Italian Shoes

Chapter 1

My daughter doesn’t have a well of her own.

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

The crows were motionless.

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

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

I tried hard to remember.

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

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

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

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

One thing was clear to me.

Harriet had not prepared her for this. She knew that she had a father, of course, but not that I was him. I was not the only one to be surprised. Harriet had astounded us both.

I picked up the buckets and started to make my way back. Why was my daughter living in a caravan in the depths of the forest? Who was she? When we shook hands, I hadn’t dared to look her in the eye. She was surrounded by a strong smell of perfume. Her hand was sweaty.

I put down the buckets to rest my arms.

‘Louise,’ I said aloud to myself. ‘I have a daughter called Louise.’

The words struck me dumb, made me a little afraid, but also exhilarated. Harriet had come to me over the ice in Jansson’s hydrocopter, bringing with her news about life, and not just the death that would soon claim her.

I picked up the buckets again and carried them to the caravan. I knocked on the door. Louise opened it. She was still wearing the high-heeled shoes, but she had replaced the pink dressing gown with trousers and a jumper. She had a very attractive figure. She made me feel embarrassed.

The caravan was cramped. Harriet had squeezed on to a bench-cum-bed behind a little table in front of the window. She was smiling. I smiled back at her. It was warm in the caravan. Louise was busy making coffee.

Louise had a lovely voice, just like her mother’s. If ice could sing, so could my daughter.

I looked round the caravan. Dried roses hanging from the ceiling, a shelf with documents and letters, an old-fashioned typewriter on a stool. A radio but no television set. I started worrying about the kind of life she led. It seemed reminiscent of my own.

And now you’ve turned up in my life, I thought. The most unexpected thing that has ever happened to me.

Louise produced a Thermos of coffee and some plastic mugs. I sat down on the bed next to Harriet. Louise remained standing, looking at me.

‘I’m pleased to note that I haven’t burst out crying,’ she said. ‘But I’m even more pleased to note that you haven’t gone overboard and insisted how happy you are about what you’ve just discovered.’

‘It hasn’t sunk in yet. But then again, I never get so excited that I lose control of myself.’

‘Maybe you think it’s not true?’

I thought about all those dust-covered bundles of legal documents containing statements made by young men swearing that they were not the father.

‘I’m quite sure it’s true.’

‘Do you feel sad because you didn’t know about me sooner? Because I’ve come into your life so late?’

‘I’m pretty immune to sadness,’ I said. ‘Just now I’m more surprised than anything else. Until an hour ago, I didn’t have any children. I didn’t think I ever would.’

‘What do you do for a living?’

I looked at Harriet. So she hadn’t told Louise anything at all about her father, not even that he was a doctor. That shocked me. What had she said about me? That her daughter had a father who was just a ship passing in the night?

‘I’m a doctor. Or was a doctor, rather.’

Louise looked quizzically at me, coffee mug in hand. I noticed that she had a ring on every one of her fingers, and her thumbs as well.

‘What sort of a doctor?’

‘I was a surgeon.’

She pulled a face. I thought about my father, and his reaction when I told him at the age of fifteen what I wanted to be.

‘Can you write prescriptions?’

‘Not any more. I’m retired.’

‘More’s the pity.’

Louise put down her mug of coffee and pulled a woolly hat over her head.

‘If you need a pee you go behind the caravan, then cover it up with snow afterwards. If you need to do something more substantial, you use the dry closet next to the woodshed.’

She went out, slightly unsteady on her high-heeled shoes. I turned to Harriet.

‘Why didn’t you tell me about her? It’s disgraceful!’

‘Don’t you talk to me about disgraceful behaviour! I didn’t know how you would react.’

‘It would have been easier if you’d prepared me for it.’

‘I didn’t dare. Maybe you’d have thrown me out of the car and left me by the roadside. How could I know if you really wanted a child?’

Harriet was right. She couldn’t have known how I would react. She had every reason to distrust me.

‘Why does she live like this? What does she do for a living?’

‘It’s her choice. I don’t know what she does.’

‘But you must have some idea?’

‘She writes letters.’

‘Surely she can’t make a living out of that?’

‘It seems to be possible.’

It occurred to me that the caravan walls were thin, and that my daughter might be standing out there with her ear pressed up against the cold plastic, or whatever it was. Perhaps she had inherited my tendency to eavesdrop?

I lowered my voice to a whisper.

‘Why does she look like she does? Why does she walk around in the snow wearing high heels?’

‘My daughter —’

‘Our daughter!’

‘Our daughter has always had a mind of her own. Even when she was five, I had the feeling that she knew exactly what she wanted to do with her life, and that I would never be able to make her out.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘She’s always chosen to live her life without worrying too much about what other people think. Her shoes, for example. They are very expensive. Ajello, made in Milan. Very few people dare to live the way she does.’

The door opened, and our daughter came back in.

‘I need to rest,’ said Harriet. ‘I’m tired.’

‘You’ve always been tired,’ said Louise.

‘I haven’t always been dying.’

For a brief moment, they were hissing at each other, like cats. Not exactly in a nasty way, but not exactly friendly either. In any case, neither of them seemed to be surprised by the other’s reaction. So Louise was aware of the fact that her mother was dying.

I stood up so that Harriet could lie down on the narrow bed. Louise put on a pair of boots.

‘Let’s go out for a walk,’ she said. ‘I need some exercise. And besides, I think we’re both a bit shaken.’

There was a well-worn path heading in the opposite direction to the abandoned farm. We passed an old earth cellar and entered a dense conifer wood. She was walking quickly, and I had difficulty in keeping up with her. She suddenly turned round to face me.

‘I thought I had a father who had gone to America and vanished. A father called Henry who was mad about bees, and spent his time researching into how they lived. But the years passed by, and he didn’t even send me a jar of honey. I thought he was dead. But you’re not dead. I’ve actually met you. When we get back to the caravan I’m going to take a photograph of you and Harriet. I have lots of photos of her, on her own or together with me. But I want a photo of both my parents before it’s too late.’

We continued walking along the path.

It seemed to me that Harriet had told Louise the facts. Or at least as much of the facts as she could, without telling a lie. I had gone to America, and I had vanished. And in my youth I’d been interested in bees. Moreover, it was certainly true that I wasn’t yet dead.

We continued walking through the snow.

She would get her photograph of her parents.

It wasn’t yet too late to take the picture she needed.

Chapter 2

The sun had sunk down towards the horizon.

In the middle of a little field was a boxing ring, covered in snow. It looked as if somebody had thrown it out, and it had just happened to land there in the whiteness. Half hidden in the snow were a couple of ramshackle wooden benches that might well have been taken from a chapel or a cinema.

‘We have boxing matches in spring and summer,’ she said. ‘We generally start the season in mid-May. That’s when we have the weigh-in, using some old scales from a dairy.’

‘We? Are you telling me that you box as well?’

‘Of course. Why shouldn’t I?’

‘Who do you box with?’

‘My friends. People from around here who have chosen to live the kind of life they think suits them best. Leif, for instance, who lives with his old mum who used to run the biggest moonshine operation for miles around. Amandus, who plays the fiddle and has very strong fists.’

