A Treacherous Paradise

44

Every morning when Hanna woke up Carlos was sitting in her bed with his hairy back towards her. She didn’t like him being there: she was afraid he would introduce stinging and blood-sucking insects into her bed. She chased him away and closed the bedroom door before going back to bed and extinguishing the paraffin lamp. But Carlos always either opened the door, or climbed back in through the window she kept open. He was there every morning. She was the one living in a cage, not Carlos.

In the end Hanna realized that he was longing for company, just as she was. He was missing the companionship characteristic of the life of chimpanzees — allowing another member of the troop to examine his fur and pick it clean. She felt sad once this had become clear to her. She could see her own loneliness mirrored in his, sat down close to him and began searching his skin for dead insects. It was obvious how much he enjoyed that. When Carlos wanted to repay the compliment by searching through her own hair, she allowed him to do so.

She started to see the pair of them as an odd couple, their mutual respect growing all the time even though they didn’t really have anything more in common than this morning ritual, which could go on for hours.

In the early days of this new stage in her life as a widow, she kept thinking about how she had changed her name for the second time in her short life. In the course of a brief ceremony in the distant city of Algiers, she had stopped being Renström and become Lundmark. Then that second name had been replaced by Vaz. In all the documents that her solicitor Senhor Andrade brought for her to read and sign, it said that her name was Hanna Vaz, and that her title was now viuva, widow.

But the thought of her being suddenly subjected once again to widowhood didn’t affect her nearly so much as the realization that she had become a very rich woman. Andrade produced accounts for her to read and sign, and she was astounded when she laboriously worked out the equivalents of English pounds, Portuguese escudos or American dollars into Swedish kronor. She was staggered to think that she now probably had more liquid capital than Jonathan Forsman’s total possessions. She sometimes woke up in the middle of the night under the impression that money — shiny new coins and pristine banknotes — was raining down on to her bed. Even after a few months, this wealth seemed totally unreal to her. And money continued to come rolling in. Every morning the short, slim cashier Eber, who was descended from a German family that had emigrated to southern Africa, would come up to her house from the brothel with a leather briefcase crammed full of cash. She would sign for the briefcase, give Eber the empty briefcase from the previous day, and then shut herself up in the study she had taken over from her former husband. In one of the walls was a safe that needed two different keys to open it: she wore them on a ribbon tied round her neck. She would enter the amounts in a cash book, then place the notes and coins inside the safe and lock it again. Not even Carlos was allowed to be in the room when she was counting out the money from the brothel.

Once a month, in accordance with the cashier’s instructions, she would prepare the payments that needed to be made. On that day Eber was always accompanied by several Portuguese soldiers who escorted him back to the brothel with the bulging briefcase.

Nobody stayed in the hotel as a paying guest now. Once Hanna had moved out the rooms had either remained empty, or been used by the whores when their own rooms were being repaired after being trashed by some overexuberant client. She even wondered if there had ever been any normal paying guests before her, or whether the hotel business was no more than a front to give the brothel an appearance of decency.

One day when she was putting more money into the safe, she noticed a little notebook lying on the bottom shelf, covered in dust that had somehow, mysteriously, managed to filter in despite the tightly fitting steel door. When she examined it more closely while sitting at the desk, she discovered that it was empty. There wasn’t a single word written in it. It was a gift from a Japanese shipping line with Yokohama as its main port. Japanese sailors sometimes visited the brothel. They were clean and polite, but not especially liked by the women because the intensity of their sexual activity could be painfully tiring. Hanna had heard rumours of a Japanese mate who had paid for a whole night, and was alleged to have had nineteen sexual encounters. Whether or not that was true, the Japanese were certainly persistent, and on some occasion or other Senhor Vaz must have received the empty notebook as a present, or perhaps as a souvenir — or possibly even as an apology for an excessively savage erotic outburst.

The leather smelled of calfskin, but it had turned black over the years. The white pages were made of thick paper, but were nevertheless soft and pliable. When Hanna wrote her name on one, she could see how the paper sucked up the dark blue ink. No blotting paper was needed.

She wrote the current date: 26 March, 1905. Carefully, as if every single word could have dangerous consequences, she wrote a sentence: ‘Dreamt last night about what no longer is.’

‘Dreamt last night about what no longer is.’ That was all. But it seemed to her that she had sparked off a new habit that she was determined to stick to. She would no longer simply write down new figures in her account books, but she would also keep a diary that nobody but she would have access to.

From then on she would write down a few sentences after Eber had been with his bag full of money and she had locked away the previous night’s income in the safe. As the days passed she dared to stray from the usual paths where the words she wrote simply referred to something she had dreamt, or what Carlos had done, or what the weather had been like. She started to write about the women who worked for her, both in the brothel and in the house where she was sitting and writing.

After just over a month she made a note about Senhor Vaz and his hopeless attempts to satisfy both her and himself. Her tone became increasingly sharp, the judgements she passed on people increasingly less considerate. No unauthorized readers were going to have access to her diary.

But what she wrote in her diary had no effect on the daily conversations she had with the people she was in charge of. In those situations she was just as friendly and considerate as she had been before. But in her diary she wrote what she really thought. That was where the truth was; but she kept it hidden.

Only one other person knew of the existence of the diary. That was young Julietta, who helped out in the house whenever and wherever necessary. One day she had stood in the half-open doorway and seen Hanna leaning over her diary at her desk. Hanna had called the girl in and shown her what she was writing, well aware that Julietta was illiterate and had no idea about writing nor languages. Julietta had asked what Hanna was writing.

‘Words,’ Hanna had said. ‘Words about the country I come from.’

That was all she had said, despite the fact that Julietta continued to ask questions. Afterwards Hanna had asked herself why she had lied to Julietta. There was nothing in the diary about her life in the mountains and by the cold river. But on the other hand she had often made disparaging comments about Julietta.

Why hadn’t she told her the truth? Had she begun to be like all the others in this town, who never seemed to tell the truth? At first she had believed that Senhor Vaz had been right when he claimed that all black people told lies. But then she had discovered that the same applied to all the whites, and to those of Indian or Arabic origins. Everybody lied, even if they did so in different ways. She was living in a country which seemed to be founded on lies and hypocrisy.

She signalled that Julietta should leave the room. Then she wrote down what she had just been thinking: ‘Black people lie in order to avoid unnecessary suffering. White people lie to preserve the superiority they wish to uphold. And the others, the Arabs and Indians, lie because there is no longer room for the truth in this town we live in.’

She also thought, although she didn’t write it down, that she regretted having shown Julietta her notebook. Perhaps that was a careless move that would come back to haunt her at some time in the future.

She locked the diary away in the safe and stood by the window looking out over the sea. She took her binoculars and viewed the island called Inhaca which she had once visited, during her ‘time of inactivity’, with Senhor Vas and the solicitor, Senhor Andrade.

She redirected the binoculars at the town, at the harbour district where the brothel was located. If she stood on tiptoe she could see the lookout outside the gate, and possibly also one or two of the girls hanging around in the shadows, waiting for a client.

A thought occurred to her that she had had many times before: I can see them. But the question is, can they see me? And if they can: what do I mean to them?

She replaced the binoculars and stand on the marble shelf in front of the window, and closed her eyes. Despite the heat she could conjure up how she had sat in the sleigh, wrapped up in Jonathan Forsman’s furs that smelled of lard and dogs.

When she opened her eyes again, she thought that she really must soon make up her mind. Should she stay where she was, or should she return home?

But on that day of all days, the day when she had shown Julietta her notebook, Hanna was possessed by another emotion.

She was frightened. She had the feeling that danger was approaching. There was something in the vicinity that she hadn’t yet discovered.

A growing threat. That she couldn’t see. But she knew that it was approaching rapidly, like a sleigh gliding along at speed over tightly packed snow.

45

Not long after she had begun to write about Senhor Vaz in her diary, Hanna called a meeting of the women and everybody else who worked in the brothel. She held it early in the morning when the brothel was nearly always empty. Most of them generally slept when the last of the clients had left. Many of them travelled in horse-drawn carriages, but some in motor cars, all of which were cleaned and polished during the night by the black workers who disobeyed the law that said blacks were not allowed in the town at night. The police turned a blind eye because they always had right of access to the women in the various brothels concentrated along rua Bagamoio provided they left the nocturnal workers in peace.

It seemed to Hanna that the newly polished cars heading for the South African border in the early hours of the morning were a sign that the men who used the services of her brothel wanted to remove all trace of what they had been up to. It was as if the cars and carriages were also soiled by what went on inside the brothel. But now the men were travelling back in their sparklingly clean vehicles to the country where it was morally reprehensible and perilously close to being a jailable offence for white men to associate with black women.

Hanna gathered the women and the security guards around the jacaranda tree in the garden. She had asked Andrade to be present, and had taken Carlos with her, dressed in his white waiter’s jacket. She now allowed him to be what he really was — a chimpanzee stolen from his troop somewhere inland. Carlos seemed worried at first about returning to the brothel, but after slapping the lid of the piano hard several times he calmed down and sat on Zé’s knee, just as in the old days.

Zé seemed to be barely aware of the fact that his brother had passed away unexpectedly. He had attended the funeral, but had shown no sign of sorrow or pain. He sat at the piano and continued to tune the strings which never seemed to attain the harmony he was striving for.

Hanna started by saying that essentially, nothing would change. Everything would continue more or less as it always had done. As the widow of Senhor Vaz she intended to retain all the rules, duties and benefits that her husband had introduced to give their workplace the best possible reputation that it had always enjoyed. She would continue to be generous with regard to granting time off, and would be no less strict than Senhor Vaz had been when it came to clients who were violent or behaved in any other unacceptable fashion.

But of course, not everything could be the same as before, she said as she approached the end of her little speech that she had learnt off by heart in Portuguese, to ensure that she didn’t lose control of her words and thoughts. She was a woman. She didn’t have the same bodily strength as her husband had had — she wouldn’t be able to intervene if there was some kind of disturbance — and so she was going to appoint a couple more sturdy security guards who would protect the women and guarantee their safety.

But there was another thing which would inevitably be different because she wasn’t a man. The women would find it easier to talk to her about some things that would have been difficult to discuss with her husband. She envisaged a situation in which they could all talk more intimately with one another. That had to be an improvement for everybody, she asserted at the end of her brief address.

Afterwards, she was enveloped by a long-drawn-out silence. A single jacaranda flower floated slowly, as light as a feather, down to the ground. She hadn’t expected anybody to make any comments, but the silence scared her. It was not the usual silence between whites and blacks: it seemed to have a significance that she was unable to put her finger on.

She flung her hands out wide to indicate that the meeting was over. Nobody needed to stay any longer. The women picked up their chairs and went indoors, and Judas started sweeping the courtyard — but she waved him away as well. Zé returned to the piano with Carlos half asleep on his lap.

It dawned on Hanna what the silence had indicated. Nobody had wanted the closer relationship she had offered them. The silence had been heavy with an invisible reluctance, she realized that now. But she didn’t understand it. Couldn’t they see that as she was a woman, she really was closer to them? That everything she had said was true, unusually so in this world of hypocrisy and lies?

She had taken her notebook with her, and now she wrote in it — hesitantly, as if she couldn’t rely on her ability to interpret her own thoughts: ‘Anybody who robs somebody of their freedom can never expect to form a close relationship with them.’

She read what she had written. She put the notebook back in the woven basket which also contained a shawl and a tin flask that she always carried with her. It contained drinking water that had boiled for many hours before being left to cool down.

The women had returned to their rooms. Nobody was sitting on the sofas yet, ready to receive their clients once again. It was clear to Hanna that they were keeping out of her way so that they didn’t need to risk her speaking to them and offering them the closer relationship she had spoken about.

A close relationship, she thought. As far as they are concerned, all that means is a threat to which they don’t want to expose themselves.

She stood there with the basket in her hand, unsure about whether the reaction she had been confronted with aroused her anger or disappointment. Or was she in fact grateful and relieved that she didn’t need to try to carry out in practice what she had so wrongly envisaged in theory?

Senhor Andrade suddenly materialized by her side. Despite the fact that it was early in the morning, sweat was already pouring down his face. A drop hanging from the tip of his nose filled her with distaste. She had to restrain herself from thwacking him in the face with the handkerchief she had stuffed inside her blouse.

‘Is there anything else you require of me this morning?’

‘No. Nothing apart from hearing what you thought about it.’

Andrade gave a start. New drops of sweat gathered on the tip of his nose. Hanna realized that she had used the familiar form of address, and that he objected to that. She ought to have included the words ‘Senhor Andrade’. He evidently thought that not doing so indicated a lack of respect. But she knew that he was well paid for his services, and she certainly didn’t want to exchange him for one of the keen young solicitors from Lisbon who were now converging on Portugal’s African possessions in the hope of making their fortunes.

‘What I thought about what?’

‘My address. The meeting. The silence.’

Her distaste was increasing all the time. The beads of sweat on his bloated face made her feel ill.

‘It was a good exposition of the facts of the situation,’ said Andrade thoughtfully.

‘You’re not in court. Tell me what you really think. About their reaction.’

‘The whores? What else can you expect from them but silence? They’re used to opening other things than their mouths.’

Andrade’s effrontery almost made Hanna blush. She became the girl by the river again, scarcely daring to look any man she didn’t know in the eye. But she also realized that he was right. Why had she thought that she might be able to expect anything other than silence? On several occasions she had been present when Senhor Vaz had assembled the women to address them, but none of them had ever asked a question or requested that anything should be explained more clearly — and most certainly there had never been any question of contradicting him.

Andrade went out into the broiling sunshine and clambered into his car, which was driven by a black chauffeur in uniform. Hanna had arranged for the chauffeur to come and collect her an hour later.

She went up the stairs and opened the door to the room where she had slept those first nights after she had fled from Svartman’s ship. She lay down on the bed and closed her eyes. But there was nothing she could return to, not even the memory of those first lonely nights, the bleeding, and Laurinda coming to help her without making a sound.

She left the room without understanding why she had gone up the stairs to the upper floor. She sat down on one of the red plush sofas and waited for the car. Carlos had woken up and climbed into the jacaranda tree. He sat there watching her, as if he expected her to climb up as well and cling on to the branches.

She looked at all the closed doors. She thought about the fact that she knew nothing at all about what really went on inside the women’s heads. She would never be able to repeat the conversations she had sometimes had with Felicia. The fact that she was now the owner of the brothel opened up a chasm between her and the women with whom she had previously had a relationship as close as racial differences allowed.

Her unrest made it difficult for her to breathe. She held tightly on to the arms of the sofa so as not to fall. I can’t stay here, she thought. I have no business to be here. On a foreign continent where the residents either hate me or are scared of me.

