people with charred black bodies moving around outside. You can take the bed and I’ll lie on the floor; if we gather together lots of clothes, blankets and cushions it will be soft enough. I’m going to have a glass of rum, then we’ll play cards for a little while before we go to bed. In spite of the fact that the house has burned down and someone seems to be wandering around signalling with a torch.’

  ‘I just don’t understand who it could have been.’

  Louise didn’t reply. She dug a half-empty bottle of dark rum out of her bag and poured herself a glass. She knocked it back, pulled a face and poured herself another. I hadn’t noticed it before, but she emptied the glass exactly as her mother used to do. Harriet had never drunk much, but when she did she downed it as if it were something deeply unpleasant.

  Louise put her glass down on the table.

  ‘What are you thinking about? The torch?’

  ‘I’m thinking that I see Harriet when I look at you.’

  ‘What do you see?’

  ‘You both knock back your drink in exactly the same way.’

  ‘Our tolerance is different though. She used to fall asleep after a couple of glasses; I either get melancholy or furious. I never know in advance what’s going to happen. But you needn’t worry; I’m not trying to get drunk tonight. It makes me shudder when I think about everything that’s gone, everything that can never be restored.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ve fully grasped what’s happened, but tomorrow we need to start talking about the future.’

  Louise pushed away her glass and picked up the cards.

  Card games have always bored me. We started to play poker. She won nearly all the time, whether she had a better hand than me or not. I couldn’t read her face; I had no idea when she was bluffing. Occasionally I thought she was letting me win out of sympathy. Every time my pile of matches was nearly gone, I won and had to carry on playing.

  Neither of us said a word. Louise was totally focused on the game while I frequently made mistakes.

  At eleven o’clock she decided we should take a break. She went outside for a pee, then came back in and made sandwiches. She had a cup of coffee; I drank water. Then we carried on playing. By midnight I still hadn’t managed to lose all my matches. I threw down my cards and said I’d had enough. Louise wasn’t happy, but she nodded. I went out to empty my bladder; I could hear her making preparations for the night. A faint crescent moon was just visible; the cloud cover had lifted. I waited until it was quiet inside the caravan, then I tapped on the door and went back in.

  Louise had made her bed on the floor and had already settled down. Her eyes were closed as she wished me goodnight. I undressed, climbed into bed and switched off the lamp. The external light from the boathouse was shining in through the window; I got up to close the curtain.

  ‘Leave it,’ Louise said. ‘It makes the night less dark.’

  I went back to bed. My tiredness was a very heavy burden. I was simply too old to start all over again.

  Oslovski popped into my head. She had always been a woman who hid strong emotions, but that had changed. When I met her on the quayside it was obvious that she was afraid. She had even shown me where her fear came from: the outside world, a threat somewhere behind her.

  Before I fell asleep I made a mental note that tomorrow I must convince Louise that the decision about what ought to happen next was hers alone. If she still saw herself living on the island in the future, then she must make up her mind what the new house should look l
ike. I had taken out a very good insurance policy years ago in which it was stated that such an old house couldn’t possibly be rebuilt as it had once been. There would be no oak beams forming the framework. Under the terms of the policy, Louise had a free choice.

  But what if the charred black ruin scared her away? What would I do if she suggested selling the island, if she said that she wanted part of her inheritance right now, while I was still alive? Could I take on the huge responsibility of having a new house built? Or would I live in the caravan on a permanent basis? Perhaps I could ask a local handyman to extend the boathouse, enabling me to live behind wooden walls rather than the laminated plastic of the caravan?

  I could have my car brought over from the mainland and hitched up the caravan, as if I were getting ready to be transported across the Styx by car instead of by ferry…

  I had almost dropped off when I was roused by Louise’s voice. She was talking quite loudly, as if she assumed I was still awake.

  ‘I’m going to make a garden.’