‘But surely you can’t be a boxer and play the violin as well? How do his fingers cope?’

‘You’ll have to ask Amandus that. Ask the others.’

She didn’t tell me who the others were. She continued along the well-trodden path leading to a barn at the other side of the boxing ring. As I observed her from behind, it struck me that her body was very much like Harriet’s. But what had my daughter looked like when she was a little girl? Or when she was a teenager? I trudged along through the snow and tried to think myself back in time. Louise was born in 1967. She was a teenager when I was at the height of my career as a surgeon. I suddenly felt a surge of anger. Why had Harriet not said anything?

Louise pointed to some tracks in the snow and said they had been made by a wolverine. She opened the barn door. There was a paraffin lamp on the floor: she lit it and hung it from a hook in the ceiling. It was like entering an old-fashioned gym used by boxers or wrestlers. Dotted around on the floor were dumb-bells and weightlifting bars, a punchbag hung down from the ceiling, and on a bench was a neatly coiled skipping rope and several pairs of red and black boxing gloves.

‘If it had been spring, I’d have suggested we should have a couple of rounds,’ Louise said. ‘I can’t think of a better way of starting to get to know a father I’ve never met before. In more than one sense.’

‘I have never, ever worn a pair of boxing gloves.’

‘But you must have been in a fight or two?’

‘When I was thirteen or fourteen, I suppose. But they were more like wrestling matches in the school playground.’

Louise stood by the punchbag and set it swaying gently back and forth with her shoulder. The paraffin lamp was shining just above her head. I still thought it was Harriet I was looking at.

‘I’m nervous,’ she said. ‘Have you any more children?’

I shook my head.

‘None at all?’

‘No, none at all. What about you?’

‘None.’

The punchbag was still swaying back and forth.

‘I’m just as confused as you are,’ she said. ‘There have been times when I’ve remembered that I must have had a father, despite everything, and the thought has made me furious. I think that’s why I took up boxing. So that I could knock him out on the day that he rose from the dead, and count him out into eternity, as my revenge for him abandoning me.’

The light from the lamp danced around the rough walls. I told her about how Harriet had suddenly turned up on the ice, about the forest pool, and the detour she had suddenly asked me to make.

‘Didn’t she say anything about me?’

‘No, all she spoke about was the forest pool. Then she said that she wanted me to meet her daughter.’

‘I ought to throw her out really. She’s made fools of us both. But you don’t throw out somebody who’s ill.’

She raised her hand and stopped the punchbag swinging.

‘Is it true that she’s going to die soon? You’re a doctor — you must know if she’s telling the truth.’

‘She’s very ill indeed. But I don’t know when she’s going to die. Nobody could put a date on that.’

‘I don’t want her to die in my caravan,’ said Louise, blowing out the paraffin lamp.

We stood there in the pitch dark. Our fingers happened to meet. She took hold of my hand. She was strong.

‘I’m so glad you’ve turned up,’ she said. ‘I suppose that, deep down, I’ve always thought you would do one day.’

‘It had never occurred to me that I might have a child.’

‘You don’t have a child. You have a grown-up woman approaching middle age.’

When we emerged from the barn, I could see her in front of me as a silhouette. The stars seemed to be almost within reach, glittering.

‘It’s never completely dark up here in the far north,’ said Louise. ‘When you live in a big town, you don’t see the stars any more. That’s why I live here. When I lived in Stockholm, I used to miss the silence, but most of all the stars. I don’t understand why it doesn’t seem to have occurred to anybody that in this country we have fantastic natural resources just waiting to be exploited. Why is nobody selling silence, in the same way that they sell the forests and the iron ore?’

I knew what she meant. Silence, starry skies, perhaps also solitariness — such things simply don’t exist any more for most people. I was beginning to think that she was very like me, despite everything.

‘I’m going to start a company,’ she said. ‘My boxer friends are going to be partners. We’re going to start selling these glittering, silent nights. We’ll all be very rich one of these days, I’m sure of it.’

‘Who are these friends of yours?’

‘There’s a deserted village a few miles north of here. Its last inhabitant moved out one day in the 1970s. All the houses were empty, nobody even wanted them as holiday cottages. But Mr Mateotti, an old Italian shoemaker, came here while on his journey looking for silence. Now he’s living in one of those houses, and he makes two pairs of shoes per year. At the beginning of May every year, a helicopter lands in the field behind his house. A man from Paris comes to pick up the shoes, pays him for his work, and passes on the orders for the shoes Giaconelli is expected to make in the coming year. There’s an old rock singer living in Sparrman’s village store that closed down years ago. He used to call himself the Red Bear, and he had two gold discs, making him a candidate for the Swedish King of Rock in competition with Ricky Rock and Gary Granite. His hair was bright red, and he made a scrumptious recording of “Peggy Sue”. But when we celebrate midsummer and sit down to eat at our table in the boxing ring, we all want him to sing “The Great Pretender”.’

I remembered that hit very well, in the original version recorded by the Platters. Harriet and I had even danced to it. I think I could remember all the words, if I put my mind to it.

But the Red Bear and his gold discs — that meant nothing to me at all.

‘It sounds as if there are a lot of remarkable people living around here.’

‘There are remarkable people living everywhere, but nobody notices them because they’re old. We live in an age when old people are supposed to be as transparent as a sheet of glass. It’s best if we don’t even notice that they exist. You are becoming more and more transparent as well. My mother has been for ages.’

We stood there in silence. I could just about make out the lights from the caravan in the distance.

‘Sometimes I feel an urge to lie down out here in the snow in my sleeping bag,’ said Louise. ‘When it’s full moon, the blue light gives me the feeling of being in a desert. It’s cold at night in the desert as well.’

‘I’ve never been in a desert. Unless the shifting sands at Skagen count as a desert?’

‘One of these days I really will go to bed out here. I’ll take the risk of never waking up again. We don’t only have rock musicians around here: we have jazz musicians as well. When I lie down out here and try to go to sleep, I’ll have them standing round me, playing a slow lament.’

We set off again through the snow. An owl hooted somewhere in the distance. Stars fell out of the sky, but then seemed to be ignited again. I tried to digest what she had told me.

It turned out to be a very strange evening.

Louise prepared a meal in the caravan while Harriet and I sat squashed together on the narrow sofa bed. When I said Harriet and I would have to find somewhere to spend the night, Louise insisted that all three of us could sleep in her bed. I was going to protest, but decided not to. Louise produced a flagon of wine that seemed to be very strong and tasted of gooseberries. She then served up a stew which she claimed contained elk meat, and to go with it a variety of vegetables grown by one of her friends in a greenhouse, which he evidently used as a home as well. His name was Olof, he slept among his cucumbers, and was one of the men she boxed with in the spring.

It wasn’t long before we were all drunk, especially Harriet. She kept dozing off. Louise had an amusing habit of clicking her teeth whenever she emptied a glass. I tried hard to stay sober, but failed.

Our conversation became increasingly confused and bewildering, but I managed to glean something of the kind of relationship Louise and Harriet had. They were constantly in touch, often quarrelled and hardly ever agreed about anything at all. But they were very fond of each other. I had acquired a family that oozed anger, but was held together by deep-felt love.

