Italian Shoes

Chapter 1

I always feel more lonely when it’s cold.

The cold outside my window reminds me of the cold emanating from my own body. I’m being attacked from two directions. But I’m constantly resisting. That’s why I cut a hole in the ice every morning. If anyone were to stand with a telescope on the ice in the frozen bay and saw what I was doing, he would think that I was crazy and was about to arrange my own death. A naked man in the freezing cold, with an axe in his hand, opening up a hole in the ice?

I suppose, really, that I hope there will be somebody out there one of these days, a black shadow against all the white — somebody who sees me and wonders if he’d be able to stop me before it was too late. But it’s not necessary to stop me because I have no intention of committing suicide.

Earlier in my life, in connection with the big catastrophe, my fury and despair were sometimes so overwhelming that I did consider doing away with myself. But I never actually tried. Cowardice has been a faithful companion throughout my life. Like now, I thought then that life is all about never losing your grip. Life is a flimsy branch over an abyss. I’m hanging on to it for as long as I have the strength. Eventually I shall fall, like everybody else, and I don’t know what will lie in store. Is there somebody down there to catch me? Or will there be nothing but cold, harsh blackness rushing towards me?

The ice is here to stay.

It’s a hard winter this year, at the beginning of the new millennium. This morning, when I woke up in the December darkness, I thought I could hear the ice singing. I don’t know where I’ve got the idea from that ice can sing. Perhaps my grandfather, who was born here on this little island, told me about it when I was a small boy.

But I was woken up this morning, while it was still dark, by a sound. It wasn’t the cat or the dog. I have two pets who sleep more soundly than I do. My cat is old and stiff, and my dog is stone deaf in his right ear and can’t hear much in his left. I can creep past him without him knowing.

But that noise?

I tried to get my bearings in the darkness. It was some time before I realised that it must be the ice moving, although it’s a foot or more deep here in the bay. Last week, one day when I was more troubled than usual, I walked out towards the edge of the ice, where it meets the open sea, now stretching for a mile beyond the outermost skerry. That means that the ice here in the bay ought not to have been moving at all. But, in fact, it was rising and falling, creaking and singing.

I listened to this sound, and it occurred to me that my life has passed very fast. Now I’m here. A man aged sixty-six, financially independent, burdened with a memory that plagues me constantly. I grew up in desperate circumstances that are impossible to imagine nowadays in Sweden. My father was a browbeaten and overweight waiter, and my mother spent all her time trying to make ends meet. I succeeded in clambering out of that pit of poverty. As a child, I used to play out here in the archipelago every summer, and had no concept of time passing. In those days my grandfather and grandmother were still active, they hadn’t yet aged to a point where they were unable to move and merely waited for death. He smelled of fish, and she had no teeth left. Although she was always kind to me, there was something frightening about her smile, the way her mouth opened to reveal a black hole.

It seems not so long ago since I was in the first act. Now the epilogue has already started.

The ice was singing out there in the darkness, and I wondered if I was about to suffer a heart attack. I got up and took my blood pressure. There was nothing wrong with me, the reading was 155/90, my pulse was normal at 64 beats per minute. I felt to see if I had a pain anywhere. My left leg ached slightly, but it always does and it’s not something I worry about. But the sound of the ice out there was influencing my mood. Like an eerie choir made up of strange voices. I sat down in the kitchen and waited for dawn. The timbers of the cottage were creaking and squeaking. Either the cold was causing the timber to contract, or perhaps a mouse was scurrying along one of its secret passages.

The thermometer attached to the outside of the kitchen window indicated minus nineteen degrees Celsius.

I decide that today I shall do exactly what I do every other winter day. I put on my dressing gown, thrust my feet into a pair of cut-down wellington boots, collect my axe and walk down to the jetty. It doesn’t take long to open up my hole in the ice — the area I usually chip away hasn’t had time to freeze hard again. Then I undress and jump into the slushy water. It hurts, but when I clamber out, it feels as if the cold has been transformed into intensive heat.

Every day I jump down into my black hole in order to get the feeling that I’m still alive. Afterwards, it’s as if my loneliness slowly fades away. One day, perhaps, I shall die of the shock from plunging into freezing cold water. As my feet reach the bottom I can stand up in the water; I shan’t disappear under the ice. I shall remain standing there as the ice quickly freezes up again. That’s where Jansson, the man who delivers post to the islands in the archipelago, will find me.

No matter how long he lives, he will never understand what happened.

But I don’t worry about that. I’ve arranged my home out here on the little island I inherited as an impregnable fortress. When I climb the hill behind my house, I can see directly out to sea. There’s nothing there but tiny islands and rocks, their low backs just about visible over the surface of the water, or the ice. If I look in the other direction, I can see the more substantial and less inhospitable islands of the inner archipelago. But nowhere is there any other dwelling to be seen.

Needless to say, this isn’t how I’d envisaged it.

This house was going to be my summer cottage. Not my final redoubt. Every morning, when I’ve cut my hole in the ice or lowered myself down into the warm waters of summer, I am again amazed by what has happened to my life.

I made a mistake. And I refused to accept the consequences. If I’d known then what I know now, what would I have done? I’m not sure. But I know I wouldn’t have needed to spend my life out here like a prisoner, on a deserted island at the edge of the open sea.

I should have followed my plan.

I made up my mind to become a doctor on my fifteenth birthday. To my amazement my father had taken me out for a meal. He worked as a waiter, but in a stubborn attempt to preserve his dignity he worked only during the day, never in the evening. If he was instructed to work evenings, he would resign. I can still recall my mother’s tears when he came home and announced that he had resigned again. But now, out of the blue, he was going to take me to a restaurant for a meal. I had heard my parents quarrelling about whether or not I should be given this ‘present’, and it ended with my mother locking herself away in the bedroom. That was normal when something went against her wishes. Those were especially difficult periods when she spent most of her time locked away in the bedroom. The room always smelled of lavender and tears. I always slept on the kitchen sofa, and my father would sigh deeply as he made his bed on a mattress on the floor.

In my life I have come across many people who weep. During my years as a doctor, I frequently met people who were dying, and others who had been forced to accept that a loved one was dying. But their tears never emitted a perfume reminiscent of my mother’s. On the way to the restaurant, my father explained to me that she was oversensitive. I still can’t recall what my response was. What could I say? My earliest memories are of my mother crying hour after hour lamenting the shortage of money, the poverty that undermined our lives. My father didn’t seem to hear her weeping. If she was in a good mood when he came home, all was well. If she was in bed, surrounded by the scent of lavender, that was also good. My father used to devote his evenings to sorting out his large collection of tin soldiers, and reconstructing famous battles. Before I fell asleep, he would often lie down beside me on my bed, stroke my head, and express his regret at the fact that my mother was so sensitive that, unfortunately, it was not possible to present me with any brothers or sisters.

I grew up in a no-man’s-land between tears and tin soldiers. And with a father who insisted that, as with an opera singer, a waiter required decent shoes if he was to be able to do his job properly.

It turned out in accordance with his wish. We went to the restaurant. A waiter came to take our order. My father asked all kinds of complicated and detailed questions about the veal he eventually ordered. I had plumped for herring. My summers spent in the archipelago had taught me to appreciate fish. The waiter left us in peace.

This was the first time I had ever drunk a glass of wine. I was intoxicated almost with the first sip. After the meal, my father smiled and asked me what career I intended to take up.

I didn’t know. He’d invested a lot of money enabling me to stay on at school. The depressing atmosphere and shabbily dressed teachers patrolling the evil-smelling corridors had not inspired me to think about the future. It was a matter of surviving from day to day, preferably avoiding being exposed as one of those who hadn’t done their homework, and not collecting a black mark. Each day was always very pressing, and it was impossible to envisage a horizon beyond the end of term. Even today, I can’t remember a single occasion when I spoke to my classmates about the future.

‘You’re fifteen now,’ my father said. ‘It’s time for you to think about what you’re going to do in life. Are you interested in the culinary trade? When you’ve passed your exams you could earn enough washing dishes to fund a passage to America. It’s a good idea to see the world. Just make sure that you have a decent pair of shoes.’

‘I don’t want to be a waiter.’

I was very firm about that. I wasn’t sure if my father was disappointed or relieved. He took a sip of wine, stroked his nose, then asked if I had any definite plans for my life.

‘No.’

‘But you must have had a thought or two. What’s your favourite subject?’

‘Music.’

‘Can you sing? That would be news to me.’

‘No, I can’t sing.’

‘Have you learned to play an instrument, without my knowing?’

‘No.’

‘Then why do you like music best?’

‘Because Ramberg, the music teacher, pays no attention to me.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘He’s only interested in pupils who can sing. He doesn’t even know the rest of us are there.’

‘So your favourite subject is the one that you don’t really attend, is that it?’

‘Chemistry’s good as well.’

My father was obviously surprised by this. For a brief moment he seemed to be searching through his memory for his own inadequate schooldays, and wondering if there had even been a subject called chemistry. As I looked at him, he seemed bewitched. He was transformed before my very eyes. Until now the only things about him that had changed over the years were his clothes, his shoes and the colour of his hair (which had become greyer and greyer). But now something unexpected was happening. He seemed to be afflicted by a sort of helplessness that I’d never noticed before. Although he’d often sat on the edge of my bed or swum with me out here in the bay, he was always distant. Now, when he was exhibiting his helplessness, he seemed to come much closer to me. I was stronger than the man sitting opposite me, on the other side of the white tablecloth, in a restaurant where an ensemble was playing music that nobody listened to, where cigarette smoke mixed with pungent perfumes, and the wine was ebbing away from his glass.

That was when I made up my mind what I would say. That was the very moment at which I discovered, or perhaps devised, my future. My father fixed me with his greyish-blue eyes. He seemed to have recovered from the feeling of helplessness that had overcome him. But I had seen it, and would never forget it.

‘You say you think that chemistry is good. Why?’

‘Because I’m going to be a doctor. So you have to know a bit about chemical substances. I want to do operations.’

He looked at me with obvious disgust.

‘You mean you want to cut people up?’

‘Yes.’

‘But you can’t be a doctor unless you stay on at school longer.’

‘That’s what I intend doing.’

‘So that you can poke your fingers around people’s insides?’

‘I want to be a surgeon.’

I’d never thought about the possibility of becoming a doctor. I didn’t faint at the sight of blood, or when I had an injection; but I’d never thought about life in hospital wards and operating theatres. As we walked home that April evening, my father a bit tipsy and me a fifteen-year-old suffering from his first taste of wine, I realised that I hadn’t only answered my father’s questions. I’d given myself something to live up to.

I was going to become a doctor. I was going to spend my life cutting into people’s bodies.

Chapter 2

There was no post today.

There was no post yesterday either. But Jansson, the postman, does come to my island. He doesn’t bring me junk mail. I’ve forbidden him to do so. Twelve years ago I told him not to bother making the journey if he was only bringing junk mail. I was tired of all the special offers on computers and knuckles of pork. I told him I didn’t need it — people who were trying to control my life by pestering me with special offers. Life is not about cut prices, I tried to explain to him. Life is basically about something more important. I don’t know what exactly but, nevertheless, one must believe that it is important, and that the hidden meaning is something more substantial than discount coupons and scratch cards.

We quarrelled. It was not the last time. I sometimes think it is our anger that binds us together. But he never came with junk mail after that. The last time he had a letter for me, it was a communication from the local council. That was over seven years ago, an autumn day with a fresh gale blowing from the north-east, and low tide. The letter informed me that I had been allocated a plot in the cemetery. Jansson claimed that all local residents had received a similar letter. It was a new service: all tax-paying residents should know the location of their eventual grave, in case they wished to go to the cemetery and find out who they would have as neighbours.

It was the only real letter I have received in the last twelve years, apart from dreary pension documents, tax forms and bank statements. Jansson always appears at around two in the afternoon. I suspect he has to come out this far in order to be able to claim full travel expenses from the Post Office for his boat or his hydrocopter. I’ve tried to ask him about that, but he never answers. It could even be that I’m the one who makes it practical for him to continue as postman. That the authorities would have cancelled deliveries altogether but for the fact that he heaves to at my jetty three times a week in the winter months, and five times a week in the summer.

Fifteen years ago there were about fifty permanent residents out here in the archipelago. There was a boat ferrying four youngsters to and from the village school. This year there are only seven of us left, and only one is under the age of sixty. That’s Jansson. As the youngest, he is dependent on the rest of us keeping going, and insisting on living out here on the remote islands. Otherwise there’ll be no job for him.

But that’s irrelevant to me. I don’t like Jansson. He’s one of the most difficult patients I’ve ever had. He belongs to a group of extremely recalcitrant hypochondriacs. On one occasion a few years ago, when I’d examined his throat and checked his blood pressure, he suddenly said he thought he had a brain tumour that was affecting his eyesight. I said I didn’t have time to listen to his imaginings. But he insisted. Something was happening inside his brain. I asked him why he thought that. Did he have headaches? Did he have dizzy spells? Any other symptoms? He didn’t give up until I’d dragged him into the boathouse, where it was darker, and shone my special torch into his pupils, and told him that everything seemed to be normal.

I’m convinced that Jansson is basically as sound as a bell. His father is ninety-seven and lives in a care home, but his mind is clear. Jansson and his father fell out in 1970, and then Jansson stopped helping his father to fish for eels and went to work at a sawmill in Småland instead. I’ve never understood why he chose a sawmill. Naturally, I can understand his failing to put up with his tyrannical father any longer. But a sawmill? I really have no idea. However, since that trouble in 1970, they’ve not spoken to each other. Jansson didn’t return from Småland until his father was so old that he’d been taken into a home.

Jansson has an older sister called Linnea who lives on the mainland. She was married and used to run a cafe in the summer — but then her husband died. He collapsed on the hill down to the Co-op, whereupon she closed the cafe and found Jesus. She acts as messenger between father and son.

Jansson’s mother died many years ago. I met her once. She was already on her way into the shadows of senility, and was convinced I was her father, who had died in the 1920s. It was a horrible experience.

I wouldn’t have reacted so strongly now, but I was different in those days.

I don’t really know anything more about Jansson, apart from the fact that his first name is Ture and he’s a postman. I don’t know him, and he doesn’t know me. But whenever he sails round the headland, I’m generally standing on the jetty, waiting for him. I stand there wondering why, but I know I’ll never get an answer.

It’s like waiting for God, or for Godot; but instead, it’s Jansson who comes.

I sit down at the kitchen table and open the logbook I’ve been keeping for the past twelve years. I have nothing to say, and there’s nobody who might one day be interested in anything I write. But I write even so. Every day, all the year round, just a few lines. About the weather, the number of birds in the trees outside my window, my health. Nothing else. If I want, I can look up a particular date ten years ago and establish that there was a blue tit or an oystercatcher on the jetty when I went down there to wait for Jansson.

I keep a diary of a life that has lost its way.

The morning had passed.

It was time to pull my fur hat down over my ears, venture out into the bitter cold, stand on the jetty and wait for the arrival of Jansson. He must be frozen stiff in his hydrocopter when the weather’s as cold as this. I sometimes think I can detect a whiff of strong drink when he clambers on to the jetty. I don’t blame him.

When I stood up from the kitchen table, the animals came to life. The cat was the first to the door, the dog a long way behind. I let them out, put on an old, moth-eaten fur coat that belonged to my grand father, wrapped a scarf round my neck and reached for the thick fur hat with earflaps that dated back to military service during the Second World War. Then I set off for the jetty. It really was extremely cold. There was still not a sound to be heard. No birds, not even Jansson’s hydrocopter.

