Daniel

Chapter 20

One morning Daniel awoke to find the ground completely white. At first he thought it was a dream, that he was still asleep and back in the desert. But when he saw the black birds fighting above the piles of manure and went outside into the yard and stepped barefoot onto the cold white blanket, he knew that he was still with Edvin and Alma. He walked across the yard. The cold penetrated his body quickly, and his footprints looked like those he had left behind in the warm sand.

He left tracks in both the cold white and the warm white. He didn’t understand how that was possible.

Alma had come out in the yard and discovered him.

‘You can’t go barefoot in the frost!’ she shouted. ‘Put on your shoes!’

During the time that had passed since Father left, Daniel had realised that Alma was afraid of him. She liked him, sometimes stroking his head, especially when no one was looking, but she was afraid. Daniel didn’t know why. She avoided looking him in the eye, and when she didn’t think he would notice she kept watch over him.

Daniel and Alma shared a secret. He was sure of that. But as yet he didn’t know what it was.

Edvin came out on the steps.

‘The boy’s standing here barefoot in the frost,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you tell him to put on his shoes?’

‘I did, but he won’t move.’

By the time Edvin came out, Daniel’s feet had already turned into frozen clumps. He wanted to hurry inside and curl up by the fire burning in the kitchen, but something made him stand still. The cold whiteness under his feet was tugging at him. The earth desired him, wanted to have him.

‘He can’t just stand there,’ said Alma. ‘He’ll freeze to death.’

Edvin shook his head. ‘How can we work out what he’s thinking?’

He walked through the whiteness and stood next to Daniel.

‘You can’t walk outside in the frost barefoot,’ he said. ‘Can’t you feel how everything is freezing?’

Daniel was shaking all over. He tried to be still but couldn’t do it.

‘We’re going back inside,’ said Edvin.

He took hold of Daniel’s hand but Daniel didn’t move. Through the kitchen window Daniel could see the two milkmaids and the hired hand eating breakfast. They were looking out at what was happening in the yard with curiosity.

‘You’ll have to carry him in,’ said Alma.

‘He has to learn to obey. If we tell him to go inside he has to do it. I don’t understand why he won’t wear shoes.’

‘What difference does it make if you understand it or not? He can’t stand out here freezing to death.’

Edvin lifted Daniel up and carried him inside. In the kitchen Alma wrapped him in a blanket and began rubbing his feet. She had strong hands. Daniel liked it when she grabbed him hard. It was almost as if Be’s hands were touching him.

‘What he did outside?’ asked the milkmaid whose name was Serja and who came from Poland. She spoke poor Swedish. Several times Daniel had heard Alma scolding her and calling her lazy. She ought to take lessons from Daniel, who already spoke much better than she did, even though he was black and came from very far away.

‘Don’t talk so much,’ said Edvin. ‘The cows are waiting.’

The girls and the hired hand left. Alma rubbed Daniel’s feet. Edvin sat on a chair by the deal table, staring at his hands.

Daniel gazed into the fire. Far inside among the flames there was another world. He could see Be and Kiko, he could see the snakes gliding through the sand, and the clouds and the rain and the rock face where the antelope had frozen in its leap.

He gave a start at the thought. The antelope was caught in its leap there on the rock the same way that he had started to freeze solid in the white stuff that covered the ground. It must mean that the gods were very close to him. Somewhere underneath his feet. They were the ones who had tugged at him and slowly tried to change him from a human being into an image carved in a mountain wall.

He pulled away from Alma, threw off the blanket and rushed out into the yard again. This time he also took off his clothes and was standing naked by the time Alma and Edvin came after him. Daniel tried to resist when Edvin grabbed hold of him, but Edvin was strong. He lifted the boy up and carried him inside. Daniel tried to bite him on the neck, but Edvin held him far enough away that he couldn’t reach him. He put Daniel down on the floor by the fire.

‘Now you’re not going out again!’ he shouted. ‘Not without clothes and not without shoes. You live here, and we are responsible for you until Bengler comes back.’

Daniel didn’t answer. He knew that Father would never come back. He also realised that if he ran outside again Edvin might hit him. And he didn’t want that. He let Alma wrap the blanket around him again and rub his feet.

‘If only I understood,’ said Edvin, who had sat down in the chair again. ‘But I can’t see into his head.’

‘We have taken on responsibility for him,’ Alma said. ‘It doesn’t matter whether we understand or not.’

‘But how can you raise a child you can’t understand?’

Alma didn’t reply. Daniel thought about being the only child in the house. Alma and Edvin didn’t have any children of their own, even though they were already starting to get old. Maybe the children were already dead or were so big that they had left. He wanted to know, but he didn’t dare ask.

‘We’ll have to talk to the pastor,’ said Alma. ‘Maybe he can give us some advice.’

‘What will Hallén understand that we don’t?’

‘He is a pastor.’

‘He’s a bad pastor. Sometimes I wonder if he really believes in what he preaches.’

‘Don’t blaspheme. He’s a man of God. Besides, he’s not stuck-up.’

‘Somebody said he was the son of a town whore up in Småland.’

‘Don’t blaspheme. I want you to talk to him.’

Edvin got up from the table. ‘Things might get better when he starts school. It’s not working the way it is now.’

Alma kneaded and rubbed. ‘We must have patience,’ she said. ‘And we have to give it time.’

Daniel looked into the fire again. The flames were dancing. When he closed his eyes the dance continued inside his eyelids. The cold had made him tired. Every night since Father left, Daniel had woken up in the darkness. He had dreamed that Father was standing outside the house, but nobody heard him knocking. But when he opened his eyes there was no one at the door. There was only the snoring hired hand, the milkmaids, and himself sleeping alone in a corner of the kitchen.

Edvin went outside. Daniel closed his eyes. Alma kept rubbing his feet. Daniel tried to imagine Father’s face, but he was gone. Maybe he wasn’t even alive any longer. Then Daniel would have lost two fathers. First Kiko and then Father. Daniel often tried to work out what had happened that evening when the woman with the buttons was alone with Father. Everything that took place after that, the plans that were changed, had been affected by something that happened then. Daniel searched for an answer that he couldn’t find. How could Father just leave him here? In a place where there wasn’t even any sea? There were only the ponds in the beech woods and the puddles in the fields after a long rain.

Daniel didn’t know how long Father had been away. He knew that days, weeks, and months had passed. The only thing he was sure of was that the moon had been full four times since he left. It had grown colder, and the earth had changed and turned white.

For the first few days Daniel thought that he had been left far from the sea so that he would die. Maybe he had also hoped during that time that Father might come back. But late one evening, when Edvin had been drinking and was tipsy, Daniel had listened to a conversation between him and Alma in the bedroom. They were talking about Father. The first payment of ten riksdaler had arrived. It had been sent to Hornman the organist, who often handled estate inventories and was an honest man. Edvin had said that Father would probably never come back, but as long as the money arrived on time they didn’t have to worry. Alma asked about the future. What would happen when Daniel was bigger? And Edvin replied that he would be a farmhand like the others.

In that instant Father had vanished for good. He had been transformed into a shadow. And Daniel started to hate him. He was an evil man behind all his friendly words.

That was also when Daniel started to make a plan.

It had come to him from a bird.

Every morning when the hired hand was working with Edvin out in the fields and the girls were milking, Daniel went up onto a hill behind the house. From there he could see the horizon. Black birds that always seemed restless were riding on the updraughts or screeching in a clump of trees in the middle of the nearest field.

On this particular morning a lone seagull had joined the flock. The black birds chased it off, and as it left, the gull sailed right over Daniel’s head. He remembered that bird. There had been flocks of them around the ship that brought him here. Whenever they approached land the birds had appeared. Daniel realised that the gull had come to remind him that the sea was still there, even if he couldn’t see it.

He had to prepare for his escape. Without attracting attention, he had to find out in which direction the sea lay. Then he would take off. He would find somewhere he could be alone and learn to walk on the water. No one would find him, even though they would surely look for him.

There was no danger from the two milkmaids and the hired hand, but Edvin and Alma were always trying to see inside him and read his thoughts. He had to build a shell around himself that their eyes could not penetrate.

The most important thing was for him to act friendly and humour them. Even though he hated the shoes he was forced to wear, he would try to avoid showing his disgust. Only when he was alone would he kick them off and walk barefoot on the ground, which was growing colder all the time. He would do as he was told. Whenever Alma or Edvin asked him for help he would do more than they asked of him.

But this morning he was unsuccessful. He woke up and saw all that whiteness and he couldn’t control himself. Now he had to be careful so that Edvin and Alma would not discover his secret.

Alma finished rubbing his feet. She had bad teeth but he liked her smile anyway.

‘Are you warm now?’

Daniel nodded.

‘Then you can get dressed and go and play.’

Daniel went outside. The white on the ground had been trampled. He stood completely still in the yard and looked at the smoke that came out of his mouth every time he breathed. As soon as the girls were finished milking he would go into the barn. It was warm in there. He would have liked to sleep there with the animals, bedded down in their straw.

One of the piglets had escaped from its pen and was snuffling around in all the white. Daniel didn’t like the pigs, though he didn’t know why. He liked their smell but he was afraid of their eyes. They looked at him as if they wanted to do him harm. He was sure that they had once been people who had died and now had come back to live another life. But they must have been evil people, since they didn’t come back as horses or cows.

He looked at the pig snuffling closer and closer to him. He took a step to the side. But the pig followed him. Suddenly it began to change. It had a human face now, a face that Daniel had seen before. He jumped out of the way but the pig kept following him. He yelled. It was Kiko who had taught him that loud noises could keep beasts of prey away. He also knew that you should never look a beast of prey in the eye or it might attack. Kiko had taught him that animals had to be handled in different ways. If a snake raised its head to spit poison, you should stand motionless and hold your breath.

But Kiko had never seen a pig. Daniel’s shouting didn’t help. The pig kept coming closer. Daniel searched his memory in vain for where he had seen this face before.

Then he knew.

It was the man who had killed Kiko. The pig was the same man who had shot Kiko and then kicked his dead body. Daniel looked around for a weapon, but there was nothing in the yard apart from him and the pig that kept coming closer and closer. He tore off one of his wooden shoes and slammed it hard on the pig’s head. It shrieked. He hit it again. Now the pig’s legs began to give way. The yard was slippery. It tried to get away but Daniel kept hitting it. Somewhere behind him he heard Alma yelling. Then the hired hand and Edvin came running up. The milkmaids stood in the doorway of the barn. And Daniel kept hitting. He didn’t stop even when Edvin tossed him aside. By then the pig was dead. Its blood had run out onto the white ground. In the moment of death the pig had shut its eyes. Daniel knew that he had conquered the man who killed Kiko. He now had his revenge. Kiko would have been proud of him.

Edvin stared in astonishment at the dead animal.

‘He beat it to death with his wooden shoe,’ said Alma.

‘But why?’

‘I don’t know.’

Edvin looked at Daniel. Daniel could feel that he had his shell on now. Edvin couldn’t see into him.

‘Why did you do it?’

Daniel didn’t answer. Edvin wouldn’t understand anyway. No one would understand.

‘Why did you do it? Why kill a little piglet with a wooden shoe?’

‘He’s crazy,’ the hired hand blurted out. ‘He’s crazy and he doesn’t belong here.’

‘He lives here,’ shouted Edvin. ‘I’m getting ten riksdaler a month for him. He lives here and he will stay here.’

The hired hand spat but didn’t dare reply.

Edvin looked at Daniel again. Daniel moved away.

‘He saw what you were thinking,’ said Alma. ‘He saw that you were thinking of hitting him. And you did.’

‘I haven’t touched him.’

‘But he could feel the blow you were thinking of giving him.’

Edvin motioned the hired hand to take away the dead animal. Alma called to the milkmaids to go back inside the barn.

‘This won’t do any longer. We’ll have to talk to the pastor. Maybe he can get him to say why he did it.’

‘He wants to go home,’ said Alma. ‘It can’t be anything else. He wants to go home.’

‘But he doesn’t have a home, does he? Aren’t they all dead? That’s what Bengler said.’

‘That man is a big windbag. I didn’t believe half of what he said.’

Edvin looked at his hands. He said no more. Then he went back out in the field.

‘What harm did the pig do you?’ asked Alma.

From her hand Daniel could feel that she wasn’t angry with him. He put his fingers cautiously around her wrist to feel her pulse and sensed that it beat just as calmly as Be’s heart used to do. But at the same time he knew that he couldn’t answer her question. He could say something that wasn’t true, of course, that he didn’t know why he felt compelled to kill the pig, but she would never understand that the evil man who had once killed Kiko had searched for him and changed himself into a pig.

So he said the only words he knew would never be misunderstood.

‘My name is Daniel. I believe in God.’

He put on his wooden shoes and left Alma. One shoe was bloody. He could feel his foot sticking to it. Alma stood and looked at him. She’s the one who can see inside me, Daniel thought. I have to watch out for her. But at the same time she’s the one who understands that I’m not actually here, I am somewhere else.

He went up onto the hill behind the house. Far out in the fields he could see Edvin and the hired hand. They were busy moving away a large stone. The wind had begun to blow. The black birds sat motionless and silent in the clump of trees. Daniel searched for the seagull. He listened. Sometimes he thought he could hear drums in the distance, but then he realised that it was only the wind that blew across the fields and then was gone.

He was cold and his nose was running. No matter how much he sniffled, his nose was always full. In the desert he had never had a cold. There he was sometimes struck by fever or had a stomach ache, but he had never had a runny nose.

He kept on gazing at the horizon. Edvin and the hired hand had managed to get the stone onto a wooden sledge. The two horses were pulling and straining at the sledge. Daniel had noticed that Edvin never hit his horses. Father had whipped his oxen. Sometimes he had loosed some unknown wrath on them, even though they were pulling as best they could, but Edvin never struck the horses. He might slap the reins, but never so hard that it hurt the animals.

Daniel continued to scan the horizon as he slowly turned round.

He saw something moving on a cart track on the other side of the hill. It led to a neighbouring farm where a family named Hermansson lived. Soon after Father had left, people from this farm had come to have a look at him. He had shaken hands, bowed and avoided looking them in the eye. They were young people, and they stood silently with mouths agape, watching him. Finally it was too much for Alma, who told Daniel to go out to the barn, and then served coffee to the guests. He had stayed in the barn until he heard the clop of hooves in the yard. He had peeked through a crack in the barn wall, and when the neighbours were gone he came out.

‘They’ll get used to you,’ Alma said. ‘But it’s terrible the way people can stare.’

Daniel fixed his gaze on what was moving along the cart track. At first he thought it was an animal. Then he saw that it was a person. A woman. She was running. He hadn’t seen her before. She was heading towards the hill. He moved aside and hid behind some bushes.

When she reached the top of the hill he saw that it was a girl. He guessed that she was older than the girls who had skipped in the courtyard in Simrishamn. He lay motionless behind the bushes and watched her. Her clothes were dirty and she had clumps of mud in her blonde hair. Daniel wondered what she was up to. She was squatting down and scratching with her fingers in the mud. After a while he realised she was searching for something. As she dug she muttered, but he couldn’t hear what she was saying. He could see that she was in a hurry. She gave up on the first hole she scratched. Then she put her ear to the ground and crawled about until she stopped and began digging again.

Daniel sneezed.

It came on him so quickly that he couldn’t stifle the sound. The girl gave a start and saw him at once behind the bushes. She’s going to scream, he thought. It’ll be the same way as with the pig. Edvin and Alma will come dashing over and this time Edvin will do what he’s thinking of doing. His heavy hand will fall like a stone on my head and it will hurt.

Daniel stood up. But the girl didn’t scream. She didn’t even stare. She smiled and started to laugh. She got up out of the mud and came over to him. He could smell the urine and dirt on her. On her forehead along the hairline he saw dried mud.

‘I’ve heard about you,’ said the girl. ‘But they wouldn’t let me come along and see you. They thought I’d behave badly.’

She spoke rapidly and her words sounded mushy in her thick dialect. Yet he could still understand what she said.

She grabbed hold of his hand.

‘You’re completely black,’ she said. ‘In the church there’s a devil on the wall. He’s black too. Do you come from hell?’

‘I come from the desert.’

‘I don’t know what that is. But your name is Daniel?’

‘I believe in God.’

‘I don’t. But you can’t tell anyone that.’

The girl was still holding his hand. He took hold of her wrist, just as he had done with Alma. The girl’s heart was beating hard.

‘What were you searching for?’ Daniel asked.

‘Sometimes I hear voices in the mud. As if someone is trapped down there. I try to help them. But I never find anyone.’

She let go of his hand and spat out some pebbles.

‘I like to chew on pebbles. Sometimes I can make them clack. Do you chew on pebbles?’

Daniel shook his head.

‘My name is Sanna,’ said the girl. ‘And I’m crazy.’

Then she ran off. Daniel watched her go. For the first time since Father left him he felt like laughing.

She ran along the cart track.

He watched her until she disappeared.

Chapter 21

Every morning David Hallén repeated the same ritual. Just after seven he would leave the dilapidated parsonage and walk across the road to the church. Inside the sacristy he swept out the mouse droppings that always awaited him. During the night the mice usually tried to nibble at the hymnals and the Bible on the table in the whitewashed room.

Then he would stand in front of the mirror with his head bowed, take a deep breath, and look at his face. Every morning he hoped that it wouldn’t be his own face that met him, but the face of the God he served. But it was his own features that looked back at him with eyes wide, a nose that was growing redder all the time and those pale cheeks that were always poorly shaven.

This morning too he encountered his own face in the mirror. Since he still hadn’t given up hope that a miracle might occur, he felt the same disappointment he had felt so many mornings before. He had now been the pastor of the congregation for eighteen years. When he was young he had dreamed of the mission, that his poor congregation far out on the wind-lashed plain of Skåne would be one step on a long journey. But he had never gone any further. The fields had become his ocean. He had never reached the foreign lands where the heat was strong, the diseases perilous and the black people thirsted for salvation. He had remained here. The children had come too quickly and there were far too many of them. The years had passed before he actually noticed and now he was too old to start over. The mud would hold him here until he dropped.

David Hallén was a stern pastor, and he had an energy that could sometimes drive him to rage. He was impatient, couldn’t stand the inertia he felt all around him, and often wondered whether there was actually any difference between saving black souls and dealing with these dull farmers. Sometimes he felt like giving up, but the face he met in the mirror each morning reminded him of why he was standing there. He was a servant who could finish his service only when he was dead or so paralysed that he could no longer climb into the pulpit.

He heard the church door close and knew who had come in. Alma, who never fell asleep during a sermon and always sang loudly even if she was off-key, had stood and curtsied in the doorway of the parsonage and told him about the black boy who was living with her and Edvin. Hallén hadn’t met him yet. He knew that the boy had come, he knew Dr Madsen well, but he had been away on a long trip to Dalarna to bury his sister when the boy had arrived. Alma had stood there and asked for help. The boy had killed a pig, he refused to wear shoes, and nobody knew exactly what to do with him.