  I heard the words clearly, but I didn’t understand. If there was one thing I thought I knew about my daughter, it was that she and I shared the same distaste for poking around in the soil with a trowel in order to get something to grow.

  ‘And where is this garden going to be?’

  ‘Here.’

  ‘Nothing grows on this island. The soil is very poor, and it’s full of stones. The oaks and the alders take any nutrients there might be.’

  ‘Obviously I shall make a garden that’s suitable for the prevailing conditions.’

  ‘I’ve never known you show any interest in plants.’

  The caravan rocked as she leaped up, wrapped a blanket around her body and switched on the lamp. She sat down at the table as I lay there blinking in the light.

  ‘I went to the village where Giaconelli is buried. He had told me about a beautiful garden behind a wall that was almost completely hidden by ivy. I found the wall and climbed over it. The garden was overgrown, but I’m sure it had once been lovely. As I walked around I realised that I wanted to make a garden somewhere else. Giaconelli had shown me this one, but at the same time he knew that I would go my own way. The Ocean of Emptiness is what I want to create.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I’ll tell you tomorrow. I’m turning off the light now.’

  Before I dozed off I tried without success to work out what she had meant by the Ocean of Emptiness.

  I woke just after six. Louise was fast asleep with the covers pulled over her head and one foot sticking out, as if it had detached itself from the rest of her body. Cautiously I covered it with the end of the blanket. She twitched but didn’t wake up.

  I picked up my clothes and one of the blue Chinese shirts to use as a towel, and went down to the jetty. The morning was dark and chilly. The wind had changed and was coming from the north. I took a deep breath and stepped down into the water. The cold struck my body hard as usual. It seemed to me that there was a certain point in the autumn when the feeling was exactly the same as it was immediately after the ice had broken up in the spring. Two contrasting seasons were somehow united.

  I counted to ten as I always do before climbing out. The Chinese shirt left little blue threads all over my body as I rubbed myself dry. After I had got dressed I looked at the thermometer: three degrees. The wind was gusting slightly. The bitter chill from the north bit into my face and hands.

  I sat down on the bench, huddled up in the darkness as the dawn began to break. What was it Louise had said late last night? The Heaven of Emptiness? No, the Ocean of Emptiness. It still didn’t make any sense to me.

  The caravan door opened, and Louise shouted that it was breakfast time. She was dressed and had put up her hair with several slides.

  ‘I wish I could tolerate cold water like you,’ she said when we were sitting at the table.

  The coffee she made was always far too strong for my taste, but as I knew what to expect, I didn’t complain.

  ‘You’re going to have to jump in sooner or later. We don’t have a bath tub, or any way of heating water.’

  ‘There’s a shower for sailors in the harbour.’

  ‘I very much doubt if it’s open now.’

  ‘Do you think they’d refuse to let us use it, knowing that your house has burned down?’

  She was right, of course. We finished our breakfast in silence. Louise cleared the table, insisting I couldn’t help as there wasn’t enough room in the caravan for us both to move around at the same time. We decided to go over to the mainland later, when the shops were open.

  ‘The Ocean of Emptiness,’ I said when she had finished.

  ‘I’ll show you, and I’ll explain.’

  Outside, the wind was still gusting and the cloud cover dense and low. It was eight o’clock. Louise marched determinedly up to the patch of grass behind the ruins of the house. If you sit on a rock and look towards the grass, you also have a clear view of the sea. She pointed to a flat rock and I sat down.

  She told me about a trip she had made to Japan the previous year. She is fascinating when she wants to be. I often think she has a much stronger relationship with words than I have.

  Needless to say, I had no idea that she had been to Japan, just as I knew nothing about her visits to Paraguay and Tasmania. Apparently she had gone there because she was thinking of importing special paper dragons to Europe. She mentioned it in passing, and I didn’t ask what had happened to that idea. She told me that she and a friend had visited Kyoto and the Zen Buddhist temple of Daisen-in, where she had stood before a garden made of stone and gravel, with not a blade of grass to be seen. The garden had been laid out in the sixteenth century, with the aim of creating a mystery in the landscape which would make it easier for visitors to concentrate when they were meditating.