We talked for a long time about dogs — not the kind you take for walks on a lead, but the wild dogs that roam the African plains. My daughter said they reminded her of her friends living in the forest, a herd of African dogs wagging their tails at a herd of northern Swedish boxers. I told them that I had a dog of such mixed race that it was impossible to say exactly what its ancestry was. When Louise realised that the dog roamed around at will on my grandparents’ island, she very much approved. She was also interested to hear about the old cat.

Harriet eventually fell asleep, thanks to a mixture of exhaustion, spirits and gooseberry wine. Louise gently laid a blanket over her.

‘She has always been a snorer. When I was a child I used to pretend that it wasn’t her snoring, but my father who came to visit every night in the form of an invisible but snoring creature. Do you snore?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘Thank God for that! Here’s to my father!’

‘And here’s to my daughter!’

She refilled our glasses carelessly and spilled wine on the table. She wiped it with the palm of her hand.

‘When I heard the car driving up, I wondered what kind of an old codger Harriet had brought with her this time.’

‘Does she often come visiting with different men?’

‘Old codgers. Not men. She always manages to find somebody willing to drive her here, and then drive her home again. She often sits in some cafe or other in Stockholm, looking tired and miserable. Somebody always turns up to ask if he can help her, perhaps give her a lift home. Once she’s in the car, with her walker stowed in the boot, she mentions that “home” is a couple of hundred miles or more north, just to the south of Hudiksvall. Surprisingly enough, hardly any of them refuse to take her. But she soon tires of the codger and ditches him for another one. My mother is very impatient. While I was growing up there would be long periods when there was always a different man in her bed on Sunday mornings. I used to love jumping up and down on them and waking them up, so that the men became aware of the unpleasant fact that I existed. But then there were times when she would go for weeks and months without so much as looking at a man.’

I went outside for a pee. The night was sparkling. I could see through the window how Louise placed a pillow under her mother’s head. I almost burst into tears. I thought perhaps I ought to run away — take the car and get out of there. But I carried on observing her through the window, with a distinct feeling that she knew I was watching her. She suddenly turned her head towards the window and smiled.

I left the car where it was, and went back inside.

We sat there in the cramped caravan, drinking and conducting a tentative conversation. I don’t think either of us really knew what we wanted to say. Louise produced some photo albums from a drawer. Some were faded black-and-white snaps, but most were poor-quality coloured pictures from the early 1970s, in the days when everybody had red-eye, and gaped at the photographer like vampires. There were pictures of the woman I had abandoned, and of the daughter I would have wanted more than anything in the world. A little girl, not a fully grown adult. There was something evasive in her expression. As if she didn’t really want to be seen.

I leafed through the album. She didn’t say much, merely answered the questions I put to her. Who had taken the picture? Where were they? The summer when my daughter was seven, she and Harriet spent some weeks with a man by the name of Richard Munter on the island of Getterön near Varberg. Munter was a powerfully built man, bald, and always had a cigarette in his mouth. I felt pangs of jealousy. This man had been together with my daughter when she was of the age I wished she still was. He had died a few years later, when his affair with Harriet was already over. A bulldozer had toppled over, and he was crushed to death. All that remained of him now were poor-quality photographs with the ever-present cigarette, and the red eyes caused by the camera flash.

I closed the album: I didn’t have the strength to cope with any more pictures. The level of the wine left in the flagon fell lower and lower. Harriet was asleep. I asked Louise who she wrote letters to. She shook her head.

‘Not now. Tomorrow, when we’ve slept off the hangover. We must go to bed now. For the first time in my life I’m going to lie down between my parents.’

‘There’s not enough room in that bed for all three of us. I’ll sleep on the floor.’

‘There’s room.’

She gently moved Harriet towards the wall, then folded away the table after first removing the cups and glasses. The bed was extendable, but it seemed obvious that it would be very cramped even so.

‘I’m not going to get undressed in front of my father,’ she said. ‘Go outside. I’ll bang on the wall once I’ve snuggled down under the covers.’

I did as I was told.

The starry sky was spinning round. I stumbled and fell down in the snow. I had acquired a daughter, and perhaps she would come to like, perhaps even to love the father she had never met before.

My whole life flashed before my eyes.

I’d managed to get this far. There might be a few crossroads yet to come. But not too many. My journey was nearly over.

Louise banged on the caravan wall. She had switched off all the lights and lit a candle standing on the tiny refrigerator. I could see two faces beside each other. Harriet was furthest away, and my daughter lay next to her. There was a narrow strip of bed left for me.

‘Blow the candle out,’ said Louise. ‘I don’t want to use it up the first night I’ve ever slept with my parents.’

I undressed, but kept on my vest and pants, blew the candle out and crept into bed. It was impossible to avoid touching Louise. I noticed to my horror that she was naked.

‘Can’t you put on a nightdress?’ I asked. ‘I can’t possibly sleep with you next to me, naked. Surely you can understand that?’

She clambered over me and put on something that seemed to me to be a dress. Then she came back to bed.

‘Time to go to sleep now,’ she said. ‘At long last I’m going to hear my father snoring. I shall lie awake until you’ve gone to sleep.’

Harriet was muttering in her sleep. Whenever she rolled over, we had to adjust as well. Louise felt warm. I only wished she had been a little girl sleeping soundly in a nightdress. Not a fully grown woman who had suddenly entered my life.

I don’t know when I finally fell asleep. It was a long time before the bed seemed to stop spinning round. When I eventually woke up, I was alone.

The caravan was empty. The car was gone.

Chapter 3

I could see from the tracks in the snow how Louise had turned the car round and driven off. It occurred to me that all this had been planned in advance. Harriet had collected me, taken me to meet my unknown daughter, and then the pair of them had taken my car and vanished. I’d been dumped in the forest.

It was a quarter to ten. The weather had changed, and the temperature was above freezing. Water was dripping from the dirty caravan. I went back inside. I had a headache, and my mouth was parched. There was no sign of a message saying where they had gone. There was a Thermos flask of coffee on the table. I took out a cracked cup advertising a chain of health stores.

All the time the forest seemed to be creeping up on the caravan.

The coffee was strong, my hangover painful. I took my cup of coffee out into the fresh air. A cloud of damp mist hovered over the forest. A rifle shot echoed in the distance. I held my breath. It was followed by a second one, then nothing more. It seemed that all sounds were having to queue up before being allowed into the silence — and then only tentatively, one at a time.

I went back inside and started searching methodically through the caravan. Although it was small and cramped, there was a surprising amount of storage space. Louise kept everything in good order. Her favourite colour for clothes seemed to be chestnut brown, although some items were a shade of deep red. Most garments were in earth colours.

In a simple wooden chest with the year 1822 painted on the lid, I was amazed to find a large sum of money — thousand-kronor and five-hundred-kronor notes amounting to 47,500 in all. Then I began investigating drawers containing documents and letters.

The first item I found was a signed photograph of Erich Honecker. It said on the back that it dated from 1986, and had been sent by the DDR Embassy in Stockholm. There were several more photographs in the drawer, all of them signed — Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan and Africans I had never heard of, but presumed were statesmen. There was also a photograph of an Australian prime minister whose name I couldn’t make out.

