Italian Shoes (12 page)

After what might have been another hour, she moved to the front seat and got dressed.

‘It was easier when I was young,' she said. ‘A clumsy old woman like me finds it difficult to get dressed in acar.'

She fetched dry clothes for me from the rucksack in the boot. Before I put them on, she warmed them up by spreading them over the steering wheel, where the heat from the engine was being blown into the car. I could see through the windscreen that it had started snowing. I was worried in case the snow should start drifting, and prevent us from driving back to the main road.

I dressed as quickly as I could, fumbling as if I was drunk.

It was snowing heavily by the time we left the forest pool. But the logging road was not yet impassable.

We returned to the guest house. This time it was
Harriet who went out with her walker to fetch the pizza we had for our evening meal.

We shared one of her bottles of brandy.

The last thing I saw before falling asleep was her face.

It was very close. She may have been smiling. I hope she was.

WHEN I WOKE
up the next day, Harriet was sitting with the atlas open in front of her. My body felt as if it had been subjected to a severe beating. She asked how I felt. I said I was fine.

‘The interest,' she said with a smile.

‘Interest?'

‘On your promise. After all these years.'

‘What are you asking for?'

‘A diversion.'

She pointed out where we were on the map. Instead of moving her finger southwards, she moved it eastwards, towards the coast, and the province of Hälsingland. It came to a halt not far from Hudiksvall.

‘To there.'

‘And what's in store for you there?'

‘My daughter. I want you to meet her. It will take an extra day, perhaps two.'

‘Why does she live there?'

‘Why do you live on your island?'

Needless to say, I did as she requested. We drove towards the coast. The countryside was exactly the same all the way: isolated houses with their satellite dishes, and no sign of any people.

Late in the afternoon Harriet said she was too tired to go any further. We checked into a hotel in Delsbo. The room was small and dusty. Harriet took her medicine and painkillers, and fell asleep from sheer exhaustion. Perhaps she took a drink without my noticing. I went out, found a chemist's and bought a pharmaceutical handbook. Then I sat down in a cafe and read about her medication.

There was something unreal about sitting in a cafe with a cup of coffee and a cream bun – with several small children shouting and screaming to attract the attention of their mothers, who were absorbed in well-thumbed magazines – and discovering just how ill Harriet was. I felt increasingly that I was paying a visit to a world I had lost contact with during my years on my grandparents' island. For twelve years I had denied the existence of anything beyond the beaches and cliffs surrounding me, a world that had no relevance for me. I had turned myself into a hermit with no knowledge of what was happening outside the cave in which I was hidden away.

But in that cafe in Delsbo, it became clear to me that I couldn't continue to live the life I was leading. I would return to my island, of course: I had nowhere else to go. But nothing would ever be the same as it was. The moment I noticed that dark shadow on the expanse of white snow and ice, a door had slammed behind me and would never be opened again.

I had bought a picture postcard in a corner shop. It depicted a fence covered in snow. I sent it to Jansson.

I asked him to feed the animals. Nothing else.

Harriet was awake when I got back. She shook her head when she saw the book I was carrying.

‘I don't want to talk about my woes today.'

We went to the neighbouring grill bar for dinner.

When I saw the kitchen and breathed the smell of cooking, it occurred to me that we were living in an age of deep-frying and ready-made meals. It was not long before Harriet slid her plate away and announced that she couldn't eat another mouthful. I tried to urge her to eat a little bit more – but why? A dying person eats no more than is necessary to sustain the short life remaining.

We soon returned to our room. The walls were thin. We could hear two people talking in a neighbouring room. Their voices rose and fell. Both Harriet and I strained our ears, but we were unable to make out any words.

‘Are you still an eavesdropper?' she asked.

‘There are no conversations on my island for me to overhear,' I said.

‘You always used to eavesdrop on my telephone conversations, despite the fact that you pretended to be uninterested and thumbed through a book or a newspaper. That's how you tried to hide your big ears. Do you remember?'

I was upset. She was right, of course. I've always been an eavesdropper, ever since the time when I used to listen in to the angst-ridden conversations between my father and mother. I have stood behind half-open doors and listened to my colleagues, to patients, to people's intimate conversations in cafes or on trains. I discovered that
most conversations contained small, almost unnoticeable lies. I used to ask myself if that's the way it's always been. Has it always been necessary for conversations between people to contain barely noticeable elements of untruth in order to get anywhere?

The conversation in the next room had come to an end. Harriet was tired. She lay down and closed her eyes.

I put on my jacket, and went out to explore the deserted little town. Wherever you looked was blue light oozing out of barred windows. The occasional moped, a car travelling far too fast, then silence again. Harriet wanted me to meet her daughter. I wondered why. Was it to show me that she had managed perfectly well without me, that she had borne the child I hadn't been privileged to give her? I felt pangs of sorrow as I trudged through the wintry evening.

I paused at a brightly lit ice rink, where a few young people were skating around with bandy sticks and a red ball. I suddenly felt very close to my own younger days. The crackling sound of skates on ice, of stick against ball, the occasional shout, skaters falling over only to scramble to their feet again immediately. That's how I remembered it, although in fact I had never laid my hands on a bandy stick: I had been shunted off to an ice-hockey rink, where the play was no doubt a lot more painful than what I was watching taking place.

Get back on your feet as soon as you fall.

That was the message to be learned from the freezing cold ice-hockey rinks of my youth. A lesson to be applied to the life that was in store for us.

Always scramble up again when you fall down. Never stay down. But that was precisely what I had done. I had stayed down after making my big mistake.