Her thoughts were still unclear, but she had an idea of what she ought to do. The very next day she should summon Andrade and instruct him to find somebody willing to purchase the brothel. There was bound to be any number of willing would-be buyers prepared to pay for the brothel’s good name and reputation. Then she would get out of here as quickly as possible. Her future was secure, thanks to the money she already had plus what she would earn from the sale of the brothel. It would be a rich woman leaving Africa behind her. Hers had been a brief visit. Two short-lived marriages, two unexpected deaths, and then nothing else.

I have just one problem, she thought. What will happen to Carlos? I can’t take him with me to the cold country where he would freeze to death. But who will be able to look after him, now that he has no desire at all to return to the forests he originally came from? When he doesn’t even want to be an ape any longer?

She had no answer to that. When the car arrived and she shouted for Carlos, he immediately climbed down from the tree.

But just as he touched the ground after climbing out of the tree, he had given a start, as if he had burnt himself on the hard, flat soil. He sniffed around, then hurried away.

Hanna stared at him in surprise. Why had he been afraid of the ground underneath the tree? But Carlos gave no indication of why. He simply sat down beside her in the car, grinning as the sea air caressed his face.

46

Shortly before his death, totally unexpectedly — as if he had had a premonition of his imminent demise — Senhor Vaz had told Hanna that if she ever needed advice and he was not at hand to give it, she should turn first to Senhor Pedro Pimenta.

‘Why him?’ she had asked. ‘I barely know who he is.’

‘I don’t know anybody who is more honest than he is,’ he said. ‘He’s the only person in this country who I’ve never caught out telling lies. Talk to Pedro Pimenta if you need advice. And rest assured that you can trust Herr Eber to look after our money — he’d never steal a single escudo of our assets. He believes that God goes out of His way to look after him. You couldn’t ask to find a better cashier than Herr Eber. God has erected steel bars between Herr Eber and any thievish inclinations he might have, deep down inside him.’

Pedro Pimenta was an immigrant from Coimbra who carved out for himself an astonishing career when he came to the African colony. He had first been an assistant to a tailor who had decided to seek his fortune in the African colonies. Pimenta’s real intention had been to emigrate to Angola, and more specifically to the city of Luanda, because rumour had it that the white colonial population was badly in need of tailors. But fate had dictated that the master tailor who paid for Pimenta’s ticket had decided to settle in the country that at that time was still called Portuguese East Africa. For the first three months after his arrival, Pimenta, who was only seventeen at the time, had been scared to death by everything the alien continent threw at him. He was terrified of the dark nights, of the whispering voices of the blacks, of the snakes he never saw and the spiders that hid away in the darkness. Even though it was many years since beasts of prey had wandered into the town at night, he was always afraid that a lion would force its way in through his half-open window and rip out his throat. For the first three months Pimenta spent all his time hiding behind barricades. As he was unable to sleep at night, he didn’t have the strength to work during the day. The master tailor sacked him, and kicked him out of the little house down by the harbour where he had established his tailoring business.

The fact that Pimenta was out of work did not mean that he was ruined: instead he was forced to overcome his fears and take responsibility for his life. Thanks to a number of forged references, he was given a job by an Indian businessman, learnt the basics of commerce, and before long started up his own business with prices undercutting anything his rivals had to offer. After less than ten years he had become a rich man. He built a house on a hill outside the town, was one of the first people in Lourenço Marques to own a car and a chauffeur, and was considered to be one of the most prominent of the colonial immigrants.

Nobody knew that Pedro Pimenta was illiterate. He managed to keep in his head all the figures he needed to master in his business dealings. When he became more successful he called up a younger brother from Portugal who could both read and write. That brother took care of all the necessary correspondence, and nobody had the slightest idea that all the letters of the alphabet jumped around inside Pimenta’s head in total confusion.

Pimenta’s big breakthrough came with the dogs. He had the idea one evening when he was visiting the brothel run by his good friend Senhor Vaz. It was shortly after Felicia had started to work there: Pimenta soon became a regular customer of hers, visiting her once every week, always on Tuesday evenings.

On one of his visits there was a man of about his own age sitting waiting for the woman he had just booked, hoping she would soon finish her session with her current client. He and Pimenta started talking. The man, who came from South Africa, ran a business selling guard dogs.

‘Fear is an excellent employer,’ he said. ‘Especially in South Africa where the whites shut themselves away in compounds surrounded by high fences, and their need for guard dogs is never-ending. They would really prefer to have bloodthirsty, starving wolves, but I provide them with German shepherd dogs trained in Belgium and some kennels in the south of Germany. When they are fully trained to attack black people, they are sent on boats to Durban or Port Elizabeth. My customers queue up and are prepared to pay a small fortune for the strongest and most aggressive dogs.’

The man tipped the ash off his cigar and burst out laughing.

‘The only drawback with the dogs is that they are not white,’ he said. ‘If they were, they would be worth twice as much.’

Pimenta didn’t understand at first what he meant.

‘White sheepdogs?’

‘Yes, it would be perfect if one could breed white sheepdogs — albinos, for instance. White dogs, just as white as their owners. They would scare the blacks even more. And hence make their owners feel more secure.’

Pimenta nodded and said that was a fascinating idea, of course. But what he didn’t say was that he knew a man, a Portuguese veterinary surgeon, who had a few white sheepdogs in his garden.

The following day Pimenta went to see the vet, who was in his sixties and had begun to think about moving back to Portugal before he became too old. He had lived in Africa for over forty years, and on several occasions had suffered serious bouts of malaria that had almost killed him. He was convinced that his inner organs were vulnerable to attacks by bacteria, worms and amoebae. No doctor had been able to solve the problem and they didn’t even think it was worth trying to cure him. Pimenta proposed that he should take over the pair of sheepdogs and their recent litter of puppies, all of them as white as snow, in return for a sum of money that would greatly assist the old vet to undertake the journey back home to Portugal. They reached an agreement, and a few months later Pimenta waved goodbye to him from the quay in Lourenço Marques harbour as a regular passenger liner set sail for Durban, Port Elizabeth, Cape Town and Lisbon.

By that time Pimenta had already bought some land outside the town with the utmost secrecy, and he had a large complex of kennels built on it. His brother Louis, the one who could read and write, took over responsibility for it. After two more years, he had a collection of over thirty white sheepdogs. By then Louis had grown tired of the African heat and returned home. And so Pimenta took over control of everything himself. With the help of a retired Portuguese cavalry officer the dogs had been trained to go on the attack the moment a black person approached. Pimenta had paid the commander of the fort to allow his dogs to practise on a group of black miscreants who were being held in the military jail. In order not to appear excessively brutal, Pimenta had supplied the black prisoners with thick fur coats that the sheepdogs were unable to bite through.

Pimenta travelled to Johannesburg and placed an advert in the biggest national newspaper announcing that sensational white sheepdogs, trained as guard dogs, were for sale, albeit only in limited numbers at present.

He had rented a suite in one of Johannesburg’s leading hotels. Before long the desperate hotel manager was forced to employ extra staff to cope with the long queue of prospective buyers.

Pimenta had taken two of the puppies with him to Johannesburg, a dog and a bitch. They were two of the most intelligent of the dogs he had bred. To demonstrate their aggressiveness he called a black bellboy to his room: the dogs immediately began straining at their leashes, snarling and growling frantically.

He sold the dogs for amounts that made it clear he had the equivalent of top-grade diamonds in his kennels. When he went back home he had with him orders and down payments for over fifty dogs, and had increased his fortune just like a successful gold prospector — without ever having so much as touched a spade or a wash pan.

Pedro Pimenta had become an entrepreneur in fear. He knew how he was going to exploit his knowledge. As far as he was concerned, the fear some people had of others was purely and simply a brilliant business opportunity.

47

The day after the meeting at the brothel, Hanna paid to borrow Andrade’s car and chauffeur in order to visit Pedro Pimenta’s estate outside Lourenço Marques.

Pimenta had built an enormous house next to his dog kennels. He had created a large garden around it, and dug out several ponds in which he fattened up crocodiles before sending their skins to tanneries in Paris where they were made into shoes and handbags. The crocodile eggs were collected from sandbanks further up the River Komati. He had also employed oarsmen to capture newly born crocodiles from the water next to the sandbanks where the mothers were lying on guard. They didn’t hesitate to attack if anybody tried to steal their eggs or the youngsters they had carefully carried down to the river in their mouths. On one occasion a large crocodile had succeeded in overturning one of the flimsy rowing boats. Both men had fallen into the water and desperately attempted to swim to the riverbank. One of them had succeeded, but had had been forced to watch as his friend struggled as far as the bank and dug his fingers into the wet sand in order to haul himself up: but as he tried to do so a crocodile seized him by the leg and dragged him down into the water again. His head had appeared once more before the crocodile pulled him back down under the surface for good, and lodged the body in among the tangled roots of the trees near the bank. The body would rot away there until it was ready for eating.

Hanna had heard that story from Felicia, and had no doubt that it was true. She couldn’t just dismiss it as yet another of the thousands of yarns told by the men sitting in the brothel, chatting to their whores.

Pedro Pimenta was religious. Felicia had shown her the memorial stone he had erected in the municipal cemetery in memory of the man who had been eaten by the crocodiles. There had been no body to bury. The dead man’s clothes had been placed in a beautifully carved wooden coffin. The only word on the memorial stone was the name Walibamgu: Pimenta didn’t know the man’s surname. He had simply turned up one day at the crocodile pools, looking for work, and Pimenta had recruited him without further ado. As far as Pimenta was concerned it didn’t matter that the man had no surname and no past. He was just one of the vagrants from the interior of Africa who only existed for one moment, a Walibamgu with no date of birth — but a date of death.

Pimenta believed in God and attended the cathedral regularly. He donated money for the purchase of new candlesticks, and had also paid for the repair of some pews that had been damaged by termites.

Now he was sitting in the shade on his large veranda with views of the river and beyond that the mountains that seemed to melt away into a permanent mist. Hanna knew that Pimenta very rarely left his home. The only excursions he made were to the brothel and to the cathedral. He turned down all the invitations he received. Not even the Portuguese governor was able to tempt him to attend any of the dinners the rest of the white colonial elite fought among themselves in order to be present at. Pimenta preferred to sit on his veranda, keeping watch on his crocodiles as they grew bigger and fatter in their ponds, and on the white sheepdogs whose aggression was being built up in the extensive kennels. In a pond next to his veranda he kept a few baby crocodiles and fed them himself with small fish and frogs.

Pimenta was wearing a white linen suit and a pith helmet with a protective cloth covering the back of his neck. The shape of his body was peculiar: the whole of his body was thin apart from his stomach, which stuck out like a tumour over his belt. His skin was covered in scars caused by insect bites and pimples, one of his eyelids was sagging as if half of his being was devoted to struggling with overpowering exhaustion. Although he was still young, he had aged prematurely — as was often the case with white people who migrated to the tropics and spent their time there working far too hard.

For several years Pedro Pimenta had been living with a black woman called Isabel, and had two children with her: a son and a daughter. Both of them had been baptized in the cathedral and were called Joanna and Rogerio.

Hardly any of the whites in Lourenço Marques worried about the fact that he had a black lover; but the fact that he lived openly with her, as if they were married, and that he looked after her children as if they were his own — which of course they were — with the help of a private tutor, was condemned by everybody. In some circles he was regarded with contempt, while others looked upon him with a sort of vague worry.

Pimenta shook Hanna’s hand when she emerged from the car, and invited her to accompany him to the veranda where there was at least a suggestion of cool breezes from the river valley blowing along the house walls. Isabel came out to greet her. She was dressed just like a white woman and her black hair was gathered in a tight bun at the back of her head. It struck Hanna that this was the first black woman she’d met who had looked her in the eye when they shook hands. The expression in Isabel’s eyes gave Hanna the feeling that this was what native Africans had looked like before the whites had arrived in their ships in search of slaves, diamonds and ivory.

Isabel fetched the children so that they could greet her as well. Hanna thought she was looking at two unusually handsome children.

‘My children,’ said Pimenta. ‘My greatest joy. Often my only joy, come to that.’

Hanna wondered why he suddenly sounded so downcast. A cold breeze that didn’t come from the river but from inside herself wafted past. She didn’t understand how he could talk about joy in a way that actually indicated depression.

Something worried her, although she couldn’t put her finger on it.

He took her to the dog kennels.

‘Demand is growing all the time,’ he said. ‘I thought I would have a monopoly of these white dogs for four years at most, then other breeders would start producing similar dogs to satisfy the market demands: but I now realize that I had underestimated the human need of originals. And these here are the originals, they exist nowhere else.’

‘How much do the dogs cost?’ Hanna asked.

‘Anybody who asks about the price can hardly be able to afford one of them.’

‘I’m not asking because I want one for myself.’

‘I know. You would be able to afford one.’

Hanna gathered that he didn’t want to reveal his asking price. Or perhaps he didn’t have a set price, but asked individual customers to pay what he thought they would be able to afford.

They continued to the various pools that comprised the crocodile farm. Pedro explained to her that the slowly growing crocodiles needed to be separated from the rest so that they didn’t become food for those that had grown somewhat larger.

In a pond with dark green water, all on its own, was an enormous crocodile lying motionless on a flat rock. It was almost five metres long. Nobody knew how old it was. Pimenta wouldn’t allow anybody else to feed it. Once a week he would throw food down into the pond. And in fact it was this very day that he was due to feed Noah, as he called it. He asked Hanna if she would like to watch. She really wanted to say no, but nodded her head. He shouted for one of the black workers who looked after the crocodiles. A woolly sheep, a very powerfully built ram, was dragged out of a pen. The black man handed the rope to which the sheep was attached to Pimenta, then hurried off. The ram seemed to suspect what was going to happen — like an animal that can smell the blood of those that have just been slaughtered.

Pimenta hung his jacket on a coat rack next to the pond that was evidently there for this very purpose. He unbuttoned the waistcoat that was stretched over his enormous stomach, folded up his shirt sleeves and untied the rope at the same time as he took a firm grip of the ram’s neck. The ram bellowed. The crocodile lay there motionless. Pimenta suddenly grabbed the ram’s feet and turned it over on its back, then threw it down into the water where the crocodile was waiting. With a sudden movement that was so quick that Hanna barely saw it, the crocodile left the rock and sank down into the water. It clamped its jaws round the ram, threw it into the air to turn it over, dragged it down under the surface, then reappeared with just the ram’s head.

Hanna didn’t want to see any more. She turned away and hurried back to the veranda.

‘I’ll come when the party’s over,’ she heard Pimenta saying behind her.

It’s almost as if he were taking part in the feast himself, she thought agitatedly. How is this man going to be able to advise me on what to do with my life?