I moved on to the second drawer, which was full of letters. After having read five of them, I began to understand how my daughter spent her time. She wrote letters to political leaders in all parts of the world, protesting about the way in which they were treating their own citizens and also people in other countries. In every envelope was a copy of the letter she had written in her sprawling hand, and the reply she had received. She had written to Erich Honecker in passionate English to the effect that the Berlin Wall was a disgraceful scandal. In reply she had received a photograph of Honecker on a podium waving to a blurred mass of East Germans. Louise had written to Margaret Thatcher urging her to treat the striking miners decently. I couldn’t find a reply from the Iron Lady — in any case there was nothing in the envelope apart from a photograph of Thatcher clutching her handbag tightly. But where had Louise got all that money from? There was no clue here to answer that question.

That was as far as I got. I heard the sound of a car approaching, closed the drawers and went outside. Louise was driving fast. She braked abruptly in the wet snow.

Louise took the walker out of the boot.

‘We didn’t want to wake you up. I’m delighted to discover that my father is an expert in the art of snoring.’

She helped Harriet out of the car.

‘We’ve been shopping,’ said Harriet with a smile. ‘I’ve bought some stockings, a skirt and a hat.’

Louise lifted some carrier bags from the back seat.

‘My mother never did have any dress sense,’ she said.

I carried the bags to the caravan while Louise helped Harriet to negotiate the slippery slope.

‘We’ve eaten already,’ said Louise. ‘Are you hungry?’

I was in fact, but shook my head. I didn’t like her borrowing my car without permission.

Harriet lay down on the bed to rest. I could see that the trip had done her good, but had exhausted her even so. She soon fell asleep. Louise produced the red hat that Harriet had bought.

‘It suits her,’ she said. ‘It’s a hat that could have been made specific ally for her.’

‘I’ve never seen her wearing a hat. When we were young, we were always bare-headed. Even when it was cold.’

Louise put the hat back in its bag, and looked round the caravan. Had I left any traces? Would she see that I’d spent the time they were away going through her belongings? She turned to look at me, then at my shoes that were standing on a newspaper next to the door. I’d had them for many years. They were very worn, and several of the lace-holes had split. She stood up, gently placed a blanket over her mother, and put on her jacket.

‘Let’s go out,’ she said.

I was only too pleased to do so. My headache was painful.

We stood outside the caravan, breathing in the bracing air. It struck me that I had failed to write anything in my logbook for several days now. I don’t like breaking my routine.

‘Your car could do with a service,’ said Louise. ‘The brakes are out of balance.’

‘It’s good enough for me. Where are we going?’

‘We’re going to see a good friend of mine. I want to give you a present.’

I turned the car round in the slush. When we came to the main road, she told me to turn left. Several lorries laden with logs whipped up clouds of snow. After a couple of miles she told me to turn right: a sign indicated that we were heading for somewhere called Motjärvsbyn. The pine trees came to the very edge of the road, which was badly ploughed. Louise was concentrating on the road ahead. She was humming a tune: I recognised it, but couldn’t remember what it was called.

We came to a fork, and Louise pointed to the left. After half a mile or so the forest receded and the road was lined with a row of cottages: but they were empty, dead, no smoke rose from their chimneys. Only the cottage at the end of the row, a two-storey wooden building with a battered, green-painted porch, showed any signs of life. A cat was sitting on the steps. A thin wisp of smoke rose up from the chimney.

‘Via Salandra in Rome,’ said Louise. ‘That’s a street I’m determined to walk along one of these days. Have you ever been to Rome?’

‘I’ve been there several times. But I don’t know the street you mention.’

Louise got out of the car. I followed her. The timber-built cottage must have been over a hundred years old; opera music could be heard from inside.

‘There’s a genius living in this house,’ said Louise. ‘Giaconelli Mateotti. He’s an old man now. But he used to work for the famous shoemaking family Gatto. As a young apprentice, he was taught his trade by the one and only Angelo Gatto, who started his workshop at the beginning of the 1900s. But now Giaconelli has brought his skills to the forest. He grew tired of all the traffic, of all the important customers who were always so impatient and refused to accept the fact that patience and time were essential for the making of good shoes.’

Louise looked me in the eye, and smiled.

‘I want to give you a present,’ she said. ‘I want Giaconelli to make you a pair of shoes. The ones you are wearing are an insult to your feet. Giaconelli has told me how our feet our constructed; the bones and muscles that enable us to walk and run, to stand on tiptoe, to dance ballet even. I know of opera singers who don’t much care about directors or conductors or costumes or the high notes they have to sing — but are passionate about the shoes they wear which they believe enable them to sing properly.’

I stared at her. This was just like listening to my father. The browbeaten waiter who had long since been banished to the grave. He had also spoken about opera singers and their shoes.

It was a strange feeling, realising that my father and my daughter had this in common.

But the shoes she was offering me? I wanted to object, but she raised her hand, walked up the steps, pushed the cat to one side and opened the front door. The opera music hit us with full force. It was coming from one of the rooms further back in the house. We passed through the rooms that Mateotti lived in, and where he kept his leather and his lasts. On one of the walls was a hand-painted motto that I assumed had been written by Mateotti himself. Somebody by the name of Chuang Chou had said: ‘When the shoe fits, you don’t think about the foot.’

One room was filled with wooden lasts, stacked on shelves from floor to ceiling. Each pair had a name label hanging from it. Louise pulled several lasts out and I was amazed when I read the names. Giaconelli had made shoes for American presidents, now dead; but their lasts were still here. There were conductors and actors, and people who’d achieved notoriety, for good reason or bad. It was a bewildering experience to make one’s way through all these famous feet. It was as if the lasts themselves had struggled through snow and swamp so that the master I still hadn’t met would be able to make his marvellous shoes.

‘Two hundred individual operations,’ said Louise. ‘That’s what’s needed to make just one shoe.’

‘They must be extremely expensive,’ I said. ‘When shoes are elevated to the level of jewels.’

She smiled.

‘Giaconelli owes me a favour. He’ll be pleased to reciprocate.’

Reciprocate.

When had I last heard anybody use that word in a context like that? I couldn’t remember. Perhaps people who live in the depths of the forest use language in a different way? Perhaps people who live in big cities chase down words as if they were outlaws?

We continued to make our way through the old cottage. There were lasts and tools everywhere, and one room smelled strongly of the tanned hides piled up on simple trestle tables.

The opera had reached its finale. The old floorboards creaked as we walked over them.

‘I hope you’ve washed your feet,’ said Louise as we came to the final door, which was closed.

‘What will happen if I haven’t?’

‘Giaconelli won’t say anything, but he will be disappointed even if he doesn’t show it.’

She knocked on the door, and opened it.

At a table with neat rows of tools sat an old man hunched over a last partly covered by leather. He wore glasses, and was completely bald apart from a few strands of hair at the back of his head. He was very thin, one of those persons who give the impression of being more or less weightless. There was nothing in the room apart from that table. The walls were bare, there were no shelves containing lasts, nothing but naked wooden walls. The music had come from a radio set standing on one of the window ledges. Louise leaned over and kissed the old man on the top of his bald pate. He seemed to be delighted to see her, and carefully slid to one side the brown shoe he was making.