Hallén had told Alma to send the boy to the church by himself. He had also admonished her not to frighten him, just say that the pastor was a friendly man who wanted to meet everyone who lived in the parish.

He stepped out of the sacristy. The light filtering in through the windows was still faint. It was hard to see in the gloom. Then he noticed Daniel standing at the very back by the church entrance. He started down the centre aisle. The boy didn’t move. Hallén saw that he had shoes on his feet. When he had almost reached the boy he saw him raise his hand and knock as if there were a door.

‘Come in,’ said Hallén. ‘But you don’t need to knock when there’s no door.’

Daniel fell to his knees and grabbed hold of one of Hallén’s muddy shoes.

‘You don’t have to kneel down either,’ said Hallén. ‘Get up.’

Daniel did as he was told. Hallén looked him over. The boy’s eyes were alert. He seemed to be ready for something to happen to him. Hallén hadn’t heard the whole story about why the boy had been lodged with Alma and Edvin. All he really knew was that the boy had been adopted by a man who was searching for rare insects and who suddenly felt compelled to set out on a long journey.

‘So you’re Daniel,’ said Hallén.

‘My name is Daniel and I believe in God.’

Hallén looked at the boy thoughtfully. The boy seemed to be taking his measure. His gaze made him uncertain for a moment. The boy wasn’t looking directly at him, but slightly to the side. Hallén turned round. It was the altarpiece the boy was looking at. The image of Jesus had hung there since the 1700s. A chip of wood had come off one knee but it had never been repaired.

They walked forward to the altar rail. Daniel wanted to climb inside the choir but Hallén held him back.

‘Not yet,’ he said.

Daniel looked at the cross. Hallén watched him from the side. The boy was searching for something that was missing.

‘What are you looking for?’

‘The water.’

‘The water?’

‘He could walk on the water.’

Hallén nodded. Actually the boy’s knowledge didn’t please him. He had wanted to exercise his power by converting this black child: transform the savage into a human being. Now someone seemed to have already begun this work.

‘Did you see him in the desert? Was there a church there?’

‘My name is Daniel. I believe in God. Where is the water?’

Hallén tried to read his thoughts. He could understand that a person from the desert would talk about water, but what was Daniel actually looking for? Hallén decided to proceed carefully. In the drab monotony that was his daily work the boy might still offer him the challenge he had been missing for so long.

‘I’m going to tell you about the water, but first I want to hear about you. Where you come from. And why you don’t want to wear shoes on your feet.’

Daniel didn’t answer. He kept searching for the water. Hallén waited.

‘I’m very patient. There’s no hurry. Why don’t you want to wear shoes?’

‘They’re heavy.’

‘Shoes are indeed heavy. But if you get cold you might get sick.’

Daniel said nothing more. Hallén kept asking questions but got no more answers. Nylander, the sexton, came in.

‘I have a visitor,’ said Hallén, who detested Nylander. They had been chafing at each other for far too many years. He often looked forward to the day when he could bury Nylander.

‘I’ve seen him. People are wondering what he’s doing here.’

‘The church is here for everyone. The paths that lead from on high are inscrutable. Also, I don’t want you to keep storing your aquavit underneath the baptismal font.’

Nylander did not reply, but left the church. Hallén could hear the clatter of spades. Nylander had to dig a grave for an old farmer who had died of gangrene.

Hallén kept waiting, but Daniel remained silent. He was looking everywhere for what was missing.

Hallén waited for half an hour, then he decided to show the boy even greater patience. It would take a long time to get close to him.

‘Come back here tomorrow,’ he said. ‘If you answer my questions I’ll tell you about the water.’

Daniel bowed, took his clogs in his hand, and went out of the church door. Hallén went into the sacristy and sat down. Through one of the narrow windows he could see Nylander digging. Hallén immediately felt himself growing irritated. Nylander was lazy. He worked far too slowly. A man digging a grave should do his work with power and tenacity.

He closed his eyes and imagined that he was in a desert where black people were gathered around him for prayer. He had a white pith helmet on his head and he was very young.

Daniel ran from the church to the hill behind the house. When he got there Sanna was sitting and digging in the mud. He was happy to see her.

‘I saw you. You were at the church. What were you doing there?’

‘I asked the pastor about the water.’

‘What water?’

‘The water Jesus walked on.’

Sanna stopped digging. Her fingers were caked with dried mud. Daniel couldn’t tell whether she had heard what he said. She took his hands and ran her finger over the back of one of them. She cautiously scraped at his skin.

‘You’re black. I can’t scrape it off. Wasn’t he afraid?’

‘Who?’

‘The pastor! He must have thought you were a real devil who had climbed down from the wall.’

Her hands were rough with clay, but Daniel liked the way she held his hands. She didn’t want anything from him, like everyone else who held his hands. She just wanted to hold them. For the first time since he had found Kiko and Be dead in the sand he had discovered something that really made him elated. Father had betrayed him, leaving him as far from the sea as he could, but maybe the girl named Sanna would help him find it again.

She kept examining his hands. She searched in the lines of his palm, flicked at his fingernails, squeezed hard.

‘If we had children they would be grey,’ said Daniel.

She gave a loud, shrill laugh. ‘We can’t have children,’ she shrieked. ‘You’re only a child and I’m crazy.’

She leaned in close to him. She smelled of sweat, but there was also something sweet that reminded him of honey.

‘I hear voices in the mud,’ she said. ‘All those people down there are whispering. I can’t help it. I hear them. Only me. Do you hear anything?’

Daniel listened.

‘You have to put your head to the ground.’

Daniel pressed his cheek and ear to the ground.

‘Not your ear,’ she whispered. ‘You can only hear the people down there if you listen with your mouth or your nose.’

Daniel pressed his face to the ground. But he could only hear through his ears. The wind was whining and the birds shrieking.

‘You’ll have to teach me,’ he said.

‘I’m too stupid to teach anything.’

‘Who told you that?’

‘Everybody.’

Daniel wondered what stupidity actually meant. The girl who sat holding his hands made him feel quite calm. Even though he still couldn’t see the sea, her eyes seemed to glisten with seawater. Maybe she could tell him what direction to go in to find the sea. A person like that couldn’t be stupid.

‘Actually I’m not supposed to be here,’ she said all of a sudden.

‘Why not?’

‘I might get lost.’

Daniel didn’t understand the word lost.

‘I don’t know what that is.’

She laughed harshly again.

‘Then you’re even stupider than me. If you go away and can’t find your way home, you sit out in the dark and scream for help but nobody hears. Then you freeze to death. When they find you, you’re so stiff that they’d have to break off your legs to get you into the coffin.’

Daniel sat silently pondering what she had said. Finally he had found a word for what he felt. What she was describing applied to him. He didn’t know where to go. Even though it wasn’t dark and he hadn’t frozen to death, he was still lost.

He decided to memorise that word. Some day, when he was old and moved away from the others in the desert, he would remember it. Everything that had happened the time he got lost. Everything that by then might have fallen away and become a mysterious memory.

‘I like being quiet,’ said Sanna.

She still hadn’t let go of his hands. Daniel was starting to get chilly because the ground he was sitting on was cold, but he didn’t want to move. He didn’t want Sanna to let go.

‘I do too,’ Daniel said.

‘There are so many kinds of quiet. When you’re just about to fall asleep. Or when you’re running so fast that all you can hear is your own heart.’

She leaned her head against his chest and closed her eyes.

‘Do you have a heart too?’ she said in surprise. ‘I didn’t think the Devil did. Damn! I thought there was only a sooty chimney inside the chest of Satan.’

Daniel gave a start. She had said the word that Father always used when he was angry or impatient. He didn’t like it. The word scared him.

‘What are you thinking about?’ she asked.

‘Nothing.’

She let go of his hands and began to slap him in the face. When he tried to protect himself she stopped.

‘I don’t like people who lie. You lied. You were thinking of something. ’

‘I was wondering where the sea is.’

‘What do you want with the sea?’

‘I want to go home.’

‘You can’t walk on the sea like it was a road. You’d sink, you’d drown. And float back up with eels swimming out of your eyes.’

Daniel could tell that Sanna was starting to get restless. She looked around, kicked at the dirt and spat. He thought that she too was a stranger, who came from somewhere far away, even though she wasn’t black. She didn’t look like any of the people he had met when he was with Father. Maybe she was on her way somewhere too, even though she didn’t know that it was possible to walk on water.

Suddenly she pulled up her dress. She was naked underneath. There was thick black hair between her legs. She pulled down her dress again.

‘Now it’s your turn,’ she said.

Daniel stood up and pulled down his trousers. Since he was cold, his member had shrunk. He pulled on it.

‘You shouldn’t do that,’ Sanna shrieked. ‘You shouldn’t touch yourself or it will fall off. On me it would turn into a big wound.’

Daniel quickly pulled his trousers back up. Sanna stared at him. Then she turned round and ran off. Daniel ran after her. Sanna stopped, picked up a rock and threw it at him.

‘You can’t come with me,’ she shouted. ‘Or I’ll get a beating.’

The rock hit Daniel on the cheek and made a cut that bled. She was holding another bigger rock in her hand.

‘I’ll throw it,’ she yelled. ‘Don’t follow me.’

She turned and kept running. Daniel stood looking after her. He didn’t know what had happened. If Father had thrown a rock at him, he would have been afraid, but he wasn’t now. She wasn’t angry with him. She was angry with somebody else.

The next day the wind was blowing hard across the brown fields. During the night he had had a dream about the oxen who had pulled him and Father through the desert towards the city where the ship was waiting. The animals were buried in sand. Only their heads were visible. They had bellowed in terror and then the sand had slowly covered their heads too. He stood looking at the animals. He wanted to help them, dig away the sand with his hands, but his hands were gone. His arms were like dry branches hanging down from his shoulders.

The dream had yanked him out of sleep. At first he didn’t know where he was. Then he heard the milkmaids sniffling and the hired hand muttering and passing wind. He lay utterly still in the darkness and tried to understand what the oxen buried in the sand were trying to tell him. Without being able to explain why, he knew that Be was behind the dream. She was the one who had sent it to him. But he couldn’t understand it. Restlessness drove him out of bed. The floor was cold. He stood carefully on one of the milkmaids’ dresses that had fallen from the end of the bed. For an instant he thought he was surrounded by all the people who had lain dead in the sand when Kiko and Be had left him. Their whispering voices were still there, with someone laughing quietly and the smell of freshly slaughtered meat. He tried to grab their bodies. But it was impossible — there was only the darkness and the voices.

Afterwards he slept fitfully until dawn. When they had finished breakfast he helped Edvin harness the horse. Alma called him into the kitchen and laid out the soiled ABC book that she had borrowed from Master Kron, who would soon be Daniel’s teacher. Daniel looked at the pictures and tried to learn the alphabet. Usually he thought it was fun, but the anxiety from the dream made it hard for him to concentrate. When Alma left him alone for a moment, he closed the book, wrapped a scarf around his neck and went outside. The cold wind almost took his breath away, but he ran towards the hill that was always waiting for him. When he got there he found Sanna sitting and digging in the dirt. It made him happy. He thought that he would tell her about his dream. Maybe she could explain it to him. When she saw him coming she stood up and waved. She looked at his cheek.

‘I didn’t mean it,’ she said. ‘I never do.’

‘It didn’t hurt.’

‘I prayed to God last night. I asked Him to forgive me. I think He listened to me.’

Daniel told her about his dream. He grew annoyed when he couldn’t find the right words, but Sanna listened. She listened to him in a way that Father had never done.

‘I don’t understand any of it,’ she said. ‘I don’t even know what a desert is. So much sand?’ She pointed out towards the brown fields. ‘Would all this be sand? And hot?’

‘You would burn your feet.’

She rested her head in her hands and thought. ‘So it would be like burying two horses here in the mud,’ she said. ‘And they would be whinnying like the butcher was standing in front of them.’

She threw a dirt clod at Daniel. It didn’t hurt and she laughed.

‘You’re making it up. There aren’t any dreams like that.’

‘I dreamed it just like I told you.’

‘You’re just as strange as I am. But at least I don’t tell lies.’

Then everything happened very fast. Daniel saw Sanna react to something and get up. There was something behind him, but he didn’t have time to turn round before a big hand grabbed hold of his coat and jerked him to his feet. The man standing there was big and rough and there was tobacco juice running out of the corner of his mouth. He let go of Daniel and gave him a box on the ear so he fell over. Sanna tried to run away but he grabbed hold of her arm. He slapped her hard in the face several times. She screamed.

‘Didn’t I tell you to stay home at the farm? Now I find you with that damn troll that Edvin brought here.’

He released Sanna, who huddled in the dirt with her hands over her head as if afraid she would be hit again. The man gave Daniel a withering stare.

‘She’s retarded,’ said the man. ‘She doesn’t know what she’s saying or what she’s doing. It’s a pure pity! That’s what it is! No parents, nothing. But we let her live with us. A pity! But the little bitch won’t do as she’s told. So she has to get slapped. That usually works. At least for a while.’

The man dragged Sanna up from the dirt and pulled her along with him down the hillside. He had a strong grip on her hair. Daniel thought she looked like a chicken on its way to have its head cut off.

Then he noticed that he had started to cry. It was as if Sanna’s pain were inside him too.

He looked all around. The fields were deserted.

Except for the shrieking black birds.

Chapter 22

The next day was Sunday. Daniel woke up early as usual. On Sundays the milkmaids took turns sleeping in. Even the hired hand could stay in bed an hour longer than normal. Daniel got up and quietly dressed. The floor was cold under his feet. The hired hand lay watching him with one eye open. He motioned to Daniel to come over to the bed. Daniel didn’t like him, but he didn’t dare disobey.

‘Pull the covers off her,’ whispered the hired hand. ‘If we’re lucky, her nightgown will be hitched up.’

This scene repeated itself every Sunday morning, no matter which of the girls was sleeping in. Daniel had never understood why the hired hand enjoyed spending his free time looking at the girls’ naked legs. But he did as he was told. She stirred a little but didn’t wake up. The nightgown had slipped all the way up to her waist. The hired hand would be pleased. Daniel hurried out of the kitchen.

It was raining. The fog lay thick over the brown fields. The black birds sat motionless in the grove of trees. Alma stood at the well hoisting up water. Edvin stood next to her, staring straight out into the fog. From far off they could hear a cow bellowing. Daniel had his shoes in his hand. He hurried to the barn where the milkmaid was milking. When he entered the warm building, one of the cats rubbed itself on his leg. He lay down in the straw and covered his body so only his face was visible. During the night he had dreamed that Sanna was calling his name. He had searched for her. Suddenly he was on the ship, rolling heavily in a storm. Sanna was sitting at the top of one of the masts, waving at him. But when he tried to climb up there, someone grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and held him back. He tried to turn his head to see who it was but there was nobody there. Nothing but the wind holding his neck in an invisible grip.

Daniel lay in the straw and thought about his dream. It was easy to understand what his night-time messenger had wanted to say. Daniel wanted to be close to Sanna but it wasn’t possible. Something was always coming between them.

He curled up in the straw to keep warm. The horse stamped in its stall.

As it was Sunday, everyone in the house would soon be going to church. The hired hand would slick his hair down with water, the milkmaids would wrap their best shawls round their shoulders and then they would all set off, with Edvin and Alma in the lead. On the way they would meet others heading in the same direction, and they would all look at Daniel and he would see at once which ones were curious, which ones didn’t like him, and which ones were jealous because Edvin got paid to have Daniel living in his house.

Hallén was going to preach. He would say a lot of words that made Daniel sleepy because he couldn’t understand them. But Alma would make sure that he didn’t fall asleep and would keep an eye on the hired hand and the milkmaids as well. They would sing, and Daniel would look up at the man who hung nailed on the boards in front of them.

He had already visited the pastor on two mornings. Daniel was still waiting to hear about the water. Hallén had asked the same question each time he had come. What was he thinking about? And Daniel had refused to answer. He didn’t want to talk about his plan. He was afraid that Hallén might tell Edvin, or forbid him. Daniel was still having a hard time learning what was forbidden. It was a word that he understood was one of the most important for people like Hallén, Edvin and Alma. The others were: damn and may I. Everything that happened between dawn and twilight was controlled by what people were allowed to do and what was forbidden. Going barefoot when the ground was white was one of the things that was most forbidden. Nor could you piss anywhere and especially not if someone was watching. There were rules about everything, and Daniel tried to learn them but without understanding why.

Sanna would also be at church. She sat right at the back, and Daniel knew that Alma would give him a disapproving look if he turned round to look at her. At church you had to look down or forward. Looking back was one of the things that was forbidden.

Daniel moved restlessly in the straw. He wondered whether Sanna would come to church, or whether the man who dragged her away would lock her in at home. Maybe he was like Father and tied her up.

The milkmaid was clattering the pails. She was singing. It sounded terrible, but he still liked her voice. Sometimes she would laugh and pat him on the head. She wasn’t like the other milkmaid, who never touched him and flinched if he happened to brush against her.

He got up from the straw. The girl was milking the last cow. He sneaked out of the barn. The yard was empty. He ran out onto the cart track. When he turned round he was surrounded by the fog. He tried to catch it in his hands. Then he listened. Sounds were louder in the fog. He turned round slowly and tried to listen for the sound of drums. From somewhere he thought he could hear beasts of prey growling or somebody laughing, but if he headed in the direction the sound was coming from they would move.

He was just about to go back when he stopped short. On the road in front of him lay a snake, frozen stiff. It was brown and had a pattern on its back. At first he thought it was dead. He took a few steps backwards without taking his eyes off it. It didn’t move. Then he realised that it was so cold that it couldn’t move. It had come up out of the ground too soon. Maybe it had dreamed of the sunshine and then, when it woke up, could not go back to sleep.

It was Father who once told him about the snakes. There weren’t any really dangerous snakes in this country. One of them was poisonous but people rarely died from its bite. From his description Daniel gathered that it was a snake like the one that lay before him on the road. He took a stick from the ditch and poked at the snake. It moved sluggishly, but didn’t whip about or coil. He hit it with the stick, but it still didn’t move.

He thought about the visit they would soon pay to the church.

He made a quick decision, ran back through the fog and fetched a wooden pail that no one was using from the barn. When he came back the snake was still lying there. Cautiously he bent over and grabbed it behind the head. When he lifted it up its body moved weakly. He shivered from the cold and dropped the snake in the pail. Then he hurried back to the barn, where he set the pail behind some spades that the hired hand used for mucking out. He covered the pail carefully so that the snake couldn’t escape if it livened up from the warmth.

He went in the house and sat down by the fire. Alma looked at him.

‘You’re not walking about with no shoes on, are you?’

Daniel shook his head.

Edvin stretched as he sat on the stool near the fireplace. ‘He’s learning fast. And now it’s time to go.’

Daniel got up quickly and ran out to the barn. The snake was still stiff. He wrapped it up in a piece of old burlap and stuffed it in his pocket.