Her first impulse was to get into the car and drive back to town. But despite everything she stayed on the veranda, and had settled down in a shady corner by the time Pimenta returned from the crocodile’s feast. There was not a trace on his face of the scenes that had been enacted in the crocodile pool. He smiled at Hanna, rang a small silver bell, ordered some tea from a servant, and asked why she had come to his house — she had never visited him before.

‘I can’t sleep at night,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why I should stay here in Africa, but nor do I know why I should leave. Nor where I should go to.’

What she said didn’t seem to surprise him. He fanned his face slowly with his pith helmet.

‘Those are thoughts that nag away at all of us,’ he said. ‘There’s no avoiding them. To stay or not to stay. Even if we were born here, we are still on foreign soil. Or perhaps I should say that we are in enemy territory.’

‘Is that what I’m feeling? All the hatred directed at us because we are white?’

‘That’s hardly something that we need to worry about. What could the blacks do to us? Nothing.’

‘There’s something they have that we don’t have.’

For the first time he looked at her in surprise.

‘And what could that be?’

‘Their numbers.’

He seemed disappointed by her answer, as if he had hoped she would astound him, say something he’d never thought of before.

‘The idea that they could be a threat to us because there are a lot of them is nothing more than a figment of the imagination for nervous people,’ he said impatiently. ‘Nightmares that can never become reality. The more of them there are, the more confused they become.’

‘I don’t regard myself as a nervous type. But I see what I see. And I hear what I hear.’

‘What do you hear?’

‘A silence. Which isn’t natural.’

Before Pimenta could respond, Isabel came out on to the veranda and sat down on one of the basket chairs. She smiled.

Hanna suspected she had been listening to their conversation. But why had she come out on to the veranda at just that moment? Because she wanted the conversation to come to an end? Or was there some other reason?

In her mind’s eye Hanna suddenly saw Pimenta grabbing hold of Isabel’s legs and flinging her into the crocodile pit. She gave a start and dropped the cup of tea she was holding in her hand. Having imagined Pimenta hurling his black wife to the crocodile, it was not far to the next image: Pimenta throwing her down as well, despite the fact that she was a white woman.

Pimenta rang the silver bell once more. A servant appeared, picked up the broken pieces of crockery and wiped the floor clean.

She suddenly recalled Berta. Jonathan Forsman had accidentally knocked a coffee cup off a table. She could see the scene in her mind’s eye: Berta picking up the bits and then wiping up the coffee. And Forsman didn’t even look in her direction.

Which direction am I looking in? Hanna thought. And why do I think what I do about Pedro Pimenta?

The cooling breezes had faded away. The heat on the veranda was motionless. A single peal of laughter rang out somewhere in the distance.

They sat there without speaking. Hanna looked at the others. The beautiful Isabel and the tight-lipped Pedro Pimenta.

I’m not a mirror, she thought. But I know that it’s him I’m beginning to look like. And I don’t want to.

48

Shortly afterwards Isabel had left them. Pedro Pimenta no longer had the energy to fan himself with his helmet. He moved over to a garden hammock suspended from springs and iron chains, kicked off his right shoe and inserted his big toe into a loop in a rope attached to a gauze-like fan a metre long, suspended over his head. As he swung back and forth in the hammock, the fan moved up and down. The resulting breeze reached as far as Hanna, who had moved her chair closer to the hammock as requested by Pimenta. Anybody observing the pair of them from a distance would have assumed that their conversation was extremely intimate: but in fact it was only the faint cooling breeze created by the fan that led them to sit so close together that their legs were touching.

‘We know nothing about each other,’ said Pimenta. ‘We all live here, but none of us knows anything about our respective pasts. I sometimes imagine that one dark night, on board a ship from Lisbon, without anybody seeing us, we all threw our pasts overboard, tightly packed and attached to heavy weights. For instance, I know nothing about you. One day, all of a sudden, you are staying in a room in a brothel that I frequent. A mysterious guest. And then, just as suddenly, you marry Senhor Vaz. When he dies, you become the owner of the most lucrative house of pleasure for gentlemen in this part of Africa. But I still know nothing about you. And you ask me for advice that I can’t possibly give you.’

‘It was my husband who suggested that I should speak to you. If I needed advice. And if he wasn’t around.’

He screwed up his eyes and looked hard at her.

‘That sounds odd.’

‘That he asked me to talk to you?’

‘No. That he thought it would be possible in any circumstances for somebody to give another person advice. He wasn’t that sort of man.’

‘He said exactly what I’ve just told you he said.’

‘Obviously, I don’t think for a moment that you are telling me an untruth. What good would it do you? I just find it astonishing that he surprises me like this after his death. I don’t like it when the dead surprise me.’

That was the end of the conversation. Isabel came and squatted down beside her husband. She ran her fingers over his neck and his cheek. Hanna was surprised that he allowed her to display such tenderness so openly in the presence of a stranger.

I have a chimpanzee, she thought, and I pick ticks off his skin. He has a black woman who caresses his cheek. In a way those two activities are remarkably similar.

She wondered what it would be like to have a black man squatting down by her side, running his fingers over her cheek. She shuddered at the thought. Then she remembered Lundmark’s rough but well-tended hands, and was overcome by sorrow.

Isabel stood up and left the veranda again. She smiled at Hanna as she left. Pimenta watched her go, his eyes screwed up.

‘I can buy the brothel off you,’ he said suddenly. ‘If you decide to leave here. I can pay you in Portuguese currency, or in gold, or in jewels. But I’m a businessman. I won’t give you a friendship price — I’ll try to buy it as cheaply as possible.’

The thought of a potential deal had made him so excited that he tugged too hard with his big toe in the rope loop, and the loop broke. He shouted at the top of his voice for a servant by the name of Harri. He came running up and retied the rope. Hanna could see that this wasn’t the first time the link had broken when Pimenta had got carried away.

‘Why is he called Harri?’ she asked when they were alone again. ‘That’s surely not a Portuguese name, is it?’

‘He comes from Matabeleland, the English colony. He claims that he once saw Cecil Rhodes in evening dress when he was about to have dinner in the middle of the bush. A large number of pack horses had carried dining tables, silver cutlery and a Persian rug that was laid out in the depths of lion and elephant country. I doubt whether he saw all this with his own eyes, but there is no doubt that Cecil Rhodes treated every campsite as if it were the Savoy hotel in London. That man really was crazy. But I’ve taken a liking to Harri. He’s now more faithful than any of my dogs. And as my dogs play such an important role in my life, blacks who behave like that have all the sympathy I can muster.’

‘What would happen if I sold the brothel to you?’

‘I would maintain its good name and reputation. And take good care of our clients.’

‘And what about the women?’

He seemed puzzled by her question. The women? His foot started pulling harder at the fan rope.

‘You mean the whores?’

‘Yes.’

‘What about them?’

‘They grow older. Fall ill. Nobody wants to pay for them any more.’

‘Then we kick them out, of course.’

‘Give them some money so that they can buy a stall in the market. Or build them a house if they need one. Those are conditions I shall impose on any buyer. That’s what we do for them now, and it must continue that way.’

He shook his head almost imperceptibly, and thought carefully before continuing. His foot operating the fan rope was still.

‘Naturally I shall continue with the routines that apply now. Why should I want to change them?’

‘I’m sure you know that many brothel owners in this town treat their girls very brutally. We have always been an exception.’

She realized that the ‘we’ was an exaggeration. It was Senhor Vaz she was speaking about. Her only contribution was not to have changed any of the routines that had always applied before her husband died.

‘It will be as I say,’ he said. ‘I shan’t change anything. Why should I?’

They spoke no more about it. Hanna was invited to a meal consisting of cold soup and a dish of peeled and mashed fruits. She drank two glasses of wine despite the fact that she knew it would give her a headache. Isabel ate as well, but she didn’t say anything. Pimenta talked at length, without any attempt to conceal his satisfaction, about the prominent families in South Africa who had bought his white sheepdogs. He recounted with pride how at least two of his white sheepdogs had bitten to death black men who had tried to burgle the palace-like mansions the dogs were guarding. Isabel didn’t seem to react when he told this story. She had a frozen smile on her face which never seemed to change at all.

Hanna returned to town later in the afternoon. The sun had disappeared behind thunderclouds that were building up over the mountains near the border with Swaziland.

The conversation with Pedro Pimenta had increased her confusion. She was more unsure than ever about what she ought to do. She couldn’t believe that what he had said about not changing anything was true. There was no reason to believe that he would treat the women any differently from the way he treated his white dogs and the crocodiles waiting in his ponds to be killed and skinned. Pimenta was a man who enjoyed throwing living sheep to hungry crocodiles.

She sat in the car with the window open. The wind was pounding the shawl she had over her mouth to avoid having to breathe in the red dust that was swirling around along the road.

For a brief moment she was sorely tempted to instruct the chauffeur to drive her to the South African border: but she didn’t, she merely closed her eyes and dreamt about the clear, brown water of the river.

When she got out of the car in front of her house, Julietta immediately opened the front door and took her hat. Hanna realized that her meeting with Pimenta had given her a sort of answer after all. She was responsible for the women her dead husband had bequeathed to her.

She could only live up to that if at the same time she accepted responsibility for herself.

49

After a night of heavy rain that once again flooded the streets of Lourenço Marques, a man stood shivering at the front door of the brothel, asking to speak to the woman who owned it. The fact that he knew there was now a woman owner and was evidently not a customer made Hanna uneasy. She was becoming more worried about the unknown, not least people wanting to see her without her knowing why.

That same morning she had sat with her bookkeeper and cashier Herr Eber and discussed the costs of repairs that were necessary after two Finnish sailors had run amok. They had smashed most of the furniture in the sofa room where the whores received their customers. Soldiers summoned from the Portuguese garrison had finally managed to handcuff them. Nobody knew what had triggered their furious outburst, least of all the drunken sailors themselves, who couldn’t speak a word of any language other than their odd-sounding Finnish — but on a previous occasion when clients had turned violent, Felicia had said that the cause was almost always the fact that the men had been stricken with impotence and could find no way of expressing their frustration other than trashing the brothel’s furniture and fittings, as if that was the cause of their impotence and therefore needed to be punished.

The captain of the Finnish ship had paid for his two crew members to be released, then hastily set sail for Goa, which was his final destination. The money he had paid barely covered the cost of the repairs, and Hanna had decided to draw up a manual listing the precise cost of every kind of damage that might be done to the brothel on some future occasion.

Judas came in, bowed, and mumbled something about a visitor at the front door. Hanna had never heard his name before: Emanuel Roberto. Judas was told to ask the man to wait until Hanna had concluded her session with Herr Eber, who was very precise but slow. There were times when his pedantic, almost somnambulistic writing with his rasping pen drove her to distraction. But she always managed to control herself. She depended on him for information about how all her businesses were going.

When Herr Eber had finally left her room with a deep bow, she summoned Emanuel Roberto. He seemed to stagger rather than walk normally, and his face was distorted by strange tics. Hanna wondered if he was drunk, and her first impulse was to send him packing without even bothering to discover what he wanted. But when he handed over his business card, his hand shaking, and she saw that he was the deputy director of the Portuguese tax authorities in Lourenço Marques, she realized that she had to treat him with respect. She asked him to take a seat, and ordered coffee and a bowl of fruit. His body secreted an odour that suggested his flesh was in a state of fermentation, and Hanna felt obliged to begin breathing discreetly through her mouth.

Roberto made no attempt to pick up his coffee cup, but instead bent forward and drank in a manner reminiscent of an animal at a waterhole.

Unlike his fidgety body, his voice was steady and distinct.

‘I had the honour of dealing with Senhor Vaz’s tax affairs during all the years he was the owner of this whorehouse,’ he began.

Hanna objected to his use of the word ‘whorehouse’: it seemed out of place in his mouth.

‘According to information I have received from Senhor Andrade,’ he went on, ‘Senhora Vaz is now the owner of this house and the activities which take place here. If I have understood the situation correctly, Senhor Andrade will continue to look after all legal aspects, just as he did in the time of the former owner.’

He paused and looked at her, as if he was expecting a response. Hanna found it difficult not to burst out laughing. The tics all over his face were much too strong a contrast to his solemn tone of voice. The man standing in front of her seemed quite simply to have been wrongly put together.

When she said nothing he opened his briefcase and took out some elegantly written-out documents on stiff paper, adorned with seals and stamps.

‘This is your final tax statement from the last financial year. As your husband was the owner and responsible for all activities for the main part of the financial year, we shall naturally simply present you with our calculations for you to check. But I can tell you that in the current financial year this whorehouse is still the biggest taxpayer in the Portuguese colony. Needless to say it can feel painful for a civil servant to acknowledge that a brothel is the most flourishing and profitable business in the country. Some officials in Lisbon are most upset. Therefore we usually describe your establishment as a hotel. But the outcome is the same, of course: your tax payments exceed those of any other business in the country. All I can say is: congratulations!’

He handed over the documents for her to read. The bureaucratic Portuguese and the ornate handwriting meant that she guessed rather than understood what was written: but the columns of figures were absolutely clear. She reckoned out quickly in her head that she was paying a gigantic sum of Swedish kronor in tax.

The very thought made her feel dizzy. For the first time she understood fully that she had not merely become well off by marrying Senhor Vaz: she was rolling in money. And it was not only in this distant outpost that she was filthy rich: even if she returned to Sweden she would still be extremely wealthy.

Emanuel Roberto stood up and bowed.

‘I’ll leave my papers here,’ he said. ‘If you have any points to raise, please contact me about them within the next fourteen days. But I think I can assure you that everything is in the best of order, correctly calculated and recorded.’

He bowed once again, then left the room. Hanna remained seated on her chair for a long time. When she finally stood up she had made up her mind to return to her house on the hill and think seriously about what all this wealth meant for her future.

When she came out into the big sitting room she saw one of the women disappearing into her room with an early customer.

She only saw the man briefly, from behind, as the door closed.

Nevertheless she was certain. It was Captain Svartman who had gone into the room.

50

The peacock screeched. It was standing in the middle of the empty street, bathed in sunshine streaming in through the gap between two houses while Indian traders slowly, almost casually opened up their stalls down at street level. All around the peacock was shadow. It seemed to be standing on a stage, illuminated by a single spotlight.

It screeched once again, then started pecking calmly at the invisible seeds that only a peacock’s eye could see.

Hanna had stopped dead. The fact that Captain Svartman was in her brothel confused her. She didn’t know if what she was feeling was joy at seeing somebody from her earlier existence, or if she was scared of actually meeting him.

But most of all she was astonished. For her, Captain Svartman had never been anything other than the resolute captain whose only passion had been the potted plants in his cabin that nobody except him was allowed to tend. She could never have imagined that he would visit whores in an African port. Perhaps he had come so early in the morning so that there was a minimal risk of his meeting anybody from the ship of which he was in command?