I could just picture him. He always looked as if he were driving an old-fashioned tram in the days when the driver had to stand outside at the mercy of the elements. His winter clothes were almost beyond description. Coats, overcoats, the ragged remains of a fur coat, even an old dressing gown, layer upon layer, on days as cold as this. I would ask him why he didn’t buy one of those special winter overalls I’d seen in a shop on the mainland. He’d say he didn’t trust them. The real reason was that he was too mean. He wore a fur hat similar to mine. His face was covered by a balaclava that made him look like a bank robber, and he wore an old pair of motorcycle goggles.

I often asked him if it wasn’t the Post Office’s responsibility to equip him with warm winter clothing. He mumbled something incomprehensible. Jansson wanted as little to do with the Post Office as possible, despite the fact that they were his employers.

There was a seagull frozen into the ice next to the jetty. Its wings were folded, its stiff legs sticking up straight out of the ice. Its eyes were like two glittering crystals. I released it and laid it on a stone on the shore. As I did so, I heard the sound of the hydrocopter’s engine. I didn’t need to check my watch, Jansson was on time. His previous stop would have been at Vesselsö. An old lady by the name of Asta Karolina Åkerblom lives there. She is eighty-eight years of age, has severe pains in her arms, but stubbornly refuses to move away from the island on which she was born. Jansson tells me her eyesight is poor, but even so she still knits jumpers and socks for her many grandchildren scattered all over the country. I wondered what the jumpers looked like. Is it really possible to knit and follow various patterns if one is half blind?

The hydrocopter came into view as it rounded the headland reaching out towards Lindsholmen. It is a remarkable sight as the insect-like vessel approaches and you can make out the muffled-up man at the wheel. Jansson switched off the engine, the big propeller fell silent, and he glided in towards the jetty, pulling off his goggles and balaclava. His face was red and sweaty.

‘I’ve got toothache,’ he said as he hauled himself up on to the jetty with considerable difficulty.

‘What am I supposed to do about that?’

‘You’re a doctor, aren’t you?’

‘I’m not a dentist.’

‘The pain is down here to the left.’

Jansson opened his mouth wide, as if he’d just caught sight of something horrific behind my back. My own teeth are in relatively good shape. I don’t normally need to visit the dentist more than once a year.

‘I can’t do anything. You need to see a dentist.’

‘You could take a look at least.’

Jansson was not going to give up. I went into the boathouse and fetched a torch and a spatula.

‘Open your mouth!’

‘It is open.’

‘Open wider.’

‘I can’t.’

‘I can’t see a thing. Turn your face this way!’

I shone the torch into Jansson’s mouth, and poked his tongue out of the way. His teeth were yellow and covered in tartar. He had a lot of fillings. But his gums seemed healthy, and I couldn’t see any holes.

‘I can’t see anything wrong.’

‘But it hurts.’

‘You’ll have to go to a dentist. Take a painkiller!’

‘I’ve run out.’

I produced a pack of painkillers from my medicine chest. He put it in his pocket. As usual, it never occurred to him to ask what he owed me. Neither for the consultation nor the painkillers. He takes my generosity for granted. That’s probably why I dislike him. It’s not easy when your closest friend is somebody you dislike.

‘I’ve got a parcel for you. It’s a present from the Post Office.’

‘Since when have they started giving away presents?’

‘It’s a Christmas present. Everybody’s getting a parcel from the Post Office.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I don’t want it.’

Jansson dug down into one of his sacks and handed over a thin little packet. A label wished me A Merry Christmas from the Chief Executive Officer of the Post Office.

‘It’s free. Throw it away if you don’t want it.’

‘You’re not going to convince me that anybody gets anything free from the Post Office.’

‘I’m not trying to convince you of anything at all. Everybody gets the same parcel. And it’s free.’

Jansson’s intractability sometimes gets the better of me. I didn’t have the strength to stand in the bitter cold and argue with him. I ripped open the parcel. It contained two reflectors and a message: Be careful on the roads! Christmas greetings from the Post Office.

‘What the hell do I need reflectors for? There are no cars here, and I’m the only pedestrian.’

‘One of these days you might get fed up with living out here. Then you might find a couple of reflectors useful. Can you give me a glass of water? I need to take a tablet.’

I have never allowed Jansson to set foot in my house, and I had no intention of doing so now.

‘I’ll give you a mug and you can melt some snow by placing it next to the engine.’

I went back into the boathouse and found the cap of an old Thermos flask that doubled as a mug, filled it with snow and handed it over. Jansson added one of his tablets. While the snow melted next to the hot engine, we stood and waited in silence. He emptied the mug.

‘I’ll be back on Friday. Then it’s the Christmas holidays.’

‘I know.’

‘How are you going to celebrate Christmas?’

‘I’m not going to celebrate Christmas.’

Jansson gestured towards my red house. I was afraid that all the clothes he was wearing might make him fall over, like a defeated knight wearing armour that was far too heavy for him.

‘You ought to hang some fairy lights around your house. It would liven things up.’

‘No thank you. I prefer it to be dark.’

‘Why can’t you make your surroundings a bit more pleasant?’

‘This is exactly how I want it.’

I turned my back on him and started walking up the slope towards the house. I threw the reflectors into the snow. As I reached the woodshed, I heard the roar as the hydrocopter engine sprang into life. It sounded like an animal in extreme pain. The dog was sitting on the steps, waiting for me. He could think himself lucky that he’s deaf. The cat was lurking around the apple tree, eyeing the waxwings pecking at the bacon rind I’d hung up.

I sometimes miss not having anybody to talk to. Banter with Jansson can’t really be called conversation. Just gossip. Local gossip. He goes on about things I have no interest in. He asks me to diagnose his imagined illnesses. My jetty and boathouse have become a sort of private clinic for just him. Over the years I have transferred into the boathouse — in among the old fishing nets and other equipment — blood pressure cuffs and instruments for removing earwax. My stethoscope hangs from a wooden hook together with a decoy eider my grandfather made a very long time ago. I have a special drawer in which I keep medicines that Jansson might well need. The bench on the jetty, where my grandfather used to sit and smoke his pipe after gutting the flounders he’d caught, is now used as an examination couch when Jansson needs to lie down. As blizzards raged, I have kneaded his abdomen when he suspected he had stomach cancer, and I have examined his legs when he was convinced he was suffering from some insidious muscle problem. I have often thought about the fact that my hands, once used in complicated operations, are now used exclusively to frisk Jansson’s enviably healthy body.

But conversation? No.

Every day I examine my own boat which has been beached. It’s now three years since I took it out of the water in order to make it seaworthy again. But I never got round to it. It’s a splendid old clinker-built wooden boat that is now being destroyed by a combination of weather and neglect. That shouldn’t be allowed to happen. This spring I shall get down to sorting it out.

But I wonder if I really will.

I went back indoors and returned to my jigsaw puzzle. The theme is one of Rembrandt’s paintings, Night Watch. I won it a long time ago in a raffle organised by the hospital in Luleå in the far north of Sweden, where I was a newly appointed surgeon who concealed his insecurity behind a large dose of self-satisfaction. As the painting is dark, the puzzle is very difficult to solve; I only managed to place one single piece today. I prepared the evening meal and listened to the radio as I ate. The thermometer was now showing minus twenty-one degrees. The sky was cloudless, and the forecast was that it would become even colder before dawn. It looked as if records for low temperatures were about to be broken. Had it ever been as cold as this here? During one of the war years, perhaps? I decided to ask Jansson about that — he usually knows about such things.

Something was nagging at me.

I tried lying down on the bed and reading. A book about how the potato came to Sweden. I had read it several times before. Presumably because it didn’t raise any questions. I could turn page after page and know that I wasn’t going to be faced with something unpleasant and unexpected. I switched off the light at midnight. My two animals had already gone to sleep. The wooden walls crackled and creaked.

I tried to come to a decision. Should I continue to man the defences of my island fortress? Or should I accept defeat, and try to make something of the life that was left to me?

I could not decide. I stared out into the darkness, and suspected that my life would continue as it had done hitherto. There would be no significant change.

It was the winter solstice. The longest night and the shortest day. Looking back, it would become clear to me that it had a significance I had never suspected.

It had been an ordinary day. It had been very cold, and in the snow around my frozen-in jetty were a couple of reflectors from the Post Office, and a dead seagull.

Chapter 3

Christmas came and went. New Year came and went.

On 3 January a snowstorm blew in over the archipelago from the Gulf of Finland. I stood on the hill behind my house, watching the black clouds piling up on the horizon. Almost two feet of snow fell in eleven hours, and I was obliged to climb out of the kitchen window in order to shovel snow away from the front door.

When the snowstorm drifted away, I noted in my logbook: ‘Waxwings vanished. The bacon rind deserted. Minus six degrees Celsius.’

Fifty-eight letters and three full stops. Why did I do it?

It was time for me to open up the hole in the ice and take a dip. The wind cut into my body as I trudged down to the jetty. I hacked away the thin covering of ice and stepped into the water. The cold felt like burning.

Just as I had clambered out and was about to return to the house, the wind fell momentarily. Something made me feel afraid and I held my breath. I turned round.

There was somebody standing out on the ice.

A black figure, a silhouette, outlined against all the white. The sun was only just over the horizon. I squinted in the glare, and tried to make out who it was. It was a woman. It looked as if she was leaning on a bicycle. Then I saw that it was in fact a wheeled walker, a Zimmer frame with wheels. I was shuddering with cold. Whoever it was, I couldn’t just stand here by my hole in the ice, naked. I hurried up to the house, and wondered if I’d had a vision.

I dressed and walked up the hill with my binoculars.

I hadn’t been imagining things.

The woman was still there. Her hands were resting on the handles of the walker. She had a handbag over one arm, and had wrapped a scarf round her fur hat, which was pulled down over her forehead. I had difficulty in making out her face through the binoculars. Where had she come from? Who was she?

I tried to think. Unless she was lost, it must be me she’d come to visit. There is nobody else here but me.

I hoped she had lost her way. I didn’t want any visitors.

She was still standing there motionless, her hands on the walker’s handles. I began to feel increasingly uncomfortable. There was something familiar about that woman out there on the ice.

How had she managed to make her way over here, through a snowstorm, pushing a Zimmer frame? It was three nautical miles to the mainland. It seemed incredible that she could have walked that far without freezing to death.

I stood watching her through the binoculars for over ten minutes. Just as I was about to put them away, she slowly turned her head and looked in my direction.

It was one of those moments in life when time doesn’t merely stand still, it ceases to exist.

The binoculars brought her closer towards me, and I saw that it was Harriet.

Although it was in spring almost forty years ago that I last saw her, I knew it was her. Harriet Hörnfeldt, whom I had loved more than any other woman.

I had been a doctor for a few years, to my waiter father’s endless surprise and my mother’s almost fanatical pride. I had managed to break out of poverty. I was living in Stockholm then, the spring of 1966 was outstandingly beautiful and the city seemed to be bubbling over with life. Something was happening, my generation had burst through the floodgates, torn open the doors of society and demanded change. Harriet and I used to walk through Stockholm as dusk fell.

Harriet was a few years older than I was, and had never had any ambition to continue her studies. She worked as an assistant in a shoe shop. She said she loved me, and I said I loved her, and every time I went home with her to her little bedsit in Hornsgatan, we made love on a sofa bed that constantly threatened to fall to pieces.

Our love was like a raging fire, it would be fair to say. And yet I let her down. I had been given a scholarship by the Karolinska Institute to do postgraduate work in the USA. On 23 May I would be leaving for Arkansas, and would be away for a year. Or at least, that’s what I told Harriet. In fact, the flight was due to leave for New York via Amsterdam on the 22nd.

I didn’t even say goodbye to her. I simply disappeared.

During my year in the USA I made no attempt to contact her. I knew nothing about her life, nor did I want to know. I sometimes woke up out of dreams in which she committed suicide. I had a guilty conscience, but always managed to silence it.

She gradually faded away from my consciousness.

I returned to Sweden and started work at a hospital in the north, in Luleå. Other women entered my life. Sometimes, especially when I was on my own and had drunk too much, I would wonder what had become of her. Then I would call directory enquiries and ask about Harriet Kristina Hörnfeldt. But I always hung up before the operator had tracked her down. I didn’t dare to meet Harriet again. I didn’t dare to discover what had happened.

Now she was standing out there on the ice, with a wheeled walker.

It was exactly thirty-seven years since I had vanished without explanation. I was sixty-six years old. Which meant she must be sixty-nine, going on seventy. I wanted to run into the house and slam the door shut behind me. And then, when I eventually stepped outside again, she would have gone. She would no longer exist. Whatever it was she wanted, she would have been a mirage. I would have simply not seen her standing out there on the ice.

Minutes passed.

My heart was racing. The bacon rind hanging in the tree outside the window was still deserted. The birds had not yet returned after the storm.

When I raised my binoculars again, I saw that she was lying on her back, her arms outstretched. I dropped the binoculars and rushed down to the ice, falling over several times in the deep snow, to where she lay. I checked that her heart was beating, and when I leaned over close to her face, I could just about feel her breathing.

I wouldn’t have the strength to carry her to the house. I fetched the wheelbarrow from behind the boathouse. I was drenched in sweat by the time I had eased her into the barrow. She hadn’t been as heavy as that in the days when we were close. Or was it me who no longer had the strength? Harriet lay doubled up in the wheelbarrow, a grotesque figure who had not yet opened her eyes.

When I came to the shore, the wheelbarrow became stuck. I briefly considered pulling her up to the house with the aid of a rope, but I rejected the idea — too undignified. I fetched a spade from the boathouse and cleared the snow from the path. Sweat was dripping off me. All the time I kept checking on Harriet. She was still unconscious. I felt her pulse again. It was fast. I shovelled away for all I was worth.

I eventually succeeded in getting her to the house. The cat was sitting on the bench under the window, and had been watching the whole process. I placed some planks over the steps up to the door, opened it, then ran with the barrow as fast as I could. At the third attempt, I managed to get Harriet and the wheelbarrow into the hall. The dog was lying under the kitchen table, watching. I chased him out, closed the door and lifted Harriet on to the kitchen sofa. I was so sweaty and out of breath that I was forced to sit down and rest before beginning to examine her.

I took her blood pressure. It was low, but not worryingly so. I removed her shoes and felt her feet. They were cold, but not frozen. Nor did her lips suggest that she was dehydrated. Her pulse fell slowly until it was 66 beats per minute.

I was just going to place a cushion under her head when she opened her eyes.

‘Your breath smells something awful,’ she said.

Those were her first words after all those years. I had found her on the ice, struggled like crazy to get her into my house, and the first thing she said was that I had bad breath. My immediate impulse was to throw her out again. I hadn’t invited her, I didn’t know what she wanted, but I could feel my guilt rising to the surface. Had she come to call me to account?

I didn’t know. But what other reason could there be?

I realised that I was afraid. It was as if I’d been caught in a trap.

Chapter 4

Harriet looked slowly round the room.

‘Where am I?’

‘In my kitchen. I saw you out there on the ice. You’d fallen over. I brought you in here. How are you?’

‘I’m fine. But I’m tired.’

‘Would you like some water?’