The fog was as thick as ever when they reached the church. Daniel had a tight grip on the snake in his pocket. It hadn’t moved. He looked around for Sanna. Finally he saw her, standing behind the man who had dragged her off by the hair. She cast down her eyes when Daniel looked at her. She had a big bruise on one cheek. Daniel felt a violent urge to rush up to the man and stuff the snake down his shirt. Maybe the snake wouldn’t be able to bite and inject its venom, but the man would have a good fright and understand that there was someone who was prepared to defend Sanna. When the church bells began to ring Daniel tried to shift closer to her, but she moved away and shook her head almost imperceptibly. Daniel understood. She was afraid. The man who had pulled her by the hair had a firm grip on her arm.

Daniel sat between Alma and Edvin. The snake still lay motionless in his pocket. He wondered if he had been mistaken after all, that it wasn’t just frozen stiff but dead. Snakes were cold-blooded though. And he knew that when you least expected it they could sink their fangs into a person or an animal.

Hallén climbed into the pulpit. He looked at Daniel and smiled. Daniel looked down. Then Hallén began to talk about grace. It was a word he almost never used. Grace and sin. Daniel tried to comprehend what he was saying, but the snake in his pocket and the man with the chipped knee hanging on the cross in front were more important. He understood that someone had placed the snake on the road. It hadn’t got there by itself. Someone who knew where snakes hid had found it and laid it at his feet. No one had been as good at knowing where to find snakes as Be. She was the one who usually dug them up and caught them. Once she caught a snake that was more than twice as long as he was and as thick as Kiko’s arm. They had eaten it, and it was enough to feed everyone in the group for a whole day.

Be had placed the snake before him, and since it was Sunday that could only mean that she wanted him to give it as an offering. In this country people didn’t eat snakes. So there was only one possibility, and he knew what he was supposed to do.

He looked at the man hanging motionless on the cross. He too was an antelope frozen in the midst of flight, but he wasn’t about to take a leap. He was nailed fast and someone had stuck a sword in his chest. He had frozen at the moment of death, in the middle of his last breath. While Hallén was speaking, Daniel tried one more time to understand. Why did these people have a god that they nailed to planks? Why did they treat him like an enemy? Why didn’t anyone take him down from the cross and fix his chipped knee? But he could find no answer.

Hallén finished speaking and left the pulpit. Everyone stood up and prayed. Daniel had almost learned the entire prayer by heart. Then they sat down again. The whistling and wheezing organ began to play. Daniel felt the snake. The moment would soon arrive. Alma sat with her eyes closed. Cautiously he took out the coiled snake and held it below his knees. The two men who were carrying the long poles with bags at the end would appear soon. Edvin already had a coin in his hand. When the pole was thrust towards him Daniel quickly dropped the snake into the bag. He did it so quickly that no one noticed.

Then he felt that Be was right next to him. He closed his eyes and felt her warm breath against his neck.

Edvin gave him a poke.

‘I’m awake,’ said Daniel. ‘I believe in God.’

At the same moment he heard a loud howl. Hallén, who was kneeling before the altar rail, gave a start and stood up. One of the men with the poles came rushing up the centre aisle.

‘There’s a viper in the offering pouch!’ he yelled.

He held out the bag so Hallén could see. The organist had stopped playing. There was total silence in the church. Hallén stared. The man dropped the bag to the floor. The snake was no longer frozen; it wriggled out of the bag onto the stone floor. The man who had yelled was standing behind the pew where Daniel was sitting. He pointed at him and kept on yelling.

‘He was the one who put it in there!’ he shouted. ‘It looked like a rag. I thought there was money wrapped inside it. But it was a snake.’

Daniel’s stomach was churning. He hadn’t expected this. He had thought that the offering he gave, the fact that he had caught a poisonous snake, would be greeted with joy.

The snake wriggled slowly across the stone floor. People rushed out of the pews and the church door was thrown open. Finally a man who Daniel knew was an old seaman brought a spade and chopped the snake in two. Daniel had seen snakes cut in half many times before. The two halves usually kept moving very fast, whipping back and forth. but the viper just kept moving slowly and soon it was quite still. Hallén had come down from the altar and stood in front of Daniel.

‘Did you put the snake in the offering pouch?’

Daniel didn’t answer. He got ready to kick off his shoes and run out of the church.

‘You must answer,’ said Edvin. ‘The pastor is asking you a question.’

Daniel leapt up from the pew. But he didn’t get past Edvin, who seemed to be ready and grabbed him.

‘We’ll take him into the sacristy,’ said Hallén.

Edvin held him tight. When Daniel tried to bite him to get loose, Edvin shouted at him to settle down. The man who had carried the offering pouch and pointed at Daniel and accused him now took hold of his legs and held him so hard that Daniel screamed in pain. He managed to get his legs free and kicked the man in the face so his nose started to bleed. But Edvin didn’t release his grip until they were in the sacristy. Alma followed, but Hallén told her to wait outside.

‘I didn’t see any snake!’ she shouted. ‘It must have been somebody else.’

‘He’ll confess soon enough.’

‘I don’t want you to hurt him.’

Hallén shooed Alma away without replying and pulled the heavy door shut.

‘Let the boy go and give him a box on the ear,’ said Hallén. ‘That’ll calm him down.’

Edvin did as he was told. The blow was so hard that Daniel fell to the floor. His cheek burned and his eyes began to water.

Hallén bent over him. He was breathing hard, panting as if he had been running.

‘Did you put the snake in the offering pouch?’

Daniel thought that Hallén was a beast of prey and he had to avoid looking him in the eye at all costs. Next to him was a window and outside he caught a glimpse of Sanna, with her nose pressed against the glass.

For the first time since Father left he felt that he wasn’t alone. It gave him the same power as when he was small and Be or Kiko sat next to him. That was the first thing he had learned, that a human being who is alone is not a real human being. Sanna was waiting outside, his pain was hers, and he was no longer afraid to look Hallén straight in the eye.

‘I was offering to the gods.’

Hallén promptly stood up as if Daniel’s reply had given him a jab in the chest.

‘Did you put a snake in the collection pouch as an offering?’ Hallén shook his head and looked at Edvin. ‘This was the Sunday we were taking a collection to support the mission in Africa, and so this little black devil puts a snake in the offering pouch.’

Edvin stood with his cap in his hand. Daniel could see that he was afraid of Hallén.

‘He probably had no idea what the collection was for.’

‘He put a snake in the bag!’

Hallén was talking very loudly, as though he were in the pulpit letting his words hail down over the congregation. Edvin shook his head.

‘I’m sure he doesn’t understand.’

‘A snake in the offering pouch is not merely blasphemy. It is a mark of shame for you and Alma, who have not succeeded in teaching him how to behave.’

‘He probably doesn’t even know what behave means.’

Hallén pointed at Daniel’s feet in a rage.

‘He doesn’t have shoes on his feet. Even though it’s winter. He goes to church barefoot. And you allow this?’

Edvin tried to hold his head high when he replied. ‘He had shoes on when we came. He must have kicked them off in the pew.’

Hallén shook his head. ‘I’ve tried,’ he said. ‘I’ve spoken to him several times. But he says nothing. He only asks about the water.’

Daniel was sitting on the floor looking at Sanna. Each time Edvin or Hallén moved, her face disappeared, but then it would pop up again.

Hallén stood with his back leaning against the big wardrobe and regarded Daniel.

‘Next Sunday he will have to make a full confession in front of the congregation. He will have to beg their forgiveness.’

‘Perhaps we should realise that he doesn’t understand,’ said Edvin. ‘He comes from a place where there’s nothing but sand. Here we live in mud. Perhaps a person like him thinks differently.’

Daniel thought that Edvin was right. He had understood something that even Father had not grasped.

‘What do sand and mud have to do with snakes?’ Hallén enquired. ‘The boy must be disciplined. He does indeed come from a desert. But the mission has shown that people can become civilised. The most important step on this path is to give testimony and beg for forgiveness.’

‘I’ll try to talk to him. But I must still ask the pastor to help.’

‘I shall talk to him. Tomorrow. You can go now.’

They left the sacristy. Alma was waiting in the centre aisle. The man Daniel had kicked in the face lay on a pew with a rag over his nose to stop the flow of blood.

The snake was gone.

‘His shoes,’ said Edvin.

Alma looked under the pew where they had sat. She bent down and pulled out his clogs. Daniel bowed to the shoes and then put them on.

Alma looked at Daniel’s cheek. ‘Hallén hit him.’

‘No. It was me,’ said Edvin.

‘Was that necessary?’

‘How should I know what’s necessary? How can I make sense of what I don’t comprehend? Where are the hired hand and the milkmaids?’

‘I sent them home.’

‘And the church green?’

‘It’s probably full of curious folks.’

Edvin tossed his cap to the floor and sat down heavily on one of the pews. ‘Then we’ll have to run the gauntlet.’

Alma gave him an astonished look as she stroked Daniel’s hair. ‘Surely we don’t have anything to be ashamed of?’

‘I might get so angry that I punch some of them on the nose.’

‘There’s been enough hitting here today. We should be able to walk home without thinking of falling to the ground in shame, shouldn’t we?’

Edvin kept shaking his head. Daniel waited impatiently to go outside with them. He longed for Sanna. Even though he couldn’t talk to her, she would at least see his face.

Alma took Daniel’s hand. ‘We’re going now,’ she said. ‘You can either sit here or come with us.’

Edvin gave her an entreating look. ‘What shall we do? Maybe it was a mistake to take him in.’

‘We’ll talk about that later. Right now we’re going home.’

Edvin bent down to pick up his cap. The man lying on the pew sat up. He was holding the rag to his nose.

‘He just about kicked off my nose,’ he said in a thick voice.

‘There’s a doctor in Simrishamn,’ replied Alma. ‘If you hadn’t yelled and pointed so much this never would have happened.’

Daniel had never heard Alma speak so firmly before. The man on the pew said no more and lay back down.

When they came out of the church the green was full of people. Edvin groaned and Alma took a deep breath. A silent path opened before them as they walked, led by Alma. Daniel looked around for Sanna. When he didn’t see her he began to worry. Had he been imagining it? Was it not her face he saw outside the window?

When he finally found her she was standing on the churchyard wall. She waved cautiously to him. Daniel raised his hand but Alma pulled it back down. The people around them were silent. Edvin trudged along behind. He didn’t catch up with them until they reached the road.

‘Did you see?’ he asked.

‘I saw,’ said Alma. ‘And I felt it. But I don’t care. I care about understanding why he did it.’

Edvin stopped. ‘A viper in the middle of winter? Where did it come from?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Alma. ‘But I don’t want you ever to hit him again.’

Daniel wondered what had actually happened. He thought that Sanna was the only one who would be able to explain it.

Slowly he could feel himself filling with joy. He had found someone who pushed away his loneliness. Someone who might understand him.

He thought about the water, about the wet pelt that would grow accustomed to his feet.

Suddenly he was certain.

Sanna could show him where the sea was.

Chapter 23

A fierce storm was passing over the plain of Skåne. It was the night after Daniel had put the viper in the collection pouch. He woke up when Edvin shook the hired hand and said that the straw roof was starting to blow off the barn and that the animals were frightened. Soon afterwards Alma came in and woke the milkmaids. They had to help with the animals so none would be injured. When Alma leaned over Daniel with a candle in her hand he pretended to be asleep.

‘I don’t know why,’ she said. ‘But you’re not fooling me. I can see you’re awake.’

Daniel opened his eyes.

‘Are you afraid of the storm?’

Daniel shook his head.

‘I would dearly like to help you. But how can I help someone that nobody understands?’

The wind tore at the walls of the house. Daniel felt the draught coming through the ill-fitting windows.

‘The sky is restless,’ Alma said.

Daniel sat up in bed.

‘You don’t need to help. You’re too little.’

Daniel stayed sitting on the edge of the bed and watched as Alma busied herself at the stove. He squinted his eyes so hard that his vision grew blurry. It might have been Be moving about in front of him. He whispered her name to himself but the roaring wind was too loud. He couldn’t hear whether she answered or not.

The next day the storm was still raging. It came in squalls. Ragged clouds raced across the sky. Edvin and the hired hand struggled to keep the straw on the roof of the barn. Daniel wasn’t allowed to go into the barn because the animals were skittish. He didn’t have to go to church either. Hallén could wait until the storm had passed. One of the trees blew down in the grove where the black birds perched. The birds screeched. Daniel stood and watched them. Sometimes it looked as if they were writing letters against the sky. He tried to decipher them but could not.

Edvin climbed down from the roof to piss. When he had buttoned his flies he went over to Daniel.

‘Alma says you aren’t afraid of the storm, is that right?’

‘I’m not afraid.’

Edvin touched the cheek where he had slapped him.

‘I won’t hit you again,’ he said. ‘That will never happen again. Even if Hallén tells me to.’

Then he clambered back up the ladder. Daniel watched him go and decided that Edvin meant what he said. If he raised his hand again the blow would never leave his arm.

Daniel ran towards the hill. He held out his arms so that his coat was like a sail behind him. Many times Kiko had told him that a human being could not fly but Daniel had never thought that he sounded quite sure of what he was saying. He kicked off his shoes and tried to take off, but his feet kept striking the ground.

When he reached the hill he was disappointed. Sanna wasn’t there. He looked towards the house where she lived, but the path was empty. He wondered whether the man who had pulled her by the hair had tied her up, the same way Father had done with him. He decided that he would try to find her if she didn’t show up the next day.

He ran back and sat down with his ABC book in the kitchen. Alma was out with the milkmaids in the barn. He read the letters aloud to himself. Neither Kiko nor Be had known how to read. They would often draw with sticks in the sand. Not words, but signs, faces, paths. Daniel put down the book and knelt on the wooden bench by the window. The windowpane was steamed up. With his finger he tried to draw Be’s face, but it didn’t look like her. He puffed new fog onto the window and tried Kiko’s instead, but that didn’t turn out any better.

Then he tried to draw the antelope. He imagined that his finger was the stick that Kiko used had. But the fog-covered glass windowpane was no rock face. He grew angry and had to hold himself back from smashing his fist through the glass.

By the next day the storm had abated. The straw lay still on the roof of the barn. Just after seven in the morning Daniel went to the church. The door to the sacristy was closed. He knocked and Hallén answered. Daniel opened the door, entered and bowed. Hallén was sitting on a chair in the middle of the room. He nodded to Daniel to come forward.

‘First you killed a piglet with a shoe,’ Hallén said. ‘I heard all about it. And now you put a snake in the offering pouch. All this tells me that you are still a savage. It will take time for you to learn what it means to be a human being. I will show patience, but patience has its limits. If you obey me, good will come to you. If you do not obey, you will be punished. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

Daniel nodded.

‘I want to hear you say it.’

‘I understand.’

‘What is it you understand?’

‘Wear shoes on the feet when there is frost, do not kill pig, and do not put snakes in the offering pooch.’

‘The words are “pigs” and “offering pouch”.’

‘The words are “pigs” and “offering pooch”.’

‘Offering pouch.’

‘Offering pouch.’

Hallén got up from his chair. ‘Let’s go and look at Jesus.’

They stood before the altar rail again. The sunlight shining through a window glittered in one of the eyes of the nailed-up man. Daniel gave a start. The same glint had been there in the antelope’s eye.

‘Jesus sacrificed his life for you,’ said Hallén. ‘No one can become a true human being without believing in him. But one must also know how to behave oneself.’

‘That must hurt,’ said Daniel.

Hallén gave him a questioning look. ‘Hurt?’

‘To be nailed to a board.’

‘Of course it hurts. His suffering was appalling.’

Daniel thought that now he could ask his question again.

‘I want to learn walking on water.’

‘Nobody can walk on water. Jesus was God’s son. He could do it. But no one else can.’

Daniel knew that the man standing at his side was wrong, but he didn’t dare talk back. The slap from Edvin still burned on his cheek.

‘This is where you will stand next Sunday,’ said Hallén. ‘In front of the whole congregation. You will beg us all for forgiveness because you violated the holy church by putting a viper in the offering pouch. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

Daniel realised with dread what Hallén meant.

‘Will I be nailed up on boards too?’

Hallén grabbed the collar of Daniel’s coat and raised his hand, but he did not strike.

‘You have the gall to compare yourself to our Saviour? You have the gall to compare yourself to the One who suffered for all our sins?’

Hallén let him go and stepped aside, as if he couldn’t stand to be too close to Daniel.

‘You are still a savage. I keep forgetting that. The path you must walk is long. We shall walk it together. You may go now. But I want you to come back tomorrow.’

Daniel stood motionless until Hallén had vanished behind the tall altarpiece. Then he rushed out of the church. He ran all the way home, and he was soaked with sweat when he reached the hill behind the house. He knew that there were five days left until it was Sunday again. Then he would be nailed up on boards. Before then he had to find out where the sea was. He had to set off, and even if he still couldn’t walk on water he had to stay hidden until he had learned how to do it. He called out for Kiko and Be. He yelled as loud as he could, but no reply came except for the unsettled sounds of the black birds.

He fell to the ground and curled up with his head between his knees. The long run had made him tired. It was cold, and he felt exhausted.

When he woke up, Sanna was standing beside him.

‘I heard you yelling,’ she said. ‘Why are you lying here sleeping? You could freeze to death.’

He didn’t know how long he had been asleep. In his dream he had been hanging on two crossed boards. It was the hired hand who had nailed him up, and the milkmaids were lying at his feet, asleep with the covers pulled up to their necks.

‘They will nail me up,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘They will nail me up on boards. And put me in the church.’

Sanna shook her head. ‘Who told you that?’

‘Hallén.’

‘So the pastor is going to nail you up on boards? He can’t do that. It’s forbidden. It’s permitted to chop off people’s heads, but not to nail people up on boards.’

‘He said so.’

Sanna gave him a pensive look. She chewed on her lip while she thought.

‘Maybe it’s not the same for people who are black,’ she said. ‘Maybe they’re allowed to nail up people like you.’

Then she shrieked so shrilly that the black birds lifted off from the treetops.

‘He can’t do that!’

‘I’m going to leave.’

‘Where can you go? They’ll come after you. They’ll catch you.’

‘I’ll hide.’

‘But you’re black. You can’t hide.’

‘I’ll make myself invisible.’

Sanna started chewing on her lip again. ‘Can you do that?’

‘I don’t know.’

She sat down close to him and took his hand.

‘If you start to scream when they nail you up, I promise I’ll scream too. Then it might not hurt as much.’

‘Thanks.’

‘But you can’t hang there too long. Because you’re a human being and dead people smell bad. But I can put flowers on your grave.’

‘Thanks.’

Sanna sat in silence for a moment. Daniel tried to decide when he should make his escape. Should he wait or should he leave tonight? He realised that Sanna would never dare come with him. She certainly didn’t have the patience necessary to learn to walk on water, either. But he would still tell her about it. He had to share his thoughts with somebody. Maybe she could help him by steering the people who would be searching for him in the wrong direction.

He told her the truth. He was going to leave. Maybe even that very night. He would find his way to the sea, and when he had learned what he had to do for the water to support him, he would walk until he reached his home. Sanna listened with her mouth hanging open.

‘You’re crazy,’ she said when he was finished. ‘I don’t understand half of what you’re talking about. But I know this much — you’re just as insane as I am.’