‘This is my father,’ said my daughter. ‘He’s come back after all these years.’

‘A good man always comes back,’ said Giaconelli. He had a thick accent.

He stood up and shook hands.

‘You have a beautiful daughter,’ he said. ‘She’s also an excellent boxer. She laughs a lot, and helps me whenever I need help. Why have you been hiding yourself away?’

He was still grasping my hand. His grip became even tighter.

‘I haven’t been hiding away. I didn’t know that I had a daughter.’

‘Deep down, a man always knows if he has a child or not. But you have turned up. Louise is happy. That’s all I need to know. She’s been waiting for long enough for you to come walking through the forest to visit her. Perhaps you’ve been on your way all these years without realising it? It’s just as easy to lose your way inside yourself as it is to get lost in the woods or in a city.’

We went to Giaconelli’s kitchen. Unlike his ascetic workshop, it was cluttered with all shapes and sizes of pans, dried herbs, bunches of garlic hanging from the ceiling, paraffin lamps and rows of jars with spices squeezed on to beautifully carved shelves. In the middle of the floor was a large, heavy table. Giaconelli noticed me looking at it, and stroked his hand over the smooth surface.

‘Beech,’ he said. ‘The marvellous wood from which I make my lasts. I used to get my timber from France. It’s not possible to make lasts from any other kind of wood: beech trees grow in rolling countryside, tolerate shade, and are not affected by big and unexpected variations in climate. I always used to choose personally which trees were going to be felled. I would pick them out two or three years before I needed to replenish my stocks. They were always felled during the winter and chopped into lengths of six feet, never any more, and were stored outdoors for long periods. When I moved to Sweden I found a supplier in Skåne. I’m too old now to raise the strength to drive down south to pick out individual trees myself. I find that very sad. But then, I make fewer and fewer lasts nowadays. I prowl round in my house and wonder how much longer I shall carry on making shoes. The man who chooses which trees to cut down for me presented me with this table when I celebrated my ninetieth birthday.’

The old master invited us to sit down, and produced a bottle of red wine in a raffia sleeve. His hand shook as he filled our glasses.

‘A toast to the father who turned up!’ he said, raising his glass.

The wine was very good. I realised I had been missing something during the years I had spent alone on my island: drinking wine with friends.

Giaconelli began telling remarkable stories about all the shoes he had made over the years, about customers who kept coming back for more, and their children who would turn up at his door after their parents had passed on. But most of his stories were about all the feet he had seen and measured before making his lasts, and how my feet would have already carried me for approaching 120,000 miles. About the significance of the ankle bone — talus — for the strength of a foot. He fascinated me by speaking about the apparently insignificant little cuboid bone — os cuboideum. He seemed to know everything there was to know about the bones and muscles of the foot. I recognised much of what he talked about from my days as a medical student — such as the incredibly ingenious anatomical constructions; how all muscles in the foot are short in order to give strength, endurance and flexibility.

Louise said she wanted Giaconelli to make a pair of shoes for me. He nodded sagely, and stared at my face for several seconds before turning his interest to my feet. He slid to one side an earthenware dish of almonds and other nuts, and asked me to stand on the table.

‘Please take off your shoes and socks. I know some modern shoemakers measure feet with socks on, but I’m old-fashioned. I want to see the naked foot, nothing else.’

It had never occurred to me that I would ever have somebody measuring my foot in order to make me a pair of shoes. Shoes were something you tried on in a shop. I hesitated, but removed my worn-out shoes, took off my socks and clambered on to the table. Giaconelli looked at my shoes with a worried expression on his face. Louise had evidently been present before on occasions when the Italian had measured people’s feet for shoes, as she withdrew into an adjacent room and returned with some sheets of paper, a clipboard and a pencil.

It was like going through a rite. Giaconelli examined my feet, stroked them with his fingers, and then asked if I was feeling well.

‘I think so.’

‘Are you completely healthy?’

‘I have a headache.’

‘Are your feet in good order?’

‘Well, they don’t hurt at least.’

‘They’re not swollen?’

‘No.’

‘The most important thing when making shoes is to measure the feet in calm circumstances, never at night, never in artificial light. I only want to see your feet when they are in good condition.’

I was beginning to wonder if I was the object of a practical joke. But Louise seemed completely serious, and was ready to start making notes.

It took Giaconelli over two hours to complete his examination of my feet, and to compile a list of the various measurements needed for the creation of my lasts, and thereafter of the shoes my daughter was keen to present me with. During those two hours, I learned that the world of feet is more complicated and comprehensive than one might think. Giaconelli spent ages searching for the theoretical longitudinal axis dictating whether my left or right foot pointed outwards or inwards. He checked the shape of the ball of each foot, and the instep, and investigated to see if I had any characteristic deformations: was I flat-footed, was either of my little toes unduly prominent, were my big toes higher than usual, so-called hammer toes? I gathered that there was one golden rule that Giaconelli followed meticulously: the best results were achieved using the simplest of measuring instruments. He restricted himself to two shoe heels and a shoemaker’s tape measure. The tape measure was yellow and had two different calibration scales. The first scale was used to measure the foot in old French stitches, each one equal to 6.66 millimetres. The other one measured the width and circumference of the foot, using the metric system, in centimetres and millimetres. Giaconelli also used an ancient set square, and when I stood on the sheet of indigo paper he drew a line round my feet using a simple pencil. He talked all the time, just as I recalled the older doctors doing when I started training as a surgeon — constantly describing exactly what they were doing and commenting on every incision, the blood flow, and the general condition of the patient. As he was drawing an outline of my feet, Giaconelli explained that the pencil must be held at exactly ninety degrees to the paper: if the angle was less than this, he elaborated in his heavily accented Swedish, the shoes would be at least one size too small.

He traced the outline of each foot with his pencil, always starting from the heel and following the inside of the foot to the big toe, then along the tips of the toes, and back to the heel via the outside of the foot. He instructed me to press my toes down hard on the ground. He used the word ground, even though I was standing on a sheet of paper on a table. As far as Giaconelli was concerned, people always stood on the ground, nowhere else.

‘Good shoes help a person to forget about his feet,’ he said. ‘Nobody travels through life on a table or on a sheet of paper. Feet and the ground are linked together.’

As the left foot and the right foot are never identical, it is essential to draw outlines of both of them. When the outlines were completed, Giaconelli marked the location of the first and the fifth phalanx, and also the most prominent points of the ball of the foot and the heel. He drew very slowly, as if he were not only following the outline of my foot, but was also relating to an inner process that I knew nothing about, and could only guess at. I had noticed this characteristic in the surgeons I admired.

When I was finally allowed to get down from the table, the whole procedure was repeated once again, with me sitting in an old rattan basket chair. I assumed Giaconelli had taken it with him from Rome when he’d made up his mind to continue creating his masterpieces in the depths of the northern forests. He displayed the same degree of meticulous accuracy, but now he didn’t speak: instead he hummed arias from the opera he’d been listening to when Louise and I had arrived at his house.