She nodded. I fetched a glass. She shook her head when I made to help, and sat up of her own accord. I observed her face and decided that she hadn’t really changed all that much. She had grown older, but not different.

‘I must have fainted.’

‘Are you in pain? Do you often faint?’

‘It happens.’

‘What does your doctor say about that?’

‘The doctor doesn’t say anything, because I haven’t asked him.’

‘Your blood pressure’s normal.’

‘I’ve never had problems with my blood pressure.’

She watched a crow clinging on to the bacon rind outside the window. Then she looked at me, her eyes clear and bright.

‘I’d be telling a lie if I said I was sorry to disturb you.’

‘You’re not disturbing me.’

‘Of course I am. I’ve simply turned up here unannounced. But that doesn’t bother me.’

She sat more upright. I could see that she was in fact in pain.

‘How did you get here?’ I asked.

‘Why don’t you ask how I found you? I knew about this island, where you spent your summers, and I knew it was off the east coast. It wasn’t easy to track you down, but I managed it in the end. I phoned the Post Office, because I realised they must know where somebody called Fredrik Welin lived.’

I began to remember something. Early in the morning I’d dreamed about an earthquake. I’d been surrounded by extremely loud noise, but suddenly everything was silent again. The noise hadn’t woken me up, but I’d opened my eyes when silence returned. I must have been awake for a couple of minutes, listening for sounds outside in the darkness.

Everything had been as normal. And I went back to sleep.

I now realised that the noise I’d heard in my dream had been Jansson’s hydrocopter. He was the one who had brought her here, and left her on the ice.

‘I wanted to arrive early. It was like travelling in an infernal machine. He was very nice. But expensive.’

‘What did he charge you?’

‘Three hundred for me and two hundred for the walker.’

‘But that’s scandalous!’

‘Is there anybody else out here with a hydrocopter?’

‘I’ll see to it that you get half of that back.’

She pointed at her glass.

I refilled it with water. The crow had flown away from the bacon rind. I stood up and said I would go and fetch her walker. There were large pools of water all over the floor from my boots. The dog appeared from somewhere behind the house, and accompanied me down to the shore.

I tried to think clearly.

After close to forty years, Harriet had reappeared from the past. The protective wall I’d erected out here on the island had proved to be inadequate. It had been breached by a Trojan Horse in the form of Jansson’s hydrocopter. He had rammed his way through the wall — and charged a lot of money for doing so.

I walked out on to the ice.

A north-easterly breeze was blowing. A flight of birds could just be made out in the far distance. The rocks and skerries were all white. It was one of those days characterised by the mysterious stillness one experiences only when the sea has iced over. The sun was low in the sky. The walker was frozen fast in the ice. I carefully worked it loose, then started wheeling it towards land. The dog was limping along behind me. I would soon have to have him put down. Him and the cat. They were both old, and their ancient bodies were causing them a lot of pain.

When we came to the shore, I went to the boathouse and fetched a threadbare blanket that I laid out on Grandfather’s bench. I couldn’t go back to the house until I’d decided what to do. There was only one possible reason for Harriet being here. She was going to take me to task. After all these years, she wanted to know why I had left her. What could I say? Life had moved on, that was the way things turned out. Bearing in mind what had happened to me, Harriet ought to be grateful that I had vanished out of her life.

It was cold, sitting there on the bench. I was about to get up when I heard noises in the distance. Voices and the sound of engines travel a long way over water and ice. I realised that it was Jansson. There wouldn’t be any post today, but he was busy running his illegal taxi service, no doubt. I walked back to the house. The cat was sitting on the steps, waiting to go in. But I shut her out.

Before entering the kitchen, I examined my face in the mirror hanging in the hall. A hollow-eyed, unshaven face. Hair uncombed, lips squeezed together, deep-set eyes. Not exactly pretty. Unlike Harriet, who looked much the same as she had always done, I had changed with the passing years. I flatter myself that I looked pretty good when I was young. I certainly attracted a lot of interest from the girls in those days. Until the events that put an end to my career as a surgeon, I was very particular about what I looked like and how I dressed. It was when I moved out here to the island that deterioration set in. For several years, I removed the three mirrors that had been hanging in the house. I didn’t want to see myself. Six months could pass without my going to the mainland for a haircut.

I stroked my hair with my fingers, and went into the kitchen.

The sofa was bare. Harriet wasn’t there. The door to the living room was ajar, but the room was empty. The only thing in there was the gigantic anthill. Then I heard the toilet flushing. Harriet returned to the kitchen, and sat down on the sofa again.

Once again, I could see from the way she moved that she was in pain but I couldn’t work out where.

She had sat down on the sofa so that the light from the window fell over her face. She seemed to look just the same as she’d done when we used to wander around Stockholm in the spring evenings, when I was planning to flee without taking leave of her. The closer the day came, the more often I would assure her that I loved her. I was afraid that she would see through me, and discover my carefully planned treachery. But she believed me.

She was staring out of the window.

‘There’s a crow on the lump of meat hanging in your tree.’

‘Bacon rind,’ I said. ‘Not a lump of meat. The small birds vanished when the gale blew up, before it became storm force and brought the blizzard with it. They always hide away when there’s a strong wind. I don’t know where they go.’

She turned to face me.

‘You look terrible. Are you ill?’

‘I look like I always look. If you’d come tomorrow afternoon, I’d have been clean-shaven.’

‘I don’t recognise you.’

‘You’re the same as ever.’

‘Why do you have an anthill in your living room?’

The question was direct, without hesitation.

‘If you hadn’t opened the door, you wouldn’t have seen it.’

‘I didn’t mean to go snooping around your house. I was looking for the bathroom.’

Harriet transfixed me with her clear eyes.

‘I have a question to ask you,’ she said. ‘Obviously, I ought to have been in touch before coming. But I didn’t want to risk you vanishing again.’

‘I have nowhere to run away to.’

‘Everybody has somewhere. But I want you to be here. I want to talk to you.’

‘So I understand.’

‘You understand nothing at all. But I need to stay here for a few days, and I have difficulty in walking up and down stairs. May I sleep on this sofa?’

Harriet wasn’t going to reproach me. So I was prepared to agree to anything. I told her that of course she could sleep on my sofa, if that’s what she wanted. As an alternative I had a collapsible camp bed that I could set up in the living room. Assuming she had no objection to sleeping in the same room as an anthill. She said she didn’t. I fetched the camp bed and erected it as far away from the anthill as possible. In the middle of the room was a table with a white cloth, and next to it was the anthill. It was almost as high as the table. Part of the cloth hanging down over the edge had been swallowed up by the anthill.

I made the bed, and supplied an extra pillow as I remembered that Harriet always liked to have her head comparatively high when she slept.

But not only then.

Also when she made love. I soon learned that she liked to have several pillows underneath the back of her head. Had I ever asked her why that was so important? I couldn’t remember.

I laid out the quilt, then looked out through the half-open door. Harriet was watching me. I switched on the two radiators, checked that they were warming up, and went into the kitchen. Harriet seemed to be recovering her strength. But she was hollow-eyed. Her face was constantly on the alert, ready to parry pain that could strike at any moment.

‘I’ll have a lie-down for a while,’ she said, and stood up.

I opened the door for her. I’d closed it again even before she’d lain down. I felt a sudden urge to lock the door and throw the key away. One day Harriet would have been swallowed up by my anthill.

I put on a jacket and went out.

It was a fine day. The gusts of wind were becoming less violent. I listened for Jansson’s hydrocopter. Was that a chainsaw I could hear in the distance? Perhaps getting fuel for a fire?

I walked down to the jetty and into the boathouse. A rowing boat was hanging there, suspended from ropes and pulleys, reminiscent of a gigantic fish that had been beached. There was a smell of tar in the boathouse. It was ages since I’d stopped using tar on the boats and fishing equipment out here in the archipelago, but I still have a few tins that I open now and then, just for the smell. It gives me a sense of tranquility — more than anything else is capable of.

I tried to recall the details of our farewell that wasn’t a proper farewell, that spring evening thirty-seven years ago. We’d walked over Strömbron Bridge, strolled along the quay at Skeppsbro, and then continued to Slussen. What had we spoken about? Harriet had talked about her day in the shoe shop. She loved telling me about her customers. She could even turn a pair of galoshes and a tin of shoe polish for old leather boots into an adventure. Memories of events and conversations came back to me. It was as if an archive that had been closed for ever had suddenly been opened up.

I sat on the bench on the jetty for a while before returning to the house. I peeped into the living room. Harriet was asleep, and had curled up like a little child. I felt a lump in my throat. That’s how she had always slept. I walked up the hill behind the house and gazed out over the white bay. It felt as if it was only now that I realised what I’d done on that occasion so long ago. I’d never dared to ask myself how Harriet had reacted to what had happened. When had it dawned on her that I would never be coming back? I had extreme difficulty in imagining the pain she must have felt when she knew that I had abandoned her.

When I got back to the house, Harriet had woken up. She was sitting on the kitchen sofa, waiting for me. My ancient cat was lying on her knee.

‘Did you get some sleep?’ I asked. ‘Did the ants leave you in peace?’

‘I like the smell of the anthill.’

‘If the cat is pestering you we can throw her out.’

‘Do you think I look as if I’m being pestered?’

I asked if she was hungry, and began preparing a meal. I had a hare in the freezer that Jansson had shot. But it would take too long to thaw out. Harriet sat on the sofa, watching me. I fried some cutlets and boiled some potatoes. We spoke hardly at all, and I was so nervous that I burned my hand on the frying pan. Why didn’t she say anything? Why had she come?

We ate in silence. I cleared the table and made coffee. My grandfather and grandmother always used to boil their coffee grains and water in a saucepan — there was no such thing as filter coffee in those days. I make my coffee like they used to do, and always count to seventeen once it starts boiling. Then it turns out exactly as I like it. I took out a couple of cups, put some cat food in a dish, and sat down on my chair. It was dark outside already. All the time, I was waiting for Harriet to explain why she had come. I asked if she wanted a refill. She slid her cup forward. The dog started scratching at the door. I let him in, gave him some food, then shut him in the hall with the walker.

‘Did you ever think we would meet again?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I asked what you thought.’

‘I don’t know what I thought.’

‘You are just as evasive now as you were in those days.’

She withdrew into herself. She always used to do that when she’d been hurt, I remembered that clearly. I felt an urge to stretch out my hand over the table and touch her. Did she feel an urge to touch me? It was as if nearly forty years of silence had started to bounce back and forth between us. An ant crawled over the tablecloth. Had it come from the anthill in the living room, or had it been unable to find its way back to the nest I suspect was inside the south wall of the house?

I stood up and said I was going to let the dog out. Her face was in shadow. It was a clear, starry night, dead calm. Whenever I see a sky like that, I wish I could write music. I walked down to the jetty again — I’d lost count of the number of times I’d done so already today. The dog ran out on to the ice in the light from the boathouse, and stopped where Harriet had been lying. The situation was unreal. A door had opened into the life I had more or less considered to be over, and the beautiful woman I had once loved but deceived had come back. In those days, when I used to meet her when she’d finished work in the shoe shop in Hamngatan, she used to be wheeling a bicycle. Now she supported herself on a wheeled walker. I felt lost. The dog returned, and we walked up to the house.

I paused at the back and looked in through the kitchen window.

Harriet was still sitting at the kitchen table. It was a while before I realised that she was crying. I waited until she’d dried her eyes. Only then did I go in. The dog had to stay in the hall.

‘I need some sleep,’ said Harriet. ‘I’m tired out. I’ll tell you tomorrow why I’ve come.’

She didn’t wait for me to respond, but stood up, said goodnight and eyed me briefly up and down. Then she closed the door. I went to the room where I keep my television set, but I didn’t switch it on. Meeting Harriet had tired me out. Naturally, I was afraid of all the accusations I knew would come. What could I say? Nothing.

I fell asleep in the armchair.

It was midnight when I was woken up by a stiff neck. I went to the kitchen and listened outside Harriet’s door. Not a sound. And no strip of light under the door. I cleared up in the kitchen, took a loaf and a baguette out of the freezer, let the dog and the cat in, and went to bed. But I couldn’t sleep. The door that had shut out everything I thought was in the past was banging; swinging back and forth. It was as if the time we had spent together was using the wind to force its way in.

I put on my dressing gown and went back down to the kitchen. The animals were asleep. It was minus seven degrees outside. Harriet’s handbag was on the kitchen sofa. I put it on the table and opened it. It contained a hairbrush and comb, her purse and a pair of gloves, a bunch of keys, a mobile phone and two bottles of medicine. I read the labels; it was clear that they were painkillers and antidepressants. Prescribed by a Dr Arvidsson in Stockholm. I began to feel uneasy, and I continued searching through her handbag. Down at the very bottom was an address book. It was worn and well thumbed, full of telephone numbers. When I looked up the letter ‘W’, I saw to my surprise that my Stockholm telephone number from the middle of the 1960s was there.

It had not even been crossed out.

Had she kept the address book all those years? I was about to put it back when I noticed a piece of paper tucked into the cover. I unfolded it and read it.

After doing so, I went to stand outside the front door. The dog sat by my side.

I still didn’t know why Harriet had come to my island.

But I had found in her handbag a letter informing her that she was seriously ill and did not have much longer to live.

Chapter 5

The wind came and went during the night.

I slept badly and lay listening to the gale. Squalls coming from the north-west — I could feel the draught through the wall. That was what I would note down in my logbook the following day. But I wondered if I would record the fact that Harriet had come to visit me.

She was lying on a camp bed directly underneath where I was. Inside my head, I kept going through the letter I’d found in her handbag, time and time again. She had stomach cancer, and it had spread. Cytotoxic drugs had only slowed things down a little, operations were out of the question. She had a hospital appointment with her consultant on 12 February.

I still had enough of the medical practitioner in me to be able to read the writing on the wall. Harriet was going to die. The treatment she had received so far would not cure her, and might not even prolong her life. She was passing into the terminal and palliative phase, to use the medical terms.

No cure, but no unnecessary suffering.

As I lay there in the darkness, the same thought kept coming to me, over and over again: it was Harriet who was going to die, not me. Although it was I who had committed the cardinal sin of deserting her, she was the one afflicted. I don’t believe in God. Apart from a short period in the early stages of my training as a doctor, I have barely been affected by religious considerations. I have never had discussions with representatives of the other world. No inner voices urging me to kneel. But now I was lying awake and feeling grateful for not being the one under threat. I barely slept for many hours. I got up twice for a pee and to listen outside Harriet’s door. Both she and the ants seemed to be asleep.

I got up at six o’clock.

When I went down to the kitchen, I saw to my surprise that she had already had breakfast. Or at least, she had drunk coffee. She had warmed up the dregs from the previous evening. The dog and the cat were out — she must have let them out. I opened the front door. There had been a light snowfall during the night. Tracks made by the paws of a dog and a cat were visible. And footprints.

Harriet had gone out.

I tried to see through the darkness. Dawn was still a distant prospect. Were any sounds to be heard? The wind came and went in squally gusts. All three sets of tracks led in the same direction: towards the back of the house. I didn’t need to look far. There is an old wooden bench in among the apple trees. My grandmother used to sit there. She would knit, straining her short-sighted eyes, or would simply sit with her hands clasped in her lap, listening to the sounds of the sea, which was never silent when not frozen over. But it wasn’t my grandmother’s ghostly figure sitting there now. Harriet had lit a candle that was standing on the ground, sheltered from the wind by a stone. The dog was lying at her feet. She looked the same as when I had first seen her the previous day: hat pulled over her ears, a scarf wrapped round her face. I sat down next to her on the bench. It was below freezing, but as the overnight wind had faded away, it didn’t feel particularly cold.