‘What does it mean to be insane?’

‘Like me. I’m stupid in the head. I don’t understand what people say to me. I can’t learn to read or write. Sometimes they say that I’m stupid, sometimes that I’m retarded, but I’m not dumb enough to be locked in a madhouse.’

‘Why did your pappa drag you by the hair?’

Sanna pinched his nose so hard that he got tears in his eyes.

‘He’s not my pappa. My pappa is dead. My mamma too. I live with them because I was auctioned off.’

Daniel didn’t understand the word.

‘Is he your pappa’s brother?’

‘His name is Hermansson and he grabs me under my skirts when Elna isn’t looking. At night he comes and grabs me under the covers. I don’t want to but he tells me I can’t say anything. Otherwise I’ll end up in the madhouse and have to lie all day long in a tub full of cold water.’

Daniel didn’t understand the meaning of her words. But he could see in her face that she bore a pain that reminded him of his own. He thought that when he finally got home he would remember her and he would certainly dream about her at night.

‘I will carve your face in the rock wall,’ he said. ‘Next to the antelope. ’

‘What’s that?’

‘An animal.’

Daniel got up from the dirt, crossing his arms over his head like the crown of a kudu buck.

Sanna laughed. ‘That looks like an animal.’

‘The antelope is an animal.’

‘But you’re a human being. Even though you’re just as crazy as me.’

As she talked she kept looking around. Suddenly she pointed.

‘Someone’s coming up the path.’

Daniel saw that it was Edvin.

‘I’ll come back tonight,’ he said. ‘I want to see you one more time before I leave.’

‘But they’ll find you! They’ll send dogs after you.’

‘They will never find me.’

Sanna ran off down the hill. Daniel went to meet Edvin.

‘Who was that you were talking to?’

‘Nobody.’

‘You don’t have to lie to me. Was it Sanna?’

Daniel didn’t answer.

‘Dr Madsen is here,’ said Edvin. ‘He has two gentlemen from Lund with him. They want to meet you.’

Daniel stopped short.

‘It’s nothing dangerous. They just want to draw you. They’re going to write about you in a book.’

The two men waiting in the kitchen were both young. They stood up, shook Daniel’s hand and smiled kindly. He noticed that they weren’t staring at him. They looked at him with a curiosity that held no fear. Then they said their names. The shorter one, who had a pale face and yellow hair, was named Fredholm, and the other, who was bald with a moustache, was named Edman. Dr Madsen, who frightened Daniel since he was to blame for Father’s departure, squatted down in front of him.

‘Herr Fredholm and Herr Edman are students,’ he said. ‘Do you know what a student is?’

Daniel shook his head. When Madsen was there he didn’t want to say too many words. Every time he spoke he revealed his thoughts. He didn’t want Madsen to know what he was really thinking.

‘They study at the university in Lund,’ Madsen went on. ‘I don’t suppose you know what that means either. But you have been there, and you have certainly heard that people go there to seek knowledge. A biology professor there, Professor Holszten, studies people — why we’re all different. The noticeable differences between the races. Those that are inferior, dying out, and the races that have a future ahead of them. It was Professor Holszten who sent these gentlemen to visit you. The results will be published in a journal of racial biology that has just been started.’

Dr Madsen led Alma and Edvin out of the kitchen. The man named Edman with the bald head took out a drawing pad and began to sketch a likeness of Daniel. Fredholm wrapped a measuring tape around Daniel’s head. Daniel felt like laughing but knew that he should be serious. He couldn’t understand why it was so important to measure his nose or the distance between his eyes. The two men reminded him of Father. They devoted themselves to actions that were difficult to comprehend. Father had almost lost his life in the desert, searching for beetles and butterflies, and here stood grown men measuring his nose in all seriousness.

‘I wonder what he’s thinking,’ said Edman, taking up a new position to draw Daniel’s profile from the left side.

‘If he thinks at all,’ replied Fredholm, noting down the length of Daniel’s left ear.

‘It’s odd to stand before a creature from a race that’s dying out. I wonder if he’s aware of it himself? That soon he will no longer exist?’

Daniel listened absent-mindedly to what they were saying. Suddenly he had an idea. Maybe they could tell him where the sea was. Since they were alone in the room, neither Alma nor Edvin would know that he had asked. He would wait until they were finished, then he could ask, and he would do it in such a way that they wouldn’t realise the purpose of his question.

‘Open your mouth,’ said Fredholm.

Daniel obeyed.

‘Have you ever seen teeth like this? Not one cavity.’

‘Cavities are caused by bacteria. But the whiteness of his teeth seems brighter because he’s black.’

Fredholm tugged at his teeth. ‘As strong as a beast of prey. If he bit you it would be like having a mad cat hanging from your wrist.’

Daniel remembered that this was the second time he had been drawn and measured. He wondered whether it was a custom in this country to put a measuring tape around the heads of people who came to visit.

Fredholm kept measuring. Now he pulled on Daniel’s lips. It hurt, but Daniel didn’t flinch.

‘I drew the head of a fox once. Presumably it had rabies and its head had been cut off. I have the same feeling now, that it’s an animal I’m drawing.’

Fredholm blew his nose in his handkerchief and then asked Daniel to raise his arm. He sniffed at his armpit.

‘Bestial,’ he said. ‘Very strong. No normal peasant sweat.’

Edman put down his pad and smelled Daniel’s armpit. ‘I don’t notice any difference.’

‘In what?’

‘The odour of my own sweat and the boy’s. You have to be careful to stay faithful to the facts.’

‘Then I shall note that he perspires the same odour as a human being.’

Edman laughed. ‘He is a human being.’

‘But of a dying race.’

Fredholm put down his measuring tape and sat on a chair. ‘Just imagine this boy a few years older. Copulating with a rosy-cheeked peasant girl.’

‘The thought is repulsive.’

‘But what if? What would be the result?’

‘A mulatto. With low intelligence. Holszten has already written about that.’

Fredholm scratched out his pipe and then lit it. ‘But what if that’s all wrong?’ he said. ‘If the very premise is incorrect. Where does that leave us?’

‘Why should the premise be incorrect?’

‘What if Christian teachings are telling the truth after all? That all human beings are created equal?’

‘Species of animals die out. Why not less successful human races as well?’

‘I have a feeling that he understands everything we’re saying.’

Edman put down the drawing pad. ‘Perhaps. But he doesn’t fully comprehend what he understands. If you’re finished I would like to go outside. It smells rank in here.’

Fredholm shrugged his shoulders. ‘I admit that he reminds me of an ape. But I can’t keep thinking that nevertheless he doesn’t seem like a human being who’s about to die out.’

‘Take up that discussion with Holszten. He doesn’t like being contradicted. He believes that racial biology is the future. Whoever doesn’t follow his path will have to find different ones.’

Fredholm said nothing more, but put his measuring tape and calipers back in a little bag.

‘Where is the sea?’ asked Daniel.

The two men looked at him in astonishment.

‘Did he say something?’ asked Fredholm.

‘He asked about the sea.’

‘Where is the sea?’ Daniel repeated.

Edman smiled. Then he pointed. ‘In that direction is Simrishamn. And that direction is Ystad. In that direction is Trelleborg. And that way is Malmö. The sea lies all around you like a horseshoe. East, south and west. But not north. There is nothing but forest up there.’

Just as Daniel had hoped, they didn’t ask why he was wondering about the sea. They packed up their bags and opened the door to the room where Dr Madsen was waiting with Edvin and Alma.

‘I hope that five riksdaler will be enough,’ said Dr Madsen, placing a banknote on the table. Edvin nodded. ‘More than generous.’

Then he and Alma accompanied the three men out to the waiting carriage.

Daniel was still standing in the middle of the kitchen. He closed his eyes and thought he could hear the roar of the waves.

Now he knew in which direction not to go.

Chapter 24

Two days later Daniel set off. Just after one in the morning, when he was sure that everyone was asleep, he silently got dressed and slipped out of the kitchen with his wooden shoes in his hand. He had packed a bundle containing the sand that was left in Father’s insect cases, and some potatoes and pieces of bread. When he reached the courtyard the cold hit him hard. He hesitated, wondering whether he would survive his walk to the sea. He didn’t know how far it was, or whether the plains would be broken by mountains or bogs. He wrapped his scarf round his head and started off. He sensed that Be and Kiko were calling him. There was no wind and it was overcast. He had decided to head south. The night before he had gone outside and taken a bearing on a star in that direction. He followed the cart track past the house where Sanna lived and ran straight out into a field when a dog started barking. He didn’t stop until it fell silent. The cold stung his lungs.

He had explained to Sanna that he had to leave. They were sitting up on the hill and he told her about it while she dug and searched for the invisible people under the mud. She repeated the same thing she had said before, that he was crazy, that they would find him and bring him back. A person who was destined to be nailed up on boards could never escape.

In the end he realised that she didn’t believe what he was saying. Then he knew that she would never consider coming with him.

When she ran home he watched her until she disappeared. Then he imagined his own disappearance. He would run through the night and he would be gone when Edvin and Alma woke up in the morning. He had poured a little sand into his bed and hoped they would believe that he had turned himself into those grains of sand.

The darkness surrounded him. The cold tore at his chest. He made his way along the narrow tracks that wound through the fields. The soil was frozen and no longer stuck to the bottom of his shoes. Now and then he would stop to catch his breath, but he grew so cold that he forced himself to keep moving.

The plain seemed endless. He felt like he was moving in a trance. The cold had stopped stinging him. Now it burned inside him. He knew that he had to keep going until dawn. Only then could he search for a place where he could get warm and sleep. If he stopped now he would be buried in the darkness, and when the sun returned only his stiff, frozen body would be left. All night long he thought about Be and Kiko. They were inside him and they were as cold as he was. Sometimes he stretched out his arms and asked Kiko to carry him. But Kiko would only shake his head and say that he had to manage for himself.

The dawn came.

At the same time it began to snow. At first scattered snowflakes, then so thick that he couldn’t make out the horizon. He was in the middle of a field. Off in the distance he saw a house surrounded by trees but he couldn’t see the sea anywhere. At the top of a small hill stood the ruin of a windmill. Its sails hung like the remains of a dead bird above the crumbling walls. He walked towards the hill. When he looked back the field had already turned white, and his tracks were clearly visible. He kept on heading for the windmill. He glimpsed a fox, and then it was gone. One corner of the ruin still had part of the roof left. On the floor lay some old sacks. He wrapped the sacks around his body and huddled in the corner. Then he ate one of the pieces of bread and a potato. He wondered why he wasn’t thirsty. If he had walked all night long in the desert he wouldn’t have been hungry, but he would have wanted water. Now it was food he needed.

Did he dare go to sleep? Would the sacks keep him warm enough, or would he freeze to death? He tried to make a decision, but he was already asleep. Kiko lay by his left side, with one arm under his head as usual. Be was somewhere behind him. Without seeing her he knew that she had curled up and was sleeping with her hands clasped under her belly.

He dreamed that his heart was beating more and more slowly. With a huge effort he kicked himself up out of the dream. He was so cold he was shaking. He had no idea how long he had been asleep. To his surprise he noticed that he was crying. The tears had run down to his mouth. That had never happened before; he had never started to cry while he was asleep.

At first he didn’t know where he was. It was still snowing. He struggled to stand up and tried to determine from the thickness of the snow how long he had been asleep. He measured with one finger and then looked up at the clouds. He couldn’t see where the sun was. He took a little snow in his hand and put it in his mouth. Now he realised how thirsty he was.

Before he left the ruin he tore the sacks into strips and stuffed them inside his trousers and shoes. Then he continued heading south.

He knew that he wouldn’t be able to survive another night. He had to rest, and he had to get warm. Otherwise he would die. Just before dark he reached a farm with big barns and a red-brick house with a tower in the middle. He hid behind some boulders in the field and waited. Now and then he could hear voices in the distance and the sound of buckets clanking. When it got dark he cautiously approached one of the barns. At the back there was an old manure trench that he could creep inside. The barn was full of cows. Some moved restlessly as he trudged forward in the dark. He smelled the aroma of milk. He found some in the bottom of an unwashed pail and drank it down. He kept looking and found another pail of milk. All the while he was listening for voices, but he was alone with the animals. He went back the way he had come and crept into the straw next to the cow that stood closest to the manure trench. The cow sniffed at him. Daniel felt its warm breath on his face. He ate the bread and potatoes he had left and then burrowed into the straw. One hand was slippery with manure. He wiped it off against the wall and then curled up. Slowly he could feel his body’s warmth coming back. Tonight he would not freeze to death.

He woke up when he heard someone screaming. He had slept so soundly that he hadn’t noticed when the milkmaids came in, clanking their pails. Now a skinny girl with a pockmarked face was standing outside the cow’s stall and screaming him awake. He stood up and she fled, dropping her pail. He sneaked out through the manure trench and ran as fast as he could. It had stopped snowing but it was colder. He slipped and fell but got to his feet and kept running. He expected to hear shouts and dogs barking behind him. He noticed that he was running uphill. If only he could make it over the top he would be safe.

When he reached the top he stopped short.

Far off on the horizon lay the sea. He closed his eyes hard and then looked again. It wasn’t his imagination. The sea was there, far ahead of him, and when he turned round the fields were empty. There were no people and no dogs.

He continued walking and reached a wider road. Already he could see the smoke rising into the air from many chimneys. Maybe he was on his way to the same town where he had once arrived with Father. He carried on. When he saw two horse carts in the distance he left the road and hid in a ditch. The driver behind the first horse was asleep. Behind the reins of the second cart sat a woman. The thought crossed Daniel’s mind that it was Be in disguise, wanting to show herself to him and tell him that he was on the right track.

He kept hiding until it began to get dark again. He had come close enough to the town to see that it wasn’t the same one he and Father had visited. There were no cobblestone streets here, only a few muddy lanes winding between low houses.

But he had discovered something that was more important. There was a harbour. And in the harbour were several ships. Perhaps he would be able to get aboard one of them and not have to learn to walk on water.

Hunger was gnawing at his stomach. He tried to imagine what had happened when Edvin and Alma had discovered that he was gone. Alma probably thought that the sand in his bed was all that was left of him, but Edvin would be doubtful and they would start looking for him. By now a whole day and two nights had passed. They would think that he was lying dead somewhere, buried under the snow.

Just as darkness fell the wind began to blow. Daniel was worried that the ships would leave before he managed to get aboard. He went a roundabout way past the houses and down to the harbour. The wind picked up. The ships scraped against the quay. He was surprised that there were no lights in the cabins. Where were the sailors?

The quay was deserted. The only light came from the window of a hut near the end of the jetty. He walked past the ships without running into anyone. His disappointment made him angry. Why were they lying here in the harbour like dead animals? Why weren’t any sailors waiting for dawn to set sail?

He stopped near the biggest ship. The clouds were beginning to shred in the wind. The moonlight made it possible to see. He hopped over the railing and felt how the deck moved beneath his feet. Suddenly he gave a start. It felt as if Father were somewhere among the shadows. He didn’t want Daniel to board a ship. He wanted to grab him by the scruff of the neck and take him back to Alma and Edvin. But the deck was empty. There was nobody there. Again he felt how hungry he was. If he didn’t find some food he wouldn’t be able to think clearly. He walked along the deck and tried the door to the aft cabin. It was unlocked. Without knowing why, he knocked. No one answered. He opened the door and went in. It smelled of wet clothes inside. There was a candle on a table. He pulled the curtains over the portholes and lit the candle, capping his hand over the flame to shield it. On the table stood a butter tub and a plate of hard tack. He began to eat. He spread the butter on the bread with his fingers. There was also a bottle there, the same kind Father used to drink, which he called beer. It tasted bitter, but he drank until the bottle was empty.

When the bread was gone he was full. He put out the candle and sat down on the bunk behind the table.

There were voices all around him now. He could feel their breath and sense their bodies in the darkness as the ship scraped and bumped against the quay.

‘What shall I do?’ he whispered into the darkness.

But the answers were lost in the whining and screeching from the draughty portholes and from the lines slapping against the masts outside.

He lay down and pulled up the blankets. They smelled acrid from tobacco and urine. He knew that he ought to make a decision, but he was too tired. He couldn’t even think about finding a hiding place.

In his dreams he saw Be, who had flown up into a treetop. There was no sound around her, only water. She was alone up there in the tree, and the water was rising up the trunk. He saw that she was giving birth to a child. She called for Kiko but no one answered. Daniel wanted to climb up to help her, but he couldn’t, and finally he understood that he was the one being born up there, as the water slowly rose. He saw Be bite off the umbilical cord of the bloody child and he felt himself being torn away from her. Soon the water would reach all the way to the top of the tree and the waves would sweep them away. Then he noticed that Be had wings. She unfolded them and lifted off from the tree just as the waves began to snatch at her feet.

He awoke with a violent start. A ray of light was hitting his eyes. A man stood leaning over the bunk with a lantern in his hand. He was unshaven, and one eyelid hung halfway over his eye.

‘Now I’ve seen all the devils,’ he said. ‘Who are you?’

Daniel sat up.

‘My name is Daniel. I believe in God.’

‘If I was drunk I’d run right out of here. A little black person in the aft cabin?’ The man shook his head. ‘I hear the wind picking up and decide to get dressed and go down to check the moorings. Something makes me take a look in the cabin. And here lies a person in my bunk.’

Daniel could tell at once that the man wasn’t dangerous.

‘I’m on my way home,’ he said. ‘I’m not afraid of climbing up masts. I don’t eat much. I can sleep on deck. Just so long as it’s warm.’

The man set the lantern on the table without taking his eyes off him.

‘You are really black,’ he said. ‘A young black man from Africa. Who speaks Swedish. Who eats hard tack. And drinks Pilsner. And lies down to sleep in my bunk. If I told anyone about this they’d say I was crazy. Maybe I am crazy.’

He reached out his hand.

‘Take my hand so I can feel that you’re real.’

Daniel reached out his hand.

‘You’re real, all right,’ said the man. ‘And you’re cold. You’re freezing. And your name is Daniel?’

‘I believe in God.’

‘That’s not so important. But you have to understand that I’m wondering where you came from. And how you wound up here. In my cabin, in the middle of winter.’

The man sat down on the edge of the bunk and pulled the blankets over Daniel’s legs.

‘My name is Lystedt,’ he said. ‘This is my ship. Her name is Elin of Brantevik.’

He paused and pulled the lantern closer to the edge of the table.

‘You probably don’t know where you are, do you?’

‘No.’

‘But you came from somewhere?’

‘From Alma and Edvin.’

‘Alma and Edvin? Do they have a last name? And where do they live?’

Daniel thought he had said too much. Even if the man with the droopy eyelid wasn’t dangerous, he might still think that Alma and Edvin ought to come and fetch him.

The man waited. He had brown eyes and deep furrows in his brow.

‘You don’t want to say where you came from? And you say you’re on your way home? That can only mean one thing. That you’re on the run. How long have you been walking in this weather?’

‘Two nights.’

‘Where did you sleep?’

‘With the animals.’

‘And you’re on your way home? Where is that?’