The thought of the ship moved her to act. She left the hotel, took with her one of the black watchmen who had been squatting down asleep in the shade outside the front door, and hurried down to the harbour. The Indian traders who were busy rolling up the blinds in front of their stalls eyed her inquisitively, but were careful not to make it obvious. Hanna had realized a long time ago that many of them knew who she was. She sometimes felt embarrassingly pleased at no longer being a nobody. That was why she was careful to dress smartly for her daily walks between her house and the brothel.

Even during the short time she was married to Senhor Vaz she had had two seamstresses who made her clothes for her. Now she had employed another one who, somewhat mysteriously, had ended up in Africa after a long life in the most renowned circles of Parisian fashion. There were rumours of embezzlement, and perhaps something even worse, but she was still a skilled dressmaker, and Hanna didn’t hesitate to pay her whatever she asked for.

Hanna was out of breath by the time she got to the harbour. Berthed at one of the quays furthest out was the ship she knew so well. She stopped in the shadow of one of the enormous cranes that had recently been installed in the harbour. Black labourers in ragged trousers and bare feet were standing in a circle around a white foreman who was assigning work. Hanna had the feeling that he was some kind of priest, preaching the religion of slavery to the black workers.

But her attention was concentrated on the ship. She was filled with contradictory thoughts and feelings. As they were unloading all their cargo of timber in Lourenço Marques, Hanna assumed that must mean the ship was now on its way back to Sweden. She would be able to go back home as a paying passenger, leave everything behind her, sell the brothel that very day. She would obviously lose money on such a deal, but she would still be a very rich woman.

The sight of the ship also put her possible flight in a different perspective. What did she have to return to? Surely her life had turned out to be something she could never have dreamt of?

She returned to the brothel, more unsure than ever about what she wanted. When she entered through the front door she still wasn’t sure whether she would reveal her presence to Captain Svartman. She headed for the bench under the jacaranda tree, but before she could get there the door to Felicia’s room opened, Captain Svartman came out, and suddenly they were face to face.

At first he didn’t seem to recognize her. He paused for a second. Then he knew.

‘Are you here?’ he said.

‘I could say the same about you,’ she said. ‘Is Captain Svartman here?’

They looked each other up and down. Hanna felt that she had the upper hand, because he couldn’t possibly know what she was doing there in the brothel. He would probably jump to the obvious conclusion — that she was there to give pleasure to men in return for money. But surely he would find that difficult to believe?

Hanna felt she ought to make it clear that any such suspicion was unfounded. She shook her head.

‘Things are not what you probably think,’ she said.

She beckoned him to follow her out to the jacaranda tree and the wooden bench. Zé had materialized from nowhere and sat down at the piano. He said nothing but was obviously longing for Carlos, who was probably his only friend now that Senhor Vaz’s heart had stopped beating. Hanna thought he probably regarded her as an evil person who had robbed him of his brother and also the chimpanzee he could always turn to.

Hanna and Captain Svartman drank tea under the jacaranda tree.

‘I wonder who is most surprised,’ she said. ‘You at seeing me, or me at seeing you?’

‘I obviously wondered what happened,’ said Svartman. ‘We spent a whole day looking for you. But then we were forced to continue our voyage.’

‘I had the constant feeling that Lundmark was still there on board the ship,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t cope with that. There was no other way out for me.’

Svartman nodded thoughtfully. Then he started to smile.

‘I’m very pleased, of course. Very glad to see that you are still alive.’

‘A friend of mine was married to the owner of this brothel,’ she said. ‘He died. She is very ill. I look after the money that’s made here — but I hate the whole business, of course, and only do it for the sake of my friend.’

Did he believe her? She couldn’t be sure. The ring she had on her left hand could be a leftover from her marriage to Lundmark.

‘What exactly happened?’ Captain Svartman asked when he had thought about what she said. It still seemed as if he couldn’t really grasp the fact that he had met again the third mate’s widow, who had jumped ship.

‘I booked into a hotel to start with. I had enough money to do that. Then I ended up looking after a house for an elderly man. But all the time I’ve been looking forward to the moment when I can go back home.’

‘What prevents you from doing that?’

‘My sorrow at having lost Lundmark. And my fear of the sea.’

‘I think I can understand,’ said Svartman doubtfully.

As nothing she had said was true, Hanna tried to change the subject. She returned to the moment when she had left the ship under cover of night.

‘What did you think had happened?’ she asked.

‘I thought you might have drowned.’

‘Drowned by accident, or drowned myself?’

‘I suppose I considered both possibilities. But needless to say there were others on board who made wilder guesses. That you had fallen into the hands of white slave traders, for instance. Or been killed by a bite from a poisonous snake that had managed to slither on board, and that you had fallen overboard as the poison began to work.’

‘But nobody suspected that I had left the ship of my own free will?’

Svartman sounded depressed when he replied.

‘I have to admit that not even I could envisage that possibility. And after all, during my many years as captain I’ve seen lots of sailors disappear in ports all over the world.’

She asked about the voyage, and the return route: had they called at Lourenço Marques on the way home as well? Svartman told her they had gone straight to Port Elizabeth to pick up some mixed cargo bound for the French port of Rouen.

She started asking about Halvorsen and the other sailors. And about Forsman and Berta. He answered briefly and suddenly seemed to be in a hurry. Hanna gathered that he didn’t want to stay at the brothel any longer than necessary. His visit to Felicia had been a secret, and nobody in the crew must get to know about it.

Hanna was disappointed to discover that Captain Svartman was just like all other men. They concealed the truth about themselves, the things they did in secret, under cover of darkness.

But was she any better herself? Didn’t she also go sneaking around? They were simply sitting there under the jacaranda tree exchanging half-truths.

‘How long are you staying here?’ she asked.

‘Until tomorrow.’

‘I’d like to visit the ship. And naturally, I won’t mention the fact that I met you here.’

She thought she could detect a doubtful look in his eye as he tried to decide whether or not to believe her. But she looked him straight in the eye. She was his equal now, no longer the scared cook who had curtseyed deeply to him almost a year ago.

She stood up and brought the conversation to a close. She was setting him free.

They said goodbye outside in the street.

‘This afternoon will be okay,’ said Svartman. ‘I have business to see to this morning, and I must keep an eye on the bunkering.’

The peacock was nowhere to be seen. The street was completely deserted in the blazing sunshine. She stretched out her hand.

‘I’ll come this afternoon, then,’ she said. ‘If that’s all right with you.’

‘I’ll be there.’

He bowed, then seemed to hesitate.

‘Peltonen is dead,’ he said. ‘He fell overboard one night off the Egyptian coast. Nobody noticed he was missing until the next morning.’

‘It was Peltonen who measured the depth of Lundmark’s grave,’ said Hanna. ‘1,935 metres.’

Svartman nodded. Then turned and walked away. He turned off into the first side street.

So he’s not taking the shortest route to the harbour, she thought. He turned off as soon as possible so that I wouldn’t be able to see him.

She suddenly wondered if they had seen any icebergs.

Then she was driven back home to her house on the hill, and sat down to write the letters that couldn’t wait.

51

It was a shock to her when she read through the letter she had written to Elin. Instead of writing about the voyage, she had written something more like a saga. The only link with reality was her description of how she had met Lundmark, married him, and then been forced to watch as he was buried at sea. But she had left out completely most of what had happened afterwards — her jumping ship and meeting the brothel owner Senhor Vaz. She merely wrote that she was in Africa, in good health, and on her way home. As an explanation of why she hadn’t completed the voyage to Australia and hadn’t come back to Sweden on the Lovisa, she wrote rather vaguely that she had been afflicted with a serious but short-lived illness, and had been perfectly healthy again for ages.

She put the letter down in disgust. It was only now that she realized the full consequences of what Captain Svartman had said. What Forsman had been told when the ship docked in Sundsvall after returning from Australia. And what Elin must eventually have been told in her house in the remote mountains.

Her daughter was dead. For a long time Elin had been forced to live with the sad news that Hanna had died in a foreign country. Nobody knew what had happened to her, or where her grave was. Always assuming that there was a grave.

The thought made Hanna cry. She suddenly realized that Julietta was standing in the half-open doorway, watching her. In a flash of rage Hanna grabbed Senhor Vaz’s old bronze paperweight and hurled it at her. Julietta dodged it, and hastily closed the door.

Hanna wanted to cry in peace. But it seemed that there was no time even for that. She tore the letter up and wrote a new one, her hand shaking.

‘I’m alive,’ she wrote. That was the most important thing. ‘I’m alive.’ She repeated those words on almost every other line. The whole letter was a sort of long request to be taken at her word. She was alive, she wasn’t dead as Captain Svartman had thought. She had gone ashore because she was devastated by grief, and then stayed there when the ship continued its voyage to Australia. But she would soon be coming home. And she was alive. That was the most important thing of all: she was still alive.

That was the letter she wanted to write to Elin. And she repeated the same words, albeit in less emotional style, in the other two letters she wrote that day. One was to Forsman, the other to Berta. She was alive, and she would soon be coming home again.

Eventually the three letters lay on the desk in front of her, meticulously fitted into envelopes that she carefully sealed with the names of the recipients written as neatly as she could possibly manage. She and Berta had taught themselves to read and write — with difficulty, but even so it was an important step away from poverty: she still found it difficult to write, and was unsure about spelling and word order. But she didn’t bother about that. The letter to Elin would be the most important message she had ever received in her life. One of her daughters had returned from the dead.

In the afternoon she summoned Andrade’s car and was driven to the harbour. She had put on her best clothes, and spent an age in front of the big mirror in the hall next to the front door. On the way to the harbour she suddenly had an idea, and asked the chauffeur to make a detour and stop outside Picard’s photographic studio. Picard was a Frenchman who had established himself in Lourenço Marques as early as the beginning of the 1890s. His studio was used by the town’s wealthy inhabitants. His face had been disfigured by a shell splinter that had hit him during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. Although his face was repugnant, his friendliness and his photographic skills endeared him to everybody. But he refused to take pictures of black people, unless they were in the role of servants or bearers, or simply made up the background behind the white people who were being portrayed.

Picard bowed and informed her that he could take her photograph immediately — a couple had just cancelled their slot because their engagement had been broken off. Hanna wanted to be photographed standing up, wearing her big hat, her long gloves, and with her furled parasol by her side.

Picard asked respectfully who the picture was for. He knew exactly who she was, and about her short marriage to Senhor Vaz. Hanna also knew that for some unknown reason Picard had always patronized a rival establishment when he made his regular brothel visits.

‘The photograph is for my mother,’ she said.

‘I see,’ said Picard. ‘So we want a dignified picture. One showing that all is well on the African continent, and that you are leading a life that has brought you success and riches.’

He placed her next to a large mirror and a chair with beautiful arms. He moved a flower arrangement standing on a small table out of the composition after having tried it but found it unsuitable. Then he took the photograph and promised to develop it immediately and make three copies. Hanna paid him twice as much as he asked for. They agreed that the black messenger boy would deliver the photographs to Captain Svartman’s ship the moment they were dry.

When she reached the harbour she found Captain Svartman standing on the gangplank, waiting for her. Hanna noted that his uniform had been newly brushed down and his peaked cap polished. She walked up the gangplank, and for a brief, dizzy moment recalled the emotions she had felt when she left the ship. Some crewmen were busy splicing ropes, others were repairing a cargo hatch. She couldn’t see anybody she recognized. The captain realized that she was looking for a familiar face.

‘The crew is completely new,’ he said. ‘After Lundmark’s death rumours started to spread suggesting that I was an unlucky captain. Peltonen’s disappearance didn’t help matters. But my new crew is very competent. As captain I can’t go around wishing that earlier crew members were back on board again. I sail with the living, not the dead.’

He took her to his cabin. On the way there she saw the new cook coming out of the galley, a young man with blond hair.

‘An Estonian,’ said the captain. ‘He usually makes pretty good food. He’s quiet and clean.’

They sat down in the cabin and were served tea by a nervous-seeming boy in a white jacket. Hanna noticed that the potted plants in the brass-framed portholes were well looked after.

‘I must know what you said to Jonathan Forsman.’

Svartman nodded. He’d been expecting that question.

‘All I could tell him were the facts as I knew them. That you had disappeared during our stop at the last port before the final lap to Australia. That we spent a whole day looking for you, but were then forced to continue our voyage. And that I didn’t know what had happened to you. Either you were alive, or you were dead: I had no idea which.’

‘What did Forsman say?’

‘He was upset. Shaking. I was afraid he might get into such a state that he had a heart attack. It wasn’t me he was directing his anger at, but Fate. The fact that you hadn’t come back. I think he felt a heavy responsibility.’

‘Do you know what he told my mother?’

The captain shook his head.

‘I assume he tried to give her courage and hope, but I suspect she must have thought that her daughter was dead and buried in a foreign country.’

Hanna felt a lump in her throat, and tears gathering behind her eyes. But she didn’t want to start crying in front of the captain. She tried to keep a firm grip on herself so as not to break down.

They drank the tea that the boy had poured into their cups, his hand trembling. Hanna recognized the crockery from her time on board.

‘This accursed continent!’ said the captain out of the blue. ‘I’m trying to understand how it’s been possible for you to live here so long.’

‘Not everything is bad,’ she said. ‘The heat can be difficult, but most of the time it’s pleasant. There’s no such thing as cold here. I’ve tried to explain to black people what snow is — like ice, but at the same time as light as a chicken feather falling down from the sky. It’s not possible to make them understand.’

‘But what about the people? The blacks? I shudder when I see how they live.’

‘I don’t know much about that. They live their own lives outside town. In the mornings they come wandering in out of the sun to work as servants or miners. Then they disappear again.’

‘I hear a lot of talk about violence and robbery. We always post extra guards by the gangplank when we are berthed in African harbours. Other captains have told me about thieves who swim to the ship and climb on board.’

‘I haven’t come across anything of that kind all the time I’ve been living here. The blacks are not like us, but I don’t know if they are dangerous. I wouldn’t have thought so.’

‘Can they be trusted?’

‘No,’ said Hanna, mostly because that was obviously what the captain wanted to hear. She suddenly realized that she simply didn’t know what she really thought.

The captain studied his hands without speaking.

‘It doesn’t happen very often,’ he said eventually. ‘My visits to those black women.’

‘Of course not,’ said Hanna. ‘I’ve already forgotten it was there we happened to meet.’

The captain seemed relieved. Hanna immediately cashed in on her reward for being so understanding.

‘I only went to the brothel to find out why the cashier hadn’t been to see me the evening before. I never go there otherwise. I do the work I need to do at a safe distance. I live in a stone-built house that is not much smaller than Jonathan Forsman’s.’

The captain nodded. Hanna could see that he was impressed by what she had to say, although he wasn’t totally convinced that it was true. We don’t trust each other, she thought. But we did when we were working together on the boat.