‘It’s beautiful here,’ she said.

‘It’s dark. You can’t see anything. And you can’t even hear the sea, as it’s frozen over.’

‘I had a dream that the anthill was growing and surrounding my bed.’

‘I can move your bed to the kitchen if you’d prefer that.’

The dog stood up and wandered off. It was moving cautiously, as dogs do when they are deaf and hence afraid. I asked Harriet if she’d noticed that the dog was deaf. She hadn’t. The cat came flouncing up. She took a good look at us, then withdrew into the darkness. The thought I’d had many times before came to me yet again: nobody understands the way cats behave. Did I understand the way I behaved? Did Harriet understand the way she behaved?

‘You’re naturally wondering why I’ve come here,’ she said.

The candle flickered without going out.

‘It is unexpected.’

‘Did you ever think you would see me again? Did you ever want to?’

I didn’t answer. When a person has abandoned another without explaining why, there isn’t really anything to say. There is no abandonment that can be excused or explained. I had abandoned Harriet. So I said nothing. I merely sat there, watching the dancing candle flame, and waited.

‘I haven’t come here to put you in the dock. I’ve come to beg you to keep your promise.’

I understood immediately what she meant.

The forest pool.

Where I went swimming as a child, the summer when I celebrated my tenth birthday, and my father and I paid a visit to the area in the north of Sweden where he was born. I’d promised her a visit to that forest pool when I returned from my year in America. We would go there and swim together in the dark water under the bright night sky. I’d thought of it as a beautiful ceremony — the black water, the light summer sky when it never gets dark, the great northern divers calling in the distance, the pool said by the locals to be bottomless. We would go swimming there, and after that, nothing would ever part us.

‘Perhaps you’ve forgotten the promise you made me?’

‘I remember very well what I said.’

‘I want you to take me there.’

‘It’s winter. The pool will be frozen.’

I thought about the hole in the ice that I made every morning. Would I be able to chop away at a frozen forest pool in the far north of Sweden? Where the ice is as hard as granite?

‘I want to see the pool. Even if it is covered in snow and ice. So that I know it’s true.’

‘It is true. The pool exists.’

‘You never said what it’s called.’

‘It’s too small to have a name. This country is full of small lakes without names. There’s hardly a single city street or country lane without a name, but lakes and pools without names are plentiful in the forests.’

‘I want you to keep your promise.’

She stood up with difficulty. The candle fell over and went out with a fizzing noise. It was completely dark all around us. The light from the kitchen window didn’t reach this far. Even so, I could see that she had brought her walking aid with her. When I held out my hand to assist her, she waved it away.

‘I don’t want help. I want you to keep your promise.’

When Harriet and her green wheeled walker came to where the light illuminated the snow, it seemed to me that she was walking down a moonlit street. When we were together almost forty years ago, we’d somewhat childishly pretended that we were moon worshippers. Did she remember that? I watched her side-on as she worked her way through the snow-covered stones and rocks. I found it hard to believe that she was dying. A person approaching the ultimate border. A different world or a different kind of darkness would take over. She parked the walker at the foot of the three steps and held on hard to the rail as she struggled up to the front door. As she opened it, the cat scampered between her legs and into the house. She went to her room. I listened with my ear pressed against the closed door. I could hear the faint clinking noise from a bottle. Medicine from her bag. The cat miaowed and rubbed herself against my legs. I gave her something to eat, and sat down at the kitchen table.

It was still dark outside.

I tried to read the temperature on the thermometer attached to the outside of the window frame, but the glass containing the mercury column had misted over. The door opened, and Harriet came in. She had brushed her hair and changed into a new jumper. It was lavender blue. I was reminded of my mother and her lavender-scented tears. But Harriet wasn’t crying. She smiled as she sat down on the kitchen sofa.

‘I’d never have believed that you would become a person who lived with a dog and a cat and an anthill.’

‘Life seldom turns out the way you thought it would.’

‘I’m not going to ask you about how your life turned out. But I do want you to keep your promise.’

‘I don’t think I could even find my way back to the forest pool.’

‘I’m quite sure you could. Nobody had a sense of direction and distance anywhere near as good as yours.’

I couldn’t challenge Harriet’s claim. I can always find my way through even the most complicated maze of streets. And I never get lost in the countryside.

‘I suppose I might be able to find it if I think hard enough. It’s just that I don’t understand why.’

‘Because it’s the most beautiful promise I’ve ever been given in my life.’

‘The most beautiful?’

‘The only genuinely beautiful one.’

Those were her very words. The only genuinely beautiful promise. It was as if she’d started off a large orchestra playing inside my head, such was the power of her speech.

‘We’re always being made promises,’ she said. ‘You make them yourself and you listen to others giving theirs. Politicians are always going on about providing a better quality of life for people as they get older, and a health service in which nobody ever gets bedsores. Banks promise you high interest rates, some food promises to make you lose weight if you eat it, and body creams guarantee old age with fewer wrinkles. Life is quite simply a matter of cruising along in your own little boat through a constantly changing but never-ending stream of promises. And how many do we remember? We forget the ones we would like to remember, and we remember the ones we’d prefer to forget. Broken promises are like shadows dancing around in the twilight. The older I become, the more clearly I see them. The most beautiful promise I’ve ever been given in my life was the one you made to take me to that forest pool. I want to see it, and dream that I’m swimming in it, before it’s too late.’

I would take her. The only thing I might be able to avoid was setting off in the middle of winter. But perhaps she didn’t dare wait until the spring, because of her illness?

I thought that perhaps I should tell her I knew she was mortally ill. But I didn’t.

‘Do you understand what I mean when I talk about all the promises that accompany one’s journey through life?’

‘I’ve tried to avoid being taken in. One is so easily fooled.’

She stretched out her hand and placed it over mine.

‘There was a time when I knew you. We walked along the streets of Stockholm. In my memory, it’s always spring when we’re out walking there. The person I had by my side then is not the same person that you are now. He could have become anything at all — apart from a solitary man on a little island on the edge of the open sea.’

Her hand was still lying on top of mine. I didn’t touch it.

‘Do you recall any darkness?’ she asked.

‘No. It was always light.’

‘I don’t know what happened.’

‘Nor do I.’

She squeezed my hand.

‘You don’t need to lie to me. Of course you know. You caused me endless pain. I don’t think I’ve got over it even now. Do you want to know what it felt like?’

I didn’t answer. She took away her hand and leaned back on the sofa.

‘All I want is for you to keep your promise. You must leave this island for a few days. Then you can come back here, and I’ll never bother you again.’

‘It’s not possible,’ I said. ‘It’s too far. My car isn’t up to it.’

‘All I want is for you to show me how to get there.’

It was obvious she wasn’t going to give up.

It was starting to get light. The night was over.

‘I married,’ she said out of the blue. ‘What about you?’

‘I divorced.’

‘So you got married as well? Who to?’

‘You don’t know them.’

‘Them?’

‘I was married twice. My first wife was called Birgit, and she was a nurse. After two years we had no more to say to each other. And she wanted to retrain as a mining engineer. What did I care for stones and gravel and mine shafts? My second wife was called Rose-Marie, and was an antiques dealer. You can’t imagine how often I left the operating theatre after a long day and accompanied her to some auction sale or other, and then had to ferry home an old cupboard from some peasant’s kitchen. I lost count of how many tables and chairs I had to soak in lye in an old bathtub in order to get rid of the paint. That lasted for four years.’

‘Have you any children?’

I shook my head. Once upon a time, ages ago, I had imagined that when I grew old, I would have children to lighten the darkness of my old age. It was too late now — I’m a bit like my boat, out of the water and covered by a tarpaulin.

I looked at Harriet.

‘Do you have any children?’

She eyed me for a long time before answering.

‘I have a daughter.’

It struck me that she could have been my child, had I not abandoned her.

‘She’s called Louise,’ said Harriet.

‘That’s a lovely name,’ I said.

I stood up and made coffee. Morning was now in full swing. I waited until the water started to boil, counted to seventeen, and then let it brew. I took two cups from the cupboard, and sliced up the loaf of bread that had thawed by now. We were a couple of OAPs sitting down to coffee in the middle of January. We were one of the thousands of coffee mornings that take place every day in this country of ours. I wondered if any of the others were taking place in circumstances anything remotely like the one in my kitchen.

After drinking her coffee, Harriet withdrew into her anthill room and closed the door.

For the first time in many years I skipped my winter bath. I hesitated for some considerable time, and was about to get undressed and fetch the axe when I changed my mind. There would be no more winter baths for me until I had taken Harriet to the forest pool.

Instead of my dressing gown I put on a jacket and walked down to the jetty. There had been an unexpected change of weather: a thaw had set in, and the snow stuck to my boots.

I had a few hours to myself. The sun broke through the clouds, and melting snow and ice began dripping from the boathouse roof. I went inside, fetched one of my tins of tar and opened it. The smell calmed me down. I almost fell asleep in the pale sunlight.

I thought back to the time when Harriet and I were together. I felt that nowadays I belonged to an epoch that no longer existed. I lived in a strangely barren landscape for those who were left over, who had lost their footing in their own time and were unable to live with the innovations of the new age. My mind wandered. When Harriet and I were together, everybody smoked. All the time, and everywhere. The whole of my youth was filled with ashtrays. I can still recall the chain-smoking doctors and professors who trained me to become a person with the right to wear a white coat. In those days, the postman who delivered mail to the skerries was Hjalmar Hedelius. In winter he would skate from island to island. His rucksack must have been incredibly heavy, and that was before the modern obsession with junk mail.

My rambling thoughts were broken by the sound of an approaching hydrocopter.

Jansson had already been to the widow Mrs Åkerblom, and was now heading for me at full speed, bringing all his aches and pains. The toothache that had been pestering him before Christmas had gone away. The last time he moored by my jetty, he had asked me to examine a few brown moles that had formed on the back of his left hand. I calmed him down by assuring him that they were normal developments as a man grew older. He would outlive all the rest of us on the islands. When we pensioners have gone, Jansson will still be chugging along in his old converted fishing boat, or rushing around in his hydrocopter. Unless he’s been made redundant, of course. Which will almost certainly be his fate.

Jansson glided up to the jetty, switched off the engine and began wriggling out of all his coats and hats. He was red in the face, his hair was standing on end.

‘A Happy New Year to you,’ he said when he was standing on the jetty.

‘Thank you.’

‘Winter is still very much with us.’

‘It certainly is.’

‘I’ve been having a few problems with my stomach since New Year’s Eve. I’ve been finding it hard to go to the toilet. Constipation, as they say.’

‘Eat some prunes.’

‘Could it be a symptom of something else?’

‘No.’

Jansson had difficulty in concealing his curiosity. He kept glancing up at my house.

‘How did you celebrate New Year?’

‘I don’t celebrate New Year.’

‘I actually bought some rockets this year. Haven’t done that for years. Unfortunately one shot in through the door of the woodshed.’

‘I’m usually fast asleep by midnight. I see no reason why I should change that habit simply because it’s the last day of the year.’

Jansson was dying to ask about Harriet. No doubt she hadn’t told him who she was, just that she wanted to visit me.

‘Have you any post for me?’

Jansson looked at me in astonishment. I’d never asked him that before.

‘No, nothing,’ he said. ‘There never is much in the way of post at this time of year.’

The conversation and consultation were over. Jansson took one last look at the house, then clambered down into his hydrocopter. I started walking away. As he switched the engine on, I put my hands over my ears. I turned and watched him disappear in a cloud of snow round the headland generally known as Antonsson’s Point, after the skipper of a cargo boat who’d had a drop too much to drink and ran aground while on the way to beach his craft for the winter.

Harriet was sitting at the kitchen table when I went in.

I could see that she had been making herself up. In any case, she was less pale than she had been before. It struck me again how good-looking she was, and what an idiot I’d been to ditch her.

I sat down at the table.

‘I shall take you to the forest pool,’ I said. ‘I’ll keep my promise. It’ll take two days to get there in my old car. We’ll have to spend one night in an hotel. And I should say that I’m not sure I’ll be able to find my way there. Up in those parts, the logging tracks keep changing, according to where the felling is taking place. And even if I can find the right track, it’s by no means sure that it will be passable. I might need to find somebody with a plough attachment for his tractor who can open up the road for us. It will take at least four days altogether. Where do you want me to take you, when it’s all over?’

‘You can just leave me at the side of the road.’

‘At the side of the road? With your walker?’

‘I managed to get here, didn’t I?’

There was an edge in her voice, and I didn’t want to persist. If she preferred to be left at the side of the road, I wasn’t going to argue.

‘We can set off tomorrow,’ I said. ‘Jansson can take you and your walker to the mainland.’

‘What about you?’

‘I’ll walk over the ice.’

I got up, as it had dawned on me that there was an awful lot for me to do. First of all I needed to make a catflap in the front door, and make sure that my dog could use the kennel that had been abandoned for many years. I would have to provide them with enough food to last them for a week. Needless to say, they would eat everything as soon as they could. Saving for the future was not a concept with which they were familiar. But they’d be able to manage without food for a few days.

I spent the day fixing a catflap in the front door and trying to teach the cat to use it. The kennel was in a worse state than I thought. I nailed some felt on to the roof to keep out the snow and rain, and laid out a couple of old blankets for the dog to lie on. I’d barely finished doing that before he had lain down inside it.

I phoned Jansson that evening. I’d never rung him before.

‘Ture Jansson, postman.’

It sounded as if he were reciting a noble rank.

‘Fredrik here. I hope I’m not disturbing you.’

‘Not at all. You don’t often ring.’

‘I have never rung you. I wonder if you could do a taxi run tomorrow?’

‘A lady with a wheeled walker?’

‘As you charged her such a disgraceful amount when you brought her here, I take it for granted that there will be no charge tomorrow. If you don’t go along with that, I shall naturally report you for running an illegal taxi business out here in the archipelago.’

I could hear Jansson’s intake of breath at the other end of the line.

‘What time?’ he asked eventually.

‘You won’t have any post to deliver tomorrow. Can you be here for ten?’

Harriet spent most of the day lying down and resting while I made all the preparations for the journey. I wondered if she’d be able to cope with the strain. But that wasn’t really my problem. I was only going to do my duty, nothing else. I thawed the hare steak and put it in the oven for dinner. My grandmother had placed a handwritten recipe for preparing a hare steak inside a cookery book. I had followed her instructions before with some success, and this time was no exception. When we sat down at the kitchen table, I noticed that Harriet’s eyes had glazed over again. I realised that the clinking noise I’d heard coming from her room was not from medicine bottles, but from bottles of alcohol. Harriet kept retiring to her room in order to knock back the booze. As I started to chew the hare steak, it occurred to me that the journey to the frozen forest lake might turn out to be even more problematic than I had first thought.

The hare was good. But Harriet poked around rather than eating much. I knew that cancer patients are often afflicted by a chronic lack of appetite.

We rounded off the meal with coffee. I gave the remains of the steak to the dog and the cat. They can generally share food without resorting to scratching and fighting. I sometimes imagine them as an old couple, something like my grandmother and grandfather.