‘It’s called the desert.’

Daniel remembered something that Father had often said: The boy comes from the far-off Kalahari Desert.

‘I come from the far-off Kalahari Desert.’

The man nodded pensively.

‘Once when I was young I sailed on a Dutch vessel that was going to Cape Town. We almost capsized in a storm off the Skeleton Coast. I recall the captain saying there was a desert called the Kalahari.’

He leaned over and pulled the blanket up to Daniel’s chin.

‘Are you cold?’

‘No.’

‘How did you come to Sweden, boy? Who was cruel enough to drag you way up here?’

‘Father.’

‘Your father?’

Daniel was forced to search through his weary and distressed memory for the name that Father used.

‘Hans Bengler.’

‘A white man? Not your real father?’

‘Kiko died in the sand. My mother was named Be. She could fly. Her arms turned into wings when the water went up around the tree. That’s where I was born.’

Daniel sighed. He only had the energy to give short answers. Most of all, he wanted to go back to his dream and fly away with Be.

‘I don’t understand much of what you’re saying. But I know you’re on the run and that you were brought here by some madman who probably wanted to exhibit you at fairs. Is that how it was?’

‘Father showed insects. Then he lifted a cloth. There I sat.’

The man leaned forward and stroked Daniel’s face.

‘I understand that you want to go home,’ he said. ‘Why should you be here in the cold winter when you’re used to the heat? What was it he was called, the man who brought you here? Hans Bengler? Do you know anyone else here in Skåne? Because you’ve been living in Skåne. I can tell by the way you speak.’

‘Dr Madsen.’

‘The doctor in Simrishamn? Then it’s not only unpleasant people that you’ve met. He helps people even if they have no money.’

Daniel could feel that he was slipping into sleep again. The man sitting on the edge of the bunk made him feel utterly calm.

‘I can raise the sail,’ said Daniel. ‘And I don’t get sick when the waves are high.’

‘No doubt you’re a good sailor, even though you’re only a boy. But first you have to get some sleep. I think you should stay here. The old woman at home would go crazy and shriek that the Devil had come into her house if I took you there. She doesn’t have much patience with things that aren’t familiar.’

Daniel could no longer understand what the man was talking about. Or else he didn’t have the strength to listen.

‘When do we sail?’ he asked.

The man gave him a long look before he replied.

‘Maybe tomorrow,’ he said at last. ‘It depends. If the wind holds.’

‘I can sleep on deck,’ Daniel muttered.

‘You can sleep here. You don’t need to run any more.’

The man put his hand on Daniel’s forehead.

‘Well, you haven’t got a fever from the cold, at least. Go to sleep now, and we’ll see in the morning which way the wind is blowing.’

Daniel sank quickly deep inside himself.

At one point in the night he opened his eyes. The man was still sitting on the edge of the bunk looking at him. Daniel thought that he would probably sit there until he woke up the next day. He felt completely safe now. He wouldn’t have to learn how to walk on water. And he wouldn’t be nailed up on any boards either.

He would go home.

But when he woke up it was Dr Madsen who stood there looking at him. Lystedt waited by the door and avoided looking Daniel in the eye. Madsen was grave.

‘You’ve caused Alma and Edvin a great deal of worry,’ he said. ‘We’re going home now.’

Daniel looked with horror at Madsen. And then at Lystedt.

‘I had no choice,’ he said. ‘The ship is unrigged for the winter. I won’t be sailing until spring. But I understand why you want to go home.’

‘The boy will stay in Sweden,’ Madsen snapped.

‘I’m saying what I think,’ said Lystedt. ‘The boy has the right to go home to the desert. What business does he have staying here?’

Dr Madsen didn’t answer. He just pulled off the blankets.

‘Get up,’ he said. ‘I really don’t have time for this. There’s a serious case of gangrene waiting at the hospital. But I will see to it that you get back.’

They came out on deck. It had started to snow again. Daniel looked up at the sky. Be was there, but he couldn’t see her. Dr Madsen held his arm and shoved him on ahead. Daniel wriggled loose. Instead of hopping over the railing to the quay he ran across the deck and jumped straight into the harbour.

The last thing he thought of was the antelope, which had finally managed to free itself from the rock and take its leap.

Chapter 25

The rest of the winter, which was stormy and cold in Skåne, Daniel lay in bed. He had no idea what had happened after he jumped into the harbour. When he woke up he was lying in his bed in the kitchen again. Alma was sitting on a chair next to him, and he saw that she was happy when he opened his eyes. She called Edvin and he came in, but when the milkmaids and the hired hand wanted to see him too, she angrily shooed them out. Edvin stroked his cheek and shook his head. Daniel was warm and his heart was pounding as if he had been running in his sleep.

Then he started coughing. Edvin took a step back, while Alma did the opposite. She leaned towards his face and fluffed up the pillow behind his head.

Afterwards, when Alma explained to him what had happened, he realised that he had been asleep for a very long time. She held up a mirror so that he could see why his face hurt and he saw that he had big wounds on his forehead and across his nose that had not yet healed.

‘You hit an ice floe,’ said Alma. ‘It cut up your face. But you didn’t sink. For that, I have thanked God every day and every night.’

Daniel tried to recall what had happened. He wondered where all his dreams had gone. He couldn’t remember a thing. The last thing he had seen was the black water coming towards him like the open mouth of a beast of prey.

He stopped talking during the months he lay in bed. The hired hand moved out to a room that was hastily prepared in the barn. Alma set up two screens in front of the milkmaids’ beds. Even though she strictly forbade it, they used to peek at him from behind the screens. Daniel didn’t mind. He listened to his heart, which was still in flight. Even though his legs had stopped, his heart kept on running. Now and then Dr Madsen would come to visit. He felt and listened to Daniel’s chest and rubbed salves on his face. Daniel always closed his eyes when he came into the room. He didn’t want to see the doctor’s face because he hadn’t let him stay on the ship.

At the end of each visit Dr Madsen would repeat the same words.

‘The boy has a bad cold. And a cough that I don’t much like.’

The fever made Daniel tired. Most of the time he slept.

What was hardest for those around him was his silence. Even though he didn’t want to make Alma sad, he couldn’t speak. In his dreams, which slowly returned, he had reverted to his old language.

Pastor Hallén came to visit once a week. Daniel knew when he was coming because Alma always cleaned beforehand. Hallén would sit down on a chair a short distance from the bed and ask to be left alone with Daniel. Then he would fold his hands and say a prayer. Through his half-closed eyelids Daniel would try to see if he had a hammer and nails in his pocket, but the fact that he was sick and lying in bed seemed to have saved him from the boards.

Hallén prayed that Daniel would get well and regain his ability to speak. Each time he asked Daniel the same question, whether he wanted to hear about the time when Jesus walked on the water, but Daniel closed his eyes and lay motionless.

He thought he had heard enough. Only Be or Kiko could give him the words he longed for.

The only person he really wanted to see during those months he lay in bed never came. That was Sanna. Once he heard Alma whispering to Edvin that maybe they ought to ask the girl to come, since Daniel obviously liked her. But Edvin was hesitant. Dr Madsen had said she was not suitable company for him. She might make him upset because she was unpredictable.

Daniel slept during the day and lay awake at night when the house was quiet and the milkmaids were snoring behind the screens. Sometimes he would get up, especially when the moon was out, take his skipping rope and silently skip in the kitchen until he used up all his strength.

One night Alma opened the door. She saw him skipping but didn’t say a word, just closed the door again, and he knew that she would never tell anyone, not even Edvin.

Spring was already on the way when Daniel got out of bed one day and moved to the barn. He could no longer stand the snoring of the milkmaids. Alma and Edvin were standing in he yard when he came out of the door early one morning and walked straight over to the barn. He made himself a bed underneath the stairs that led up to the hayloft and lay down. After a while Alma came in. She chased out the curious milkmaids, and for the first time Daniel heard the way she yelled at them.

‘You don’t have to stare as if you’d never seen him before!’ she shouted.

When the milkmaids were gone, she squatted down beside Daniel. She had a bad back and her knees were stiff.

‘You can’t sleep here,’ she said. ‘If you do, you’ll never get rid of your cough.’

Daniel pulled the blanket he had taken with him over his head. He refused to answer. Then he heard Edvin come in.

‘Why does he have to sleep out here?’ said Edvin. ‘And how can we find out if he won’t answer, and we have no idea what he’s thinking? He isn’t lonely. He seems to be surrounded by people I can’t see.’

‘There’s nobody else here but you and me. You’re imagining things.’

‘Can’t you feel it? It’s like a fog around him.’

‘He’s dying of longing,’ said Alma. ‘Bengler has to take him back to the desert.’

‘That man is never coming back,’ Edvin said. ‘We can’t even be sure that he’s still alive.’

Daniel jerked the blanket down from his face.

‘At least he can still hear,’ Edvin said. ‘Just don’t ask me to carry him inside, or he’ll sink his teeth into my throat.’

‘The hired hand can move back into the house and the boy can take his room.’

‘If he lay down here then it’s because this is where he wants to be.’

Daniel turned his head and looked into Edvin’s eyes.

‘I feel like I’m looking at an old man,’ said Edvin. ‘And yet he’s only nine or ten years old.’

‘He’s dying of longing.’

‘But what is it he’s longing for? Parents who are dead? Sand that burns under his feet?’

‘He’s longing for home. Whatever it is, that’s where he longs to be.’

The hired hand moved back to the kitchen but his room remained empty. Daniel continued to sleep underneath the stairs to the hayloft. Alma came and gave him food, and shouted at the milkmaids when they were too inquisitive.

Daniel still slept during the day. At night when he was alone with the animals, he would get up and skip between the stalls. Edvin had hung up two lanterns in the barn, which he lit every evening. Sometimes, when it rained, Daniel would go outside and feel the raindrops striking his face. The fever was gone but he still had the cough. And a strange weariness that never went away no matter how much he slept.

The nights had gradually grown lighter and shorter. Daniel started going up to the hill when it was quiet in the house. He had a feeling that Alma was standing like an invisible shadow behind a window, watching him. But he trusted her, her and Sanna, and maybe even Edvin. All the others had betrayed him. He still hoped that Sanna would come back. He left signs for her on the hill, wrote his name in the dirt, left his shoes there, but whenever he returned there was never any trace of her. One night he ventured down to the house where she lived. He tried to look in through the low windows, find the place where she slept. But the only thing he could hear through the wall was someone snoring, and Daniel knew it was the man who had dragged her off by the hair.

He calculated that three full moons had come and gone by the time he felt able to think again. He would run away one more time. If he didn’t succeed in getting home he would die. If they caught him again he would be tied up and he would never have the strength to get loose.

He thought that death might not be so frightening. Kiko was dead, and Be too, but he could still talk to them. Even though they lay buried in the sand, they could still laugh. He also remembered how Be had given birth to him in the treetop and then changed her arms into wings. He decided that he wasn’t afraid to die, even though he was still just a child. The cough that never left him was a sign that death had already hidden away in some corner of his body. Kiko had once told him about all the caves there were inside a human being. Somewhere in a hole, death was hiding, and one day it would drive the living spirits out of his body. Daniel knew that the cough didn’t come from his lungs; it had the musty smell of a secret grotto deep inside him.

What scared him was not death. It was the thought of having to be dead for so long. And even longer if he was buried here in the mud, by the church where Hallén preached. Kiko and Be would never find him. He couldn’t imagine anything worse than lying dead surrounded by strangers. Who would he talk to? Who would he have for company when he set out on the long migration through the desert?

The most important thing of all was the antelope that had never been completed.

He couldn’t leave it. Kiko had said that he was the one who had to finish it, see that it lived on. The gods would also abandon him if he died here in the mud.

He no longer believed that he would be able to learn to walk on water. The death he carried inside him made him too heavy. He also didn’t believe that he would be able to find his way back to the harbour where the ship was waiting.

The thoughts he was thinking were so heavy that he could barely manage to carry them. He was still too little for all that was loaded on his shoulders. And the weight wasn’t only on his shoulders, it was inside him too.

One night as he was sitting on the hill he realised that he would never succeed if he didn’t get some help. The only ones who could help him were Alma and Sanna. Maybe Edvin too, but Edvin was afraid of Hallén. He almost never dared look up at the sky. His gaze was always fixed on the ground. He was afraid of everything that was unexpected. Even the fact that he had taken Daniel in might be a sign of fear about staying in Dr Madsen’s good graces: some day the doctor might refuse to help him or Alma if they fell ill. But Alma was different. The only thing she was afraid of was that Daniel might be treated badly. But he couldn’t ignore the fact that she was old. She had pain in her back and her legs were stiff.

That left only Sanna. And she had disappeared. Despite the fact that he had left signs for her on the hill, she didn’t reply.

Maybe she was dead. Maybe the man who had dragged her by the hair had killed her. Sanna wasn’t like anyone else. She might have done something dangerous and then been punished with death. Maybe Hallén had nailed her up on the boards instead of Daniel.

He had to find out whether Sanna was still alive. Without her he might as well lie down and die. Then he would vanish into the depths of the brown fields, and anyone who searched for him would search in vain.

And the antelope would weep.

That night he walked up the long path to the church. The big door was locked, but he managed to prise open a window to the sacristy and climb in. He lit a candle and shivered with cold. Hallén was there in the darkness, breathing towards him. Daniel growled like an animal and Hallén’s shadow disappeared. He went into the sanctuary. He found no boards anywhere with Sanna nailed up on them. For the first time he dared go inside the altar rail. He stood on tiptoe and stroked the chipped knee of the figure hanging there. When he felt it with his fingers he noticed that a sliver of wood was coming loose. He carefully pulled it out and put it in his pocket.

He blew out the candle and left the church.

It was already starting to get light. Mist was drifting across the field.

He ran as fast as he could along the road. Somewhere in the distance he heard a cock crow. When he reached Alma and Edvin’s house it was still quiet. He turned off the road and continued along the cart track until he reached the top of the hill. He could see at once that Sanna hadn’t been there. He took the piece of wood out of his pocket and buried it. As he ran all the way from the church he had decided to make use of his memories. Memories from the time when he was so small that Be still carried him bound to her back; the memories of her movements when she danced. With his bare feet he drew a circle around the place where he had planted the piece of wood from Jesus’ broken knee. Then he began to search in his body for Be’s rocking motions. Even though he started to cough, he danced around the circle. He also wanted to sing, but thought that Edvin would hear him. A hare sat motionless out in the field watching him. He danced until the coughing fits were about to choke him.

When he rubbed his hand across his mouth he found blood on it. The cold wind from the grotto of death had come all the way out to his mouth. He squatted down and spat onto the ground. Now both the piece of wood and his blood were there. He sat on the ground and fought for breath. It ripped and tore at his chest, but now he was sure. Sanna would come back. And she would understand that he was searching for her.

As he came down from the hill he was struck by a sudden weakness that made him collapse. He lay there on his back and looked up at the sky, which was covered by low clouds. His heart was beating fast, and his lungs were fighting to take in air. I have to make it, he thought. I can’t die here in the mud.

After a while he got up and continued home. There was still no smoke coming out of the chimney. He went into the barn, curled up in the straw, and fell asleep.

He woke up when the hired hand poked him.

‘Vanja is sick,’ said the hired hand. ‘Alma is taking care of her. Here’s your food.’

Daniel didn’t reply. He merely took the dish and began to eat his porridge. He didn’t like the hired hand. Jonas had never dared look him in the eye. Even when he said his name it sounded as though he were saying something that wasn’t true. Daniel assumed that Jonas hated him because his skin was a different colour. Jonas had red hair and his skin was almost as white as snow. Several times he had heard Edvin complaining about him to Alma, that he was lazy.

Vanja was the older of the two milkmaids, and the fatter one, compared to Serja who was very thin. As he ate he thought that Vanja must be seriously ill for Alma not to bring him his food. Serja had always been the one who stared at him, the one who most often made Alma cross. Vanja moved slowly and heavily, and would suddenly break out in violent laughing fits that no one understood and then sit silently and rub her hands over her heavy breasts. The hired hand always wanted Daniel to pull the covers off her when she lay alone in bed. It was her big body that he most wanted to see.

Daniel put down the dish. The cows were waiting impatiently to be milked. A hen came near his blanket pecking the ground. The door slammed. It was Serja coming in. She had pails in her hands and stopped before Daniel with tears in her eyes.

‘Vanja sick,’ she said in broken Swedish. ‘She raving.’

Daniel didn’t know what raving meant, but he could tell that Serja was scared. He decided to break his silence.

‘Does she hurt?’

‘It is in her throat. She cannot breathe.’

‘Does she hurt?’

‘She cannot breathe! Hurt can one. But if one cannot breathe one die.’

Then she began to clank the pails against each other as if she were losing her mind.

‘I have to milk!’ she screeched. ‘But Vanja sick. And I am afraid. I sleep in same bed. Maybe it catching.’

She vanished among the cows. Daniel could hear her crying. Late in the afternoon Jonas came back with more food.

‘She’s even sicker now,’ he said, and Daniel could see that his shivers of fear were somehow mixed with glee.

‘The doctor has come,’ he went on. ‘But not even Madsen can do anything.’

Jonas left. Daniel pushed the plate away. He wasn’t hungry. Nearby lay someone who was very ill, who might die. And he knew that it had something to do with him.

That evening Alma came out to the barn. She was pale and moved with extreme difficulty.

‘You know that Vanja is sick,’ she said. ‘The illness has progressed quickly, and we don’t know if she’ll survive. She has an abscess in her throat. Dr Madsen can’t cut it out because she might bleed to death.’

‘Why is she sick?’ Daniel asked.

Alma seemed not to hear.

‘The girl is only nineteen years old. That’s not an age for dying. That’s a time to live.’

Alma left him. Serja was doing the evening milking. Daniel waited. When everything was quiet he left the barn. Through the window of the house he could see Alma sitting on a chair next to Vanja’s bed. Alma had fallen asleep. Her hands were resting in her lap, and her head had drooped forward. Carefully he opened the door and went in. Vanja was breathing with a wheezing sound. There were brown medicine bottles on the table. Daniel looked at her face. She was both pale and red at the same time. Her breast was heaving violently. He carefully lifted the covers. He had to know if her knee had swollen up. Whether she was about to die because he had pulled a splinter of wood out of the wooden body that hung on the cross in the church. Her knee looked normal. The abscess in her throat had nothing to do with him. And yet he knew it was a warning. Death was searching, and soon it would find him.

Two days later Vanja died. It was Alma who came out to the barn and told him. She was crying. Daniel thought that he didn’t have much time left. If he was ever going to make it home it would have to be now.

That same night he went up to the hill. Sanna still hadn’t been there, but he knew that she would come soon.

On Saturday the coffin was taken on a wagon to the church. It was raining. Alma brought food for him out to the barn. She was dressed in black. Daniel reached out his hand and took hold of her wrist. He hadn’t done that in a long time.

‘The girl was so young,’ Alma said. ‘So young and now she’s dead.’

Daniel waited until the wagon was gone, then he got up. While the funeral was in progress he would leave Alma and Edvin’s house for the last time. He walked around in the barn and patted the cows.