  ‘I became utterly still,’ Louise said. ‘It was as if I had found something I had been searching for, even though I didn’t know it. I sat down on a bench and I was immediately drawn into that world of stone. I felt a great calmness, but I was excited at the same time. I immediately decided that one day I would make my own garden, as a nod to the Ocean of Emptiness – that was the name of the garden before me. And because nothing grows on this island, as you pointed out, I can’t think of a better place to create my garden of rocks and gravel. Then they can reach out their stony hands and wave to one another from Sweden and Japan.’

  She suddenly broke off and ran back down to the caravan. She returned with a black and white photograph.

  ‘The Ocean of Emptiness,’ she said. ‘This is what it looks like.’

  I sat there for a long time holding the picture. Louise left me and wandered around the patch of grass that she was intending to transform into something resembling the image in my hand.

  I didn’t understand what she had found so captivating about the garden in Kyoto. Gravel, stone, maybe sand, a few small mounds that looked like petrified bubbles on the smooth ground.

  My life seemed to be full of rocks and stones at the moment, I thought. There was nothing left of my house apart from the foundations. The previous day I had taken Lisa Modin to Vrångskär, where remnants of rock had reminded us of the people who had tried to survive there in spite of unimaginable poverty. I had talked about the fact that I sometimes believed that the stones that had been used to build houses on the skerry all those years ago were on their way back to the places from which they had come.

  And now this.

  I tucked the photograph in my inside pocket. Louise came and sat down beside me.

  ‘What was it you saw?’ I asked. ‘A picture can’t convey what you actually experienced.’

  ‘You’ll understand when I’ve made my garden here.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘I’m always serious.’

  ‘I know, but are you going to make this garden before we build a new house?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Well, it’s your decision.’

 
She nodded without saying anything, then she bent down and picked up a piece of stone that had splintered away from the rock on which we were sitting. She got up and placed it in the middle of the grass.

  ‘My garden begins with a single stone,’ she said.

  ‘You need to decide what you want to do with the house.’

  ‘Tonight. Let’s go.’

  —

  Louise sat in the prow, facing forward. I reflected on what she had told me about the Japanese garden. I was struck by a thought that came out of nowhere. I was so taken aback that I slowed down. She turned and looked enquiringly at me. I slowed down even more, until the engine was idling.

  ‘Why have we stopped?’

  I moved to the middle seat in order to get closer to her.

  ‘Did you say the Japanese garden was something to do with Buddhists?’

  ‘They believe it was created by a monk called Soami.’

  ‘And he was a Buddhist?’

  ‘A Zen Buddhist.’

  ‘I don’t know the difference.’

  ‘I can explain when we get home, if you like.’

  ‘I’m just wondering if you’re intending to turn our island into a Zen Buddhist temple? Have you become a Buddhist?’

  Her reaction to my questions was an outburst of rage. She picked up the plastic bailer and threw it at me. It contained rainwater, which splashed all over my face. I threw it straight back at her, and we sat there attacking one another with the bailer flying between us until she accidentally threw it overboard, and I had to fish it out with one of the oars.

  ‘I’m not religious,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to be religious to make a garden.’

  I didn’t reply, I simply accelerated towards the harbour.

  The shower block was locked. Louise tugged at the door several times, then we went into the chandlery. Nordin was unpacking a box of heavy-duty gloves when we walked in.

  My wellingtons hadn’t arrived. And of course Louise lost her temper when Nordin told her that the showers wouldn’t open until May next year. He understood that our need was great, but at the same time he couldn’t go against the council’s decision. I wished Louise wasn’t so fiery. I have rarely, if ever, found that anger helps to solve a problem. Sometimes it seemed to me that my daughter had a need to fly into a rage.