I told her that Jansson would be coming to collect her the next day, handed over my car keys and explained what the car looked like and where it was parked. She could sit in it and wait while I walked ashore over the ice.

She took the keys and put them in her handbag. Then, without warning, she asked me if I’d ever missed her during all those years.

‘Yes,’ I told her, ‘I have missed you. But missing something only makes me depressed. It makes me afraid.’

She didn’t ask anything more, but disappeared into her room again; and when she came back, her eyes were even more glassy than before. We didn’t speak much to each other at all that evening. I think we were both worried about spoiling the journey we were going to make together. Besides, we had always found it easy to be silent in each other’s company.

We watched a film about some people who ate themselves to death. We made no comment when it was over, but I’m sure we shared the same opinion.

It was a very bad film.

I slept fitfully that night.

I spent hours thinking about all the things that could go wrong on the journey. Had Harriet told me the whole truth? I was wondering more and more if what she really wanted was something else, if there was another reason why she had tracked me down after all those years.

Before I finally managed to go to sleep, I had made up my mind to be careful. I couldn’t know what was in store, of course. All I wanted was to be prepared.

Uneasiness was persisting, whispering its silent warnings.

Chapter 6

It was a clear, calm morning when we set off.

Jansson arrived on time. He lifted the walker on board, and then we helped Harriet to squeeze in behind his broad back. I didn’t mention my intention of going away as well. The next time he came, and found that I wasn’t waiting for him on the jetty, he would walk up to the house. Perhaps he might think I was lying dead inside? And so I had written a note and pinned it to the front door: ‘I’m not dead.’

The hydrocopter vanished behind the headland. I had fixed a pair of old hunting clamps to my boots, so that I wouldn’t keep slipping on the ice.

My rucksack weighed nine kilos. I had checked the weight on my grandmother’s old bathroom scales. I walked quickly, but avoided working up a sweat. I always feel afraid when I have to walk on ice covering deep water. It’s nerve-racking. Just off the easternmost headland of my island is a deep depression known as the Clay Pit, which at one point is fifty-six metres deep.

I squinted in the dazzling sunlight, reflected off the ice. I could see some people on skates in the distance, heading for the outermost skerries. Otherwise, nothing — the archipelago in winter is like a desert. An empty world with occasional caravans of ice skaters. And now and then, a nomad like me.

When I came to the mainland at the old fishing village whose little harbour is hardly ever used nowadays, Harriet was sitting in my car, waiting for me. I collapsed the walker and packed it away in the boot, then sat down behind the wheel.

‘Thank you,’ said Harriet. ‘Thank you for this.’

She stroked my arm briefly. I started the engine, and we set off on our long journey northwards.

The journey began badly.

We’d barely gone a mile when an elk suddenly strode into the middle of the road. It was as if it had been waiting in the wings, to make a dramatic entrance as we approached. I slammed on the brakes and narrowly missed crashing into its massive body. The car skidded and we became stuck in a snowdrift at the side of the road. It all happened in a flash. I had screamed out loudly, but there hadn’t been a sound from Harriet. We sat there in silence. The elk had bounded away into the dense forest.

‘I wasn’t speeding at all,’ I said in a lame and totally unnecessary attempt to excuse myself. As if it had been my fault that an elk had been lurking around at the side of the road, and chosen that moment to take a closer look at us.

‘It’s OK,’ said Harriet.

I looked at her. Perhaps there’s no need to be frightened of elks that appear from nowhere when you’re shortly going to die?

The car was well and truly stuck. I fetched a spade from the boot, cleared the snow away from around the front wheels, broke off some fir branches and laid them on the road behind the wheels. I then reversed out of the drift with a sudden spurt, and we were able to continue our journey.

After another six or seven miles, I could feel the car starting to pull to the left. I pulled over and got out. We had a puncture in a front tyre. It occurred to me that the journey could hardly have started any worse than this. It is not a pleasant experience, kneeling down in snow and ice, messing about with nuts and bolts and handling dirty tyres. I have not been deserted by the surgeon’s demand for cleanliness during an operation.

I was soaking in sweat by the time I’d finished changing the tyre. I was also angry. I would never be able to find the pool. Harriet would collapse, and no doubt a relative or friend would turn up and accuse me of acting irresponsibly, undertaking such a long journey with somebody that ill.

We set off again.

The road was slippery, the snow piled up at the sides of the road very high. We met a couple of lorries, and passed an old Volvo Amazon parked on the hard shoulder: a man was just getting out with his dog. Harriet said nothing. She was gazing out through the passenger window.

I started thinking about the journey to the pool I’d made with my father a long time ago. He had just been sacked again for refusing to work evenings at the restaurant that had employed him. We drove north out of Stockholm and spent the night in a cheap hotel just outside Gävle. I have a vague memory of it having been called Furuvik, but I may be mistaken. We shared a room; it was in July, very stuffy, one of the hottest summers of the late forties.

As my father had been working at one of Stockholm’s leading restaurants, he had been earning good money. It was a period when my mother cried unusually little. One day, my father came home with a new hat for her. On that occasion she cried tears of happiness. That very same day he had served the director of one of Sweden’s biggest banks, who was very drunk even though it was an early lunch, and he had given my father far too big a tip.

As I understood it, being given too large a tip was just as degrading for my father as being given too little, or even no tip at all. Nevertheless, he had converted the tip into a red hat for my mother.

She didn’t want to come with us when my father suggested that we should go on a trip to Norrland and enjoy a few days’ holiday before he needed to start looking for work again.

We had an old car. No doubt my father had started saving up for it at a very early age. Early in the morning, we clambered into that selfsame car and left Stockholm, taking the main road to Uppsala.

We spent the night at that hotel I think might have been called Furuvik. I remember waking up shortly before dawn and seeing my father standing naked in front of the window, gazing out through the thin curtain. He looked as if he’d been petrified in the middle of a thought. For what seemed like an eternity but was probably just a brief moment, I was scared to death and convinced that he was about to desert me. It was as though only a shell were standing there in front of me, nothing else. Inside the skin a large vacuum. I don’t know how long he stood there immobile, but I clearly recall my breathless fear that he was going to abandon me. In the end he turned round, glanced at me as I lay there with the covers pulled up to my chin and my eyes half closed. He went back to bed, and it was not until I was sure he was asleep that I turned over and lay with my head pressed up against the wall, and went back to sleep.

We reached our destination the following day.

The pool was not large. The water was completely black. On the opposite side to where we were standing, cliffs towered up; but either side was dense forest. There was no shore as such, no transition between water and forest. It was as if the water and the trees were locked together in a trial of strength, with neither being able to cast the other to one side.

My father tapped me on the shoulder.

‘Let’s go for a swim,’ he said.

‘I don’t have any swimming trunks with me.’

He looked at me in amusement.

‘Who do you think does? Who do you think’s going to see us? Dangerous forest goblins hiding in among the trees?’

He started to undress. I observed his large body surreptitiously, and felt embarrassed. He had an enormous belly that bulged out and wobbled when he removed his underpants. I followed suit, nervously aware of my own nakedness. My father waded out and then flopped down into the water. His body seemed to be surging forward like a gigantic whale, causing chaos in every part of the pool. The mirror-like surface was shattered in his wake. I waded out and felt the chill of the water. For some reason I had expected the water to be the same temperature as the air. It was so hot in among the trees that steam was rising. But the water was cold. I took a quick dip, then hurried to get out.

My father swam round and round with powerful strokes and kicks that created cascades of icy water. And he sang. I don’t recall what he sang, but it was more a bellow of delight, a fizzing cataract of black water that transmogrified into my father’s headstrong singing.

As I sat in the car with Harriet by my side, it occurred to me that there was nothing else in my life that I could recall in such vivid detail as the time at the pool with my father. Although it had happened fifty-five years ago, I could see the whole of my life summed up in that image: my father swimming alone and naked in the forest pool. Me, standing naked among the trees, watching him. Two people belonging together, but already quite different.

That’s the way life is: one person swims, another watches.

I started to reassess returning to the pool. It was now more than a matter of keeping a promise I’d made to Harriet. I would also have the pleasure of seeing again something I never thought I would.

We travelled through a winter wonderland.

Freezing fog hovered over the white fields. Smoke was rising from the chimneys. Small icicles were hanging down from the thousands of dishes pointing their metallic eyes towards distant satellites.

After a few hours, I stopped at a petrol station. I needed to top up the windscreen washer fluid, and we also had to eat. Harriet headed for the grill bar attached to the petrol station. I watched how cautiously she moved, one painful step at a time. By the time I got there, she had already sat down and started eating. The day’s special was smoked sausage. I ordered a fish fillet from the main menu. Harriet and I were just about the only diners. A lorry driver was sitting at a corner table, half asleep over a cup of coffee. I could read from the logo on his jacket that his job was to ‘Keep Sweden Going’.

What are we doing? I wondered. Harriet and I, on our journey northwards? Are we keeping our country going? Or are we peripheral, of no significance?

Harriet chewed away at her smoked sausage. I observed her wrinkled hands, and thought about how they had once upon a time caressed my body and filled me with a sense of well-being that I had hardly ever found again later in life.

The lorry driver stood up and left the cafe.

A girl with a heavily made-up face and a dirty apron served me my fish. Somewhere in the background I could hear the faint sound of a radio. I could gather that it was the news, but I had no idea what was being said. Earlier in my life I was the kind of person who was always eager to discover the latest news. I would read, listen and watch. The world demanded my presence. One day two little girls drowned in the Göta Canal, another day a president was assassinated. I always needed to know. During my years of increasing isolation on my grandparents’ island, that habit had gradually deserted me. I never read the newspapers, and watched the television news only every other day at most.

Harriet left most of the food on her plate untouched. I fetched her a cup of coffee. Snowflakes had begun to drift down outside the window. The cafe was still empty. Harriet took her walker and disappeared into the toilet. When she came back, her eyes were glazed. It worried me without my being able to explain why. I could hardly blame her for trying to deaden the pain. Nor could I very well take responsibility for her secret drinking.

It was as if Harriet had read my thoughts. She suddenly asked me what I was thinking about.

‘About Rome,’ I said evasively. I don’t know why. I once attended a conference for surgeons in Rome that had been exhausting and badly organised. I skipped the last two days and instead explored the Villa Borghese. I moved out of the big five-star hotel where the conference delegates were staying, and moved to Dinesens’ Guest House where Karen Blixen once used to be a regular guest. I flew from Rome convinced that I would never return.

‘Is that all?’

‘That’s all. I wasn’t thinking about anything else.’

But that wasn’t true. I had in fact returned to Rome two years later. The major catastrophe had taken place, and I rushed away from Stockholm in a frenzy in order to find peace and quiet. I remember dashing to Arlanda airport without a ticket. The next flights to southern Europe were to Madrid and Rome. I chose Rome because the travelling time was shorter.

I spent a week wandering round the streets, my mind full of the great injustice that had stricken me. I drank far too much, occasionally got into bad company, and was mugged on my last evening. I returned to Sweden severely beaten up, with my nose looking like a blood-soaked dumpling. A doctor at the Southern Hospital straightened it out and gave me some painkillers. After that, Rome was the last place on earth I ever wanted to visit again.

‘I’ve been to Rome,’ said Harriet. ‘My whole life has revolved around shoes. What I thought was just a coincidence when I was young, working in a shoe shop because my father had once worked as a foreman at Oscaria in Örebro, turned out to be something that would affect the whole of my life. All I’ve ever done, really, is wake up morning after morning and think about shoes. I once went to Rome and stayed there for a month as an apprentice to an old master craftsman who made shoes for the richest feet in the world. He devoted as much care to each pair as Stradivari did to his violins. He used to believe feet had personalities of their own. An opera singer — I can no longer remember her name — had spiteful feet that never took their shoes seriously or showed them any respect. On the other hand, a Hungarian businessman had feet that displayed tenderness towards their shoes. I learned something from that old man about both shoes and art. Selling shoes was never the same again after that.’

We set off again.

I had started to think about where we should spend the night. It wasn’t dark yet, but I preferred not to drive in bad light. My sight had deteriorated in recent years.

The winter landscape’s uniformity gave it a special kind of beauty. We were travelling through country where practically nothing happened. Though now as we passed over the brow of a hill we both noticed a dog sitting by the side of the road. I braked in case it suddenly darted out in front of the car. When we’d passed it, Harriet remarked that it had a collar. I could see in the rear-view mirror that it had started following the car. When I slowed again, it caught up with us.

‘It’s following us,’ I said.

‘I think it’s been abandoned.’

‘Why do you think that?’

‘Dogs that run after cars usually bark. But this one isn’t barking.’

She was right. I pulled up on the hard shoulder. The dog sat down, its tongue hanging out of its mouth. When I reached out, it didn’t move. I took hold of its collar, and saw that it had a disc with a telephone number. Harriet took out her mobile phone and dialled the number. She handed the phone to me. Nobody answered.

‘There’s nobody there.’

‘If we drive off, the dog may run after us until it drops dead.’

Harriet took the phone and called directory enquiries.

‘The owner is Sara Larsson, who lives at Högtunet Farm in Rödjebyn. Do we have a map?’

‘Not a sufficiently large-scale one.’

‘We can’t just leave the dog on the road.’

I got out and opened the back door. The dog immediately jumped in and curled up. A lonely dog, I thought. No different from a lonely person.

After five or six miles we came to a little village with a general store. I went in and asked about Högtunet Farm. The shop assistant was young and wearing a baseball cap back to front. He drew a map for me.

‘We’ve found a dog,’ I said.

‘Sara Larsson has a spaniel,’ said the shop assistant. ‘Perhaps it’s run away?’

I returned to the car, gave Harriet the hand-drawn map and drove back the way we’d come. All the time the dog lay curled up on the back seat. But I could see that it was alert. Harriet guided me into a side road hidden between banks of snow carved by the snowplough. It was disorientating entering this white corridor, all sense of direction lost. The road meandered along between fir trees heavily laden with snow. Though the road had been ploughed nothing had been through since last snowfall.

‘Look — animal tracks in the snow,’ said Harriet. ‘They’re leading back towards the main road.’

The dog had sat up on the back seat, its ears cocked, staring out through the windscreen. It kept shuddering, perhaps feeling cold. We drove over an old stone bridge. Ramshackle wooden fencing was just visible by the side of the road. The forest opened up. On a hillock ahead of us was a house that hadn’t seen a coat of paint for many years. There was also an outhouse and a partially collapsed barn. I stopped and let the dog out. It ran to the front door, scratched at it, then sat down to wait. I noticed that no smoke was coming from the chimney and the outside light over the front door was not on. I didn’t like what I saw.

‘Just like a painting,’ said Harriet, ‘left behind by the artist on nature’s easel.’

I got out of the car and lifted out the walker. Harriet shook her head, and stayed in the car. I stood in front of the house, listening. The dog was still sitting there motionless, staring at the door. A rusty old plough stuck out of the snow like the remains of a shipwreck. Everything seemed to be abandoned. I could see no tracks in the snow apart from those made by the dog. I was feeling more and more uneasy. I walked up to the house and knocked on the door. The dog stood up.

‘Who’s going to open it?’ I whispered. ‘Who are you waiting for? Why were you sitting out there on the main road?’

I knocked again, then tried the handle. The door wasn’t locked. The dog ran in between my legs. It smelled stuffy inside the house — not unaired, but as if time had stood still and begun emitting a scent of doom. The dog had run into what I assumed was the kitchen, and not returned. I shouted, but there was no answer. On the left was a room with old-fashioned furniture and a clock with a pendulum swinging silently behind the glass. On the right was a staircase leading to the upper floor. I went to where the dog had gone and stopped abruptly in the doorway.