When he reached the top of the hill, Sanna was sitting there waiting for him.

Chapter 26

Sanna hadn’t noticed the splinter of wood. She hadn’t come to the hill to wait for him — she had gone there to be alone.

Daniel could see at once that something had happened. All her restless energy was gone. She sat still, huddled up, and she hardly noticed when he appeared. He sat down next to her and waited. Even though time was short, he knew that he couldn’t leave without her. He couldn’t talk to her, either. All the invisible doors surrounding her were closed. For once the black birds were quiet. They perched in the tree out in the field, unmoving.

Daniel waited. On Sanna’s face he could see the traces of tears. He sensed that it had something to do with the man who had dragged her off by the hair.

Not until Daniel had a coughing fit did she come to life again and look at him.

‘Who died?’ she asked.

‘Vanja.’

‘What happened?’

‘She got something in her throat that poisoned her and made her stop breathing.’

‘I saw when they drove off with the coffin. First I thought you were the one who was dead. Then I saw that the coffin was big.’

‘I’m leaving. I have to go now. I can’t stay any longer.’

She gave a start. ‘Do you still want me to come with you?’

Daniel was dumbstruck. Was she answering his question before he even had a chance to ask it?

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I want you to come too. But we have to leave now. Before they come back from church.’

Instead of replying, Sanna began to cry. She seemed to cast herself headlong into a sobbing fit, filled equally with rage and sorrow.

‘He raped me!’ she shrieked. ‘That damn devil of a man raped me! And he was supposed to be my father!’

Daniel didn’t know what the word meant. Raped? He had never heard it before.

‘What happened?’ he asked cautiously.

Sanna pulled up her dress to the waist. She was naked underneath and Daniel saw that there was dried blood on the inside of her thighs.

‘Did he beat you?’

‘You’re stupid, you’re a child, you don’t understand a thing. He told me to help him move a calf to another stall. Then he threw me down and stuck it in. I couldn’t even scream. He shoved straw and cow shit in my face. I almost suffocated. And then he said he would kill me if I said a word.’

She suddenly started to scratch and tear at the hair below her belly. Daniel still wasn’t sure that he understood what had happened.

‘What if he got me pregnant?’ she yelled. ‘Then they’ll lock me up in the madhouse in Lund.’

She let her skirt fall and sank back to the ground. Daniel took her hand. She squeezed it so hard with her fingernails that he had to make an effort not to pull his hand away.

Just as suddenly as it began, her fit was over.

‘I’ll come with you. But I’ll never be able to walk on water. I’m too stupid and I’m too clumsy.’

‘We’re not going to walk on water. It’s too late for that now. We’re going to find a boat.’

‘I can’t swim.’

‘We’ll find a boat that won’t sink.’

‘I’ve never seen the sea.’

Daniel dug up the sliver of wood from the mud.

‘This will protect us.’

He told her about his night-time visit to the church.

‘It will protect us from the waves if they get too high.’

She got up and pointed to the road on the other side of the hill.

‘I’ll wait for you there. I just have to run home and fetch something I want to take with me. There’s nobody there now, so I can do it.’

Then she was gone. At the same moment the birds took off from the treetop. They circled around a few times and then vanished across the fields. Daniel followed them with his gaze as long as he could. It occurred to him that they had been there the whole time he had lived with Alma and Edvin. Now they were leaving. Earlier he had walked in the direction they had flown. Now he understood that he had to go in the other direction.

He looked at the house one last time. Then he went down to the road and waited for Sanna.

She came as she had promised. She had wrapped a red shawl around her head. In one hand she had a bundle, in the other something that Daniel couldn’t make out.

‘I took everything he had,’ she said as she came close and opened her hand. There was a bunch of banknotes like the kind Father had often sat and counted.

‘Everything he had,’ she repeated. ‘He didn’t think I knew where he hid the money. In an old hymn book behind the corner cupboard. But I took everything he had.’

‘I don’t think we need any money,’ said Daniel. ‘I know that somewhere a boat will be waiting for us.’

‘It’s important to have money. Otherwise it’s impossible to survive.’

They started walking but stopped after a few steps.

‘Where are we heading?’

Daniel pointed in the direction of the road. ‘To the sea.’

‘I think it’s called Copenhagen,’ said Sanna. ‘It’s on the other side of the water. A city that’s very big.’

They began walking again. Sanna walked so fast that Daniel couldn’t keep up with her. She didn’t stop until he started coughing.

‘You’re sick,’ she said. ‘You might die.’

He shook his head and wiped away the tears once the violent coughing fit was over.

‘I have to go home,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll be well again. And you’re going with me.’

‘I would much rather it had been you who stuck it in,’ she said. ‘Even if it turned out to be a grey baby.’

‘I can’t have babies,’ Daniel said. ‘I’m too little.’

‘Me too!’ Sanna yelled. ‘If I walk as fast as I can, maybe I can shake it loose.’

That afternoon they reached a small town. While Daniel waited behind a barn outside the town, Sanna went in to find them some food. She came back with milk, bread and a fistful of dried fish. When they had eaten, they took a detour around the town. Daniel could feel his fever had come back. He didn’t say anything to Sanna, and tried to keep up with her even though she was almost trotting. When evening fell Sanna still didn’t want to stop. Daniel saw her turn round often and then walk even faster. He could tell that she was very frightened.

That night they crept in under a bridge. Sanna felt that Daniel was feverish.

‘Crawl in here,’ she said, wrapping her shawl around his shoulders. Then she drew him close to her.

‘Can you hear it?’ she asked.

‘What?’

‘The sea.’

Daniel could hear only the fever pounding between his temples.

‘Tomorrow,’ he replied. ‘Tomorrow.’

No woman had held Daniel so tightly since he was with Be.

‘You’ve got a fever,’ she said. ‘But you mustn’t die.’

‘I won’t die. I’m just tired.’

She began to rock him as if he were a little baby.

‘They won’t find us,’ she said. ‘Are there apples in the country you come from?’

Daniel didn’t dare tell her the truth.

‘Yes, there are apples,’ he said. ‘And they’re just as green as the apples you have here.’

‘Then it doesn’t matter if there’s a lot of sand. As long as there are apples.’

Daniel thought that Sanna probably didn’t understand what a long journey they had before them, and how different everything would be. But he also knew that she couldn’t go back. The man who had dragged her by the hair had hurt her and Sanna had stolen his money. There was no going back now. Hallén would nail both of them up on boards.

‘I’m scared,’ Sanna said suddenly, when Daniel was almost asleep. ‘But at the same time I feel happy. For the first time I’m doing something that nobody told me to do.’

She burst out laughing. Daniel woke up. Her happiness made his fever feel lighter to bear for a moment. We’re going to make it, he thought. Tomorrow we’ll find the boat. Then everything that has happened will become a dream, and soon I won’t remember any of it.

‘Tomorrow we’ll reach the sea,’ he said. ‘But there’s still a long way to go. So we have to get some sleep.’

Several times during the night Daniel awoke because Sanna got up and went onto the bridge to look back the way they had come. He understood her fear, but he knew that nobody was there. The people following them would go in the same direction the birds had flown.

They set off at daybreak. They drank their fill from the stream that ran under the bridge and then shared what was left of the bread. The road was narrow and wound through groves of trees and across open fields. Late in the afternoon they reached a hill. On the way up Daniel had to stop and catch his breath. Sanna ran ahead, racing the last bit to the top. Then he heard her shriek and saw her jump up and down as if she had an invisible skipping rope in her hands.

When he rubbed his hand across his mouth he saw that there was blood again. He wiped it on the inside of his coat sleeve before he went up to the hilltop where Sanna was waiting impatiently.

The sea lay at their feet.

‘Is that where we’re going?’ Sanna asked, pointing.

Daniel was worried that it wasn’t the sea but one of the lakes he had seen so many times on his travels with Father. On the other side of the water was a strip of land. But when he followed the line of the land with his eyes he could see that it disappeared in a haze. There the sea continued. Then he knew that they had come the right way.

‘Where’s the boat?’ asked Sanna. She kept looking back over her shoulder.

‘I don’t know,’ Daniel said. ‘We have to find it.’

Sanna looked at him and flew into a rage.

‘If only you weren’t so damn black!’ she shrieked. ‘They’re going to find us.’

‘Not when it’s dark. Then they’ll see me less than they will you.’

Sanna started walking down the slope. Daniel followed her.

Sanna did the same thing she had done the day before: left Daniel and came back later with some food. They hid in a grove of trees and waited for the sun to set. Daniel slept. When he woke up it was already almost dark. Sanna was sleeping by his side. She had stuck her thumb in her mouth like a little baby. Daniel tried to remember what he had dreamed, whether there was any message for him, but his head was silent. He touched the sliver of wood in his pocket.

He woke Sanna cautiously. She gave a start and held her hands in front of her face as if he might hit her.

‘We have to get moving,’ he said.

Sanna shivered. ‘How are we going to find a boat when it’s nearly dark?’

Daniel didn’t know. But somewhere there had to be a boat. If they had reached the sea, they had also reached the boats. The wind had already begun to flutter in the masts that Daniel bore inside him.

They passed through a village that lay silent. A dog barked. Then everything was quiet again. All Daniel knew was that they had to walk straight towards the water. Now he was the one leading the way. Sanna followed close behind, holding onto his coat.

They followed a ridge along the water, which roared in the dark. The wind felt colder now that they were so close to the sea.

‘Where’s the boat?’ Sanna nagged. ‘Where’s the boat?’

Daniel didn’t reply.

They reached some wooden steps that led down to the water. Daniel smelled tar, so there had to be boats nearby. When they got down to the beach they found themselves standing in the midst of some overturned rowing boats. By a little stone wharf lay some bigger boats with sails wrapped around their masts. Daniel was disappointed. The boats were small.

Sanna pinched him anxiously on the arm.

‘What are we going to do now?’

Daniel looked around. He was like Kiko now, on the hunt for prey; not an animal, but a ship.

‘Wait here,’ he said. ‘I have to search.’

‘No,’ she replied, pinching his arm hard. ‘You’re not leaving me.’

She kept holding onto his coat as if she were blind. She stumbled often, and Daniel realised she was really quite clumsy.

Suddenly he noticed the glow from a fire far out on the little wharf. A man was sitting by the fire with a mug in his hands which he lifted to his lips now and then.

He’s waiting for us, Daniel thought. That’s the only reason he would be sitting there.

They walked out onto the stone wharf. Daniel stamped hard with his clogs so that the man wouldn’t be afraid. He looked in their direction with his mug in his hand. They went up to the fire. The man was old. He had a long beard and a worn-out cap on his head.

‘Do I have trolls paying me a visit?’ he said.

‘We need a boat,’ said Sanna, ‘that can take us away from here.’

The man looked them up and down. He wasn’t in the least afraid, Daniel thought. That was the most important thing. Sanna held out the money they had left. The man leaned forward and looked at it. Then he squinted at Daniel’s face.

‘Come closer,’ he said. ‘So I can see you.’

Daniel squatted down by the fire. The man threw a few twigs onto it so that the flames flared up.

‘You really are completely black,’ said the man. ‘I saw a person like you once on a street in Malmö. Was it you?’

‘I don’t know. My name is Daniel and I believe in God.’

‘And the girl?’

‘I have no name,’ she said. ‘But people call me Sanna.’

‘And you want me to take you across to Copenhagen? Because you’ve run away from somewhere?’

Sanna promptly began to cry. She pulled her jumper over her face.

‘I don’t care why you ran away,’ said the man. ‘Children have a hard time. I ran away from Älmhult myself, and I wound up here.’

‘We have to go now,’ Daniel said.

The man shook his head. ‘There’s no wind. And I certainly won’t be rowing you across the Sound.’

‘It’s not totally calm,’ said Daniel. ‘Your boat is small. It doesn’t need much wind.’

The man burst out laughing. He had almost no teeth. Then he snatched up the money that Sanna had in her hand.

‘We can always drift across,’ he said. ‘Help me up. My bones are stiff.’

Daniel took hold of his arm. The man kicked the burning twigs into the water, where they hissed and went out.

‘Climb aboard,’ said the man. ‘You sit in the middle. There’s a blanket there.’

Sanna had stopped crying, but she hesitated to climb into the boat.

‘It’ll sink,’ she said. ‘The fish will swim into my body and eat me up.’

‘It won’t sink,’ Daniel told her. ‘Remember what I have in my pocket.’

Sanna stepped clumsily onto the boat.

‘There’s water in it!’ she shouted. ‘We’re sinking already.’

‘Only a few drops,’ said the man. ‘There’s a bailer somewhere.’

Daniel stepped down onto the boat. When he felt it move, relief washed over him. The man cast off the moorings and shoved the boat out. Then he raised the triangular sail and sat down at the tiller. They drifted slowly across the water. Now and then a gust of wind would catch at the sail.

‘Will we sink?’ Sanna asked.

‘We’re on our way now.’

Sanna giggled. Then she whispered in Daniel’s ear, ‘He didn’t get all the money. I have two notes left.’

The boat drifted away from the shore. The water lapped softly against the sides.

‘My name is Hans Höjer,’ said the man at the tiller. ‘I’m a thousand years old, I fish, and I know that if I sit by the fire out on the wharf somebody will always come, either to keep me company or to ask me to take them over to Copenhagen. I respect freedom. I don’t care whether it’s thieves or whores or counterfeiters who want to cross. I don’t take murderers on board. But I assume that you haven’t killed anyone.’

‘Somebody killed me,’ replied Sanna.

‘Not quite,’ chuckled Hans Höjer. ‘You’re still alive.’

And then he died. Daniel saw him suddenly grab his chest, grunt, try to draw air into his throat, and then fall forward. Sanna didn’t see what happened because she was busy wrapping the blanket around herself.

‘Damn, what a smell,’ she said.

Daniel didn’t answer. He reached out his hand and felt for one of the big blood vessels in the man’s throat. He couldn’t feel a pulse.

The boat had begun to turn in the wind. The sail was flapping back and forth. Sanna sat with her head sticking out of the dirty blanket and closed her eyes.

‘He’s dead,’ Daniel said.

Sanna didn’t reply.

Daniel tried to think. Why had he died? There could only be one explanation: Daniel was meant to take over the tiller. Hans Höjer had really been sitting by his boat and waiting for them.

‘He’s dead,’ Daniel said again.

Sanna opened her eyes and looked at him.

‘Who’s dead? I know that Vanja’s dead. Is someone else dead?’

Then she noticed that there was no longer anyone sitting in the stern at the tiller. She got up on her knees.

‘Is the man dead?’

‘He just fell over and stopped breathing.’

Sanna pinched him hard on the arm. ‘Then we’re going to sink.’

‘I’ll steer.’

‘What are we going to do with him? Is he just going to lie here and be dead?’

‘I don’t know,’ Daniel said. ‘First I have to sit down and steer.’

He crawled over the dead man and sat down by the tiller. The line to the sail was loosely lashed. Sanna started digging in the dead man’s coat for the money.

‘If he’s dead he won’t need any money.’

She stuffed the roll of notes inside her blouse and then threw the dirty blanket over the man.

‘Will we be there soon?’ she asked impatiently.

‘Not yet,’ said Daniel. ‘Not quite yet.’

They sat in silence. Sanna dozed. Daniel could hear her snoring. He waited for daybreak. Only then would he be able to see which direction to sail in. Then he would also decide what to do with the man who lay dead at his feet.

Chapter 27

The lookout yawned. He was standing by the railing and scanning the horizon with his binoculars. Daybreak had come slowly across the Sound. At the stern a deckhand was hoisting the three-tongued blue-and-yellow Swedish naval flag in which the coat of arms of the kingdom of Norway was inset. The morning was cool, the water calm. On the east side lay Malmö, to the west Copenhagen. They were steaming slowly northwards. King Oskar had come down with a headache the evening before, and Captain Roslund had hove to during the night. Now they were continuing their slow progress towards Gothenburg, which was the first stop on the journey to Kristiania.

The lookout kept looking though his field glasses. A lone seagull sat bobbing on the waves. In the distance some fishing boats were on their way north, perhaps heading for the rich fishing banks beyond the Danish coast.

Suddenly the lookout spied a boat floating still on the water. It was a very small fishing skiff. He rested his elbows on the railing to steady his gaze. It looked as though someone was preparing to set a net or perhaps a buoy. Then he realised to his shock that someone was tying weights around a human body. He called to the deckhand, who had finished with the flag. Captain Roslund, who was always up early in the morning, stuck his head out from the bridge and shushed him. The Swedish King was sleeping and did not want to be disturbed. The deckhand looked through the binoculars.

‘They’re tipping someone overboard,’ he said in amazement. ‘Could it be a murder?’

They took turns looking through the glasses again and were convinced. A lifeless body was being wrapped in a blanket with stone sinkers. In the boat were a young girl and a boy who was completely black.

The deckhand shuddered. ‘We have to tell Roslund.’

Together they went up to the command bridge of the Drott. The captain listened to what they had to say, shook his head, but then put his own big telescope up to his eye. He gave a start, lowered the glass and then raised it again.

‘We’ll have to go over there,’ he said. ‘If the King wakes up, let’s hope he understands that it was necessary.’

Roslund gave orders to increase their speed slightly. The white-uniformed helmsman was given the new course. Roslund estimated the distance at eight hundred metres.

‘One of them is black,’ Roslund said. ‘Could it be a coal stoker?’

‘It’s a boy,’ replied the deckhand.

Daniel saw the large ship approaching. Earlier it had not been moving at all. He was having a hard time fastening the two stone sinkers he had found in the boat. Sanna refused to help him. She had turned her back, playing with one hand in the water and humming, as if what was going on behind her was of no consequence.

When Daniel finally tipped the body into the water the large ship was already quite close.

The body did not sink. It remained floating near the boat.

Someone shouted to him, a man with a peaked cap and gold buttons on his coat. Daniel didn’t listen. He tried to force the body under the surface, but it was no use. A lifeboat was lowered over the side and some seamen rowed quickly over to their skiff. Sanna had pulled the dirty blanket over her head, but she kept on humming. Daniel could hear that it was a hymn. The man with the peaked cap grabbed hold of the gunwale.

‘What the hell is going on here? Did you kill him?’

The seamen began to pull up the body. There was another boat next to the lifeboat. Two seamen had guns in their hands.

The body was now halfway out of the water. Hans Höjer’s face had turned yellow. One eye was half open, as if even in death he wanted to know what was going on around him.

‘This man has been murdered,’ said Roslund. ‘I’ve seen plenty in my day, but never a little black devil like this all alone out on the Sound. Why is the girl hiding under the blanket?’

Daniel thought he ought to say something. but Sanna, who kept humming underneath the blanket, upset him and made it impossible for him to find the words.

At that moment there was a whistled signal from the big ship. It cut through the dawn and scared some seagulls from the water.

‘Hell,’ said Roslund. ‘What’s the King doing up so early?’

He turned round and saluted. A man with a grey beard was standing at the railing. Next to him were two men dressed in black and white. One had a tray in his hand, the other a towel.

