After the Fire

by Henning Mankell

  When I received the money I went to South Africa, even though apartheid was still in force. I hired a car at Nelspruit airport and drove to the Kruger National Park. I spent a week there, driving from one overnight post to another. I experienced the ever-present arrogance of the whites towards the blacks. There was a strange silence everywhere. The whites spoke to the blacks or coloureds only when issuing an order. I never heard a relaxed conversation between the races. I was terribly upset and tried to show kindness towards the blacks who served me at mealtimes or topped up my car with petrol, but my friendliness made them wary, suspicious.

  I travelled around the vast park and encountered all the wild animals I had hoped to see. I had the constant feeling that the animals saw me twice as often as I saw them. A boa constrictor had half-swallowed a wild-boar cub. A pride of lions was tearing at a zebra. I was a visitor, a polite guest cautiously knocking on the door of untamed nature.

  I spent the rest of the money on some expensive suits and dining at exclusive restaurants. I even bid fifteen thousand kronor for a statue of the Buddha at an antiques auction. I lost it when my house burned down.

  I went into the betting shop in the town centre and worked out an improvised system of a couple of hundred lines on harness races in Solänget. God knows where that was. Needless to say I didn’t recognise the names of any of the horses or the drivers, but I decided I preferred a horse called Bumblebee’s Brother to another in the same race with the name Wolfskin. The owner of the shop was a man whose bald head had an indentation to the left of his temple. According to Jansson, who knew all about everyone’s medical problems, the man had had an accident with his tractor when he was trying to get his old motorboat into the water one spring many years ago. Jansson thought it was remarkable that he had survived without suffering brain damage, but during my years as a doctor I often saw people whose heads were a very odd shape as a result of accidents without any loss of their mental capacities. In particular I remembered a young academic researcher who was regarded as a mathematical genius both before and after a car accident. His head looked like a cone.

  I handed over my betting slip, put the receipt in my inside pocket, then went to the restaurant at the bowling alley for something to eat.

  I had just left the restaurant when Louise called. The odd snowflake was drifting through the air. I went back inside and stood by the lane; there were no noisy games in progress at the moment.

  She was fine, but naturally she was worried about her baby.

  I asked as many questions as I could think of about the unit where the child was being cared for. Louise felt that all the staff were very experienced and knew what they were doing.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ I asked.

  ‘Pray.’

  ‘Pray? But I’m not a believer!’

  ‘You can pray anyway.’

  ‘OK. I can say a prayer and send it off in all directions, backwards and forwards in time, straight out into the universe and down into the depths of the sea.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Is there anything else you want me to do?’

  ‘Not right now.’

  Louise assured me she was getting all the support she needed from Ahmed. Then she started talking about Muhammed in his wheelchair.

  ‘His eyes are like light,’ she said. ‘They move at the speed of light, looking into worlds I know nothing about. One day he will receive answers to all the messages he sends out.’

  ‘I don’t really understand what you mean,’ I said. I asked if they had chosen a name for the baby yet.

  ‘She’s going to have three names, and later on she can choose which one she prefers. Rachel, Anna and Harriet.’

  I thought about Rachel who had cleaned my room at the hotel in Paris. I thought about Harriet. No one in our family was called Anna; perhaps the name was linked to Ahmed and Islam?

  ‘Pretty names,’ I said. ‘So what are you calling her at the moment?’

  ‘We vary it from day to day.’

  ‘I want to see her,’ I said.

  ‘That’s really why I called. I’m sending a picture to your phone.’

  ‘Are you coming home for Christmas?’

  ‘This is home. Besides, she’s still in an incubator.’

  ‘If you’re short of money, I can help.’

  ‘This isn’t about money. Build the new house.’

  Because I couldn’t bear the thought of losing the closeness we had achieved, I quickly dropped the subject. She asked if it was raining or snowing. Talking about the weather is always the last resort, but it calmed us both down. No angry ripostes, no hostile silences.

  The photograph of Rachel Anna Harriet arrived immediately after the call ended.

  My grandchild, barely visible in the incubator, looked like no one but herself. I couldn’t see anyone else in her little face, not even Ahmed. I stood there by the bowling lane and realised I was moved. There on my phone was a new person who had just begun to participate in the dance of life. A little girl with three names who would live, if she achieved a ripe old age, until the end of the twenty-first century.

  I didn’t stop looking at my phone until a group of young men arrived for a game. They spoke a language I didn’t understand; presumably they belonged to the group of refugees who had just been billeted in the town.

  I drove down to the harbour, keeping an eye out for foxes all the way, but nothing happened this time. All I saw were some crows flapping away from the remains of a dead badger on the road.

  Oslovski’s house was deserted; no one appeared to have crossed the neatly raked gravel drive. I carried my bags down to the boat, which was moored by the petrol pumps, and went to show Veronika the picture of my grandchild.

  ‘She’s very pretty,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know about that. It’ll be a while before we can say one way or the other.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ Veronika said. ‘Maybe Paris is a city I could move to? I know you’ve been there.’