An old woman was lying prone on the floor of grey linoleum. It was obvious that she was dead. Nevertheless, I did what one ought to do in the circumstance: knelt down and felt for a pulse in her neck, her wrist and in one temple. It wasn’t really necessary as the body was cold and rigor mortis had already set in. I assumed it was Sara Larsson lying there. It was cold in the kitchen as one of the windows was half open. That was no doubt the way the dog had taken in order to get out and try to fetch help. I stood up and looked around. Everything was neat and tidy in the kitchen. In all probability, Sara Larsson had died of natural causes. Her heart had stopped beating; perhaps a blood vessel had burst in her brain. I estimated her age at somewhere between eighty and ninety. She had thick white hair tied in a knot at the back of her head. I carefully turned the body over. The dog was watching everything I did with great interest. When the body was lying on its back, the dog sniffed at her face. I seemed to be looking at a painting different from the one Harriet had seen. I was looking at a depiction of loneliness beyond description. The dead woman had a beautiful face. There is a special kind of beauty that manifests itself only in the faces of really old women. Their furrowed skin contains all the marks and memories imprinted by a life lived. Old women whose bodies the earth is crying out to embrace.

I thought about my old father, shortly before he died. He had cancer that had spread all over his body. By the side of his deathbed was a pair of immaculately polished shoes. But he said nothing. He was so afraid of death that he had been struck dumb. And wasted away to such an extent that he was unrecognisable. The earth was crying out to embrace him as well.

I went out to Harriet, who had got out of the car and was leaning on her walker. She accompanied me back to the house, and held tightly on to my arm as she walked up the steps. The dog was still sitting in the kitchen.

‘She’s lying on the floor,’ I said. ‘She’s dead and stiff and her face has turned yellow. You don’t need to see her.’

‘I’m not afraid of death. What I think is horrific is the fact that I shall have to be dead for so long.’

Have to be dead for so long.

Later, I would remember those words spoken by Harriet as we stood in the dark hallway just before entering the kitchen where the old woman was lying on the floor.

We stood in silence. Then I scanned the house, looking for evidence of a relative I could contact. There had once been a man in the house, that much was obvious from the photographs hanging on the walls. But now she was alone with her dog. When I came downstairs again, Harriet had placed a handkerchief over Sara Larsson’s face. She’d had great difficulty in bending down. The dog was lying in its basket, watching us attentively.

I telephoned the police. It took me some time to explain exactly where I was.

We went out on to the porch to wait, both subdued. We said nothing, but I noticed that we were trying to stand as close together as possible. Then we saw headlights slicing through the forest, and a police car drew up outside. The officers who got out of it were very young. One of them, a woman with long fair hair tied in a ponytail behind her cap, seemed to be no more than twenty or twenty-one at most. Their names were Anna and Evert. They went into the kitchen. Harriet remained on the porch, but I followed them.

‘What will happen to the dog?’ I asked.

‘We’ll take it with us.’

‘And then what?’

‘I suppose it will have to sleep in the cells with the drunks until we can establish if there is some relative or other who can take care of it. Otherwise it will have to go to a dogs’ home. If the worst comes to the worst, it will be put down.’

There was a constant scraping sound coming from the radio receivers attached to their belts. The young woman made a note of my name and telephone number.

She said there was no need for us to stay there any longer. I squatted down in front of the basket and stroked the spaniel’s head. Did she have a name? What would happen to her now?

We drove through the gathering dusk. The headlights illuminated signs with unfamiliar names.

Everything is silent travelling in a car through a winter landscape. Summer or spring are never silent. But winter is mute.

We came to a crossroads. I stopped. We needed somewhere to stay; a sign indicated the Foxholes Inn five miles off.

The inn turned out to be a mansion-like building with two wings, situated in extensive grounds. A lot of cars were parked outside the main building.

I left Harriet in the car and entered the brightly lit lobby, where an elderly man, who gave the impression of being in another world, sat playing an old piano. He came down to earth when he heard me come in, and stood up. I asked if he had any rooms for the night.

‘We’re full,’ he said. ‘We have a large party celebrating the return of a relative from America.’

‘Have you any rooms at all?’

He studied a ledger.

‘We have one.’

‘I need two.’

‘We have one large, double room with a view of the lake. On the first floor, very quiet. It was booked, but somebody in the big party fell ill. It’s the only room we have available.’

‘Is it a double bed, or a twin?’

‘It’s a very comfortable double bed. Nobody has ever complained about it being difficult to get to sleep there. One of Sweden’s elderly princes, now dead, slept in that bed many times without trouble. Although I’m a monarchist, I have to admit that royal guests can sometimes be demanding.’

‘Can you divide the bed?’

‘Only by sawing it in half.’

I went out to Harriet and explained the situation. One room, a double bed. If she preferred, we could drive on and try to find somewhere else.

‘Do they serve food?’ Harriet asked. ‘I can sleep anywhere.’

I went back in. I recognised the tune the man at the piano was churning out, something that had been popular when I was a young man. Harriet would certainly be able to name it.

I asked if they served an evening meal.

‘We have a wine-tasting dinner that I can thoroughly recommend.’

‘Is that all?’

‘Isn’t that good enough?’

His response sounded very disapproving.

‘We’ll take the room,’ I said. ‘We’ll take the room, and look forward to the wine-tasting dinner.’

I went out again and helped Harriet out of her seat. I could see that she was still in pain. We walked slowly through the snow, up the ramp for wheelchairs, and entered the warmth. The man was back at the piano.

‘“Non ho l’età”,’ said Harriet. ‘We used to dance to that. Do you remember who sang it? Gigliola Cinquetti. She won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1963 or 1964.’

I remembered. Or at least I thought I did. After all those solitary years on my grandparents’ island, I no longer relied on my memory.

‘I’ll sign us in later,’ I said. ‘Let’s take a look at our room first.’

The man collected a key and escorted us down a long corridor that led to a single door with a number inlaid in the dark wood. We were to occupy room number 3. He unlocked the door and switched on the light. It was a large room, very attractive. But the double bed was smaller than I’d expected.

‘The dining room closes in an hour.’

He left us alone. Harriet flopped down on to the bed. The whole situation suddenly seemed to me totally unreal. What had I got myself into? Was I going to share a bed with Harriet after all these years? Why had she agreed to go along with it?

‘I can find a sofa to sleep on,’ I said.

‘It makes no difference to me,’ said Harriet. ‘I’ve never been afraid of you. Have you been afraid of me? Scared that I’d stick an axe into your skull while you were asleep? I need to be left alone for a while. I’d like to eat in half an hour. And you don’t need to worry — I can pay for myself.’

I went out to the piano player and signed the register. From the part of the dining room sealed off by a sliding door came the buzz of conversation of the party welcoming their relative home from America. I went into one of the lounges and sat down to wait. It had been a long day. I was restless. Days on the island always passed by slowly. Now I had the feeling I was under attack and felt defenceless.

Through the open door I saw Harriet emerging from the corridor with her walker. It looked as if she was standing at the wheel of some strange vessel. She was moving unsteadily. Had she been drinking again? We went into the dining room. Most of the tables were vacant. A friendly waitress with a swollen and bandaged leg gave us a corner table. Just as my father had taught me to do, I checked to see if the waitress was wearing decent shoes. She was, although they could have done with polishing. Unlike earlier in the day, Harriet was hungry. I wasn’t. But I made up for that by drinking greedily the wine served by a thin youth with a freckled face. Harriet asked questions about the wine, but I said nothing, merely drank up whatever was put before me. They were mainly Australian wines, with some from South Africa. But so what? All I wanted just now was to get tipsy.

We toasted each other, and I noticed that Harriet became quite drunk almost immediately. I wasn’t the only one drinking too much. When was the last time I’d been so drunk that I had difficulty in controlling my movements? Very occasionally, when depression got the better of me, I would sit at the kitchen table and drink myself silly, then kick the cat and dog out, and crash out fully clothed on top of the bed. It hardly ever happened during the winter. Perhaps on a light spring evening or early in the autumn I would have an attack of angst, and would bring out the bottles.

The dining room closed. We were the last diners. We had eaten and drunk, and as if by tacit agreement had mentioned nothing about our lives, nor where we were heading. Even Sara Larsson and her dog were not discussed. I charged the meal to our room despite Harriet’s protests. Then we stumbled off. Somehow or other Harriet seemed to manage with her walker in a controlled manner, I had no idea how she managed it. I unlocked the door of our room, and said I would go for an evening walk before going to bed. It wasn’t true, of course. But I didn’t want to embarrass Harriet by being present when she went to bed. I suppose I was just as keen not to embarrass myself.

I sat down in a reading room. It was lined with shelves of old books and magazines. The man at the piano had disappeared, and the large party had dispersed. Sleep came without warning, as if it had ambushed me. When I woke up, I didn’t know where I was. I could see from the clock that I’d been asleep for nearly an hour. I stood up, staggered slightly as a result of all the wine I’d drunk, and went back to our room. Harriet was asleep. She had left the light on at my side of the bed. I undressed quietly, had a wash in the bathroom and crept down into bed. I tried to hear if she really was asleep, or just pretending. She was lying on her side. I felt tempted to stroke her back. She was wearing a light blue nightdress. I switched off the light and listened to her breathing in the darkness. I felt very uneasy inside. And there was something else that I had been missing for a very long time. A feeling of not being alone. As simple as that. Loneliness had been banished, just for a moment.

I must have fallen asleep. I was woken up by Harriet screaming. Half asleep, I managed to switch on the bedside light. She was sitting upright in bed, screaming from deep despair and pain. When I tried to touch her shoulder, she hit me — hard, and in the face.

My nose spurted blood.

We got no more sleep that night.

Chapter 7

Dawn rose over the white lake like grey smoke.

I stood at the window, thinking about how I recalled seeing my father doing the same. I’m not as fat as he was, even though I’ve acquired a bit of a pot belly. But who could see me? Only Harriet, who had plumped up the pillow behind her back.

You could say I was a half-naked man in a winter landscape.

I thought about going down to the frozen lake and creating my hole in the ice. I missed the pain involved in exposing myself to the freezing cold water. But I knew I wouldn’t do it. I would stay in our room, together with Harriet. We would get dressed, have breakfast and continue our journey.

I was intrigued by Harriet’s dream, which had woken her up screaming. What she said about it seemed extremely muddled. She could only remember fragments. Somebody had nailed her down, intent on ripping her to pieces because she had refused to let go of her body. She had resisted: she had been in a room — or perhaps it was outside — surrounded by people, none of whose faces she recognised. Their voices had sounded like cries from threatening birds.

And that’s when she woke up. When I tried to calm her down, or perhaps rather to calm myself down, she had still been in the borderland between dream and consciousness, and was defending herself against whatever had pinned her down. The punch she gave me was in the heavyweight class. Its effect reminded me of the pain I’d felt when I was beaten up and mugged in Rome.

But this time my nose wasn’t broken.

I stuffed rolled-up toilet paper into my nostrils, wrapped a handkerchief soaked in cold water round the back of my neck and, after a while, the nosebleed petered out. Harriet knocked on the bathroom door and asked if she could be of assistance. I wanted to be left in peace, so I told her ‘no’. When I eventually came out of the bathroom with two wads of paper in my nose, she had gone back to bed. She had taken off her nightdress and hung it over the bedstead. She looked me in the eye.

‘I didn’t mean to hit you.’

‘Of course you didn’t. You were dreaming.’

I sat down on one of the chairs by the big window looking out over the lake. It was still dark outside. I could hear a dog barking in the distance. Individual barks, like broken-off sentences. Or like the way you speak when nobody’s listening.

I watched her as she continued to recount her dream, and it seemed to me that she was just the same as when I had known and loved her. I wondered what exactly it was that made me think so. I eventually realised that it was her voice, which hadn’t changed at all over the years. I recalled telling her many times that she would always be able to get a job as a telephone operator. She had the most beautiful telephone voice I had ever heard.

‘An enemy cavalry company was hiding in the forest,’ she said. ‘They suddenly burst into the open and attacked before I had chance to defend myself. But it’s all over now. Besides, I know that certain nightmares never return. They lose all their strength and don’t exist any more.’

‘I know that you’re seriously ill,’ I said.

I hadn’t planned to say that at all. The words simply tumbled out of my mouth. Harriet looked at me in surprise.

‘There was a letter in your handbag,’ I said. ‘I was looking for some explanation for why you had fallen down on the ice. I found the letter, and read it.’

‘Why didn’t you say you knew?’

‘I was ashamed of having rooted around in your handbag. I would be furious if somebody did that to me.’

‘You’ve always been an interfering nosy parker. You were always like that.’

‘That’s not true.’

‘Oh yes it is. Neither of us have the strength to lie any more. It’s a fact, isn’t it?’

I blushed. I’ve always rummaged around other people’s property. I’ve even been known to steam open letters, and reseal them afterwards. My mother had a collection of letters from her younger days in which she opened her heart to a friend of hers. Shortly before she died she had tied a ribbon round them and asked for them to be burned. I did so — but read them first. I used to read my girlfriends’ diaries and raid their drawers; I’ve been known to ransack fellow doctors’ desks. And there have been patients whose wallets I have comprehensively investigated. I never stole any money. I was after something different. Secrets. People’s weakness. Knowledge of things nobody knew that I knew about.

The only person who ever found me out was Harriet.

It happened at her mother’s house. I had been left alone for a few minutes, and had started to work my way through their bureau when Harriet entered the room silently and wondered what on earth I was doing. She had already noticed that I used to go through her handbag. It was one of the most embarrassing moments of my life. I can no longer remember what I said. We never spoke about it again. I never touched her belongings after that. But I continued digging into the lives of other friends and colleagues. Now she had reminded me of the kind of person I am.

She smoothed down the covers and beckoned me to sit next to her. The thought that she was naked underneath the sheets suddenly excited me. I sat down and put my hand on her arm. She had a pattern formed by birthmarks near her shoulder. I recognised them all. Everything’s the same, I thought. Such a long time has passed, but we are still the same as we were at the beginning.

‘I didn’t want to tell you,’ she said. ‘You might think that was why I tracked you down. Looking for help where there is no help possible.’

‘Nothing is ever hopeless.’

‘Neither you nor I believe in miracles. If they happen, they happen. But believing in them, expecting them — that’s nothing more than wasting the time allotted to you.

‘I might live for another year, or it might only be six months. In any case, I think I can survive for a few more months with the aid of this walker and all the painkillers. But don’t try telling me that nothing is ever hopeless.’

‘Advances are being made all the time. Sometimes things happen amazingly quickly.’

She sat up a little more erect against the pillows.

‘Do you really believe what you’re saying?’

I didn’t answer. I remembered her once saying that life was like your shoes. You couldn’t simply expect or imagine that your shoes would fit perfectly. Shoes that pinched your feet were a fact of life.

‘I want to ask you to do something,’ she said, and burst out laughing. ‘Can’t you take those bits of paper out of your nostrils?’

‘Was that all?’

‘No.’

I went to the bathroom and removed the blood-soaked pieces of toilet paper. The bleeding had stopped. My nose was tender; there would be a bruise and some swelling. I could still hear the solitary dog barking mournfully somewhere outside.