Eventually, when all the measuring was finished and I was allowed to put back on my socks and my old, worn-out shoes, we drank another glass of wine. Giaconelli seemed to be tired, as if the measuring had exhausted him.

‘I suggest a pair of black shoes with a hint of violet,’ said Giaconelli, ‘and a perforated pattern on the uppers. We shall use two different leathers in order to present the design discreetly but also to add a personal touch. I have leather for the upper that was tanned two hundred years ago. That will give something special in the way of colour and subtlety.’

He poured us another glass of wine, emptying the bottle.

‘The shoes will be ready a year from now,’ he said. ‘At the moment I am busy with a pair for a Vatican cardinal. I’m also committed to making a pair of shoes for Keskinen, the conductor, and I have promised the diva Klinkova some shoes appropriate for her concerts featuring Romantic lieder. I shall be able to start on yours eight months from now, and they’ll be ready in a year.’

We emptied our glasses. He shook us both by the hand, and withdrew. As we left through the front door, we could hear once again music coming from the room he used as his workshop.

I had met a master craftsman who lived in a deserted village in the depths of the vast northern forests. Far away from urban areas, there lived people with marvellous and unexpected skills.

‘A remarkable man,’ I said as we walked to the car.

‘An artist,’ said my daughter. ‘His shoes are beyond compare. They’re impossible to imitate.’

‘Why did he come here?’

‘The city was driving him mad. The crowds, all the impatience that left him no peace and quiet in which to carry out his work. He lived in the Via Salandra. I made up my mind some time ago to go there, in order to see the place he has left behind.’

We drove through the gathering dusk. As we approached a bus stop, she asked me to pull into the side and stop.

The forest came right down to the edge of the road. I looked at her.

‘Why are we stopping?’

She stretched out her hand. I took hold of it. We sat there in silence. A lorry laden with logs thundered past, whipping up a cloud of snow.

‘I know you searched through my caravan while we were out. I don’t mind. You’ll never be able to find my secrets in drawers or on shelves.’

‘I noticed that you write letters and sometimes receive answers. But probably not the answers you’d like to get?’

‘I receive signed photographs from politicians I accuse of crimes. Most of them answer evasively, others not at all.’

‘What do you hope to achieve?’

‘To make a difference that’s so small it’s not even noticeable. But it’s a difference, for all that.’

I had a lot of questions, but she interrupted me before I had chance to ask them.

‘What do you want to know about me?’

‘You lead a strange life out here in the forest. But then, maybe it’s no more strange than my own. I find it hard to ask all the questions I’d like to have answers to: but I can sometimes be a good listener. A doctor has to be.’

She sat in silence for a while before she started speaking.

‘You have a daughter who’s been in prison. That was eleven years ago. I hadn’t committed any violent crimes. Only fraud.’

She half opened the door, and immediately it became cold inside the car.

‘I’m telling you the facts,’ she said. ‘You and Mum seem to have lied to each other. I don’t want to be like you.’

‘We were young,’ I said. ‘Neither of us knew enough about ourselves to do the right thing every time. It can sometimes be very hard to act in accordance with the truth. It’s much easier to tell lies.’

‘I want you to know the kind of life I’ve led. When I was a child, I felt like a changeling. Or, if you like, as if I’d been billeted with my mother by chance, while waiting for my real parents. She and I were at war. You ought to know that it’s not easy to live with Harriet. That’s something you’ve escaped having to go through.’

‘What happened?’

She shrugged.

‘The usual horror stories. One thing after another. Glue sniffing, thinner, drugs, truancy. But it didn’t get me down, I pulled through. I recall that period of my life as a time playing non-stop blind man’s buff. A life led with a scarf tied over my eyes. Instead of helping, all my mum did was tell me off. She tried to create an atmosphere of love between us by shouting at me. I left home just as soon as I could. I was trapped in a net of guilt: and then came all the fraud and deceit, and in the end I was locked up. Do you know how many times Harriet came to visit me while I was locked up?’

‘No?’

‘Once. Shortly before I was released. Just to make sure that I had no intention of moving back in with her. We didn’t speak to each other for five years after that. It was a long time before we got in touch again.’

‘What happened?’

‘I met Janne, who came from up here in the north. One morning I woke up to find him stone-cold dead in bed beside me. Janne’s funeral took place in a church not far from here. His relatives arrived. I didn’t know any of them. Without warning I stood up and announced that I wanted to sing a song. I don’t know where I got the courage from. Maybe I was angry to find that I was on my own again, and maybe I was annoyed by all those relatives who hadn’t put in an appearance when Janne needed them. The only song I could remember was the first verse of “Sailing”. I sang it twice — and looking back, I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever done in my life. When I emerged from the church and saw those apparently endless Hälsningland forests, I had the feeling that I belonged here, in the trees and the silence. That’s why I ended up here. Nothing was planned, it just happened. Everybody else around here is leaving and heading for the cities: but I turned my back on urban life. I found people here that I’d never realised existed. Nobody had told me about them.’

She stopped, and announced that it was too cold in the car to carry on talking. I had the feeling that what she had said could have been the blurb on the back of a book. A summary of a life, lived thus far. I still didn’t really know anything about my daughter. But she had begun to tell me.

I switched on the engine. The headlights illuminated the darkness.

‘I wanted you to know,’ she said. ‘One thing at a time.’

‘Let it take as long as it needs,’ I said. ‘The best way to get to know another person is one step at a time. That applies to you just as much as it does to me. If you go too fast, you can collide, or run aground.’

‘As happens at sea?’

‘What you don’t see is what you notice too late. That doesn’t only apply to unmarked channels at sea, it applies to people as well.’

I pulled out and continued along the main road. Why hadn’t I told her about the catastrophe that had blighted my life? Perhaps it was only due to exhaustion and confusion as a result of the astonishing revelations of the last couple of days. I would tell her soon enough, but not just yet. It was as if I was still trapped in that moment when I’d emerged from my hole in the ice, had the feeling that there was something behind me, looked round and saw Harriet, leaning on her wheeled walker.

I was deep in the melancholy forest of northern Sweden. But even so, most of me was still in my hole in the ice.

When I got back home, if the thaw hadn’t started and the ice was still there, it would take me a long time to chop it away again and open up the hole.

Chapter 4

The headlight beams and shadows danced over the snow.

We got out of the car without speaking. It was a cloudless and starry sky, colder now, and the temperature was falling. Faint light seeped out from the caravan windows.

When we went inside I could hear from Harriet’s breathing that all was not well. I failed to wake her up. I took her pulse: it was fast and irregular. I had my blood pressure monitor in the car. I asked Louise to fetch it. Both Harriet’s diastolic and systolic readings were too high.

We carried her out to my car. Louise asked what had happened. I told her that we needed to take Harriet to an A&E department where they could examine her thoroughly. Maybe she had had a stroke, perhaps something had happened in connection with her general condition: I didn’t know.