  ‘Paris is a very big city. It’s easy to disappear if you don’t know why you’re there.’

  I headed back down to the quayside, then changed my mind and called in at the chandlery, where fru Nordin was drinking coffee with a plate of Danish pastries in front of her. As a doctor I ought to say something about her obesity, but then I noticed that her eyes were suspiciously shiny, as if she had just been crying. No doubt she was still grieving for her husband.

  I didn’t show her the photograph on my phone; I just asked for new batteries for my torch.

  The sun broke through the clouds as I travelled home. I decided I would ask Jansson to sing at the New Year party, just as he had sung at Harriet’s midsummer party a few weeks before she died.

  I couldn’t think of a better ending to the old year or a better start to the new one.

  Perhaps I could even ask him to sing ‘Ave Maria’?

  The same as last time. Now as then.

  CHAPTER 22

  One day Louise and Ahmed decided that their baby would be called Agnes. All thoughts of Rachel and Harriet disappeared.

  Agnes. A beautiful name that no one in our family had ever had. A beautiful name for a very small person.

  A few years before they died my parents had been seized by a sudden urge to find out more about their background. They both knew their maternal and paternal grandparents, but that was it; anything further back lay hidden in a thick fog. They dug through church records and regional archives; they sought information from the few relatives who were still alive. I remember sensing a silent competition between the two of them: who would succeed in tracing their family back the furthest? The only way each of them felt they could achieve some kind of nobility was to find out more than the other.

  When they died, they left behind a decent family tree, but there was no Agnes. On my mother’s side they had discovered, to their boundless shame, that a brother of her great-grandfather had been executed – beheaded, in fact – on a hill just outside Väster�
�s. He had been a guardsman; he had got into a drunken quarrel with a comrade and had killed him, stabbing him twenty-one times, as the court record meticulously noted. King Karl XV had refused to show him any mercy, and Karl Evert Olaus Tell had lost his head early one morning in 1867.

  This knowledge sent an icy wind whistling through their research. When I came home for a visit from medical school, I noticed that all the papers relating to the family tree had disappeared from their place of honour on the bureau with the secret compartment where I had once found a pair of old spectacles when I was a child, but no hidden treasures. One evening when my mother had dozed off and my father had drunk a fair amount, he had revealed the humiliating truth about the executed guardsman. The discovery somehow lurked beneath the surface like a silent, grotesque, corrosive accusation against my mother.

  Gradually they started looking into their past once more, but the joy and excitement had gone, replaced with a sense of anxiety about what they might find in the yellowing documents.

  It is difficult to imagine two more reluctant researchers than my parents. They had taken on a task of which they were now ashamed. The archives sent a poison coursing through their veins.

  Needless to say, they didn’t come across any more murderers. To their surprise they learned that they both came from the sparsely populated inland area of Västerbotten and the equally desolate forests of Härjedalen. There was Finnish blood on my father’s side, and on my mother’s an unexpected diversion to Russia.

  But no Agnes. The little girl in Paris was Agnes the First.

  From time to time the police contacted me, occasionally with a question but usually to tell me that they still had no answers. The fire seemed to have come out of nowhere.

  Louise and I spoke on the phone every day. Occasionally Ahmed would start the call, and we would exchange a few words before he handed over to Louise. I thought I detected a new tone in her voice, although I couldn’t quite pin it down. Hadn’t the child’s arrival brought unadulterated joy? Was Louise tired? Was she experiencing the fear that so often accompanied new motherhood, particularly when it involved a premature baby? I always ended our conversation with an assurance that I was there if she needed my help.

  We also spoke about the burned-out house. She told me she often dreamed about it, saw it rising from the ashes. Another recurring dream she dismissed as embarrassingly childish. Every morning the Carpenter Elves had raised the wooden walls by one metre, using their old-fashioned skills. Nobody knew where they came from, nobody heard the sound of their hammers during the night. The house kept on growing, but the ruins were still there, black and cold, just as they had been after some unknown person came along and set the fire.

  —

  I promised Louise that our house would be rebuilt; I stressed that promise again on the day she told me the baby’s name was Agnes.

  ‘In the old days people used to give their children several names,’ I said. ‘Even if they were poor, they could shower their children with a wealth of names. I had a classmate with seven Christian names, even though he was the poorest of the poor in my school.’

  ‘Do you remember the names?’

  ‘Karl Anton Axel Efraim Hagbert Erik Olof. His surname was Johansson.’

  ‘My daughter will only be called Agnes,’ Louise said. ‘She’ll never be in any doubt about what her name is.’

  One morning I noted the fact that Agnes was one month old as I took my morning dip in the ice-cold water. The weather was changeable, as temperamental as an irascible human being. It snowed, the snow melted, the wind blew from all directions, then there was the kind of windless calm that really belongs to high summer. It could rain for four days non-stop, with constant cloudbursts hammering down on the fragile roof of the caravan.

