After the Fire

by Henning Mankell

  We both started crying; we were exhausted. At least now we could rest.

  I was woken by the sound of an engine at some point during the morning. My jaw was aching where my tooth had broken off. I drank a scoop of water out of the container on the draining board. I knew Jansson was on his way; no other engine sounds like his.

  I was sitting on the bench by the time he rounded the headland. He hove to, leaving the engine running. I relaxed; he wasn’t intending to stay long this time either. He looped the mooring rope around the bollard and clambered ashore. We shook hands and discussed the essentials: the weather, wind direction, the banks of cloud over to the east, the temperature, the ice and the fact that the Enberg family, who farmed sheep and fish, had a ten-year-old daughter who played the double bass; she had just been given a grant of three thousand kronor by the Lions.

  I waited impatiently for Jansson to tell me why he had come. I didn’t want to run the risk of him staying any longer than necessary, so I didn’t mention Louise’s calls or my lack of sleep.

  ‘I’m going to visit my brother,’ he said at last, when there was nothing more to say about the weather.

  ‘You’ve got a brother? I’ve never heard you mention him.’

  ‘We don’t have much contact with each other. He’s a few years younger than me, and he left long before you moved here.’

  ‘But you’ve never even told me that you’ve got a brother!’

  ‘Of course I have.’

  ‘Where does he live?’

  ‘In Huddinge.’

  ‘Stockholm…and that’s where you’re going?’

  ‘I’m setting off first thing tomorrow morning, and I’ll be away until Sunday.’

  I did a quick calculation: he would be away for three days.

  Jansson got to his feet. ‘It’s many years since I was in Stockholm,’ he said as he unhooked the mooring rope. ‘Perhaps it’s time to see how the capital city is getting on.’

  ‘Have a good trip, and say hello to your brother from me. What’s his name?’

  ‘Albin.’

  We waved to each other as he reversed away from the jetty. I found it very strange that Jansson had never mentioned his brother in all the years I had known him. Or had I forgotten?

  I managed to get hold of a dentist who was willing to see me. The trip and the treatment took three hours; by the time I got back the pain had gone.

  The following day I woke early; I had slept for many hours. Louise rang at eleven o’clock that night and told me that the doctors now had Agnes’s illness under control. She promised to call me the next day. That night I went to bed with a feeling of relief that I didn’t recognise from any other time in my life.

  It was cold and still when I woke up. As I sat at the table with a cup of coffee, I was struck by a thought that I immediately pushed aside. But it came back.

  I would go over to Stångskär and visit Jansson’s house. He had once told me that he kept a spare key under a stone in the garden.

  I couldn’t explain why I needed to go there; perhaps it was something to do with the unease I had felt when the Valfridssons’ house burned down?

  At ten o’clock in the morning I left the island and set my course for Stångskär. From time to time the boat sliced through thin shards of floating ice. Another week of this cold, and the ice would be here to stay.

  Jansson’s boathouse and his old slipway lay in a south-facing inlet, where he and his boats were sheltered from the worst of the storms coming in from the north and west. I switched off the engine and drifted towards the jetty. His boat wasn’t there; he really had gone to see his brother. I climbed out and called his name a few times just to make sure he really wasn’t around. I walked up to his two-storey house, which was one of the oldest in the archipelago. I knocked on the door but no one answered. The key was well hidden, and it took me a while to find it. As I inserted it in the lock I wondered once again why I was making this secret visit. I thought about Oslovski’s house and about the deserted house deep in the forest. And now here I was at Jansson’s red-painted cottage with its sparkling windows and freshly painted decorative carving above the porch.

  I went inside. Jansson kept the place very clean. The floors were spotless; everything in the kitchen shone. In that way he reminded me of Oslovski. I went upstairs and into what must be his room. The bed was neatly made, slippers side by side, no clothes lying around. The other rooms were empty because he never had visitors. The beds were made up, but for what reason? Could they be an expression of his loneliness, his longing?

  I went back downstairs. In the living room he had draped a sheet over the television. The house didn’t suit Jansson at all. He should live in completely different conditions.

  Finally I went into the laundry room beyond the kitchen. Again, everything was in perfect order. The pale January sun shone in through the window. Clean clothes were arranged on hangers, underwear folded in baskets. I suddenly remembered Jansson bringing me underpants after my house had burned down.

  I was just about to leave when I noticed the laundry basket, which contained items that had not yet been washed. I saw the shirt and trousers Jansson had been wearing at my New Year’s Eve party and when I saw him later at the fire.

  I couldn’t help picking them up. They told me nothing that I didn’t already know. I was just about to put them back when I noticed another shirt underneath. This one had black sooty marks on the lower part of the sleeves. I lifted it to my nose; it stank of petrol.

  My head was spinning. I felt as if I could see everything with perfect clarity.

  The night when my house burned down, a dazzling light had flared up.

  That’s how it must have happened.

  When I went back to the boat a little while later, I was afraid.

  I hoped I hadn’t left any traces behind.

  CHAPTER 25

  I thought about the Japanese garden my daughter had described to me.