She suddenly had the feeling that she wanted to get away from the ship as quickly as possible. And so she put the three letters on the little table that was screwed down on to the floor.

‘Three copies of a photograph are on their way,’ she said. ‘A messenger boy will bring them to the ship shortly. I want Forsman and Berta to have a copy, and the third one should be sent to my mother.’

She opened her purse and took out several high-value Portuguese banknotes. Svartman declined to accept them. Hanna couldn’t help wondering what currency he had used to pay Felicia for her services. She felt uncomfortable when the image of the naked captain lying on top of Felicia’s attractive body appeared in her mind’s eye.

He accompanied her out on to the deck.

‘I’ll be going back to Sweden soon,’ she said. ‘Other Swedish ships call in here from time to time, but I can’t possibly leave just now. I’ve accepted responsibility for the brothel for as long as the owner is ill, so I can’t leave this town until she’s fit again.’

‘Of course not,’ said the captain.

He doesn’t believe me, Hanna thought. Or at least, he doesn’t believe what I say. Why should he, after all?

They walked around the ship, and took a good look at the Norwegian forest cat that had come on board in Sundsvall and was now curled up fast asleep down at the bottom of a large coil of hawser.

‘How about Berta?’ Hanna asked apropos of nothing. ‘Is she still at Forsman’s place?’

‘She’s had a baby,’ said the captain. ‘I don’t know who the father is, but Forsman has allowed her to stay on in his house.’

Hanna immediately assumed that Forsman himself was the father of the child. Otherwise he would never have allowed Berta to stay.

Berta’s loneliness, she thought. And mine. Is there really any difference between them?

A black man came running along the quay. He had a packet in his hand. It contained the photographs from Picard. The captain and Hanna opened the envelope. The black and white picture was a true image of what she looked like, she realized. A woman, still very young, looking frankly and unhesitatingly straight at the camera.

‘Both Forsman and your mother will be very pleased,’ said the captain. ‘Forsman will probably be extremely relieved to discover that you are alive.’

He had one last question for her before they took leave of each other by the gangplank.

‘Where shall I tell them you are working?’

‘At a hotel,’ she said. ‘The Paradise Hotel.’

They shook hands. She didn’t look back after leaving the ship.

The following day when she returned to the harbour, the ship had left.

52

A few days later. The sea was calm, no cooling breezes were blowing along the dusty streets.

One night Hanna woke up, feeling as if somebody had hit her. Carlos had shouted out from his perch on the ceiling light, then jumped down on to the bed. Hanna knew that monkeys screamed in a special way when they were warning others in the troop about a snake or some other danger they had become aware of. She lit the paraffin lamp next to her bed. When it radiated its flickering light around the room, Carlos seemed to calm down immediately. She thought he must have had a nightmare, something she had suspected on previous occasions when he had started whimpering restlessly in bed, and the following day seemed to be gloomily introspective and preoccupied.

But something was still worrying him. He had climbed up on to the window ledge and was now sitting behind the curtain. When Hanna opened it she found herself looking straight out into the brief tropical dawn — but she could also see smoke and flames rising from a block not far from the brothel. When she opened the window she could also hear shouts and screams in the distance. Carlos climbed out on to the roof, and didn’t come back despite her calling for him.

She aimed her binoculars at the centre of the blaze. The dawn light was still only faint, but she could see right away that it was no ordinary fire. Black men were running around with cudgels and bows and arrows in their hands. They were throwing stones and burning bundles of twigs at the soldiers from the Portuguese garrison who had assembled there. Hanna could see bodies lying in the street, but she couldn’t make out if they were black or white.

She put down the binoculars and tried to work out what was happening. Then she pulled the bell cord — hard, so that there should be no doubt about her wanting a servant to come to her room without delay, despite the fact that all of them except Anaka were bound to be still asleep.

In fact it was Julietta who came, half-dressed and unkempt, but Hanna could see immediately that she was wide awake. Presumably the others in the house had also realized what was happening down below in the town, and told the youngest of them to answer the bell.

Hanna took Julietta out on to the veranda with her.

‘What’s going on?’ she asked.

‘People are angry.’

‘Who’s angry?’

‘We are angry.’

As Julietta said those last words, she also did something out of the ordinary. She looked Hanna in the eye. It was as if she had been stung, Hanna thought. What’s going on in the street down below evidently concerns me as well.

‘Why are you angry?’ Hanna asked. ‘Please tell me without me having to drag it out of you.’

‘A white man broke a woman’s water pitcher.’

Hanna was irritated by the answer, which didn’t give her any understandable context. She angrily told Julietta to go and fetch Anaka. When Anaka arrived, she was if anything even more laconic than Julietta.

Hanna got dressed and thought it was lucky that she was expecting a visit from Andrade that morning, with some papers for her to sign. Nobody knew more than he did about what went on in town, whether it happened openly or on the sly. As she was having breakfast, waiting for his arrival, she occasionally went out on to the veranda and took another look through her binoculars. The fire was still burning, and it seemed as if new ones had been started, although they were hidden behind buildings and out of range of the binoculars. She could hear distant shouting and the rattle of gunfire. Carlos was sitting motionless on the roof, following the action.

When Andrade arrived he was red in the face and more agitated than she had ever seen him before. She noted that he had been impolite to her servants, and that he slammed a revolver on to the coffee table before sitting down. Before she had time to ask him any questions, he started to explain what had happened that morning. The sudden uprising had begun a few hours earlier when a group of black men had come marching in from the slums. They had carefully avoided the streets that were usually patrolled by Portuguese soldiers ensuring that the night curfew was observed. Once they had reached the centre of town they had run to a police station and set it on fire by throwing bottles full of paraffin through the windows. The half-asleep soldiers had started shooting the rioters, and then bloody chaos had taken hold.

‘So it’s an uprising,’ said Hanna. ‘There must be a reason for it.’

‘Must there?’ asked Andrade ironically. ‘These black savages need no reason other than their inherited bloodthirstiness to start a riot that can only lead to their own destruction.’

Hanna found it difficult to believe him. It surely couldn’t be as simple as he suggested. As early as the day when Captain Svartman’s ship had docked in Lourenço Marques, she had thought she could detect hostility and sadness in the eyes of the blacks. She was living in a sad continent where the only ones who laughed — often far too loudly — were the white people. But she was well aware that the laughter was usually no more than a way of disguising apprehension that could easily grow into fear. A fear of darkness, of the people who lived in darkness but couldn’t be seen.

Hanna insisted. Something must have triggered the fury of the blacks. Andrade shrugged impatiently.

‘No doubt somebody thought he had been treated unfairly and thought it was necessary to die if needs be in order to avenge the perceived injustice. But it will soon pass. If there’s one thing I know about these black people, it’s that they are cowards. They run away like terrified dogs when things get serious.’

He picked up the revolver from the table.

‘To be honest I would prefer our meeting to be postponed until tomorrow morning. Calm will have been restored by then, the worst of the troublemakers will be dead and the others will be locked up in the fort. What I feel I must do now is go down to where the fires are burning. I belong to the town’s civil militia who have been trained to stand shoulder to shoulder with the soldiers whenever there is a threat to our safety. I can certainly be of some use with the aid of this revolver.’

There was something jubilant in Andrade’s voice that scared Hanna. But at the same time she wanted to find out what was actually happening close to her brothel.

‘I’ll come with you,’ she said, standing up. ‘This is naturally more important than the papers I’m supposed to sign.’

‘From the point of view of safety it might be better for you to stay here,’ said Andrade. ‘Niggers running amok are dangerous.’

‘I have the brothel to look after,’ said Hanna. ‘I’m responsible for my employees.’

She wrapped a shawl around her shoulders, put on the hat with the peacock feather and picked up her umbrella. Andrade could see that there was no chance of her changing her mind.

They drove through the town, which was unusually quiet. The few blacks in the streets were walking as closely as possible to the house walls. Soldiers from the town’s garrison were everywhere. Even the town’s firemen were carrying weapons, as were many civilians who had formed small groups to protect their neighbourhood if the riot were to spread. During the whole of the drive down to the fires and the centre of the revolt, Andrade talked about what he was going to do. Hanna was disgusted by the way in which he seemed to be looking forward to the opportunity to fire his gun at some of the black rioters.

But nothing turned out as Andrade had hoped. When they came down to the town and the chauffeur turned into a side street leading to the brothel, they found themselves in the midst of a violent confrontation between soldiers and a raging mass of black men. It was bayonets and rifles against cudgels and billhooks, fear versus limitless fury. The car was surrounded by furious Africans who started rocking it from side to side in an attempt to overturn it. There was a smell of burning paraffin everywhere. Hanna was horrified by the thought of being trapped inside a burning car. She tried in vain to force the passenger door open. The sound of rifle shots suddenly rang out. A black face that shortly before had been pressed up against the glass was suddenly transformed into a mess of blood and shattered splinters of bone. Hanna shouted to Andrade to use his revolver, but when she turned to look at him she saw that he was white with terror, and a pool of urine was expanding over his white linen trousers. The chauffeur managed to open the driver’s door, get out of the car, and was then immediately swallowed up by the crowd of people. Hanna was now so scared, she was afraid of losing consciousness. But the fear of being burnt to death was even stronger. She forced herself to clamber over into the front seat and get out of the car just as the chauffeur had done.

She was surrounded by black people, their faces, eyes, smells, cudgels and knives. Hanna remembered something Senhor Vaz had told her. If you were confronted by a lion, the worst thing you could do was to run away. That would only result in the lion taking up the hunt and felling the fugitive with a bite at the back of his head.

Hanna also knew that she shouldn’t look the lion in the eye. So she lowered her gaze and forced herself to begin making her way through the crowd of people. At any moment she expected to be stabbed, or to be hit on the head by a cudgel. But a path opened up for her. She suppressed the urge to start running, and continued walking slowly, her heart pounding inside her blouse. There was still a clatter of rifle shots on all sides. She gave a start after each one. She stumbled over a man lying dead on the street with his chest torn apart, and paused. But then she forced herself to continue.

Suddenly a troop of cavalrymen on agitated, sweaty horses came galloping up. In just a few seconds the mass of people that had been crowding around her melted away. The street looked like a battlefield, filled with burnt rags and broken cudgels, and among them the gleaming cases of the soldiers’ cartridges. The street and pavements were covered in a large number of distorted black bodies, some of them almost naked. A man was howling in pain or in rage, she couldn’t make up her mind which. The white soldiers in their dark blue uniforms were standing with their rifles at the ready, as if they were afraid that the dead would rise again and attack them. White people were now beginning to assemble at a safe distance. They were making a sort of growling noise, as if the hatred they felt could not be satisfied by the sight of the dead, but needed to continue punishing them.

The howling man suddenly fell silent. Hanna began walking slowly back to Andrade’s car. The chauffeur had already returned, and was sitting with his hands round the steering wheel, staring straight ahead, right through her.

Andrade was sitting hunched up in the back seat. The urine stain on his white trousers had begun to dry. He was holding his revolver in his hands as if it were a crucifix.

Hanna looked at him, and thought that she hated him for his cowardice. But at the same time she couldn’t help but be pleased that he had survived and was uninjured. Everything is full of contradictions, she thought. Nothing is as straightforward as I wish it were.

She was surprised to find that she felt nothing at all for the dead black corpses all around her.

Swarms of flies had already begun to gather around the dead bodies. Horses and carts that had been requisitioned by the soldiers stood in the shade. Soldiers with white handkerchiefs over their faces began to gather up the corpses.

Like dead animals, Hanna thought. Just slaughtered, but not yet skinned.

She hurried away. Andrade shouted something after her but she didn’t gather what it was he wanted.

She didn’t stop until she was inside the brothel.

The black women were sitting on the sofas, looking at her. She thought she ought to say something.

But she had no idea what.

53

Their silence unnerved her, as did the fact that they were looking her in the eye. All she had experienced that morning was so frightening and so overwhelming that she was now the one who averted her eyes. She went back out into the street where an officer she recognized was handing out ammunition to the soldiers standing guard on the street corner. He visited the brothel regularly and promised to drive her back home in his army car as soon as he had finished. She sat down in his car and waited. As there was no roof, she raised her parasol to protect herself from the scorching sun. Swarms of flies were buzzing excitedly around her head as if she were dead as well. She flapped her hand at them, and had the feeling that everything that was happening was a dream she had not yet managed to wake up from.

The young officer sat down at the wheel himself. Next to him was a soldier with a gun at the ready. When they pulled up outside the stone house the officer asked if she would like to have an armed guard outside her front door, but she felt safe in her own home. In addition, she knew full well that the officer was trying to do a deal — he would provide a guard if she allowed him access to one of the women for free. That annoyed her.

And so she declined his offer and went in through the door that Julietta was holding open for her. She took her mistress’s hat, gloves and parasol.

Hanna asked her to come upstairs to the veranda. The smell from the fires in the town below was still noticeable. Anaka brought her a carafe of water. Julietta was waiting a few metres away from the sofa where Hanna was sitting. Hanna pointed to a chair, and Julietta sat down very gingerly, on the extreme edge of the seat.

‘What happened?’ Hanna asked. ‘Don’t make anything up. Just tell me what you know for sure.’

Julietta spoke slowly as she knew Hanna found it difficult to understand what she was saying. Hanna frequently had to ask her to repeat a sentence or two, but out there on the veranda that morning, Julietta spoke more clearly than she had ever done before. Perhaps that was because she knew that what she had to say was very important for her.

A young woman by the name of Nausica had gone to fetch water from a well on the outskirts of Xhipamanhine, one of the town’s biggest settlements for blacks. Like all other women, she was balancing the water pitcher on her head. The pitcher was large, it contained twenty litres: but Nausica was proceeding gracefully along the path as she had done so many times before. Then according to Julietta, something happened just as the woman was coming back to the settlement. Nausica had been confronted by three white men, all of them young, carrying shotguns to shoot the seagulls that were gathered at the site of the large rubbish dumps by the shore. It was a swampy area where nobody and nothing lived, apart from the malaria-carrying mosquitoes that had one of their biggest incubation sites just there. Nausica tried to make way for the three men without losing control of the heavy water pitcher. But just as they were passing one of the young men hit the pitcher with the butt of his shotgun and smashed it, so that the water poured down over Nausica. She sank down in a heap on to the ground, hugging her knees hard. Behind her she could hear the men laughing. Some women working on their tiny machambor had seen what happened. Only when the three men had disappeared along the path did they dare to venture forward to see if Nausica was badly injured.

But there was somebody else who had seen what had happened. It was Nausica’s father, Akatapande, who now came running along the path. He was an engine driver on trains travelling between Lourenço Marques and the South African border at Ressano Garcia. This incident happened to coincide with the two days off he had every month. Having established that Nausica was not seriously injured, his first instinct was to chase after the three men who had attacked her. Nausica and the other women tried to restrain him — he was risking being beaten to death or shot by the white men who were hardly likely to worry about a father who was protesting about his daughter having been humiliated. But they couldn’t hold Akatapande back. He raced along the path until he caught up with the three men who were still laughing about the woman who had been soaked through.