I went back and sat on the side of the bed once more.

‘I want you to lie down beside me. Nothing more than that.’

I did as she asked. Her perfume was strong. I could feel the contours of her body through the sheet. I lay down on her left side. That’s what I had always done in the past. She reached out and switched off the bedside light. It was between four and five in the morning. The faint light from a solitary lamp post by a fountain in the courtyard seeped in through the curtains.

‘I really do want to see that forest pool,’ she said. ‘I never had a ring from you. I don’t think I ever wanted one. But I’ll settle for the pool. I want to see it before I die.’

‘You’re not going to die.’

‘Of course I’m going to die. We all reach a point where we no longer have the strength to deny what’s going to happen. Death is the only constant companion a human being can have in this life. Even a lunatic usually knows when it’s time to go.’

She fell silent. Her pains came and went.

‘I’ve often wondered why you never said anything,’ she said after a while. ‘I can understand that you had met somebody else, or that you simply didn’t want to carry on any more. But why didn’t you say anything?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Of course you know. You always knew what you were doing, even when you claimed that you didn’t. Why did you hide away? Where were you when I stood at the airport, waiting to see you off? I stood there for hours. Even when the only flight that hadn’t left was a delayed charter to Tenerife, I still stood there. Afterwards, I wondered if you’d been hiding behind a column somewhere, watching me. And laughing.’

‘Why should I laugh? I’d already left.’

She thought for a moment before speaking.

‘You’d already left?’

‘The same time, the same flight, the previous day.’

‘So you’d planned it?’

‘I didn’t know if I was going to get on the flight. I simply went to the airport to see what would happen. A passenger didn’t turn up, and I was able to rebook.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘It’s the truth.’

‘I know it’s not. You weren’t like that. You never did anything without having planned it in advance. You used to say that a surgeon could never leave anything to chance. You said you were a surgeon through and through. I know you had planned it. How can you expect me to believe something that can only be a lie? You’re just the same now as you were then. You lie your way through life. I caught on too late.’

Her voice was shrill. She was starting to shout. I tried to calm her down, to make her think about the people sleeping in the neighbouring rooms.

‘I don’t care about them. Explain to me how somebody can behave like you did towards me.’

‘I’ve said that I don’t know.’

‘Have you done something similar to others? Let them get caught in your net, then left them to survive as best they can?’

‘I don’t understand what you’re talking about.’

‘Is that all you can say?’

‘I’m trying to be honest.’

‘You’re lying. There’s not a word of truth in what you say. How can you live with yourself?’

‘I’ve nothing else to say.’

‘I wonder what you’re thinking.’

She suddenly tapped me on the forehead with her finger.

‘What’s inside there? Nothing? Only darkness?’

She lay down and turned her back on me. I hoped it was over.

‘Have you really nothing to say? Not even “sorry”?’

‘Sorry.’

‘If I weren’t so ill I’d hit you. I’d never leave you in peace again. You succeeded in almost destroying my life. All I want is for you to say something that I can understand.’

I didn’t respond. Perhaps I felt a little bit relieved: lies always weigh you down, even if they seem to be weightless at first. Harriet pulled the covers up to her chin.

‘Are you cold?’ I asked tentatively.

She sounded perfectly calm when she replied.

‘I’ve felt cold all my life. I’ve gone looking for warmth in deserts and tropical countries. But all the time I’ve had a little icicle hanging inside me. People always have baggage. For some it’s sorrow, for others it’s worry. For me, it’s always been an icicle. For you it’s an anthill in a living room in an old fisherman’s cottage.’

‘I never use that room. It’s not heated during the winter and in the summer I just air it. Both my grandfather and my grandmother died in that room. As soon as I enter it, I can hear their breathing and detect their smell. One day I noticed that there were ants inside the room. When I opened the door several months later, they had started to build a nest. I left them to it.’

Harriet turned over.

‘What happened? I’m not going to give up. I don’t know what happened in your life. Why did you move out to the island? I gathered from the man who took me out there that you’d been living on the skerry for nearly twenty years.’

‘Jansson is a rogue. He exaggerates everything. I’ve been living there for twelve years.’

‘A doctor who retires at the age of fifty-four?’

‘I don’t want to talk about it. Something happened.’

‘You can tell me.’

‘I don’t want to.’

‘I shall soon be dead.’

I turned my back on her, and thought that I should never have given way. It wasn’t the forest pool she wanted, it was me.

That’s as far as I managed to think.

She moved to snuggle up against me. The warmth from her body enveloped me, and filled what had long seemed to be nothing but a pointless shell. That was how we had always lain when we slept together. I used to carry her into slumber on my back. Just for a brief moment, I could imagine that we had always been lying together like this. For nearly forty years. A remarkable sleep that we were only now beginning to wake up from.

‘What happened to you? You can tell me now,’ said Harriet.

‘I made a catastrophic mistake during an operation. Afterwards, I argued that it wasn’t my fault. I was found guilty. Not in court, but by the National Board of Health and Welfare. I was admonished, and couldn’t cope with it. That’s as much as I can bring myself to say just now. Don’t ask any more questions.’

‘Tell me about the forest pool instead,’ she whispered.

‘It’s black, they say it’s bottomless, and there’s no shore. It’s a small poor relation to all those lovely lakes with inviting waters. It’s hard to imagine that it exists at all, and isn’t just a drop of nature’s ink that has been spilled. I’ve told you that I watched my father swimming there. But what I didn’t say was that the experience made me realise what life was all about. People are close to each other so that they can be parted. That’s all there is to it.’

‘Are there any fish in that pool?’

‘I don’t know. But if there are, they must be completely black. Or invisible, because you can’t see anything in that dark water. Black fish, black frogs, black water spiders. And down at the bottom — if there is a bottom — a solitary black eel slowly wriggling its way through the mud.’

She pressed herself up against me even harder. I thought about how she was dying, how the warmth she radiated would soon be an in sidious chill. What had she said? An icicle inside her? So as far as she was concerned, death was ice, nothing more. Everybody perceived death differently, the shadow hovering behind us always takes on a different form. I wanted to turn round and hug her as tightly as I could. But something prevented me. Perhaps I was still afraid of whatever it was that had made me leave her? A feeling of being too close, something I couldn’t cope with?

I didn’t know. But perhaps I now wanted to know, despite everything.

I must have dozed off briefly. I was woken up by Harriet sitting on the edge of the bed. To my horror, I watched her sink down on to her knees and start crawling towards the bathroom door. She was completely naked, her breasts heavy, her body older than I had imagined. I didn’t know if she was crawling to the bathroom because she was too exhausted to walk, or so as not to wake me up with the squeaking wheels of her walker. Tears welled up in my eyes, she was blurred as she closed the door. When she came back, she had managed to stand up and walk. But her legs were trembling. She snuggled up close to me again.

‘I’m not asleep,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what’s happening any more.’

‘You had an unexpected visitor on to your island. An old woman from your past came walking over the ice. Now you’re on your way to fulfil an old promise.’

I could smell spirits. Did she have a bottle hidden among her toilet things?

‘Medicines don’t mix well with strong drink,’ I said.

‘If I’m forced to choose, I shall stick to my booze.’

‘You’re drinking in secret.’

‘I’ve noticed you smelling my breath, of course. But I like drinking in secret even so.’

‘What are you drinking?’

‘Ordinary Swedish aquavit. You’ll have to stop at one of the booze shops tomorrow. The stuff I brought with me is almost finished.’

We lay there waiting for dawn.

She occasionally dozed off. The dog outside in the night had fallen silent. I got up again and stood by the window. I had the feeling that I’d turned into my own father. That day at the forest pool I had discovered his loneliness. I now realised that it was also my own. Despite the fifty-five-year gap, we had fused together and become the same individual.

It frightened me. I didn’t want it.

I didn’t want to be a man who had to jump down into freezing cold water every day, in order to confirm that he was still alive.

Chapter 8

We left the inn shortly before nine.

Outside, there was patchy fog, a slight breeze, and it was a couple of degrees above freezing. The piano player had not returned. There was a young lady at reception. She asked if we had slept well, and had been satisfied with our stay. Harriet was standing with her walker a couple of yards away from me.

‘We slept very well,’ she said. ‘The bed was broad and comfortable.’

I paid and asked if she had a local map. She disappeared for a few minutes, then reappeared carrying a substantial atlas.

‘You can have it for nothing,’ she said. ‘An overnight guest from Lund left it behind a few weeks ago.’

We set off and drove straight into the fog.

We drove slowly. The fog was so thick, the road had disappeared. I thought of all the occasions on which I had rowed into patches of fog in my boat. When the mists came rolling in from the sea, I liked to rest on the oars and allow myself to be swallowed up by all the whiteness. I had always experienced it as a strange mixture of security and threat. Grandma sometimes used to sit on the bench under the apple tree and tell stories about people rowing themselves away in the fog. She maintained there was some kind of hole in the middle that people could be sucked into and never be seen again.

Now and then we would see a set of fog lights approaching, catch a fleeting glimpse of a car or lorry, and then we would be alone once more.

There was a state monopoly liquor store in one of the little towns we passed through. I bought what Harriet wanted. She insisted on paying herself. Vodka, aquavit and brandy, in half-bottles.

The fog had slowly begun to lift. I could sense that there was snow in the air.

Harriet took a swig from one of the bottles before I had time to start the engine. I said nothing, as there was nothing to say.

Then I suddenly remembered.

Aftonlöten. I remembered the name of the mountain close to the forest pool where I had watched my father swimming around like a happy walrus.

Aftonlöten.

I remember asking him what it meant. He didn’t know. At least, he didn’t answer.

Aftonlöten. It suggested pastures at eventide, and sounded like a word from the traditional songs shepherdesses used to sing as they brought their herds in to shelter for the night. It was an insignificant little mountain, barely a thousand feet high, between Ytterhögdal, Linsjön and Älvros.

Aftonlöten. I said nothing to Harriet as I was still not certain that I would be able to find my way to the pool.

I asked how she felt. We drove almost three miles before she answered. Taciturnity and distance are linked. It’s easier to be silent when you have a long way to go.

She said she wasn’t in pain. As that was an obvious untruth, I didn’t bother to ask again.

We stopped for something to eat as we approached the Härjedalen border. There was one lone car parked outside. Something about the cafe and the place as a whole perplexed me, but I couldn’t put my finger on why. There was a roaring fire burning in the timber-built cafe, and a smell of lingonberry juice. I remembered that smell from my childhood. I’d thought that lingonberry juice was so outdated now that it barely existed any more. But they served it here.

We sat down at one of the many empty tables and contemplated the timber-clad walls decorated with elk antlers and stuffed game birds. There was a cranium lying on a shelf. I couldn’t resist investigating. It was some time before I realised that it was a bear’s skull. The waitress, who had recited the menu for us, came in at that point and saw me standing there with the skull in my hand.

‘It just lay down and died.’ she said. ‘My husband used to want me to tell everybody that he’d shot it. But now that he’s no longer with us, I can tell the truth about it. It just lay down and died. It was lying on the shore at Risvattnet Lake. An old bear that simply lay down by a log pile and died.’

As she spoke, it dawned on me that I’d been here before. When I went on that trip with my father. Perhaps it was the smell of lingonberry juice that brought the distant memory to life. I’d been in this same cafe with my father. I was very young at the time; we’d had a meal and I’d drunk lingonberry juice.

Were all those stuffed birds mounted on the walls back then, staring down at hungry diners with their steely eyes? I couldn’t remember. I could see in my mind’s eye my father wiping his mouth with his serviette, checking the time, and urging me to hurry up and finish eating. We had a long way to go yet.

There was a map on the wall over the open fire. I checked it and found Aftonlöten, Linsjö Lake, and a mountain that I’d forgotten about.

It was called Fnussjen.

An impossible name — it must have been a joke. No more than eight hundred feet high, covered in trees, and somebody must have dreamt up a nonsense name for it. In stark contrast to Aftonlöten, which sounded attractive and even meaningful in an old-fashioned way.

We ordered beef stew. I finished before Harriet, and went to sit by the fire until she was ready.

She had some trouble in manoeuvring her walker over the threshold when we left the cafe. I tried to help her.

‘I can manage, thank you.’

We walked slowly through the snow back to the car. We had never lived together; but even so, people we met seemed to regard us as an old couple blessed with no end of patience with each other.

‘I haven’t the strength to do anything else today,’ said Harriet as we settled down in the car.

Her brow was covered in sweat as a result of the strain she had been subjected to; eyes half closed, as if she were about to fall asleep. She’s dying, I thought. She’s going to die here in the car. I’ve always wondered about when exactly I’m going to die. In my bed, in the street, in a shop, or down on my jetty, waiting for Jansson? But I’d never imagined myself dying in a car.

‘I need some rest,’ she said. ‘I shudder to think what will happen if I don’t get it.’

‘You’ll have to tell me what you can cope with.’

‘That’s what I’m doing. Tomorrow can be the day we go to the forest pool. Not today.’

I found a little guest house in the next town. A yellow building behind the church. We were welcomed by a friendly lady. When she saw Harriet’s walker, she gave us a large room on the ground floor. I would really have preferred a room to myself, but refrained from saying anything. Harriet lay down to rest. I thumbed through a pile of old magazines on a table before dozing off. A few hours later I went out and bought a pizza at a bleak takeaway cafe where the only customer was an old man muttering away to himself, with a greyhound slumped at his feet.

We sat on the bed and ate the pizza. Harriet was very tired. When she’d finished eating, she lay down again. I asked if she wanted to talk, but she merely shook her head.

I went out as dusk was falling, and wandered around the little town. Many shops were standing empty, with contact details in the windows for anyone interested in renting the premises. These advertisements were like cries for help from a small Swedish town in deep distress. My grandparents’ island was a part of this gigantic abandoned, unneeded archipelago lining the edge of Sweden, comprising not only islands along our coasts, but just as many villages and small towns in inland backwaters and in the forests. In this town there were no jetties for mooring and going ashore, no angry-sounding hydrocopters whipping up a whirlwind of snow as they approached with their cargo of post and junk mail. Nevertheless, wandering around this deserted place felt like walking around a skerry at the edge of the open sea. Blue television light spilled out of windows on to the snow; sometimes snatches of television sound could be heard, bits of different programmes leaking out from the windows. I thought of loneliness and all these people watching different programmes. Every evening people of all generations burrowed into different worlds, beamed down by the satellites.

In the old days, we used to have the same programmes to talk about. What did people talk about now?

I paused at what had once been the railway station, and tied my scarf more tightly round my neck. It was cold, and a wind was getting up. I walked along the deserted platform. A single goods wagon stood in a snow-filled siding, an abandoned bull in its stall. In the faint light from a single lamp I tried to read the old timetable still attached to the station wall in a case with a cracked glass window. I checked my watch. A southbound train would have been due at any moment. I waited, thinking that stranger things had been known to happen than a ghost train materialising out of the darkness and heading for the bridge over the frozen river.

But no train came. Nothing came. If I’d had a bit of hay with me, I’d have left it in front of the old goods wagon. I resumed my walk. The clear sky was full of stars. I searched for some kind of movement, a shooting star perhaps, or a satellite, perhaps even a whisper from one of the gods who are alleged to live up there. But nothing happened. The night sky was mute. I continued as far as the bridge over the frozen river. There was a log lying on the ice. A black line in the middle of all the white. I couldn’t remember the name of the river. I thought it might be the Ljusnan, but wasn’t sure.

