The Journey to the End of the World (Joel Gustafson Stories) (23 page)

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Authors: Henning Mankell

BOOK: The Journey to the End of the World (Joel Gustafson Stories)

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Joel wondered if Samuel had ever really believed that he would go to sea again. Or had it only been an impossible dream? From the very start? Joel didn’t know. And now it was too late to find an answer.

Everything that had existed before was now too late. Samuel was lying in the churchyard. He would never speak to anybody again. His voice was dead. Samuel with his badly shaved cheeks. And his drooping shoulders.

Joel made another attempt to understand. What exactly did it mean, being dead? How long would anybody have to be dead? A thousand years? Or longer? He thought the worst thing about it was having to be dead for such a long time. What existed before you were born didn’t count. But afterwards, when your life was over, what existed then? Samuel hadn’t merely gone out for a short walk. He was lying under the ground, and would be dead so long that nobody knew how long that would be. Or perhaps there was no end?

He noticed that the pain in his stomach was getting worse now. He got up and folded up the blanket. He felt very uneasy, but there was nothing he could do about that. It was a bit easier if he moved about. He wrapped the blanket round his shoulders. He went to the kitchen, then clambered up into the window seat. It was a cold night. The single streetlight lit up the snow-covered road. Everything was motionless. The only thing moving was invisible time passing. Somewhere out there in the darkness and the cold, a new morning was waiting.

Joel suddenly recalled that night when he’d been sitting on the window seat and seen a solitary dog walking away down the street. That was a lot of years ago. But he’d never managed to forget that dog. He started to think about it yet again. Where had it been heading for? For a whole year Joel had run a secret society whose only task was to look for that secretive dog. Then he hadn’t thought about it for quite a long time.

But now it was as if the dog had returned.

He strained his eyes. He felt certain that the dog would come running out of the darkness on silent paws. From the opposite direction. To say goodbye. He could feel his heart starting to beat faster, But the road was deserted.

Joel stood up. The light from the streetlamp shone into the kitchen. He shuddered. Now all he wanted was to get away as quickly as possible. The empty flat scared him. The walls were no longer creaking. It seemed as if they were howling.

Perhaps a house was capable of grieving as well? Perhaps the walls were howling over the loss of Samuel? Samuel who was now lying under the ground and would never come trudging up those stairs again. Joel folded the blanket and quickly fastened his boots. He’d put the alarm clock on the kitchen table. He thought he could see the marks made on the wall by the case containing
Celestine
.

Then he found himself in two minds.

It was still far too soon to go to the station. But he didn’t want to stay in the flat. He picked up his suitcase and his sailor’s kitbag and walked down the stairs for the last time. He hesitated on the last step. How many times had he walked up and down these stairs? How many times had he run? He didn’t know. But he could still remember how proud he’d been when he cleared the whole staircase in three enormous leaps.

Then he raised his foot. The last step. For the last time. There was no going back now. It was as if he were opening a new door, at the same time as the door to his childhood slowly closed, creaking all the way.

When he’d locked the front door he removed his mitten and pushed the key under the door.

It was cold. He pulled up his scarf to cover his mouth and nose. What should he do? Wander round the old streets one last time before heading for the station? He didn’t know.

But as he passed through the gate and entered the street, he made up his mind.

He would go to the railway bridge. If there was one place he ought to say farewell to, it was the bridge and the river.

He hurried down the street and turned off down the hill leading to the bridge. He was walking alongside the railway lines. There was an old, rickety platform where the milk churns used to stand. He hid his suitcase and kitbag behind it. Then he started running so as to keep warm.

He had the feeling that there were several boys running alongside him. A full gang, in fact. It was really himself at different ages. He felt that he was surrounded by what he used to be.

He paused when he came to the abutment. He was alone again now. His ghostly companions had left. The arch of the bridge loomed high over his head. He couldn’t resist the temptation to place one hand on the freezing cold iron. The chill penetrated him immediately. He shuddered.

At that very moment it occurred to him that there was one person he ought to say goodbye to. Gertrud. Noseless Gertrud who lived in her strange house on the other side of the river. But something held him back. No doubt she was asleep in bed. Besides, he didn’t want to say goodbye to her. It was as if he wanted to cling on to something. Something that linked him with this little town. Something that would give him an obligation to come back. Not just to plant a palm tree on Samuel’s grave, but also to meet Gertrud and say goodbye properly.

To prevent his feet from getting too cold, he sprinted over the bridge. He didn’t stop until he came to Gertrud’s house.

The light was on in her kitchen. He stopped outside her gate. Remembered the time when he and Ture had hacked open a frozen anthill and then thrown the bits into her kitchen through the window. He slowly opened the gate and crept up to the window. The snow creaked under his boots. He raised himself on tiptoe.