  The Ocean of Emptiness.

  That’s what it felt like as I headed home from Jansson’s island. It was as if Stångskär had metamorphosed into a fortress where Jansson had hidden himself with all his secrets. I now knew what I had understood, but I didn’t understand what it was that I knew. Jansson had become transparent, yet at the same time he was far, far away. If I stretched out my hand, I would never be able to reach him.

  I switched off the engine and tried to think, but my head was all over the place.

  I continued my journey home; as I reached the bay I saw someone moving around outside my tent on the skerry. I turned into a narrow inlet that is navigable only in a small boat like mine. This enabled me to approach the skerry from the side where a high rock face made it impossible for anyone to see me from the tent. Like a hunter I was also careful to stay downwind of my prey. I killed the engine and used the oars instead. Rowing this boat was hard work, even when I flipped up the engine.

  My head was full of Jansson, but there was still a little bit of room left to find out who was using my tent and my skerry.

  I hove to next to the steep cliff, where a number of depressions in the rock made it possible to scramble ashore. I remembered carving my name at the water’s edge in this very spot when I was a teenager, but there was no trace left now. I crawled across the rock like a clumsy lizard to see who was outside my tent, but there was no one in sight. Whoever it was had gone inside and zipped up the flap. Two separate strands of distaste and anxiety were fighting for space inside my mind: Jansson’s insanity and a concern that the person in the tent would turn out to be violent.

  The surfboard and sail lay where I usually left my boat, looking like an insect that had been washed ashore.

  I took a step away from the tent and accidentally kicked a pile of stones. Before I had time to scurry back to the boat, the tent flap opened.

  The boy was fair-haired and couldn’t have been more than seventeen years old. He was wearing a black neoprene suit and I immediately noticed a tear on one shoulder, which he ha
d made a reasonable job of repairing with masking tape. His eyes were dark; I couldn’t tell whether he was afraid or simply watchful. There was something about his hair that bothered me: it was too blond, too white. It looked as if it had been dyed by someone who didn’t really know what they were doing. But why had he changed the colour of his hair? In order to become someone else or because of an impatient desire to make himself different?

  I signalled to him to come out; for some reason I didn’t think he spoke Swedish. He crawled out and sat down; I sat down too. My anxiety was gradually giving way to a growing curiosity.

  ‘I haven’t taken anything,’ he said suddenly. ‘I have only rested.’

  He spoke Swedish with a slight accent; perhaps he came from the north?

  I was about to ask him his name when he leaped to his feet and ran towards his surfboard. It happened so fast that I only just had time to get up. He pushed the board out into the water and jumped onto it. He was extremely agile, moving like a sure-footed animal with a gleaming black coat. There was enough wind to fill his sail.

  I was overcome with a strange mixture of fury and impotence. I yelled after him, ‘Hey! Hey you!’

  With hindsight I can’t think of a more pointless thing to shout. He didn’t turn around, of course. I watched him disappear around the southern headland.

  Soon the ice would form, and he would no longer be able to windsurf.

  The tent flap was fluttering in the breeze. I crouched down and drew it back. There wasn’t much inside, just an empty plastic bottle, several screwed-up pieces of paper and the remains of a packet of biscuits. I crawled in and smoothed out the sheets of paper. They looked as if they had been torn off a squared pad. On some of them he had played noughts and crosses with himself. Several of the games were unfinished, with no winner.

  There was some writing on one of the pages. His handwriting was ornate, almost old-fashioned. It took me a little while to work out what it said.

  The same text was repeated twice, like a refrain:

  Some poems fade away in days

  Then daybreaks and dreams

  Have agreed on a victor

  I could read the words but found it difficult to understand what he meant. Was it a poem or a message he had decided not to send to an unknown recipient? Was it for me, the man who had put up the tent and provided him with a refuge?

  I tucked the piece of paper in my pocket and left the tent. With some difficulty I managed to scramble up the steep cliff to the top, where I could look out across the bay.

  There was no sign of him. He could be hiding among the islets in the small archipelago known as Hällarna, which is unnamed on maritime charts.

  A little further out lay Satansgrundet, or the Devil’s Reef, which was shaped like a chopped-off pillar sticking straight up out of the sea. He could hide there if that was what he wanted.

  I stayed at the top of the cliff until I started shivering. Back at the tent I took a pen out of my pocket and wrote a note on the reverse of one of the unfinished games of noughts and crosses.

  Nice poem. You’re welcome to use the tent, but naturally I’m curious about who you are.

  I thought for a moment, then signed it: Fredrik. I added my phone number, then I placed the piece of paper in the middle of the groundsheet, zipped up the flap and set off for home.

  I wondered what the boy’s name might be. He was no Erik or Anders – then again perhaps that’s exactly what he was?

  It occurred to me that the only person I knew who would have done the same thing was my daughter. In a way he was her brother. He was a visitor from a new age that I would only have time to brush up against.

  I hoped he would get in touch.

  I didn’t start the engine, I simply allowed the boat to drift towards my island. Dusk was beginning to fall. The ice would come late this year.