I remained standing on the bridge for what seemed ages. I suddenly had the feeling that I was no longer alone under those high iron arches. There were other people there as well, and it dawned on me that what I could see was in fact myself. At all ages, from the little boy who had scurried around and played on my grandparents’ island, to the me who, many years later, had left Harriet, and eventually the man I was now. For a brief moment I could see myself, as I had been and as the man I had become.

I searched among the figures surrounding me for one that was different, somebody I might have become: but there was no one. Not even a man who followed in the footsteps of his father and worked as a waiter in various restaurants.

I have no idea how long I stood there on the bridge. When I went back to the guest house, the apparitions had disappeared.

I lay down on the bed, rubbed up against her arm, and fell asleep.

I dreamt about climbing up the iron bridge in the middle of the night. I was perched on the very top of one of the huge arches, and knew that at any moment I was going to fall down on to the ice.

It was snowing gently when we set out the next day to find the right logging road. I couldn’t remember what it looked like. There was nothing in the monotonous landscape to jog my memory. But I knew that we were close by. The pool was somewhere in the middle of the triangle formed by Aftonlöten, Ytterhögdal and Fnussjen.

Harriet appeared rather better in the morning. When I woke up, she was already washed and dressed. We had breakfast in a small dining room where we were the only guests. Harriet had also had a dream during the night. It was about us, a trip we’d made to an island in Lake Mälaren. I had no recollection of it.

But I nodded when Harriet asked me if I remembered. Of course I did. I remembered everything that had happened to us.

The snow was piled up high on both sides of the road; there were few turn-offs, and most of them hadn’t been ploughed. Something from my youth came back to me without warning. Logging roads. Or perhaps I should say emotions connected with a logging road.

I’d spent a summer with one of my father’s relations in Jämtland, up in the north. My grandmother was ill, so I couldn’t spend the summer on her island. I made friends with a boy whose father was a district judge. We had paid a visit to the court archives, and when nobody was looking we’d opened a bundle of documents comprising records of proceedings and police investigations. We were fascinated by accounts of paternity cases, with all the amazing but compelling details of what had gone on in the back of motor cars on Saturday nights. The cars had always been parked on logging roads. It seemed to us that everybody had been conceived on the back seat of a motor car. We devoured case notes on the cross-examination of young men hauled up before the courts, who described reluctantly and laconic ally what had happened, or not happened, in the cars parked on the various logging roads. It was always snowing, there were never any simple and straightforward truths to rely on, there was always considerable doubt when it came to deciding if the young man was lying his way out of a corner, or if the equally young woman was right in insisting that it was him and nobody else, that back seat and no other back seat, that logging road and no other logging road. We gorged ourselves on the secret details, and I think that until reality caught up with us many years later, we dreamed about one day sharing the back seat of a car parked on snow-covered logging roads with desirable young women.

That’s what life was all about. What we longed for always took place on a logging road.

Without really knowing why, I began telling Harriet about it. I’d started to turn off automatically into every side road we came to.

‘I’ve no intention of telling you about my experiences on the back seat of motor cars,’ she said. ‘I didn’t do it when I was going with you, and I don’t do it now. There are always humiliating moments in the life of every woman. What most of us find worst is what happened when we were very young.’

‘When I was a doctor, I sometimes used to talk to my colleagues about how many people didn’t seem to know who their real father was. A lot of young men lied their way out of it, and others accepted a responsibility that wasn’t actually theirs. Even the mothers didn’t always know who the father was.’

‘All I can remember about those distant and hopeless attempts at erotic adventure was that I always seemed to smell so peculiar. And the young man crawling over me smelled funny too. That’s all I can remember. The excitement and confusion and the strange smells.’

Suddenly, we were confronted by an enormous monster of a combined log harvester trundling towards us. I slammed on the brakes, and skidded into a snowdrift. The driver of the monster jumped down and pushed while I reversed the car. After considerable difficulty, I managed to back out of the drift. I got out. The man was powerfully built and had chewing-tobacco stains round his mouth. In some strange way he seemed to be a reproduction of the enormous machine he’d been driving, with all its prehensile claws and cranes.

‘Is yer lost?’ he asked.

‘I’m looking for a forest pool.’

He squinted at me.

‘In t’woods?’

‘Yes, a forest pool.’

‘Dunnit ’ave a name?’

‘No, it doesn’t have a name.’

‘But tha’s efter it ollt’ sem? Thez a helluva lotta lakes round ’ere. Tha can teck yer pick. Where d’yer reckon yours is?’

I could see that only an idiot would be out in the forest in winter looking for a forest pool without a name. So I explained the situation to him. I thought that would sound so unlikely that it had to be true.

‘I promised the lady sitting in my car that she would see it. She’s very ill.’

I could see that he hesitated before deciding to believe me. Truth is often stranger than fiction, I reminded myself.

‘And that’ll meck ’er well, willit? Seein that there lake?’

‘Perhaps.’

He nodded, and thought it over.

‘There’s a lake at ender this muck road, mebbe that’s ’er?’

‘As I recall it was circular in shape, not large, and the trees came right down to the edge of the water.’

‘Mm, cud be ’er then — dunno if not. Woods fuller lakes.’

He held out his hand, and introduced himself.

‘Harald Svanbeck. Yer don’t often see folk on this muck road this time o’year. Scarce ever. But good luck. Is it yer mam in t’car?’

‘No, she’s not my mother.’

‘Must be some bugger’s mam, eh? Gotta be.’

He clambered back up into the cabin of his monstrous contraption, started the engine, and continued on his way. I got back into the car.

‘What language was he speaking, then?’ Harriet asked.

‘The language of the forest. In these parts, every individual has his own dialect. They understand each other. But they each speak their own language. It’s the best way for them. In these regions out on the edge of civilisation, it’s easy to imagine that every man and every woman is a unique member of an individual race. An individual nation, an individual stock with its own unique history. If they are totally isolated, nobody will ever miss the language that dies with them. But there’s always something that survives, of course.’

We continued along the logging track. The forest was very dense, the road began to climb gently upwards. Was this something I could recall from the time I was being driven by my father in the dove-blue old Chevrolet he looked after with such tender loving care? A road sloping gently upwards? I had the distinct impression that we were on the right track. We passed a stack of newly felled logs. The forest had been raped by the enormous beast that Harald Svanbeck was in charge of. By now, all distances seemed to be endless. I glanced in the rear-view mirror and the forest appeared to be closing in behind us. I had the feeling that I was travelling backwards through time. I remembered walking through the trees the previous evening, the bridge, the forest from my past. Perhaps we were now on the way to a summer lake, with my father and myself waiting impatiently to get there?

We negotiated a series of sharp bends. The snow was piled up high on both sides of the road.

Which petered out.

And there it was, in front of me, with its covering of white. I pulled up and switched off the engine. We were there. There was nothing else to say. I had no doubts. This was the forest pool. I had returned after fifty-five years.

The white cloth was spread out to welcome us. I suddenly had the feeling that Harriet had been destined to winkle me out of my island. She was a herald angel, even if she had gone there of her own accord. Or had I summoned her? Had I been waiting all those years for her to come back?

I didn’t know. But we had arrived.

Chapter 9

I told her that this was it, we had arrived. She gazed hard and long at all the whiteness.

‘So there is water underneath all this snow, is there?’

‘Black water. Everything’s asleep. All the tiny creatures that live in the water are asleep. But this is the pool we’ve been looking for.’

We got out of the car. I lifted out the walker. It sunk down into the snow. I fetched the spade from the boot.

‘Stay in the car where it’s warm,’ I said. ‘I’ll start the engine. Then I’ll dig out a path for you. Where do you want to go to? As far as the water’s edge?’

‘I want to go to the very middle of the lake.’

‘It isn’t a lake. It’s a pool.’

I started the engine, helped Harriet back into the car, and started digging. There was a foot or more of frozen snow underneath the powdery surface layer. Digging through it all was far from easy. I could have dropped dead at any moment from the strain.

The very thought scared me stiff. I started digging more slowly, tried to listen to my heart. When I had my latest check-up, my blood pressure readings were on the high side. All my other metabolic figures were OK; but a heart attack can strike for no obvious reason. It can swoop down on you from out of the blue, as if an unknown suicide bomber had burst into one of your cardiac chambers.

It’s not unusual for men of my age to dig themselves to death. They die a sudden and almost embarrassing death, clutching a spade in their stiff fingers.

It took a long time for me to dig my way out to the middle of the frozen pool. I was soaked in sweat, and my arms and back ached by the time I finally got there. The exhaust fumes formed a thick cloud behind the car. But out there, on the ice-covered pool, I couldn’t even hear the engine. There was complete silence. No birds, no movement at all in the mute trees.

I wished I could have watched myself from a distance. Hidden among the surrounding trees, an observer scrutinising himself.

As I walked back to the car, it occurred to me that things might now be drawing to a close.

I would drop Harriet off wherever she wanted us to say farewell. I still knew no more than the basic fact that she lived somewhere in Stockholm. After that, I could return to my island. A fascinating thought struck me: I would send Jansson a picture postcard. I’d never have believed that I would write to him. But I needed him now. I’d buy a card with a picture depicting the endless forests, preferably one in which the trees were weighed down with snow. I would draw a cross in the middle of the trees, and write: ‘That’s where I am just now. I’ll be back home soon. Don’t forget to feed my pets.’

Harriet had already got out of the car. She was standing behind her walker. We walked side by side along the path I’d dug. I had the feeling we were part of a procession heading for an altar.

I wondered what she was thinking. She was looking round, searching for any sign of life in among the trees. But there was silence everywhere, apart from the faint hum from the car’s engine ticking over.

‘I’ve always been scared of walking on ice,’ she said without warning.

‘But you still had the courage to go to my island?’

‘Being scared doesn’t mean that I haven’t the courage to do things that frighten me.’

‘This pool isn’t frozen all the way down,’ I said. ‘But very nearly. The ice is over three feet thick. It could bear the weight of an elephant, if necessary.’

She burst out laughing.

‘Now that would be a sight for sore eyes! An elephant standing out here on the ice, in order to calm me down! A holy elephant sent to save people who are frightened of thin ice!’

We came to the middle.

‘I think I can see it in my mind’s eye,’ she said. ‘When the ice has gone.’

‘It looks its best when it’s raining,’ I said. ‘I wonder if there’s anything to beat a gentle shower of rain in the Swedish summer. Other countries have majestic buildings or vertiginous mountain peaks and deep ravines. We have our summer rain.’

‘And the silence.’

We didn’t speak for a while. I tried to grasp the implications of our coming here. A promise had been fulfilled, many years too late. That was all, really. Our journey was now at an end. All that remained was the epilogue, a long journey south on frozen roads.

‘Have you been here since you abandoned me? Have you been here with somebody else?’

‘No such thought ever occurred to me.’

‘Why did you abandon me?’

The question came like a blow to the solar plexus. I could see that she was upset again. She was holding on tightly to the handle of her walker.

‘The pain you caused me sent me to hell and back,’ she said. ‘I was forced to make such an effort to forget you, but I never succeeded in doing it. Now that I’m standing here at long last, on the lid of your forest pool, I regret having tracked you down. What good did I think it would do? I don’t know any more. I’m going to die soon. Why do I spend time opening up old wounds? Why am I here?’

We probably stood there for a minute, no longer. Silent, avoiding each other’s gaze. Then she turned her walker round and started retracing her steps.

There was something lying in the snow that I hadn’t noticed when I was digging out the path for Harriet. It was black. I screwed up my eyes, but couldn’t make out what it was. A dead animal? A stone? Harriet hadn’t noticed that I’d stopped. I stepped out into the snow at the side of the path, and approached the dark object.

I ought to have understood the danger. My experience and knowledge of the ice and its unpredictability ought to have warned me. Far too late I realised that the dark patch was in fact the ice itself. I knew that for whatever reason, a small patch of ice could be very thin despite the fact that the ice all around it was very thick. I almost managed to stop and take a step backwards. But it was too late, the ice gave way and I fell through it. The water reached up to my chin. I ought to have been used to the sudden shock of entering ice-cold water, thanks to all my winter dips. But this was different. I wasn’t prepared, I hadn’t created the hole in the ice myself. I screamed. It wasn’t until I screamed again that Harriet turned round and saw me in the water. The cold had already begun to paralyse me, I had a burning sensation in my chest, I was desperately gulping down ice-cold air into my lungs and searching frantically for firm ground under my feet. I grasped at the edges of the hole, but my fingers were already far too stiff.

I continued to scream, convinced I was face to face with death.

I knew that she was the last person capable of helping me out. She could barely stand on her own two feet.

But she astonished me as much as she astonished herself. She came towards me with her walker, as fast as she was able. She tipped the walker over, then lay down on the ice and pushed it towards the edge of the hole so that I was able to grab hold of one of the wheels. How I managed to pull myself up I shall never know. She must have pulled at me and tried to shuffle backwards through the snow. When I scrambled out, I staggered as best I could towards the car. I could hear her calling behind me, but I had no idea of what she was saying: what I did know was that if I stopped and fell over in the snow, I would never have the strength to stand up again. I couldn’t have been in the water for more than two minutes, but that had almost been enough to kill me. I have no memory of how I got from the hole in the ice to the car. I said nothing, probably closed my eyes so that I couldn’t see how far there was still to go to the car. When I eventually pressed my face against the boot, I had only one thought in my head: to strip off all the soaking wet clothes I had on, and roll the blanket on the back seat round my body. I have no recollection of how that was achieved. There was a strong smell of exhaust fumes around me as I wriggled out of the last piece of clothing and somehow managed to open the back door. I wrapped the blanket round me, and after that I lost consciousness.

When I woke up, she was embracing me and was as naked as I was.

Deep down in my consciousness, the cold had been transformed into a sensation of burning. When I opened my eyes, the first thing I saw was Harriet’s hair and the back of her neck. My memory slowly returned.

I was alive. And Harriet had undressed and was hugging me under the blanket to keep me warm.

She noticed that I had come round.

‘Are you cold? You could have died.’

‘The ice simply opened up underneath me.’

‘I thought it was an animal. I’ve never heard a scream like that before.’

‘How long was I unconscious?’

‘An hour.’

‘So long?’

I closed my eyes. My body was scorching hot.

‘I didn’t want to see the lake only for you to die,’ she said.

It was over now. Two old people, naked on the back seat of an old car. We had spoken about such things earlier, of young people in the backs of cars. Making love then perhaps denying it. But we two, with a combined age of 135, simply clung on to each other, one because he had survived, the other because she hadn’t been left all alone in the depths of the forest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We shared one of her bottles of brandy.

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

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

Chapter 10

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

‘The interest,’ she said with a smile.

‘Interest?’

‘On your promise. After all these years.’

‘What are you asking for?’

‘A diversion.’

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

‘To there.’

‘And what’s in store for you there?’

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

‘Why does she live there?’

‘Why do you live on your island?’

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

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

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

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

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

I asked him to feed the animals. Nothing else.

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

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

We went to the neighbouring grill bar for dinner.

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

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

‘Are you still an eavesdropper?’ she asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get back on your feet as soon as you fall.

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

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

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

Never stay down if you don’t have to.

I had done what you should never do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘In the caravan?’

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

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

The caravan door opened. A woman emerged.

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

‘This is my daughter,’ said Harriet.

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

I stayed where I was.

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

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