We drove through the darkness to Hudiksvall. The hospital lay in waiting, looking like an illuminated liner. We were received by two friendly nurses at the Emergency entrance; Harriet had regained consciousness, and it was not long before a doctor arrived to examine her. Although Louise looked at me somewhat oddly, I didn’t mention the fact that I was a doctor myself — or, at least, had been. I merely informed them that Harriet had cancer, and that her days were numbered. She was taking medicine to ease her pain, that was all. I wrote the names of the medication on a piece of paper, and gave it to the doctor.

We waited while the doctor, who was about my age, performed the examination. He said afterwards that he would keep her in overnight for observation. He couldn’t find anything specific that might have caused her reaction: it was presumably due to a deterioration in her general condition.

Harriet had fallen asleep again when we left her and emerged once more into the dark night. It was gone two by now; the sky was still cloudless. Louise suddenly stopped.

‘Is she going to die now?’ she asked.

‘I don’t think she’s ready to die yet. She’s a tough lady. If she has the strength to walk over the ice with her walker, I reckon she has a lot of strength left. I think she’ll tell us when the time comes.’

‘I always get hungry when I’m scared,’ said Louise. ‘Some people feel ill, but I simply have to eat.’

We got into the freezing cold car.

I had noticed an all-night hamburger restaurant on the edge of town, so we drove there. Several shaven-headed and overweight youths looking like Teddy boys from the distant fifties were sitting round one of the tables. All of them were drunk, apart from one — there was always one who stayed sober, and did the driving. A big, highly polished Chevrolet was parked outside. There was a smell of hair cream as we passed by their table.

To my astonishment, I heard them talking about Jussi Björling. Louise had also noticed their loud-voiced, drunken conversation. She pointed discreetly at one of the four men, with gold earrings, a beer belly falling out of his jeans and salad dressing smeared round his mouth.

‘Bror Olofsson,’ she said in a half-whisper. ‘The gang call themselves the Bror Brothers. Bror has a lovely singing voice. When he was a young lad he used to sing solos in the church choir. But he stopped all that when he became a teenager and a tearaway. There are those who are convinced he could have gone far — he might even have made it to the opera stage.’

‘Why are there no normal people up here?’ I asked as I studied the menu. ‘Why are all the people we meet so unusual? Italians who make shoes, or a retro Teddy boy who talks about Jussi Björling?’

‘There’s no such thing as normal people,’ she said. ‘That’s a twisted view of the world that politicians want us to believe. That we are all a part of an endless mass of normality, with no possibility, never mind desire to claim that we are different. I’ve often thought that I ought to write to Swedish politicians. To the secret team.’

‘What team is that?’

‘That’s what I call them. The ones with the power. The ones who receive my letters but never answer them — they just send pin-up photos. The secret team with all the power.’

She ordered something called the King’s Platter, while I made do with a large coffee, a small bag of crisps and a hamburger. She really was hungry. She gave the impression of wanting to stuff everything on her tray into her mouth at one go.

It was not a pretty sight. Her table manners embarrassed me.

She’s like an impoverished child, I thought. I remembered a trip I’d made to Sudan with a group of orthopaedists, in order to find out the best way of setting up clinics for landmine casualties requiring artificial limbs. I had watched those penniless children attacking their food in extreme desperation — a few grains of rice, a single vegetable, and perhaps a biscuit sent from some well-meaning country dedicated to assisting the Third World.

In addition to the four Teddy boys who had crept out from under a stone from another age, there were a few lorry drivers dotted around the restaurant. They were hunched over their empty trays, as if they were either asleep, or contemplating their mortality. There was also a couple of young girls, very young — they couldn’t have been more than fourteen or fifteen years old. They sat there whispering to each other, occasionally erupting into laughter before reverting to whispers. I could remember that atmosphere, all those confidential certainties one could pass on and feel informed about as a teenager. We all gave promises but broke them almost immediately, promised to keep secrets but spread them as quickly as possible. Nevertheless, they were far too young to be sitting there in the middle of the night. I was shocked. Shouldn’t they be in bed? Louise noticed what I was looking at. She had gobbled her slap-up meal before I had even taken the lid off my plastic beaker of coffee.

‘I’ve never seen them before,’ she said. ‘They’re not from these parts.’

‘Are you saying you know everybody who lives in this town?’

‘I just know.’

I tried to drink the coffee, but it was too bitter. It seemed to me we ought to go back to the caravan and try to get a few hours’ sleep before we needed to return to the hospital. But we stayed put until dawn. The Teddy boys had gone by then. So had the two girls. It hadn’t registered with me when the lorry drivers left: suddenly they were no longer there. Louise hadn’t noticed when they left either.

‘Some people are like migratory birds,’ she said. ‘Those vast distances they fly are always covered during the night. They just flew away without our noticing them.’

Louise ordered a cup of tea. The two dark-skinned men behind the counter spoke Swedish in a way that was difficult to understand, then lapsed into a language that was very melodic but filled me with melancholy. Louise occasionally asked if we ought to go back to the hospital.

‘They have your mobile number if anything should happen,’ I said. ‘We might just as well stay here.’

What we had in prospect was boundless conversation — a chronicle embracing almost forty years. Perhaps this hamburger joint, with its neon lights and the smell of deep-frying, was the framework we required?

Louise continued telling me about her life. At one point she had dreamt about becoming a mountaineer. When I asked her why, she said it was because she was afraid of heights.

‘Was that really such a good idea? Hanging from ropes on a sheer cliff face when you are scared stiff of climbing a ladder?’

‘I thought I’d get more out of it than people who aren’t scared of heights. I tried it once, up in Lappland. It wasn’t a very steep cliff, but my arms weren’t strong enough. I buried my mountaineering dreams in the heather up there in the far north. By the time I’d got as far south as Sundsvall — which wasn’t all that far, let’s face it — I’d stopped crying over my abandoned dream, and decided to become a juggler instead.’

‘And how did that go?’

‘I can still keep three balls in the air for quite a long time. Or three bottles. But I was never as good as I wanted to be.’

I waited for what was coming next. Somebody opened the squeaky outside door, and there was a blast of cold air before it closed again.

‘I thought I would never find what I was looking for. Especially as I didn’t know what it was. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that I knew what I wanted, but didn’t think I’d ever get it.’

‘A father?’

She nodded.

‘I tried to find you in the games I played. Every eleventh man I passed in the street was my father. At midsummer, every Swedish girl picks seven different wild flowers and places them under her pillow in order to dream about the man she’s going to marry: I picked lots and lots of flowers in order to see you. But you never appeared. I remember once being in a church. There was an altarpiece, Jesus soaring up in a beam of light that seemed to be coming from underneath him. Two Roman soldiers were on their knees, terrified of what they had done when they nailed him to the cross. All at once, I was certain that one of those soldiers was you. His face was identical to yours. The first time I saw you, you had a helmet on your head.’

‘Didn’t Harriet have any photos?’

‘I asked her. I searched through all her belongings. There weren’t any.’

‘We took lots of pictures of each other. She was always the one who kept and looked after our snaps.’

‘She told me there weren’t any. If she’s burnt them all, you are the one she’ll have to answer to.’

She went to refill her cup of tea. One of the men working in the kitchen was sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall — fast asleep. His jaw had dropped.

I wondered what he was dreaming about.