Akatapande started by cursing the three men. At first they seemed to pay no attention to him at all, but continued walking down to the beach. However, Akatapande stood in their way and started punching one of the men on the chest. One of the others clubbed him down with the butt of his shotgun. When Akatapande managed to get to his feet, he was immediately clubbed down again. Then the first man aimed his gun at Akatapande’s head and shot him. Then they had continued on their way, quite calmly, as if nothing had happened.

News of Akatapande’s death spread with the speed that only extremely brutal attacks could bring about. When an officer summoned from the fort decided not to instigate an investigation because one of the men concerned was the son of one of the governor’s closest associates, the subdued muttering in Xhipamanhine began to grow into a furious outcry, and by the early morning had developed into the riot.

Hanna had no doubt that what Julietta had told her was the truth.

And she had become aware of something else: what upset the blacks most of all was that the young men hadn’t reacted at all to what they had done.

A dead black man — nothing to bother about.

Julietta stood up, but remained on the veranda. Hanna asked her if there was anything else she wanted to say.

‘I want to work at the hotel,’ said Julietta.

‘Don’t you like it here?’

No answer.

‘We don’t need any staff in the hotel. Nobody books in there any longer.’

‘That’s not what I mean.’

It dawned on Hanna, to her surprise, that Julietta wanted to start working as a prostitute. She wanted to sit alongside the other black women on the sofas, waiting for customers. Hanna was upset. Julietta was still a child. She was younger than Hanna had been when she had snuggled down among Forsman’s greasy furs in the sleigh that had transported her through the frozen countryside to the coast.

‘Have you ever been with a man?’ Hanna asked angrily.

‘Yes.’

‘Who? When?’

No answer. Hanna knew that she was not going to get one. But she had no real reason to doubt that Julietta was telling the truth about her experience.

I know nothing about these black people, she thought. Their life is a mystery about which I can’t even begin to conjure up some kind of explanation. It’s just as unknown as the whole of this part of the world I find myself living in.

‘That’s out of the question,’ she said. ‘You’re too young.’

‘Felicia was sixteen when she started.’

‘How do you know?’

‘She told me.’

‘I didn’t know you talked to the women who live down there.’

‘I talk to everybody. And everybody talks to me.’

Hanna thought the conversation was starting to go in circles.

‘Anyway, I’m the one who decides. And I say once and for all that you are too young.’

‘But Esmeralda is old and fat. Nobody wants to go with her any more. I want to start in her place.’

‘How do you know that nobody is interested in her any longer?’

‘She’s told me that.’

‘Has Esmarelda said that?’

‘Yes.’

Hanna no longer knew if Julietta was telling the truth or not. But unfortunately Julietta was quite right about Esmeralda. The old prostitute had recently gone even further downhill. She drank in secret, always seemed to be eating chicken coated with thick layers of fat, and she had completely lost control of her weight. At one of their morning meetings Herr Eber had told Hanna sorrowfully that nowadays Esmeralda was earning virtually no money at all. She spent most of her time sitting on sofas, with nothing else to do. Only an occasional drunken sailor would turn up late at night, collapse into her arms, then fall asleep and remain in her bed until he was lifted up by one of the guards and thrown out — naturally having first paid for the intercourse he thought he had had, but most often couldn’t remember.

Esmeralda’s situation was not something Hanna wanted to discuss with Julietta. She was still upset by the girl’s request to start working in the brothel. She dismissed her from the veranda without saying anything more.

That same afternoon Hanna sent a messenger to Felicia with a brief message she had placed inside an envelope and sealed it. Hanna didn’t want the letter to come into the wrong hands. ‘I need to talk to you about Esmeralda.’

Felicia came up the hill to the stone house that evening. There was still a smell of smoke on the veranda and outside the windows. Felicia was able to tell Hanna that all the dead bodies had now been removed from the street. The riot had fizzled out. Soldiers with guns at the ready were still patrolling the most important thoroughfares, but nobody expected anything drastic to happen. On the other hand, the brothel was almost empty.

Felicia sat down on the chair in Hanna’s study. Hanna gave her an envelope, this one sealed as well.

‘I’d like you to give this to the girl Nausica, please,’ she said.

‘Nausica is a sixteen-year-old girl who can’t read.’

‘The envelope doesn’t contain anything written. I’m giving her money. For her father’s burial and a new water pitcher.’

Felicia hesitated before accepting the envelope and putting it inside her blouse. Hanna wondered if Felicia might be considering if her honesty was being tested.

But she said nothing about that, and started talking about Esmeralda instead. Esmeralda was about twenty when she came to the brothel — Felicia didn’t know where Senhor Vaz had found her. In the early days Esmeralda had been one of the favourites, for several years the most sought after of the women.

Hanna wanted to know about Esmeralda’s life outside the brothel.

‘She’s married and has five children. Another two have died. Of those still alive four are girls and the other a boy. He is the youngest, and is called Ultimo. Her husband is called Pecado, and he makes a living by selling birds he has caught with nets.’

‘Where do they live?’

‘In a house in Jardin.’

‘Where the riot began?’

‘Where all riots begin. There or in Xhipamanhine.’

‘What is their house like?’

‘Like all the other houses.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Leaky, patched up, built of whatever Pecado has managed to get hold of.’

‘Have you been there?’

‘Never. But I know even so.’

Hanna thought over what Felicia had said. Everything seemed to be beyond her comprehension.

‘What do you advise me to do?’ she asked in the end.

Felicia was evidently prepared for that question. She took some small clear glass jars from out of one of the side pockets in her skirt. They were filled with water, and white worms were swimming around inside.

‘I think Esmeralda deserves a chance to get rid of all the fat she is carrying and become in demand again. She’ll be able to do it. She knows already that she’s no longer justifying her place on one of the sofas.’

Felicia leaned over towards Hanna and gave her the glass jars. At that very moment Carlos sneaked silently into the room. He climbed up on to the wardrobe in which Senhor Vaz used to keep his suits and shorts and ties. Carlos sat there motionless, eyeing the two women and the glass jars.

‘They are tapeworms,’ said Felicia. ‘I got them from a feticheira who knows more than anybody else in these parts about how to help people to lose weight. All Esmeralda needs to do is to put one of these tapeworms into a glass of milk and then drink it. It will start growing inside her body, and could eventually become as much as five metres long. It will gobble up most of the food that Esmeralda eats. She will quite soon be thin again. Most tapeworms need many years to grow, but not this particular type.’

Hanna observed the white worms and felt quite sick. But she knew that what Felicia had described would come to pass. Her main concern was not Esmeralda, but that Julietta shouldn’t end up with the white men who regarded the women in the brothel with superior contempt.

The following day, when the final remnants of the uprising had been cleared away, the streets cleaned up and the cartridge cases removed, Hanna had a meeting with Herr Eber. She also exchanged a few words with Felicia, who reported that Esmeralda had drunk the milk containing the tapeworm late the previous evening.

As Hanna was on her way to the outside gate, she happened to glance into the interior courtyard where the jacaranda tree was. She noticed that Esmeralda was kneeling beside the tree.

It seemed to Hanna that something was happening around that tree that she didn’t understand. But there was nobody she could ask about it. The white people she knew would understand no more than she did, and the blacks would give her evasive answers.

There was no end of possible answers. But none would be able to clarify the situation for her.

54

At first Hanna couldn’t believe her eyes. Nevertheless the fact was that Esmeralda really did start to grow thinner.

Every time Hanna looked at her, she’d changed. Herr Eber also kept presenting Hanna with a constantly increasing number of bills from seamstresses who had been taking in Esmeralda’s clothes. Hanna still felt uncomfortable whenever she thought about that white worm in the little glass jar, but it was quite obviously now growing apace in Esmeralda’s stomach, eating all the food that previously produced bigger and bigger layers of fat around her body.

Hanna had put the rest of the glass jars in the wardrobe where Senhor Vaz’s suits and shirts were hanging. Despite her uneasiness, there were evenings when Hanna simply couldn’t resist taking out one of the jars and studying the white worm wriggling away inside it. How this tiny animal could grow and become as big as five metres long in a human being’s stomach and gut was beyond her comprehension. She would put the jar back in the wardrobe with a shudder.

Carlos sat on top of the high wardrobe, watching her.

‘What can you see?’ she would ask.

Carlos would reply with his usual jabbering, then just yawn and scratch away absent-mindedly at his stomach.

Two days later Esmeralda disappeared. She had gone away during the night. Late in the evening Felicia had seen her going into her room to sleep. None of the guards had seen her leaving the brothel. Hanna asked Felicia directly if there was any cause for concern: Felicia shook her head, but Hanna thought she could detect a hint of doubt, although she couldn’t be sure.

But it soon became clear that she hadn’t gone to see her family. That made everybody start worrying.

Contrary to her usual practice, Hanna stayed in the brothel during the day. She sat by herself on one of the red sofas. The only customers were some Russian sailors. A train was expected later in the day from Johannesburg, carrying some Englishmen and Boers whose only reason for the trip was to have sessions with Hanna’s black women.

Shortly after three in the afternoon there was a buzz of excited voices in the street outside. Hanna had fallen asleep in the corner of her sofa. An unknown man was talking to one of the guards in a language Hanna didn’t understand, or even recognize. Felicia came out of her room, wearing a flimsy dressing gown, and joined in the conversation.

Suddenly silence fell. Felicia came in from the street, and announced in an unsteady voice that Esmeralda was dead. Her body had been floating in the dock. The town’s bombeiros had been called to retrieve the dead woman. Together with one of the guards and Felicia, who was still wearing her pink dressing gown, Hanna went down to the harbour. As they approached they could see a small crowd gathered at the far end of the quay. When they got there the corpse was just being lifted out of the water. Esmeralda was completely naked. Despite the fact that she had lost a lot of weight during the time she had the tapeworm inside her, her body was still swollen and enveloped by large rolls of fat. Hanna felt that it was shamefully cruel for the body to be pulled up out of the water with no clothes on.

It was a sort of burial in reverse, she thought. I watched Lundmark being tipped into the sea. Now Esmeralda is being lifted out of the selfsame water.

The governor had decreed that every dead body found in Lourenço Marques that might possibly have been the result of an assault should undergo a post-mortem. Felicia and Hanna accompanied the firemen to the mortuary that was situated behind the hospital. There was an overpowering stench when the doors were opened. The doctor who was due to carry out the post-mortem was standing outside in the courtyard, smoking. Hanna noted his dirty hands and frayed shirt collar. He introduced himself as Dr Meandros, and spoke Portuguese with a strong foreign accent. He came originally from Greece. Nobody knew for certain how he had ended up in Lourenço Marques, but some suggested that he had been on a ship that ran aground off Durban. He was a skilful pathologist.

It was very rare for him not to be able to establish the

cause of death, and hence conclude whether or not it was self-inflicted.

Dr Meandros rolled up his shirtsleeves, threw away the butt of his cigarette and stood on it, then went back into the stinking building. Hanna and Felicia went back to the brothel in a rickshaw powered by a man with enormous ears.

‘Why was she naked?’ Hanna asked.

‘I think she wanted to show everybody who she was,’ said Felicia.

Hanna tried in vain to work out what she meant by that.

‘I don’t understand your answer. Explain for me why she decided to take her own life in that filthy dock, and why she undressed before doing so.’

‘Nobody has found her clothes.’

‘How am I supposed to interpret that? That they have just vanished into thin air? Or that somebody has stolen them?’

‘All I know is that they weren’t there on the quay. Nobody saw her coming there with no clothes on. Nobody saw her jump into the water. Perhaps she was carrying large stones in each hand, to make sure that she sank.’

‘But why should she do that with no clothes on?’

‘Perhaps she did have clothes on when she jumped into the water. And then took them off before she died.’

‘Why?’

‘Perhaps she wanted to die in the same way as she had lived.’

Although she still didn’t really know what Felicia meant, Hanna suspected that she was trying to make a comment about Esmeralda’s death. Dying the way she had lived. With no clothes on, naked to the world.

Hanna asked no more questions. When Felicia had got off at the front gate of the brothel, which was being guarded by Judas, she asked the man pulling the rickshaw to go back up the steep hills to her house. He was dripping with sweat when they got there. She paid him twice as much as he had asked for, but even so it was only a few escudos, worth next to nothing.

Julietta was standing in the entrance, looking at her. Hanna could see the curiosity in her eyes, but didn’t want to talk to her. She simply gave the maid her hat and parasol and told her that Dr Meandros should be allowed in the moment he arrived. She took it for granted that Julietta and the rest of the staff in the house already knew that Esmeralda was dead. Invisible or silent messages were passed with astonishing speed among the blacks of Lourenço Marques.

Carlos was sitting on her desk chair chewing at a carrot when she entered her study. She let him stay there, sat down on the visitor’s chair and closed her eyes.

When she woke up she realized she had been asleep for four hours, a deep and long sleep that felt as if it lasted a whole night. There was no sign of Carlos. She went over to the desk chair and sat down. She had been dreaming. Unclear fragments slowly rose up into her mind. Lundmark had been in it. He had been sitting at the brothel piano, hesitantly fingering the keys. The jacaranda tree had been cut down. Senhor Vaz had been wandering around in a dinner jacket, smoking a cigar that smelled like the fires caused by the rioters. But she couldn’t see herself in the dream. She hadn’t taken part in it, was simply an observer on the outside, looking in.

She summoned Julietta, ordered tea, then sent her brusquely on her way — as if to remind her that she still hadn’t forgotten Julietta’s outrageous request to be transferred to the brothel.

She had just finished drinking her tea when Dr Meandros arrived at the front door. When he came up to her study she could see that his hands were still dirty. There were what could well have been dried bloodstains on his scruffy jacket.

He sat down and asked for a glass of wine. When Julietta brought a glass on a tray, he emptied it as if he had been dying of thirst. But he declined firmly the offer of a second glass.

‘There’s no doubt that the woman committed suicide,’ he said. ‘Her lungs were full of dirty water from the dock. It would be sufficient, of course, to give the cause of death as drowning, but I made a more comprehensive examination of her body. Visiting and travelling through a person’s intestines can be an adventurous journey. I was able to ascertain that she had probably given birth to a lot of children. Her obesity had resulted in deposits in her blood vessels and brain. Her body was old for a woman who was as young as I take it she was.’

Hanna interpreted that last remark as a question.

‘She was about thirty-eight. Nobody knows her exact age.’