‘What’s going on?’ asked the man with the grey beard.

‘I don’t know, Your Majesty. But we discovered someone trying to throw a corpse overboard.’

People had begun gathering at the railing of the big ship. A woman appeared but the man with the grey beard waved her away.

‘Who’s hiding under the blanket?’

One of the seamen pulled off the blanket. Sanna closed her eyes and held her hands in front of her face. She kept humming, louder now, and she was rocking back and forth.

‘Bring them aboard,’ said the King. ‘But perhaps it would be best to tie up the Negro boy. Quite a remarkable wake-up call, I must say. The sun comes up in the mist and the first thing one sees is a little black boy who has committed a murder.’

Roslund pointed to two of the seamen. One of them took off his belt and tried to grab Daniel’s hands, but Daniel sank his teeth into the man’s wrist. The seaman yelled and let go of Daniel, who began climbing overboard. There was nothing else to do now. Once again his journey home had been interrupted. Now he was surrounded by men in white who wanted to tie him up, so he might as well die. He would then drift deep in the sea until he finally reached home. That would be better than being buried in the earth behind Hallén’s church, where nobody would ever find him.

He made it only halfway into the water. The person who caught him was not one of the seamen but Sanna, who suddenly cast herself over him. He tried to pull himself loose, but she held on, and she was strong. He bit and struggled, but she didn’t seem to care.

‘I won’t!’ he screamed. ‘I want to go home!’

Somewhere inside him his old language welled up and cut through all the words he had been forced to learn. Be and Kiko were inside him, their voices shouted at Sanna, and they struggled as much as he did. They didn’t want to let go of him now that he was so close.

‘We’re not going to drown!’ Sanna screamed. ‘We’re going back home, no matter what happens. We’re going home.’

Daniel realised that Sanna had betrayed him. She wouldn’t let him die. She forced first Be and then Kiko to release their grip. Two of the seamen dragged him aboard and tied his hands behind him with the belt. He no longer resisted. He just closed his eyes and tried to go to sleep, to force his heart to stop beating. He felt himself lifted up and carried off and then he lay utterly still.

When he opened his eyes the man with the grey beard was standing watching him. The whites of his eyes were bloodshot.

‘Hardly one of my subjects,’ he said. ‘Not even in the remotest villages in Norway can one find the like. A Negro.’

The man looked at Captain Roslund, who stood next to him.

‘What does the girl say?’

Roslund snapped to attention and held his arms rigid at his side.

‘To be honest the girl doesn’t seem very bright, Your Majesty. She says that they were sailing to the desert. And that the man just died. Dr Steninger was unable to find any wounds on the body. He asks for permission to carry out an autopsy.’

‘On the Drott? Are corpses to be cut open on the King’s yacht? On my holiday trip to Kristiania? Permission denied!’

Roslund stamped on the deck, saluted, turned on his heel and left.

Daniel lay on a sail that had been spread out. Someone had placed a pillow under his head. All around people stood looking at him, but it was the man with the grey beard who was the most important. He stood closest, and there was a distance between him and the others. Daniel thought that he recognised his face. He had seen him before.

‘I think he recognises Your Majesty,’ said a man with a short stubby moustache.

Then Daniel remembered. In Alma and Edvin’s sitting room there was a picture on the wall. The picture was of the man who was now looking at him. Once Daniel had asked who he was, and Alma had said he was King Oskar and then a number that he didn’t recall.

He sat up at once. The grey-bearded man took a quick step backwards.

‘Careful,’ he said. ‘It’s possible the boy cannot be trusted. What does the girl say?’

‘She’s crying, Your Majesty.’

‘But before — what did she say about the boy?’

‘She said that his name is Daniel and he’s from an African desert.’

‘But I definitely heard him speaking Swedish, in a Skåne dialect.’

‘She said that they come from a village near Tomelilla.’

‘And they were just off on a sailing trip?’

‘He wanted to go back to the desert.’

The man who was the King held out his hand and was given a handkerchief. He wiped his mouth and then dropped it on the deck.

‘A peculiar dawn,’ said the King. ‘One awakens too early and immediately one has the most remarkable experience. Bathe the boy and put some clothes on him. They need food. See to it that the girl stops crying. Then I want to hear their story. What’s happening with the dead man?’

‘He is being taken ashore, Your Majesty.’

The King nodded and turned to go. A woman leaned over towards Daniel. She smelled strongly of perfume. She looked at him and then burst out laughing.

Daniel passively submitted to everything. He was bathed, given new clothes and a coat with yellow buttons. Then he was led into a room where Sanna was waiting. She was wearing a dress and her mouth was wide open.

‘The King!’ she shrieked. ‘We’re on the King’s boat.’

‘You should have let me drown. Why didn’t you let me sink to the bottom?’

She didn’t hear him. She tugged on her dress, her eyes still big with disbelief.

‘It’s the King,’ she said again, and Daniel saw that she had tears in her eyes, but whether they were from fear or joy he couldn’t tell.

Sanna had pulled him back into the boat. She had been stronger than Be and Kiko and she had betrayed him.

He knew that he must have revenge, but he didn’t know how.

The door opened. A man with a gold ribbon over his shoulder came in.

‘His Majesty awaits,’ he said in a wheezing voice.

He motioned for them to stand up and turn round. He straightened Daniel’s coat.

‘No one sits down until His Majesty gives permission. No one says anything unless His Majesty addresses one of you. You reply briefly and clearly, using no curse words, of course, and do not sit with your legs crossed. If His Majesty laughs, it may be suitable to join in with a brief laugh, or rather a smile with a little sound. No improvisations are acceptable. Is that understood?’

‘Yes,’ said Sanna, curtsying.

‘No,’ said Daniel. ‘I want to die.’

‘His Majesty expects answers to his questions and no digressions. Is that understood?’

‘Yes,’ replied Sanna, and curtsied even deeper.

‘I want to die,’ said Daniel again.

They went down a narrow corridor, up some stairs and stopped before a double door.

‘His Majesty will receive you in the aft salon. It is proper to curtsy and bow at the exact moment when I close the doors.’

They went inside. The man with the grey beard, from the portrait on Alma and Edvin’s wall, sat leaning back in a chair upholstered in red. He had a cigar in his hand. Behind him stood the man who had given the King the handkerchief. Otherwise the room was empty. Sanna curtsied and Daniel bowed. He remembered what Kiko had once told him, about the kings in olden times — you were supposed to fall to the ground and place your neck under their feet as a sign of submission.

I’m standing before a king, thought Daniel. He is my last chance.

He took a few steps forward, threw himself prostrate on the floor and then grabbed one of the King’s patent-leather shoes and placed it on his neck. The King flew out of his chair and the man with the handkerchief nervously rang a bell. Daniel was instantly surrounded by men who seemed to have come in through the walls. They held him tight.

The King sat down again.

‘Careful,’ he said. ‘Let us take a cautious look at the Negro child. It is clear that the girl is less than intelligent, but the boy must have a remarkable tale to tell.’

They were allowed to sit on low stools of the same red fabric as the King’s chair. Sanna immediately began to weep. But she did it silently. It was only Daniel who noticed the tears running down her cheeks. Maybe it was because she was sorry, maybe now she realised that she should have let him sink into the deep where Be and Kiko were waiting. He understood, and yet he hated her.

‘What’s your name?’ asked the King.

‘My name is Daniel. I believe in God.’

The King regarded the smoke curling from his cigar.

‘A good answer. But it seems practised. Let me hear the story. About how you came here.’

Daniel told him. Maybe the King would understand how important it was for him to continue his journey. Sanna sat in silence, tugging at her dress. Now and then the King would ask a question, and Daniel tried to answer without losing the thread of his story.

When he was finished, the King looked at him for a long time. Daniel saw that his eyes were kind. But they didn’t see him. They looked past him, just like Father’s when he was thinking about something important.

‘A peculiar story,’ said the King. ‘But filled with good intentions. You ought to stay and live your life where you have ended up. You should forget the desert. And besides, it’s much too hot there.’

He nodded to the man with the handkerchief. The man in the gold livery who always stood in the background came closer.

The King stood up and held out two photographs. His name was written on them. The photograph was the same one that was on the wall at Alma and Edvin’s house. Sanna made a deep curtsy. Daniel took the photograph but dropped it on the floor. He bent down to pick it up thinking that somebody was going to punish him by hitting him on the head.

‘In truth, quite a remarkable dawn,’ said the King and left the room.

They were allowed to keep the clothes, and their wet ones were put in a sea bag. The boat with Hans Höjer’s dead body had already gone. Daniel noticed that two seamen were always at his side in case he tried to jump overboard again. But he had given up. They went down a ladder and then sailed to the shore. A wind had blown up over the Sound. They came to the city called Malmö. Sanna held the picture of the King tightly. Daniel did as he was told. A carriage was brought up, and the coachman was instructed where to go. When they were sitting in the carriage, Sanna leaned against him.

‘Now he won’t dare hit me any more,’ she said. ‘He won’t dare throw me down on the ground and stick it in. Not when I have a picture of the King.’

Daniel didn’t reply. Sanna had betrayed him. He could never forgive her for that.

Late that evening the carriage rolled into the yard. It was Sanna who had directed the coachman. Alma and Edvin came outside. Daniel said nothing. He went straight into the barn and lay down in the straw. Outside he could hear Sanna explaining, leaping from one word to another as if the words were a skipping rope. When she stopped, Daniel burrowed into the straw. He heard Alma and Edvin come in and sensed that Alma had squatted down by his side. She put her hand on his brow.

‘He’s hot again.’

‘How will we ever understand him?’ said Edvin.

‘Go now,’ said Alma. ‘I’ll sit here a while.’

Daniel pretended to be asleep. He breathed slowly and deeply.

‘What makes you so restless?’ said Alma. ‘How can we make sure that you won’t kill yourself with longing? How can a child carry around so much sorrow?’

The next day Daniel stayed silent. His coughing fits worsened. Dr Madsen came several times to examine him, but Daniel no longer answered any questions. He was mute. Afterwards Madsen had a long conversation with Alma and Edvin, talking in serious whispers. That evening Alma came to Daniel and asked him if he wanted to move back into the kitchen. They hadn’t found a new milkmaid to replace Vanja and he could have a better bed. His cough wouldn’t go away if he stayed out here with the animals.

Daniel could hear that she meant what she said. His cough had begun to crack him open inside.

Two weeks after his last attempt to return to the desert, Daniel woke up in the middle of the night. He was very hot. When he rubbed his hand across his forehead he could feel that he was sweating. It was Kiko who had woken him. He stood with his hand over his face to shield his eyes and laughed. He hadn’t said a word, but Daniel understood what he meant. He got up from his bed in the straw and searched for the tip of a scythe that the hired hand had broken off. Then he headed out into the night. He ran barefoot through the dark. The sky was clear, and he didn’t stop until he came to the church. He squatted down and coughed. When he touched his mouth with his hand he saw that there was blood.

Daniel picked a stone in the wall of the churchyard that was completely smooth. He carved an antelope into it. It was hard to do, and he made many mistakes. The legs were different lengths, the animal’s back much too straight. But the most important thing was the eye. He took great care to make it completely round.

Then he sat down to wait.

When the cough came he drew the index finger of his right hand across his lips and then dabbed the blood in the antelope’s eye. In the darkness he couldn’t see the colour, but he knew that the antelope’s eye would shine bright red in the daytime when the dawn came.

Chapter 28

Someone had seen him in the night.

By early morning the rumour had started to spread, and just after nine o’clock people began gathering at the churchyard wall. The wind was blowing hard that day and the rain came in heavy squalls. Hallén woke up with a sharp pain over one eye. He was lying in bed with a cold facecloth on his forehead when his serving woman came in and announced that people had begun gathering at the church and that someone had carved a picture on the churchyard wall. Hallén had long suspected that the serving woman was growing senile, but he got out of bed because she didn’t seem confused in her usual way. Something had happened or was happening at the church. Hallén pressed one fist against the pain above his eye and left the parsonage. As he walked towards the gate he could see the crowd by the west corner of the churchyard. Hallén wondered anxiously, and with some annoyance, whether a suicide might have chosen this unfortunate place to end his life. The thought was not unreasonable because the old belief that suicides should be buried outside the churchyard was still embraced by many of his parishioners. He grimaced at the pain above his eye and at the thought. If it was a suicide, he hoped that there wasn’t too much blood. He stopped, took a few deep breaths and tried to think of a glass of cognac. He always did this when something unpleasant awaited him. He had never been able to derive the same strength from the Holy Scriptures as he could from the thought of a glass of cognac.

The crowd parted as he approached. To his relief there was no corpse lying by the wall. What he found there was a poorly carved picture of an animal. Actually it was only an outline with strange proportions and a big eye.

The eye was red, or really almost black. But it was blood, he could see that at once. The eye stared at him and the pain over his own eye grews sharper. One of the richest parishioners, an unpleasant man by the name of Arnman, stood and pounded on the wall with his stick. The year before he had donated an ugly, heavy, but expensive bridal crown to the parish. Hallén suspected that it was stolen goods that he had acquired on one of his many trips to Poland. Arnman lived there with his mistress on a run-down estate very close to the port where the ferry connection from Ystad reached the Continent. He boasted openly that almost every year he begot a Polish brat, even though his wife in Sweden kept bearing him new children. Hallén felt sad when he gazed from his pulpit at fat Arnman and his skinny wife. Sometimes he also permitted himself the unpleasantness of imagining them naked together. It seemed amazing that Arnman hadn’t crushed his wife to death in bed long ago.

‘The Negro,’ said Arnman in his thick voice. ‘It’s the Negro’s doing.’

There was muttering and buzzing among the crowd. They sounded like angry bees, thought Hallén.

‘The Negro,’ Arnman repeated, and Hallén wished he could get rid of him. But Arnman had great influence in the parish. He sat on the church board and nobody could deny that in spite of everything, he had contributed to the needy church with his donations.

‘How do you know that?’ asked Hallén, thinking about the boy from the distant dark continent, the boy he had tried to teach manners but who had thanked him for his efforts by putting a viper in the offering pouch.

Arnman waved his stick. From the dark-clad crowd of people, one of Arnman’s hired hands stepped forward. He was always drunk but according to rumour had a way with sick horses.

‘I saw him,’ said the hired hand.

‘What did you see?’

‘He was sitting here and chipping at the wall.’

‘When?’

‘Last night.’

Arnman rapped the hired hand on the back with his stick, and he slunk off.

‘He’s been drinking,’ said Arnman. ‘But you can’t deny what he saw. It was the Negro who sat here chipping away, and cut himself and rubbed blood on the wall. He doesn’t belong here. We know about witchcraft.’

Hallén gave Arnman a searching look. The pain over his eye increased.

‘What is it you know?’

‘That people should be careful about who they allow into their community.’

Arnman uttered these last words in a powerful voice. A murmur of agreement came from the crowd.

‘I shall attend to the matter,’ said Hallén. Then he turned to the sexton. ‘Try to scrub this off,’ he said. ‘And the rest of you can go home.’

Arnman marched down to the road and the carriage that was waiting for him. The crowd dispersed slowly. Hallén know that he should talk to Alma and Edvin right away, but the pain above his eye made that impossible. He went back to the parsonage and lay in bed for the rest of the day.

The next morning his serving woman came and told him that the animal with the red eye was back on the wall. Hallén had just woken up, relieved that the pain over his eye was gone.

That same day he paid a visit to Alma and Edvin. They had heard about what happened. Alma had asked Daniel about it, but she got no reply except a few words in his own strange language. They all went out to the barn together where Daniel lay curled up in the straw.

‘He has a fever,’ Alma said. ‘But he refuses to sleep in the house.’

Hallén observed the boy in silence.

‘It’s possible that he should be moved to a mental hospital,’ he said. ‘There are many indications that he has gone insane. It’s not normal to carve animals on churchyard walls. Did he cut himself to get the blood?’

‘I think he coughed it up,’ said Edvin.

‘He’s killing himself with longing for home,’ Alma said firmly. ‘What business does he have among lunatics?’

‘You don’t know anything about these matters. You heard what the pastor said,’ said Edvin.

Hallén tried to catch Daniel’s eye, but he kept looking away. Every time Hallén looked at the boy he had an eerie feeling that there was something he ought to understand that was escaping him. The child lying there in the straw had a message for him that he couldn’t comprehend.

‘It’s causing unrest in the parish, the way he’s carving the wall and daubing blood on it,’ Hallén said. ‘If it happens again we’ll have to consider sending him to St Lars in Lund.’

‘Is that a church?’ Alma asked.

‘You know quite well that it’s the madhouse,’ said Edvin.

‘He doesn’t belong among those people.’

They left him in the barn. The milkmaid who had been alone since Vanja died went about among the cows, weeping. Daniel thought of Sanna. He still couldn’t grasp how she could have betrayed him. He had felt happy with her, and she had shared her warmth with him. But she had deceived him about who she really was. She had acted the same way as the man who had hit her and dragged her by the hair.

He lay there until far into the night and tried to understand why she had acted as she did. He didn’t touch the food that Alma brought him.

‘I don’t want you to be tied up,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you to end up with crazy people. Can’t you stop going to the church?’

Daniel didn’t answer. But when Edvin came in she told him that Daniel had promised he wouldn’t go out that night.

‘We could always put the boy in the house,’ Edvin said. ‘Or I could stay out here myself.’

‘That’s not necessary. He won’t go.’

Edvin shook his head. ‘The hired hand said that Arnman has stationed some of his boys outside the church.’

‘That man is disgusting. He probably told them to attack Daniel if he shows up.’

‘If only we knew what he was thinking. He sees something that we don’t see. He’s surrounded by people again. They’re here, I can feel it.’

‘Nobody wants to put you in the madhouse,’ Alma replied. ‘But you want to put him there?’

‘I’m just trying to puzzle him out, that’s all. It’s as if he’s telling a story. Sometimes I feel like all this mud is being transformed into sand, and that it’s getting hot. But then it’s gone again.’

Daniel listened to what they were saying. By now he understood most of their speech, but his old language had taken over almost all his consciousness.

Alma put her hand on his forehead.

‘He’s much too hot,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why Dr Madsen can’t do something. He can’t catch a fever from being homesick, can he?’

‘It’s the cough,’ Edvin said. ‘You know that as well as I do. And there’s nothing to be done about that.’

‘I don’t want him to die,’ Alma said. ‘I want that man named Bengler to come back and take him home.’

They left Daniel alone. The cows stirred in their stalls. A rat rustled in a corner. One of the hens fluttered its wings. Daniel kept thinking about Sanna. At last it seemed there was only one possibility. One explanation for why she had let him down. She was an evil spirit. He had no idea who had sent her to destroy him.

He dozed off and in his dream he saw Sanna sitting among the black birds in a tree out in the field. At first he thought it was Be, who was waiting there so that she could fly off with him, but then he saw that it was Sanna and that black soot was running out of her nostrils.