The kitchen was empty. Gertrud sometimes left a light on when she went to bed. She was bound to be fast asleep now. He tiptoed further along the wall until he came to her bedroom window. When he pressed his cheek against the windowpane he could hear her snoring. But how could somebody without a nose snore? He regretted the thought.

He ought not to think like that about Gertrud.

Despite everything, she was one of the few friends he had.

He didn’t know where the feeling came from.

But all of a sudden he had been transformed into the loneliest person in existence. He thought he could step outside himself and observe himself from a distance. In the middle of the night, in the freezing cold. A boy aged fifteen standing next to a window and listening to somebody snoring. He felt the urge to cry. He left the scene. Ran up the hill, over the bridge, and didn’t stop until he got back to his case and his kitbag.

He was bending down to pick them up when he noticed tracks in the snow. They weren’t his own. Something else had been there.

A dog.

He straightened up and looked round.

He tried to spot it in the cold moonlight. But there was no dog to be seen. He started to follow the tracks. They led down to the river. The snow was deep. He had to plough his way through it. But he knew now that the dog had returned. The dog that had once been heading for a distant star.

It had returned in order to say farewell.

He forced his way through the thick bushes on the bank of the river. The tracks led straight out onto the frozen river. He tried to spot the dog in the moonlight. He carefully made his way onto the snow-covered ice. The effort had made him sweaty. But there was no way he could turn back. Not now when he was so close.

The pawmarks in the snow were very clear. Before long he was a long way out onto the ice. The arch of the bridge loomed up like an enormous animal crouching by his side.

And then the tracks came to an end.

Joel looked round. He didn’t understand what he could see. Absolutely clear pawmarks that suddenly petered out. There was no hole in the ice. Nothing but an expanse of white, virgin snow.

He looked up at the night sky and turned his back on the moon. There was only one possible explanation, he thought. An explanation that somebody who has reached the age of fifteen shouldn’t really believe in. That the dog had taken off and flown away on invisible wings. Heading for the star he’d selected to be his goal.

I must be childish to believe that such a scenario is possible, Joel thought. Now, when my father’s dead and I’m a sailor, I can’t be childish any longer. Even if I am.

Joel turned and went back to the river bank. He paused once, turned round and gazed up at the sky.

The dog was somewhere up there, flapping its invisible wings.

Joel retrieved his suitcase and his kitbag and walked through the deserted little town. When he came to the station, he found that the waiting room was still locked. He put his bags behind a dustbin and walked out onto the tracks. Stood between the rails and gazed southwards. He was in a hurry now. Not long ago he’d have liked to put time on hold. Now it was passing far too slowly. He was in a hurry to get away.

Somebody eventually came and unlocked the waiting room. Joel went in and sat down. He could feel the warmth returning to his body. He checked his inside pocket, to make sure he had his rail ticket and his discharge book. And in his pocket was his money. Eighty kronor.

An old man with a rucksack came into the waiting room and sat down. He nodded a greeting to Joel.

‘Off on a trip, are you?’ he said.

Joel mumbled something inaudible in reply. He had no desire to talk to anybody just at the moment.

‘I’m going to Orsa,’ said the old man.

‘I’m going further than that,’ said Joel.

‘Are you going to Mora?’

‘I’m going to the end of the world,’ said Joel.

The old man looked thoughtfully at him.

Joel stood up and examined the map hanging on the wall. He found Gothenburg. And the harbour. And the shipyard. And the ship that was waiting for him.

The train arrived. The engine snorted and sighed. Joel scanned the platform before boarding the train, but needless to say, there was nobody there to wave goodbye to him.

Only Samuel’s ghost. Standing there nodding to him, and whispering:

‘Off you go.’

As the train passed over the railway bridge Joel contemplated his reflection in the frozen windowpane.

He was on his way now. On his way at last. Away from the little town he’d grown up in. On his way to Pitcairn Island. To the end of the world.

That existed and yet didn’t exist.

Three days later, shortly before dawn, the cargo ship
Rio de Janeiro
left Gothenburg. Joel woke up in his cabin when the engines started to throb.

It was late winter, 1960.

During the next few years Joel signed on with several different ships. At the beginning of 1963, a few days before his eighteenth birthday, he worked on a little cargo boat that docked at Pitcairn Island.

While on shore leave, he collected a coconut from a coconut palm.

At the beginning of December that same year, he returned to Sweden and made the long trip back to the little town where he was born.

In the evening of December 4 he got off the train and made his way straight to the churchyard. He dug away the snow and planted the coconut in the frozen soil on Samuel’s grave. He knew it wouldn’t survive, so he also spread out a few palm leaves he’d brought with him from Pitcairn Island.

The following day Joel left the little town.

He’d spent the night in a boarding house.

He didn’t pay a visit to Gertrud in her house on the other side of the river.

When his train left the station, there was nobody there to wave goodbye to him this time either.

His childhood was over.

Joel had begun his long journey out into the world.

And somewhere up there, over his head, there would always be an invisible dog flapping its invisible wings.