‘That can probably be an advantage for black people,’ said Meandros thoughtfully. ‘For those of us who know the date and perhaps even the time of day or night when we were born, it can be a confounded nuisance being constantly reminded of the exact moment. A rather more vague time is preferable in many ways.’

Meandros seemed to be lost in his own thoughts for a while. Then he continued.

‘The most interesting and surprising thing, however, was that she had a very big and particularly flourishing tapeworm inside her stomach and intestines. I wound it around one of my walking sticks and measured it with a tape measure: it was four metres and sixty-five centimetres long.’

Hanna pulled a disgusted face. Meandros noticed her reaction and raised his hands in apology.

‘I don’t need to go into any more details,’ he said. ‘The body can be released for burial. I have signed the death certificate and given the cause of death as a clear case of suicide.’

‘I shall pay for the burial.’

Meandros stood up, swayed suddenly as if he had suffered an attack of dizziness, then held out his hand for Hanna to shake. She accompanied him down to the front door.

‘What do they usually die of?’ she asked.

‘The Africans, you mean? Diabetes is rare. Heart attacks and strokes are also quite unusual. The commonest causes are infections cause by malaria-carrying mosquitoes, dirty water, too little food, too little dietary variation, too heavy work. There is a vast chasm between our ways of living and our ways of dying. But tapeworms can affect white people as well.’

‘How do we get a tapeworm inside our bodies?’

‘We eat them.’

‘Eat them?’

‘By accident, of course. But once they get into your body, they stay there. Until they eventually decide it’s time to leave. They say it has happened that tapeworms have left bodies through the corner of an eye — but the usual route is of course the natural way.’

Hanna didn’t want to hear any more. She also doubted if what he said about the corner of an eye was true. She opened her purse to pay the doctor for his visit, but he refused point-blank to accept any payment. He raised his hat and set off on the walk down the hills to the hospital where he had as much responsibility for the dead as he had for the living.

The next day Felicia went to visit Esmeralda’s family. Hanna had decided to close down the brothel during the afternoon when the burial was to take place. This had never happened before, despite the fact that several of the women had died during Senhor Vaz’s time. Hanna also made sure that all of the women had decent black clothes. When they eventually gathered as a group, all dressed in black with dark hats and veils, it seemed to her that it was a ghostly collection she had standing there before her. They all seemed to be dead already.

A funeral procession of the dead. Dead people mourning a dead person. And in parallel with all this, the thought of the almost-five-metre-long tapeworm. Her desire to throw up came and went in waves.

Hanna had hired a horse-drawn hearse with benches at the sides. Felicia was waiting in the cemetery, with Esmeralda’s husband and children. Felicia whispered to Hanna that Esmeralda’s ancient father was also present. They gathered around the open grave where the coffin was resting on two rough wooden trestles.

The cemetery was split in exactly the same way as the town: on the right, just after the entrance, were the resting places for the whites — marble sarcophagi or impressive mausoleums. Then an area of less imposing graves, and beyond that the field where the blacks were buried. Their graves were marked by rickety wooden crosses, or nothing at all. Hanna decided on the spot that Esmeralda would have a decent gravestone with her name on.

The black priest, dressed in a white cowl, spoke one of the languages Hanna didn’t understand. She occasionally registered the name Esmeralda, but understood nothing else of what he said. She thought that was quite appropriate: she had no idea about Esmeralda’s life, and so it was right that she should continue to be unknown to Hanna in death.

We are the ones who have brought about this situation, Hanna thought, somewhat remorseful. We have turned their lives into something that suits us, rather than them.

Hanna stood there watching Esmeralda’s children, and her husband, who was staring at the priest with his teeth clenched. When it was all over, she summoned Felicia and asked her to tell Esmeralda’s husband that the family would receive a regular payment. The man came over to thank Hanna. His hand was wet with sweat, his grip slack like that of a man scared to grasp the hand of another person too firmly.

Hanna returned home. Herr Eber, who had attended the funeral, was instructed to make sure that the brothel was opened for business again, and that the black mourning clothes were taken care of.

As she left the cemetery she noticed that Julietta was communicating in whispers with Felicia next to a mausoleum for an old Portuguese ship’s captain. Her first instinct was to box Julietta on the ear, but she resisted the temptation, turned away and left the grave — which was already being filled in.

When she got home she went to lie down on her bed. She slept like a log for several hours. Afterwards she ate some of the food she had been served, but the thought of the tapeworm came back to haunt her, and she slid the plate to one side.

With the paraffin lantern in her hand, she went into her study to write about Esmeralda’s death and burial in her diary. But when she entered the room and the lamp banished the shadows, she saw that Carlos was sitting on her desk chair. He was holding in his hand one of the glass jars he had taken from the big wardrobe, and had unscrewed the lid. Only now did Hanna realize that the jar was empty. Then she saw the tapeworm wriggling away in the side of Carlos’s mouth. She screamed and tried to take hold of the worm, but Carlos swallowed it. Her first impulse was to hit him, but instead she prised apart his jaws and thrust her fingers down into his throat to make him sick. Carlos screamed and resisted. He was strong, and she couldn’t hold on to him. Anaka and Julietta heard the noise and came running to assist. Hanna couldn’t manage to explain what Carlos had swallowed, just that it was important that he should vomit it up. They grabbed hold of Carlos and this time it was Anaka who managed to force her hand so far down into his throat that he started to vomit. Yellow carrot juice spurted out all over the desk.

Hanna didn’t know the Portuguese word for tapeworm. She fetched one of the glass jars that were left in the wardrobe, showed them the tapeworm, and then the jar on the desk that was empty. They all poked around in the contents of Carlos’s stomach, but didn’t find it. Hanna was furious, sent Julietta to fetch more lamps, and told Anaka to thrust her fingers down into Carlos’s throat once again. But all that came up was nasty-smelling stomach juices.

They never succeeded in finding the tapeworm.

Carlos jumped up on to the ceiling light and refused to come down even when Hanna tried to console him and offered him the drink he liked more than anything else: milk. But he didn’t come down. Carlos was a wounded animal that hid himself away in his impregnable fortress — a lampshade.

Julietta and Anaka cleaned up the desk. Hanna went out on to the veranda. The town down below was shrouded in darkness. One or two fires in the far distance. Perhaps also the sound of drums.

From somewhere came the sound of laughter. It reminded her of the night when she had made up her mind to leave Captain Svartman’s ship.

Perhaps it’s the same man laughing, she thought. But I am quite a different person now: how can I be sure that I’ve heard his laughter before? And besides, on that occasion I didn’t need to worry about a chimpanzee that has eaten a tapeworm.

It was dawn before she went to bed.

By then Carlos had also gone to sleep, curled up like a frightened child in the ceiling light.

55

Hanna turned to Felicia once again. She told her about the tapeworm that Carlos had swallowed, but the only advice Felicia had to offer was to wait until it left the chimpanzee’s body of its own accord. Hanna asked whether there was a cure, anything the woman with the knowledge of medicine could give Carlos to kill the worm while it was still inside him, but Felicia said that the mysterious female magician who had sold her the tapeworms refused to have anything to do with apes or any other animal. She refused to treat elephants or mice, her knowledge was restricted to human suffering and the remedies she could offer them.

Hanna became so desperate that she borrowed Andrade’s car and was driven to the cathedral to talk to one of the Catholic priests. She assumed that the priests there could give advice on everything to do with human life. Even if it was the health of a chimpanzee that she was worried about, it was her own worries that she wanted to be free of.

The heat was like a solid wall in front of her as she travelled to the cathedral. Even though it was early in the morning the heat was so intense that her eyes ached as she hurried towards the darkness behind the open doors. Once inside, Hanna stood still for a while and allowed her eyes to become used to the darkness. The cathedral was empty, apart from a few nuns dressed in white, kneeling before a picture of the Madonna, and a solitary man in a white suit sitting in a pew with his eyes closed, as if he were asleep. There was a smell from the newly painted doors. Some black women in bare feet were gliding over the stone floor, carrying dusters and long poles with feathers on the end, with which they carefully caressed the highest-hanging pictures of the saints.

A priest dressed in black came out of a room in the chancel. He paused in front of the high altar and polished his spectacles. Hanna stood up and walked towards him. He put his glasses back on and eyed her up and down. He was young, barely more than thirty. That made her feel hesitant — a priest ought to be an old man.

‘The senhora looks as if she wants to confess,’ he said in a friendly tone.

‘What do people look like then?’ she responded. ‘Guilty? Full of sin?’

The claim that she looked as if she wanted to make a confession touched a sore point in her. She could not deny that she was the owner of the town’s biggest brothel, and earned money from the organized sin that was for sale there. But the priest didn’t seem to react against her negative tone of voice.

‘Most of all people who want to confess express a longing. They want to liberate themselves.’

‘I don’t want to confess. I’ve come here to ask for advice.’

The young priest pulled up two chairs and placed them facing each other. The cleaners had vanished, but the sleeping man was still there in a pew not far away.

‘I’m Father Leopoldo,’ said the young priest. ‘I’ve recently come here from Portugal.’

‘My name’s Hanna. My Portuguese is not good. I need to speak slowly in order to find the words I need, and I often place them in the wrong order.’

Father Leopoldo smiled. Hanna thought that his face was handsome even if he was very pale and almost gave the impression of being undernourished. Perhaps the priest also had a hungry worm in his intestines?

‘Where do you come from, Senhora Hanna?’

She recounted her background in brief, but chose not to mention the brothel: she merely said that she had married a Portuguese man called Senhor Vaz, who had died suddenly shortly after the marriage.

‘You said you needed some advice,’ said Father Leopoldo, who had listened intently to her story. ‘But you still haven’t asked me a question that I can react to.’

I can’t possibly start talking about a chimpanzee that has swallowed a tapeworm, she thought dejectedly. The priest will either think I’m crazy, or that I’ve come here to the cathedral to poke fun at him and all that’s holy.

Nevertheless, she explained the situation. She told him about the chimpanzee that meant so much to her, about the contents of the glass jar and the tapeworm that was now living inside its body. The priest was not at all annoyed by what she said: he believed both what had happened and her worries about Carlos’s fate.

‘I don’t think you have told me everything,’ he said when she had finished, still just as patient and friendly as before. ‘It’s difficult to give advice to somebody who doesn’t tell the whole story.’

Hanna realized that he had seen through her. Even if Vaz was not an unusual name in Lourenço Marques, Father Leopoldo evidently knew about the Senhor Vaz who had run the biggest brothel in town. Perhaps he had even heard about his marriage to the Swedish woman, and his death that had taken place so soon afterwards?

There was no longer any reason to hold anything back. She told him about Esmeralda, and that she herself was now the owner and proprietor of the brothel.

‘I’m afraid for my chimpanzee’s life,’ she said in the end. ‘And I simply don’t know what I’m going to do with what I now own and am responsible for.’

Father Leopoldo observed her from behind his rimless spectacles. She didn’t find his look censorious. She thought it likely that even a young priest was used to hearing the oddest of tales, whether or not they were told to him during confession.

‘There is a veterinary surgeon here in Lourenço Marques called Paulo Miranda,’ said Father Leopoldo. ‘His clinic is right next to the big market. Perhaps he can give you some advice on how to cure your ape?’

‘What can he do that the local women who know about medicines can’t do?’

‘I don’t know. You asked me for advice. Besides, I think that traditional native medicine is based mainly on magic and should be opposed.’

Hanna would have liked him to see those white tapeworms, and to explain to him how much weight Esmeralda had lost by showing him the clothes she had worn when she was at her fattest. But she said nothing.

The priest continued to look at her, and pushed his chair closer to her.

‘In everything you say I detect a searching for something else,’ he said. ‘Something different from the ape and your worries about what it has in its stomach. As I understand it, the advice you are seeking has more to do with your own life. As the owner and hostess of the biggest brothel in Lourenço Marques, I don’t need to tell you what the Church thinks about the type of life of sin that takes place in that establishment. All I know about your homeland of Sweden is that it can be very cold there, and that large numbers of poor people have left it and travelled over the sea in search of a better life in America. But not even there would the life you are now leading be regarded as decent or honourable.’

His words affected her deeply.

‘What should I do?’ she asked. ‘I was left the brothel in my husband’s will.’

‘Close it,’ said Father Leopoldo. ‘Or sell it to somebody who can transform it into a respectable hotel or restaurant. Give the women money so that they can begin to lead respectable lives. Leave this country and go back to where you come from. You are still young. The ape can return to the bush, It will no doubt soon find a troop it can join.’

Hanna said nothing about the fact that Carlos had lost his identity as an ape a long time ago, and now lived in a twilight world in which he was neither an animal nor a human being. His home was a ceiling light rather than a forest.

‘You are running away from something,’ said Father Leopoldo. ‘That flight will never come to an end if you don’t return to your homeland. And leave all this messy business behind you.’

‘I don’t know if I have anything to return to.’

‘Surely you have a family, Senhora? In which case you have your roots there, and not in this town.’

Hanna noticed that Father Leopoldo was staring at something behind her head. When she turned round to find out what it was, she saw one of the Portuguese garrison’s highest-ranking officers. He was wearing his uniform, with a sabre hanging from his belt and his officer’s cap under his arm. Father Leopoldo stood up.

‘I’m sorry I can’t continue this conversation, but do come back some other time.’

He gave Hanna an encouraging smile, then accompanied the soldier into one of the confessionals. The curtains were drawn on each side of the centre wall. Hanna thought that the high-ranking officer probably had a large number of sins to confess. She had recognized him immediately. He was a regular customer at the brothel, and sometimes had strange requirements of the women who served him. Some of his perversities were such that the women refused. Hanna had blushed the first time she’d had explained to her what the officer wanted. He asked for two women at the same time, and that they should pretend to be mother and daughter. Her first reaction was to ban him, but he was a good customer. Felicia had also told her that much worse requests sometimes came from some of the South African customers who were more deserving of a ban.

They had been sitting under the jacaranda tree, talking. Felicia had explained all the peculiar perversions men sometimes had when it came to their association with women. She had been astonished, and blushed. She had never experienced anything remotely like that in her short erotic life with Lundmark and Vaz. She realized that there was a lot she knew nothing about. Things that the proprietor of a brothel certainly ought to know.

She stood up to leave the cathedral, still unsure about what she ought to do.

The man who seemed to have been asleep was suddenly standing in front of her. He was holding his white hat in his hand, and there was a friendly smile on his face.

‘I couldn’t help hearing what Father Leopoldo said. Sometimes things can be heard very clearly in this enormous cathedral. It’s only in the confessional that nobody can hear what’s being said. But I want to stress that I’m not normally an eavesdropper. My name is José Antonio Nunez. I’ve spent many years in this country, doing business. But I’ve put all that behind me now, and nowadays I devote myself to quite different things. Things that are important in this life. I wonder if I might steal a few minutes of Senhora Vaz’s time?’