  —

  A few weeks of intense cold followed. The ice reached further and further out to sea. I lay in the caravan listening to the movement of the sea and the ice. If I placed my hand on the wall, it soon felt chilled to the bone. However much I turned up the heating, there was a constant battle between the bitter cold outside and the heat inside.

  Needless to say I spent a great deal of time thinking about Jansson and the discovery I had made at his house on Stångskär. I have never experienced so many confused and contradictory emotions, not even when I botched the operation that destroyed my life as a doctor. I brooded about him during the day and dreamed about him at night. On several occasions I sat there clutching my phone, ready to call the police, but I just couldn’t do it. The idea that Jansson could have let me burn to death in my house was too improbable, too appalling.

  I think I was most afraid of the day Jansson would return from his mysterious trip. How would I confront him? He had said he would be away for three days, but several weeks had passed.

  There were days when I walked around in the cold stillness of feeling as if I were confined in a cage. I forced myself to carry on taking a dip each morning, but not even the icy water could make me think more clearly. In my head Jansson had been transformed from a friendly seafaring postman into something that could only be described as a monster.

  I spoke to Louise every day; Agnes was now fully recovered. I didn’t ask any questions about how they lived their life or where they got their money from. I found it difficult to imagine Louise going out and earning her money as a pickpocket with a baby at home, but I had no way of knowing, and perhaps I didn’t want to know.

  It was after one of these conversations with Louise that I remembered an occasion when my father had come staggering home much too early. He was drunk, his hair a mess, and he was furious. The rage was etched on his face, every muscle seemingly set in the throes of an agonising cramp. I could also see the despair in his eyes. I must have been about ten years old at the time. My mother pushed the door to, leaving it open just a fraction. Looking back, I realise she did this so that I would be able to follow what was said, and perhaps so that I would learn how a person could be utterly crushed yet still be open to solace and have the ability to overcome his humiliation.

  I couldn’t see much, but I heard every word.

  It was the same old story: my father had fallen out with the maître d’ and been fired on the spot. He had thrown his cloth on the floor and simply walked out. The maître d’ had followed him into the street, and they had stood there yelling at one another until there were no words left. It had been raining. They had stood there like two dripping-wet dogs.

  My father was often fired under dramatic circumstances. It was by no means unusual to find him sitting at the kitchen table moaning while my mother slowly persuaded him to regain his faith in humanity, and above all in himself. But on this particular evening he said something quite different from the standard litany of complaints about the indignities to which he was constantly subjected.

  Earlier in the day, while the restaurant was quiet, he had apparently flicked through a magazine left behind by a customer. He had read about a Chinese emperor who, long long ago, had ordered that a large drum be placed by the main entrance to his palace. Anyone who came along could stop, strike several powerful blows, then pass on their complaint to a servant, who would immediately convey it to the emperor. Everyone had the opportunity to put forward a grievance without the risk of incurring imperial rage.

  ‘These drums don’t exist anywhere,’ my father fumed. ‘There isn’t a single place where we can wield our drumsticks to make sure that someone listens to all the injustices we have to suffer.’

  Why did I think of my father and the emperor’s drum after I had spoken to Louise? There was no connection. A waiter and a pickpocket had nothing in common. The only thing I could come up with was that both of them wanted to live in a different, fairer world where justice applied to everyone.

  I jotted down a few words on a scrap of paper.

  The emperor’s drum. My father’s tears at the kitchen table. What’s the connection? />
  The following day when I was in the caravan I heard Jansson’s boat approaching. My heart started racing. I opened the door and listened. There was no doubt: it was definitely Jansson.

  He seemed exactly the same as usual. The way he raised his right arm slowly, a little stiffly, before he waved with fingers outspread. He didn’t stop waving until I had returned the gesture. I couldn’t believe he had discovered my secret visit to Stångskär; if he had, he was hiding it very well.

  He had run the mooring rope from the prow to the roof of the wheelhouse, and when he reached the jetty he flung it to me. I caught it and looped it around the nearest bollard.

  Jansson clambered ashore.

  ‘My brother was fine,’ he said, perching at the end of the bench. ‘But the trip was a bit longer than I’d planned.’

  He took off his left boot and shook out a fragment of a pine cone, then put it on again.

  I stood looking at this man, whom I had known for so many years. I realised now that I had known only a small part of a complex, splintered individual. I had never had any suspicion that a terrifying figure was hidden behind the ordinary person who had delivered the post to the island for so long.

  Did he himself know who he was? Do any of us really know who we are?

  I had no answer. The only thing I was clinging to at the moment was the incomprehensible.

  A grey-haired postman who was also a ruthless arsonist.

  If the bright light hadn’t woken me, I would have burned to death. The widow Westerfeldt could also have been the victim of the terrifying power of fire. And Jansson had had no way of knowing whether the Valfridssons were out on their island or not.

  Standing there in front of the man on the bench, I felt utterly helpless.

  ‘You don’t usually come over for no reason,’ I said.

  ‘I just wanted to tell you that my brother is fine, but living in a big city seems like an insecure kind of existence to me.’