He woke up with a start and thought about what he had dreamed. Whoever had sent Sanna into his path had done it to prevent Be and Kiko from reaching him. Suddenly it all became clear to him: as long as Sanna existed he would never be able to go home. He was never meant to learn to walk on water or to sail with a ship the long way back. Be and Kiko were right next to him.

And yet he was unsure. He was too small to know everything about the evil spirits who possessed people’s souls. The only thing he could do was to try to trick Sanna into revealing who she really was and who had sent her.

Daniel slipped back and forth between sleeping and waking. Sometimes he would reach out for the mug of water that Alma always set beside him.

At dawn he ate all the food he had left untouched the night before. If he was going to find out who Sanna really was, he would have to eat and build up his strength.

It took him a few days and nights to work out a plan. He searched his memory for everything that Kiko had taught him: about how evil spirits had to be tracked the same way as animals.

Finally he found the solution.

In his coat he still had the sliver of wood he had taken from the knee of the Jesus statue.

The following night he would put his plan into action. As if to convince himself that he was doing the right thing, that he had understood the invisible powers who were preventing him from returning to the desert, his fever suddenly abated, although he was still coughing up blood. Dr Madsen, who came to visit Alma, said that perhaps he might still get well.

It was completely calm when Daniel left the barn. He stopped in the yard and listened. Everything was quiet. He had taken along one of the lanterns that Edvin lit every evening in the barn. He had put it out, but he had matches with him.

When he reached the hill he stopped and listened. He opened his nostrils wide as Kiko had taught him to do when he was scenting a spoor. Sanna often smelled bad — she was dirty and her clothes smelled sour. But he didn’t notice anything. He crept cautiously up to the top of the hill, lit the lantern and screwed down the top. At the spot where Sanna most often sat, either still with her eyes closed, or rocking impatiently and digging in the dirt, he stuck the piece of wood into the ground. Then he did as Kiko had taught him, imitating a hyena and laughing out into the darkness. Hyenas always followed the trail of death. They ate not only animal carcasses but also dug up people who had been buried. That was how they drew the spirits of people inside themselves, both the evil ones and the good. Daniel whispered the words in his language that were the most important: that in the piece of wood lived a spirit who would be able to lead Daniel back to the desert. Then he blew out the lantern and went back to the barn.

In the morning when he woke up, the hired hand stood looking at him.

‘There was somebody laughing last night,’ said the hired hand. ‘It sounded like a pig, but also like a person. It must have been you.’

‘No,’ Daniel said. ‘It wasn’t me.’

The hired hand stared at him. Then he ran to fetch Alma and Edvin.

‘I heard him,’ he said excitedly. ‘I heard him speak.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He said, “No. It wasn’t me.”’

‘Is that all?’

‘Yes.’

Alma squatted down next to Daniel. ‘Is it true that you’ve started to speak again?’

Daniel stayed silent. Alma asked him again.

‘It’s no use,’ said Edvin. ‘The hired hand must have been imagining things.’

‘I heard what I heard.’

Edvin gave him a shove. ‘Work is waiting.’

That afternoon Daniel crept out through a hole in the wall at the back of the barn. Before he set off he stuffed the broken-off scythe point into his pocket. He crouched down when he ran across the fields. A fog bank was slowly shrouding the landscape in white. He could feel his heart begin to pound faster when he saw Sanna sitting up on the hill and digging in the mud. When she caught sight of him she was happy. She jumped up and grabbed hold of him. Daniel saw that she had been digging right where he had put the stick. There was no longer any doubt. She smelled like an animal — her clothes were like a pelt — and when she laughed she sounded like an animal, not a human being.

‘I thought you were never coming back,’ she said.

The fog covered the landscape. Sanna squatted down in the mud. She had the photograph of the King with her and traced his signature with her finger. Daniel carefully pulled the scythe point out of his pocket and plunged it into the back of her neck. She fell forward without a sound. When he turned her over she stared up at him with her eyes wide open. He rubbed mud onto her face until her eyes couldn’t see him any longer. So that she wouldn’t be able to talk either, he shoved as much mud into her mouth and throat as he could. He was out of breath and sweaty when he rubbed off the blood that had spattered on his clothes. Then he took the scythe point and the photograph of the King and buried them in the mud.

The trees where the birds used to perch could not be seen in the fog. Daniel took hold of Sanna’s arms and began to drag her down the hill. Several times he had to squat down. He coughed so violently that he threw up. His mouth was full of blood, but he didn’t care. Soon he would be home again. He dragged Sanna’s body until he reached the trees. He covered her body with a thin layer of fallen branches and old brushwood. When the birds came back they would peck at her body until nothing was left. Even though he had the fever again, he felt strong. Now he didn’t need to do anything but lie down in the barn and wait. Kiko and Be would come soon.

That evening he began carving on one of his wooden shoes. He wanted to give Be and Kiko a gift when they came to get him. Above all, he wanted to show Kiko that he had grown better at carving figures. When Alma came in with the food he hid his whittling knife and the shoes. He started eating at once.

‘Not too fast,’ she said. ‘Your stomach won’t stand such haste.’ Daniel did as she said. For an instant he felt an urge to tell Alma that everything was going to be all right now. Soon he wouldn’t have to lie out in the barn any more. They wouldn’t need to worry about him at all. Yet he thought it was probably best not to say anything. Dr Madsen and Hallén had both spoken about a house where people were locked in. He never wanted to be tied up again.

That night, when he was alone with the animals, he took off all his clothes and washed his whole body. Even though the water was cold he rubbed himself hard until all the dirt was gone. He found flecks of blood on his clothes. He scrubbed them with the brush Edvin used for the horses. Then he put his clothes back on and lay down for a while, whittling on his wooden shoe. He took care not to be impatient. He wanted Kiko to be pleased and say that he had begun to learn.

At daybreak he went out into the yard.

Thick fog lay over the fields. In the distance he could hear the birds screeching. Edvin came out onto the steps and stood there taking a piss. He didn’t see Daniel until he was finished. He buttoned his trousers and went over to him.

‘Are you starting to get well?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ Daniel replied. ‘I will be well soon.’

Chapter 29

Daniel divided up his last days alive by carving notches on his other shoe, the one he wasn’t trying to turn into a sculpture. Each time he put down the whittling knife and each time he picked it up to continue his work, he would cut a notch on the shoe.

He was waiting. Now that he had tested his powers against all the evil that surrounded him and shown that he was stronger, time had lost its significance. His waiting involved something different to seeing the light of dawn creeping in through the windows of the barn or seeing the twilight fall. His waiting meant that he was listening. No matter what direction Be or Kiko came from, he would hear them. Their voices would be faint, almost whispering. Maybe they would sound like the cows snorting in their stalls, or like a hen flapping its wings. He didn’t know, and that’s why he had to pay attention to any sounds that might signal their arrival.

His cough had grown worse from the effort of dragging Sanna’s body through the mud. The fever that came and went made him tired. He slept a lot in these last days.

When he opened his eyes after dozing off one afternoon, Dr Madsen was standing in front of him. He was smiling. In his hand he held a letter.

‘Your father has written,’ he said. ‘A letter has come for you, postmarked Cape Town.’

Daniel no longer had many memories of the man he called Father. They had faded and turned into vague phantoms. Only with difficulty could he remember how he looked. His voice was already completely lost. The images in his mind were shadows.

‘He wrote to me and asked me to read the letter to you.’

Behind Dr Madsen stood Edvin and Alma. They kept their distance as if the letter demanded great respect.

Dr Madsen read:

‘An excellent letter,’ said Dr Madsen when he had finished reading and stuffed the paper back in the envelope.

‘He doesn’t even ask how the boy is doing,’ said Alma, upset. ‘He doesn’t even ask how he is.’

‘But now we know he’s alive, at least,’ Edvin said. ‘We didn’t know that before. Now we know that it will be a long time before he returns.’

Dr Madsen placed the letter in the straw next to Daniel’s head.

‘A very fine letter,’ he said.

Then he pressed his hand against Daniel’s forehead. He looked into his eyes and listened to his chest. There was a rattling sound when Daniel breathed.

‘It would have been best, of course, if we could have taken him to a sanatorium,’ he said to Alma and Edvin when he finished his examination. ‘But that’s out of the question.’

‘If it will make him well I’ll sell the horses,’ replied Edvin firmly.

Dr Madsen shook his head. ‘We can always find the money,’ he said. ‘Many people would be moved to tears by a black child who is sick. Besides, he has met the King. But it’s not a question of money. It’s a matter of whether he could stand being moved again to a place that’s completely foreign to him.’

Dr Madsen regarded Daniel lying in the straw.

‘Naturally he should be sleeping in the house. The vapours from the animals may not be dangerous, but neither are they healthy. In addition, he ought to have a diet that consists of only eggs and milk.’

‘That will be easier than moving the animals into the house,’ said Edvin. ‘He’ll stay out here whatever we do. And I refuse to tie him up.’

‘You should still think it over,’ said Dr Madsen as he left.

Daniel heard the conversation continuing in the yard. He took out his wooden shoes, which he had hidden behind his head, and went on whittling. The wood was hard and his arm quickly grew tired. The whole time he kept listening for Be and Kiko. They had come closer, he could feel it, but he still couldn’t hear them.

Two days after Dr Madsen’s visit, Alma came to see Daniel at a time when she rarely went to the barn. He saw immediately that she had been crying and was afraid that she was sick. She sank down into the straw, and he wondered whether she was going to start sleeping there too.

‘I have to tell you this,’ she said. ‘And it’s better that you hear it from me than anyone else. Sanna is dead. Something horrible has happened. One of Nilsson’s boys found her out in the field. Somebody killed her.’

Daniel nodded cheerfully. He couldn’t understand why it made Alma so sad. She gave him an appalled look when he couldn’t help laughing.

‘Are you happy that I’ve told you the girl is dead? I thought you liked her, even though she was retarded.’

Daniel didn’t want Alma to be angry with him and stopped laughing at once.

‘Somebody killed her,’ Alma went on. ‘Someone stabbed her with a knife, violated her and buried her under some bushes out in the field. Somewhere there’s a murderer and no one knows who it is.’

Daniel didn’t know what the word murderer meant. but he thought that it would be best not to tell Alma the truth, that Sanna hadn’t been a human being but an animal, a dangerous animal, which they should be happy to be rid of. There was so much that Alma and Edvin and perhaps even Dr Madsen didn’t understand, about the powers that could conceal themselves in the earth, among the trees, and above all in human beings.

For the next few days no one talked about anything else. Everyone seemed to be afraid of what they called the murderer. Several times Daniel nearly told them, but something held him back.

One morning Edvin stood before him as he lay in the straw.

‘There’s a man sitting in the kitchen,’ he said. ‘He wants to talk to you about Sanna. He’s from Malmö and has come all the way here to search for the damn person who did Sanna such harm.’

That was the first time Daniel had heard Edvin say the word that was so important to Father. Damn. Daniel could see that he was furious.

‘It was me,’ said Daniel.

Edvin stiffened. ‘What did you say?’

‘It was me.’

‘Who did what?’

Edvin’s questions made Daniel confused. He immediately regretted that he had begun to speak again.

‘I’m glad you’re talking. But I don’t understand what you’re saying.’

‘I’m going home soon.’

Edvin shook his head. ‘You’re sick,’ he said. ‘And you won’t get well as long as you sleep out here in the barn. You’re raving, but I still have to bring in the man who wants to talk to you.’

The man who came into the barn was young with only a few patches of hair on his head, and he moved quickly, as if he were in a great hurry. Edvin brought over a milk pail for him to sit on. He gave Daniel an inquisitive look.

‘I’ve read about you in the newspapers,’ he said. ‘About your trip with the dead girl on the Sound. And about how you got to meet the King. But I expected you to be bigger. And I didn’t expect that I would meet you like this.’

He moved the pail closer to Daniel and leaned forward.

‘You know what has happened. Someone killed Sanna in a very brutal way. We have to catch the man who did it. Then he will probably be executed in Malmö prison. A man who has committed such a horrible crime might do it again. That’s why we have to catch him. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

Daniel’s face was immobile.

‘He understands,’ said Edvin, who stayed in the background. ‘But he’s ill and doesn’t speak very often.’

‘I have to ask some questions,’ the man went on. ‘Did you see Sanna after you both came back here?’

Daniel didn’t like the man sitting on the pail. He smelled of shaving lotion and tobacco and would never understand what had happened. He had come to get Daniel and then chop off his head. He didn’t have time for that. Soon Kiko and Be would arrive. Each morning when he woke up he knew that the moment would soon be here. He quickly decided that the best way to get the man to leave him in peace was to answer his questions.

‘No.’

‘You never saw her?’

‘No.’

‘Do you know if Sanna ever met someone who was not from around here?’

‘No.’

‘She wasn’t afraid of anybody? I’m not talking about her stepfather, she was terrified of him, I know that. But he didn’t do it. I’ve questioned him hard and he can prove he didn’t do it. Anyone else?’

‘No.’

The man rubbed his hand over his bald head without taking his eyes off Daniel.

‘The two of you tried to leave Sweden,’ he said. ‘I can understand that you wanted to go back to Africa. My only question is how you managed to lure Sanna into going along. Or did she want to escape from someone she was afraid of?’

‘He dragged her by the hair.’

‘Who?’

‘Her stepfather.’

The man shook his head thoughtfully. ‘I don’t understand it,’ he said. ‘The two of you came back. And suddenly somebody kills her.’

He stood up quickly from the milk pail. ‘We’re going to catch him,’ he said, smiling. ‘A man who commits a crime like this cannot go free.’

Edvin followed the man out. Daniel was overcome by a great weariness that seemed to press him roughly into sleep. He tried to fight it without success.

When he woke a few hours later he had a high fever. His heart was beating very fast. He was sweating and had to squint his eyes to make out Alma, who was anxiously watching him. Behind her stood Edvin and the hired hand.

Alma leaned over close to his face.

‘You will sleep in our bed,’ she said. ‘You’ll be alone in the room.’

Daniel was too tired to resist when Edvin and the hired hand lifted him up. As they carried him across the yard he could feel that it was raining. He opened his mouth and felt the raindrops landing on his tongue, but by the time they put him to bed he was asleep again.

That night his condition grew worse. Only once during the time that remained did he get up from the bed and go out into the yard. It was when he dreamed that Be and Kiko had come and were waiting for him. When he went outside and felt the cold from the ground seep into his body, there was no one there. He went back into the barn and searched for the wooden shoes that he was carving and the knife that lay in the straw. He stuffed them under his nightshirt and returned to the yard. He called out to them, shouted their names, but got no reply. Alma and Edvin came out, roused from their sleep. After he had moved into the bedroom they slept in the kitchen with the milkmaid. He didn’t resist when Edvin lifted him up and carried him back inside.

That was the only time he got out of bed. It was a brief interruption in his decline, which would not end until he was dead.

Now and then he was struck with severe coughing fits that bloodied the sheets, but most of the time he lay quietly in the borderland where dreams and reality meet. He never said a word, never met anyone’s eyes, and recognised only Alma and Edvin. Hallén came to visit regularly, as did Dr Madsen. On one occasion Alma also called in a wise woman from Kivik who, it was said, could cure people of consumption by greasing their chests with cow fat. But Daniel continued to decline. He was not in pain, felt no hunger, had no idea whether it was day or night.

As his condition worsened, he discovered that the way back did not go towards the horizon but inwards, downwards, towards a deep that was drawing him in. There Be and Kiko were waiting. In his dreams he could already glimpse the sand that was completely white in the blazing sun. He was utterly calm now. Nothing would keep him from returning. Be and Kiko had not abandoned him. Kiko would be angry because he had taken so long to come, but not even this worried him. For a few hours every day he managed to keep carving the wooden shoe. He thought that Kiko would be pleased. He had become a better carver. One day Kiko would be able to entrust the antelope and the rock wall to him.

In the last days, after he had already slipped very far towards the desert that awaited him, he finally began to hear their voices. Now they were quite close to him. Gradually he was able to distinguish their faces as well. A boy who was a few years older than Daniel was the first to come up to his bed. Daniel no longer remembered his name, but there was no doubt that it was him, the third son that was born to one of Kiko’s older sisters. When Daniel asked his first question, — whether it would be long before Be and Kiko came — the boy replied that they were out hunting, but they would be back soon.

Just as the boy reached him, Edvin opened the door and carried in a wooden mug of milk. He set it on the table next to the bed and stood there. Then he went over to the door and called Alma in a low voice. Daniel explained to the boy who they were, Edvin and Alma, and when Alma came in the boy was sitting on the bed by Daniel’s feet.

‘They’re here again,’ said Edvin.

‘Who?’

‘The voices! Can’t you hear them? He isn’t alone in here.’

Alma listened. ‘You’re imagining things. There’s nobody here.’

‘Can’t you hear them? He isn’t alone here. Damn it all.’

‘You’re tired,’ Alma said, taking Edvin by the hand. ‘You’re not sleeping well because you’re worrying. I’m worried too. But we have to trust in God.’

‘God?’ Edvin said angrily. ‘What does he know?’

‘Don’t blaspheme.’

They left the room. The boy got up from the bed, waved to Daniel and vanished. Daniel closed his eyes and continued to sink. He could feel the warm sand under his feet. If he shaded his eyes with his hand he could see some zebras moving in the shimmering sunlight. Even though he wasn’t hungry, he had an urge to sink his teeth into some meat again from an animal that Kiko had killed.

Only once during these last days did he think that he saw Father again. By then he had already sunk so far that he was surrounded by sand and low bushes. Near a dried-up stream lay a whitened skeleton scraped clean. Right next to one hand, where the finger bones were splayed, was a little wooden box. Daniel recognised it at once. It was the same box that Father had asked Daniel on several occasions to guard because it contained the insects that Father would give his name to one day. Daniel opened it and found a desiccated butterfly that had once been blue. When he touched its wings it disintegrated into a bluish powder. He put the box back next to Father’s skeleton and hoped that someone, maybe the woman with the buttons, would one day find Father and take him back home.

At last he was there. First he saw the hills with the cave where the antelope was carved. In the distance two people were approaching. He waited. Finally he saw that it was Be and Kiko, and Be was carrying a new baby on her back, and she told him that a sister had arrived while he was gone. Kiko wasn’t angry. Daniel held out his present and at the same moment forgot that his name had been Daniel. Now he was Molo again. Nothing more. Kiko admired for a long time what he was holding in his hands.

‘You have gained patience,’ he said then. ‘You have grown up.’

Molo smiled. He was home now. Everything that had happened would soon vanish from his mind.

Daniel died early one summer morning. By then he had lain in a coma for several weeks. Dr Madsen hadn’t been able to do anything for him. There was no hope.

Not until they were about to lay him in the coffin did Alma discover the wooden sculpture. She showed it to Edvin.

‘He carved a deer out of a wooden shoe,’ he said. ‘Why did he do that?’

‘We’ll put it in the coffin with him,’ Alma said. ‘He won’t be lonely any more.’

They placed the sculpture next to his head and then screwed down the lid. Many people came to the funeral. Hallén chose not to speak from a Bible text but instead propagandised for the importance of supporting the mission work under way in Africa.

No one knew that the coffin they buried was actually empty.