‘I don’t know you. But you know my name?’

‘This is not a big town. Or at least, the white population is not so great that one can remain anonymous for very long. Let me just say that I knew your husband, and ask you to accept my condolences. I really did wish Senhor Vaz a happy and successful life.’

Hanna reckoned that the man standing in front of her was in his forties. His friendliness seemed convincing. It seemed somehow that he didn’t really belong to this town — in the same way that she was also a foreigner.

They sat down. He was confident and determined, she less so.

‘I’ll keep it short,’ said Nunez. ‘I’m prepared to relieve you of the establishment of which you are the proprietor. I would pay off the women, just as Father Leopoldo recommended. What is of value to me is the actual building. After all my years as a businessman, I’m trying to pay back something of all the benefits I have accrued. If you sell the building to me, I shall turn it into a children’s home.’

‘For black children?’

‘Yes.’

‘In the middle of the white men’s red-light district?’

‘That is precisely my intention. To create something that reminds people of all the parentless black children drifting around like leaves in the wind.’

‘The governor would never allow it.’

‘He’s a friend of mine. He knows that he’s dependent on me to keep his job. A lot of white people in this town accept my advice.’

Hanna shook her head. She didn’t know what to believe. Who was this man who had been sitting there with his eyes closed, and now suddenly wanted to buy the brothel?

‘I don’t know if I’m going to sell,’ she said. ‘Nothing has been decided.’

‘My offer still applies tomorrow, and perhaps some time into the future. I know you use the solicitor Andrade. Ask him to contact me.’

‘I don’t even know where you live.’

‘He does,’ said Nunez with a smile.

‘I need some time to think this over. We can meet here a week from now. At the same time.’

He bowed deeply.

‘I’ll be here. But a week is too long. Let us say three days from now.’

‘I don’t know who you are,’ she said again.

‘I’m sure you can easily find out.’

Hanna left the cathedral. Once again she needed some advice, and she knew there was a person she could turn to. Not only to ask about Nunez, but also about what Father Leopoldo had said.

That same afternoon she was driven out to Pedro Pimenta’s farm, where dogs were barking and crocodiles thrashing their tails before vanishing into the murky waters of their pools.

When she got out of the car and the engine had been switched off, she heard the sound of glass shattering inside the house. The veranda was deserted.

Hanna looked around. Everything seemed strangely empty. Then a white woman came racing out of the door, her hands covering her face. She was followed by a girl, screaming and trying to catch up with the fleeing woman.

They disappeared down the hill leading to the crocodile pools. Then silence once again.

A boy a few years older than the girl came out of the door. Hanna had never seen him, the girl or the sobbing woman before.

The boy, who might have been sixteen or thereabouts, paused in the doorway. He seemed to be holding his breath.

He’s like me, Hanna thought. I can recognize myself in him — there in the doorway stands a boy who doesn’t understand a thing about what is happening all around him.

56

The scene Hanna was observing was transformed into an oil painting with the frame formed by sunbeams. The boy’s face seemed to melt as he stood there in the doorway. The dogs in their cages had fallen silent: they just stood there, tongues hanging out and panting heavily.

Quietness at last! Hanna thought. In this peculiar town it is never normally silent. There’s always somebody speaking, shouting, screeching or laughing. Not even at night does the town seem to rest.

But just now: silence.

The boy stood there motionless, tied down in the middle of the painting. Hanna was just going to walk over to the steps leading up to the veranda when Pedro Pimenta came out through the door. He stopped next to the boy, who stared at him. Pimenta was holding a blood-soaked handkerchief. He had a wound in his forehead that hadn’t quite stopped bleeding. He can’t have been shot, Hanna thought. A shot in the forehead would have killed him. Then she remembered the sound of shattering glass, and assumed that the sobbing woman must have thrown something at him.

Pimenta looked down at the blood-soaked handkerchief, then caught sight of Hanna standing under her parasol. He seemed tired, lacking the usual energy and friendliness he normally displayed when he had visitors. Instead of inviting her up to the veranda, he went down the steps to her. The wound in his forehead was a deep scratch just above his left eye and running up to his greying hair.

‘Did you see where they went to?’ he asked.

‘If you mean the woman and the girl, they headed for the crocodile pools.’

He pulled a worried face, then shook his head.

‘I must find them,’ he said. ‘Go and sit down on the veranda and wait until I get back. Everything can be explained.’

‘Where’s your wife? Who’s the boy?’

Pimenta didn’t answer. He threw the handkerchief on to the ground and hurried off down the slope towards the pools.

Hanna sat down on the veranda. The boy was still in the doorway. She nodded at him, but he didn’t react. It was still silent on all sides. She stood up and went into the house. There were glass splinters all over the floor, which was covered by lion hides and zebra skins. Hanging on one of the walls was the mounted head of a kudu, with its long spiral-shaped horns. Hanna tried to imagine what had happened. Not knowing who the woman and the boy were, she couldn’t imagine the sequence of events. The glass shards glittered like pearls scattered over the animal skins.

She found all the domestic staff collected in the kitchen. They were scared, crowded together, protecting one another. Hanna was going to ask them what had happened, but changed her mind. Pimenta’s wife and the children must be somewhere in the house. She searched the ground floor, then went up the stairs. In the biggest bedroom, where Pimenta slept with Isabel, Hanna found her and the two children. They were sitting on the bed, huddled up next to each other.

‘I don’t want to disturb you,’ said Hanna, ‘but I was worried when I heard the sound of breaking glass and saw Pedro with a bleeding forehead.’

Isabel looked at her without answering. Unlike the servants, she was not afraid, Hanna could see that straight away.

Isabel was furious, full of simmering anger of a kind that Hanna had never seen in this woman before.

‘What’s happened?’ she asked.

‘It’s best if you leave,’ said Isabel. ‘I don’t want you to be here when what has to happen actually happens.’

‘What’s that?’

‘That I kill him.’

The children didn’t seem at all surprised. Hanna thought that could only mean one thing: that they’d heard her say it before.

Hanna sat down gingerly beside Isabel and took hold of her hand.

‘I don’t understand what’s going on. How can you say to me, in the presence of your children, that you’re going to kill your husband?’

‘Because I am.’

‘But why?’

Isabel turned to look at her. Hanna could see that Isabel found it impossible to grasp that Hanna didn’t get it. What is it that I can’t see? she asked herself. I’m caught up in a drama that I don’t understand.

Isabel suddenly stood up and smoothed down her skirt, as if running her hands over her body in that way would give her strength. The two children looked at her. Isabel bent down in front of them.

‘Stay here,’ she said. ‘I’ll be back shortly. Nothing will happen to you.’

Then she took Hanna by the arm and escorted her out of the room.

‘What’s going to happen now?’ Hanna asked.

‘You’ve already asked me that question. I don’t know what’s going to happen. You can leave if you want to. Or you can stay. Do whichever you like.’

They had come down the stairs by now. The boy was still standing in the doorway. Isabel swept past him without even looking at him. She doesn’t like him, Hanna thought. A grown woman distancing herself from a young boy. A suspicion, vague as yet but perhaps the beginnings of an explanation, began to grow in her mind.

Isabel flopped down on the sofa on the veranda. Hanna moved a basket chair closer to the wall and sat down carefully. Still the boy didn’t move. It seemed to Hanna that she was now entering the oil painting she had imagined earlier. She was no longer just an observer.

Pedro Pimenta appeared on the slope. Walking just behind him was the white woman, who was no longer crying. She was holding the girl’s hand tightly. The girl was silent. Hanna couldn’t hear what the woman was saying to Pimenta. He suddenly stopped, and started gesticulating with his hands. It looked as if he wanted the woman to take the girl with her and go away. He continued towards the veranda, started running, with the woman after him. When they came up on to the veranda, she exploded: ‘I believed you,’ she screamed. ‘I’ve kept all the letters you wrote, all the protestations of the enormous love you had for me. I kept asking to come and visit you with the children. I simply couldn’t bear to keep on waiting in Coimbra any longer. But all the time you kept on telling me that Lourenço Marques was too dangerous. The same thing in letter after letter.’

She took a crumpled sheet of letter paper out of her pocket and started reading in a shrill voice.

‘“In Lourenço Marques the streets are full of cunning leopards and prides of lion prowling around at night. Every morning the remains are found of some white person or other, often a woman or a child, that has been eaten. Poisonous snakes find their way into the houses. It’s still too dangerous for you to come here.” Did you write that, or didn’t you?’

‘I wrote the truth.’

‘But there are no wild animals in the streets here. You lied.’

‘They were here in the streets some years ago.’

‘Nobody I’ve spoken to has seen a single lion in this town for the last thirty years. You lied to me in your letters because you didn’t want us to come here. The love that you described doesn’t exist.’

The furious woman had forced Pimenta up against the wall of the veranda. The girl had joined her brother in the doorway. Isabel was sitting tensely on the sofa, watching what was happening. Hanna thought that perhaps she ought to leave: but something that wasn’t merely curiosity held her back.

The woman suddenly turned to look at the far side of the long veranda. Joanna and Rogerio were standing there. They had appeared without a sound, like their mother.

‘Who are they?’ yelled the woman from Coimbra.

‘Can’t we sit down and try to talk our way through this calmly and peacefully?’ said Pimenta.

But the woman continued to force him up against the wall.

‘They are my children,’ said Isabel, standing up. ‘They are the children I have with Pedro. And now I’d like to know who you are, and why you are behaving like this towards my husband.’

‘My husband? My husband? But I’m the one who’s married to him! Am I not married to you, Pedro? For nearly twenty years? Who’s she? A black whore you’ve picked up?’

Isabel thumped the woman, and promptly received a thump in return. Pimenta separated them and urged both women to calm down. Isabel sat down, but the other woman started hitting Pedro instead.

‘Can’t you tell me the truth for a change? What’s she doing here? Who are those children?’

‘Teresa! Let’s calm down a bit to start with. Then we can talk. Everything can be explained.’

‘I am calm. I’m just fed up of all the letters in which you’ve lied to me and urged me to stay in Coimbra.’

‘All the time I was scared stiff that something might happen to you.’

‘And who’s she?’

Pimenta tried to lead her away to one side, perhaps so that he could talk to her without Isabel understanding what was said. But Isabel stood up again. She fetched her children and pushed them forward to Teresa and Pedro.

‘These are Pedro’s and my children,’ she said.

Teresa stared at them.

‘Good God!’ she said. ‘Don’t tell me their names!’

‘Why not?’

‘Is the boy called José? And the girl Anabel?’

‘They’re called Rogerio and Joanna.’

‘Well, at least he hasn’t given them the same names as the children he abandoned. At least that was a step too far.’

Hanna tried to understand. So Pimenta had a family in Portugal and another family here in Lourenço Marques.

Teresa had stopped shouting now. She was speaking in a low but firm voice, as if she had drawn a horrific conclusion which nevertheless gave her the calm that truth endows.

‘So that’s why we weren’t allowed to come here,’ she said. ‘So that’s why you wrote all those damned letters about the dangers of this place. You’d got yourself a new family here in Africa. When I was finally unable to wait any longer, I thought you would be pleased. Instead, I came here and found you out. How could you treat us like that?’

Pimenta stood leaning against the wall. He was very pale. Hanna had the impression that standing in front of her was a man who had been caught after committing a very serious crime.

Teresa suddenly turned to look at her.

‘Who are you?’ she asked. ‘Does he have children with you as well? Where are they? Perhaps you are also married to him? Are your children called José or Anabel?’

Hanna stood up.

‘He’s only my friend.’

‘How can you have a man like that as your friend?’

Teresa suddenly seemed totally abandoned. She looked from one of them to the other. But it was Isabel who progressed from words to action. Lying on the table was a knife that Pimenta used to carve small wooden sculptures, which he burnt when they were finished. She grabbed the knife and thrust it deep into Pimenta’s chest, pulled it out, then stabbed him again. Hanna thought she could count up to at least ten deep wounds before Pimenta’s body slowly slithered down on to the floor of the veranda. Isabel took her children and disappeared into the house. Teresa collapsed. For the first time the boy left the doorway. He squatted down beside his mother and put his arms round her. The girl started crying again, but quietly this time, almost silently.

Many hours later, when Pimenta’s dead body had been sent to the mortuary and Isabel had been led away wearing handcuffs and with a chain round her right foot, Hanna went back home. She had also met once again Ana Dolores, the nurse who had helped her to become fit again, and tried to explain to her the difference between black and white people. Ana had taken care of Teresa and her children, but handed over Isabel’s children to the servants with instructions to take them to their mother’s sister. She lived in a slum whose name Hanna had failed to grasp. She was distressed to think that they would be taken away from the well-organized white world where they had grown up, and instead plunged into the chaos that reigned in the inaccessible black settlements.

On the way back to town Hanna asked the chauffeur to stop the car by the side of the road. They were on the bank of the river, just before the old bridge that was so narrow, it could only cope with one-way traffic. An old African stood on duty there with a red and a green flag, directing the few cars that used it. The shock of what had happened was only now beginning to register with her.

‘What will happen to Isabel?’ she asked.

‘She’ll be locked up in the fort,’ said the chauffeur. There was no trace of doubt in his voice.

‘Who will pass judgement on her?’

‘She’s already condemned.’

‘But surely the fact that Pedro double-crossed her and let her down must be taken into account? Just as he let Teresa down.’

‘If Teresa had killed him, she would just have been sent back to Portugal with the children. But Isabel is a black woman. She has killed a white man. She will be punished for that. Besides, who would get upset over the fact that a white man had let down a black woman?’

They spoke no more about the matter. Hanna noticed that the chauffeur didn’t want to reveal what he really thought.

They continued their journey back to town when the man at the bridge raised his green flag. Hanna felt a surge of anger when she noticed that the flag was broken and frayed.

She asked to be taken to the promenade to the north of the town. She took off her shoes and walked over the soft sand. It was low tide. Small single-masted fishing boats were bobbing up and down in the distance. Black children were playing on the part of the beach that wasn’t reserved for whites only.

Saving Isabel will be identical with saving myself, she thought. I can’t leave here until I’ve made sure that she gets a fair trial. Only then will I be able to make up my mind what I’m going to do.

She walked along the beach, watching the tide come slowly in. Just now Isabel was the most important person in her life. What happened to Isabel was inseparably linked with herself. She was surprised at how natural and convincing that feeling was. For once in her life, she had no doubts whatsoever.

She was driven back home and paid the chauffeur. That evening she sat at her desk and counted up all the cash she had collected since Senhor Vaz’s death. She would now use some of the money to pay for a lawyer.

Carlos was sitting on top of the wardrobe, observing what she was doing. He suddenly jumped down and sat beside her at the table. He picked up a bundle of notes and began counting them with his long, black fingers, bundle after bundle. Seriously, as if he actually understood what he was doing.