I watched them playing, and soon picked out a very little boy, the smallest of them all, albeit fat – or perhaps he was wearing more protective clothing than the rest? But he was the best. He accelerated quicker than any of the others, dribbled the ball with his stick without even needing to look at what he was doing, feinted with astonishing speed, and was always in exactly the right position to receive a pass. A fat little lad who was a faster skater than any of the others. I tried to imagine which of the skaters out there was most like me at their age. Which one would I have been, with my much heavier ice-hockey stick? Certainly not the little boy who could skate so fast and had a much better ball sense than most. I would have been one of the also-rans – a blueberry that could be picked and replaced with any other blueberry around.

Never stay down if you don't have to.

I had done what you should never do.

I went back to the hotel. There was no night porter. The room key opened the outside door. Harriet had gone to bed. One of the brandy bottles was standing on her bedside table.

‘I thought you must have run away,' she said. ‘I'm going to sleep now. I've taken a dram and a sleeping pill.'

She turned on to her side, and was soon asleep. I cautiously took hold of her wrist and measured her pulse: 78 beats per minute. I sat down on a chair, switched on
the television, and watched a news broadcast with the sound turned down so low that not even my eavesdropping ears were able to hear a word of what was said. The pictures seemed to be the same as usual. Bleeding, tortured, suffering specimens of humanity. And then a series of well-dressed men making endless pronouncements, displaying no sign of sympathy, only arrogant smiles. I switched off the television and lay down on the bed. I thought about the young female police officer with the blonde hair before falling asleep.

At one o'clock the next day we were approaching Hudiksvall. It had stopped snowing, and there was no ice on the roads. Harriet pointed out a road sign to RÃ¥ngevallen. The surface was terrible, destroyed by monster tree-felling machines. We turned off again, this time on to a private road. The forest was very dense. I wondered what kind of a person Harriet's daughter was, living like this so remotely in the depths of the forest. The only question I had put to Harriet during our journey was whether Louise had a husband or any children. She didn't. Logs were stacked in various appropriate places by the roadside. The road reminded me of the one that had led to Sara Larsson's house.

When we eventually came to a clearing, I saw several ruined buildings and dilapidated fences. And a large caravan with a tented extension.

‘We're here,' said Harriet. ‘This is where my daughter lives.'

‘In the caravan?'

‘Can you see any other building with a roof that hasn't collapsed?'

I helped her out of the car, and fetched her walker. There was the sound of an engine coming from what might once have been a dog kennel. It could hardly be anything else but a generator. There was a satellite dish on the roof of the caravan. We stood there for several minutes without anything happening. I felt an intense desire to return to my island.

The caravan door opened. A woman emerged.

She was wearing a pink dressing gown and high-heeled shoes. It seemed to me anything but easy to estimate her age. She had a pack of cards in one hand.

‘This is my daughter,' said Harriet.

She pushed her walker through the snow to where the woman was trying to stand steadily on her high heels.

I stayed where I was.

‘This is your father,' said Harriet to her daughter.

There was snow in the air. I thought of Jansson, and wished to goodness that he could have come to collect me in his hydrocopter.

MY DAUGHTER DOESN'T
have a well of her own.

Needless to say, there was no running water in her caravan; nor was there any sign of a pump anywhere on the site. In order to fetch water, I had to follow a path down the slope, through a copse, and eventually to another deserted farm with glassless windows and suspicious crows perched on the chimneys. In the yard was a rusty pump which produced water. As I raised and lowered the handle, the rusty iron screamed in pain.

The crows were motionless.

This was the first thing my daughter had asked me to do for her. To fetch two buckets of water. I'm just thankful that she didn't say anything else. She could have yelled at me and told me to clear off, or she could have been overcome with joy at finally meeting her father. But all she did was ask me to fetch some water. I took the buckets and followed the path through the snow. I wondered if she would normally go herself in her dressing gown and high-heeled shoes. But what I wondered most of all was what had happened all those years ago, and why nobody had told me anything about it.

It was 250 yards to the abandoned farm. When Harriet said that the woman standing by the caravan was my
daughter, I knew immediately that she was telling the truth. Harriet was incapable of lying. I searched my memory for the moment when she must have been conceived. As I trudged through the snow, it struck me that the only possibility was that Harriet had discovered she was pregnant after I'd disappeared. So the moment of conception must have been a month or so before we parted.

I tried hard to remember.

The forest was silent. I felt like a gnome making his way through the snow in some ancient fairy tale. We had only ever made love on her sofa bed. So that was where my daughter must have been created. When I left for America and Harriet had waited for me in vain at the airport, she would have known nothing about it. She only became aware of the situation later, and I had vanished by then.

I pumped up the water. Then I stood the buckets by the side of the pump and went into the abandoned house. The front door was rotten – it collapsed as I nudged it open with my foot.

I wandered round the rooms, which smelled of mould and rotten wood. It was like examining a shipwrecked liner. Bits of newspaper protruded from behind torn wallpaper. A page of
Ljusnan
from 12 March 1969:
A car crash took place on
. . . The rest of the article was missing.
In this picture, Mrs Mattsson is displaying one of her most recent tapestries created with her customary loving care
. . . The picture was torn, Mrs Mattsson's face was still visible, and one of her hands, but no tapestry. In the bedroom was what was left of a double bed. It seemed to have been
chopped to pieces with an axe. Somebody had vented his fury on the bed and made certain that it could never ever be slept in again.

I tried to conjure up images of the people who had lived in the house, and one day left it, never to return. But their faces were averted. Abandoned houses are like empty showcases in a museum. I left the building and tried to come to grips with the thought that I had acquired a daughter, out of the blue, who lived in the forest to the south of Hudiksvall. A daughter who must be thirty-seven years of age, and lived in a caravan. A woman who walked through the snow in a pink dressing gown and high-heeled shoes.

One thing was clear to me.