  No one knew what was going to happen to Oslovski’s house. There were rumours about the lights being on from time to time, so people started to believe the place was haunted. Someone mentioned her glass eye, claiming that at night it was transformed into a sparkling prism which seemed to find light in the darkness. At least these rumours meant the property was safe from break-ins or vandalism.

  The gravel drive was always pristine; no one went near the house. It was as if people doubted whether Oslovski had actually died. Perhaps she had just gone off on one of her mysterious journeys; no one knew where she went or why. Except to track down parts for her car, which remained missing.

  ‘It’s always been desolate around here in the winter,’ Jansson said one day. ‘But now it’s worse than ever. As if empty can become emptier.’

  I knew what he meant. The silence in the archipelago intensified during the winter. It wasn’t just the quayside crumbling away and the iron bollards rusting; it was as if the sea itself didn’t really have the heart to fill the harbour basin with water any more.

  At Oslovski’s wake I took the opportunity to ask Jansson if he would sing at our New Year party. He recoiled as if I had suggested something inappropriate.

  ‘It would make the party just perfect,’ I said with a smile.

  Jansson chewed his lower lip like an awkward schoolboy who hadn’t done his homework.

  ‘I can’t sing any more.’

  ‘Of course you can!’

  ‘And besides, “Ave Maria” isn’t the only song I know,’ he said stubbornly.

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘That’s fine.’

  We didn’t discuss it any further, but I knew I had his word. He would sing when we were gathered in the caravan, as midnight approached.

  I went through the catering one more time with Veronika. We had settled on hot-smoked salmon for the main course, with soup to start and apple cake to follow.

  ‘I would have invited you,’ I said. ‘But there isn’t enough room in the caravan.’

  ‘I’m going to Iceland on New Year’s Day,’ she said.

  I looked at her in astonishment.

  ‘Iceland? Isn’t it even colder there than it is here?’

  ‘I don’t care about the weather. I’m going because of the Icelandic horses.’

  ‘Is that where you might move to?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  Her phone rang; I gathered from the conversation that it was someone enquiring about a birthday party. I picked up my jacket, pulled my hat down over my ears and waved to her. She smiled at me as she began to make notes on a turquoise pad.

  There was an old newspaper lying on one of the tables, so I checked my betting slip. I hadn’t won anything, of course.

  I headed home, the boat buffeted by choppy waves. I felt as if the sea might solidify at any moment, petrifying the waves, the spume, the boat and me.

  A grey sea like this one was like a clockface without hands. Or a room where the walls have fallen down. Sometimes I had a vague premonition that the sea was the force that would one day take my life.

  In order to avoid the even rougher waters as I reached the part of the bay leading to the open sea, I followed the inner shipping lane. It was a longer route, but it was sheltered from the north wind almost all the way, except for the very last part of my trip. I passed an island where the bare branches of the oak trees reached up into the sky. I thought I caught a glimpse of a wild boar slipping away into the undergrowth. I let the engine idle and allowed the waves to carry me, hoping the animal would reappear. The next island was called Hästholmen; a geology professor called Sandmark had once built a summer cottage there. I had seen him when I had accompanied my grandfather to the harbour as a child. Sandmark always wore a black beret and a baggy British khaki uniform, and he lived until he was a hundred and seven years old. Back then it was Jansson’s father who delivered the post; according to Jansson, Professor Sandmark had died on his jetty, having just received a pension payment. Jansson’s father had been standing there with the notes in his hand when Sandmark sank silently to the ground and died on the spot.

  Jansson’s father had been particularly upset by the fact that the professor had collapsed without so much as a groan of pain, f
ear or protest.

  The summer cottage was in a terrible state. I didn’t know for sure, but I thought it was owned by two granddaughters, two sisters who hated each other because one had become rich while the other had failed in life.

  My phone rang; it was Jansson.

  ‘I’m sure,’ he said.

  ‘Sure about what?’

  ‘That the arsonist isn’t local.’

  ‘Did anyone ever really believe that? Apart from when I was the prime suspect.’

  ‘I’ve gone through every single person who lives out here on the islands. It can’t be any of them.’

  ‘What do we really know about people?’ I said. ‘What do you know about me? What do I know about you?’

  ‘Enough to be confident in what I’m saying.’

  I had the feeling that our conversation was going round in circles.

  ‘What do the police think?’ I asked, purely for the sake of something to say.

  ‘I imagine they probably think the same as me, but where do they start looking?’

  Jansson chuckled, as if he had said something funny, then he became serious again.

  ‘I’d really like to hear your view,’ he said. ‘On who’s behind all this. These house fires.’

  ‘I’ll give it some thought, but right now I’m out in the boat. It’s cold.’

  ‘We need to talk about this.’

  ‘You’re right, we need to talk about this. At some point.’

  I ended the call and put my phone back in my pocket. Something about our conversation was bothering me. Even though Jansson had spoken as he always did, something wasn’t right. I just couldn’t work out what it was.

  What did I really know about Jansson, apart from the fact that he had delivered the post for years in all weathers? He had an extensive knowledge of everyone who lived out on the islands. Everyone knew Jansson, the helpful postman in the archipelago. But who really knew him?