Now the story of her life featured horses and riders.

‘We never had enough money to pay for me to have riding lessons. Not even when Harriet had been promoted to manageress of a shoe shop, with a better salary. Sometimes I still get angry when I remember how mean she was. I used to turn up for the riding lessons, but I was on the wrong side of the fence: I had to stand outside and watch as the other girls rode around like little female warriors. I had the feeling of being forced to act as both horse and rider. I divided myself up into two parts: part of me was the horse and the other part the rider. When I was feeling good, and found it easy to get up in the morning, I would sit on the horse and there would be no split in my life. But when I didn’t feel like getting out of bed in the morning, it was as if I was the horse — as if I’d retired to a corner of the paddock and refused to respond, no matter how much they whipped me. I tried to feel that I and the horse were one and the same. I think that doing that helped me to survive all the difficulties I experienced as a child. Perhaps later as well. I sit on my horse, and my horse carries me — except when I jump off of my own accord.’

She stopped abruptly, as if she regretted saying what she had said.

Five o’clock came round. We were the only customers. The man leaning against the wall was still asleep. The other one was slowly and laboriously filling the half-empty sugar bowls.

Out of the blue, Louise suddenly exclaimed: ‘Caravaggio! I’ve no idea why I just started thinking about him, and his furious outbursts and his life-threatening knives. Perhaps because if he’d lived in our time, he might well have painted this hamburger bar, and people like you and me.’

Caravaggio the artist? I couldn’t see any paintings in my mind’s eye, but I recognised the name. A vague impression of dark colours, always with dramatic motifs, edged its way into my tired brain.

‘I don’t know anything about art.’

‘Nor do I. But I once saw a painting of a man holding a decapitated head in his hand. When I realised that the artist had depicted his own head, I felt I really had to find out more about him. I made up my mind to visit every single place where his pictures were hung. It was not enough to look at reproductions in books. Instead of making a pilgrimage to monasteries or churches, I started following in Caravaggio’s tracks. As soon as I had managed to save up enough money, I set off for Madrid and other places where his paintings could be seen. I lived as cheaply as possible, sometimes even sleeping rough on park benches. But I have seen his pictures, I’ve got to know the people he painted and turned them into my companions. I have a long way to go yet though. You’re welcome to pay for the journeys I still have to make.’

‘I’m not a rich man.’

‘I thought doctors were paid pretty well?’

‘It’s many years since I worked as a doctor. I’m a pensioner.’

‘With no money in the bank?’

Didn’t she believe me? I decided that it was the time of day (or night) and the stuffy atmosphere making me suspicious. The neon tubes on the ceiling were not illuminating us, they were staring down at our heads, keeping watch over us.

She continued talking about Caravaggio, and eventually I began to understand some of the passion that filled her. She was a museum, slowly developing each room with her own interpretation of the great painter’s life’s work. As far as she was concerned, he wasn’t somebody who had lived more than four hundred years ago, but was ensconced in a deserted house in the forests surrounding her caravan.

The occasional early bird started drifting into the bar and stood at the counter, reading the menu. ‘Monster Meal, Mega-Monster, Mini-Monster, Night Owl’s Menu.’ It occurred to me that there were important stories to be told even in scruffy restaurants like this one. Just for a moment, this unpleasant, smelly place was transformed into an art gallery.

My daughter talked about Caravaggio as if he had been a close relative, a brother, or a man she was in love with and dreamed of living with.

He was born Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. His father, Fermi, had died when he was six years old. He barely remembered him; his father was just another of the shadows in his life, an unfinished portrait in one of his big inner galleries. His mother lived rather longer, until he was nineteen. But all she inspired was silence, a rancorous, soundless fury.

Louise talked about a portrait of Caravaggio made by an artist called Leoni using red and black chalk. It was like an ancient police ‘Wanted’ notice posted on a house wall. Red and black, charcoal and blood. He peers at us from out of the picture, attentive, evasive. Do we really exist, or are we merely figments of his imagination? He has dark hair, a beard, a powerful nose, eyes with highly arched brows — a handsome man, some would say. Others maintained that he was nothing remarkable, a criminal type, filled with violence and hatred, despite his enormous ability to depict people and movement.

As if reciting a verse of a hymn she had learned off by heart, she quoted a cardinal whose name might have been Borromeo — I’m not sure I heard it properly. He wrote that ‘I became aware of an artist in Rome who behaved badly, had disgusting habits, was always dressed in ragged and filthy clothes. This painter, who was notorious for his cantankerous ways and his brutality, produced no art of significance. He used his paintbrushes to produce only taverns, drunkards, sly prophetesses and actors. Hard though it may be to understand, he took pleasure in portraying these wretched people.’

Caravaggio was a supremely gifted artist, but also a very dangerous man. He had a violent temperament, and was always looking for trouble. He fought with his fists and sometimes with knives, and once murdered a man as a result of a quarrel over a point in a tennis game. But above all else, he was dangerous because in his paintings he confessed that he was afraid. The fact that he didn’t conceal his fear in the shadows made — and still makes — him dangerous.

Louise talked about Caravaggio, and she also talked about death. It is visible in all his paintings, in the hole made by a maggot in an apple on top of a basket of fruit, or in the eyes of someone who is about to be decapitated.

She said that Caravaggio never found what he was looking for. He always settled for something else. Such as the horses he painted, their frothing mouths an expression of the fury he had inside himself.

He painted everything. But he never painted the sea.

Louise said that she was so deeply moved by his work because it offered her proximity. There was always a space in his pictures where she could place herself. She could be one of the people in his canvases, and she didn’t need to be afraid that they might chase her away. She had often sought consolation in his paintings, in the lovingly drawn details, where his brushstrokes had become fingertips stroking the faces he conjured up in his dark colours.

Louise transformed the foul-smelling hamburger bar into a beach on the Italian coast on 16 July 1609. The heat is oppressive. Caravaggio is walking on the sands somewhere to the north of Rome, washed ashore in the form of human jetsam. A little felucca (whatever that might be — Louise never explained) has sailed away. On board the ship are his paintings and paintbrushes, his oils and a kitbag with his ragged and filthy clothes and shoes. He is alone on the sands, the Roman summer is stiflingly hot, perhaps a gentle breeze cools him out there at the water’s edge, but there are also mosquitoes swarming around, mosquitoes that bite him, injecting poison into his bloodstream. As he lies exhausted and curled up on the beach during the hot, humid nights, they bite him over and over again and the malaria parasites begin to multiply in his liver. The first attack of fever catches him unaware. He doesn’t know he’s going to die, but the paintings he hasn’t yet completed but that he carries inside him will soon become petrified in his brain. ‘Life is a dream impossible to pin down,’ he had once said. Or perhaps it was Louise who had invented this poetic truth.

I listened in astonished admiration. Only now had I seen who she really was. I had a daughter who knew something about what it means to be a human being.

I no longer needed to doubt whether the long-dead Caravaggio was one of her closest friends. She could communicate with the dead just as well as with the living. Perhaps even better?

She carried on talking until she suddenly fell silent. The man behind the counter had woken up. He yawned as he opened a plastic bag of chips that he tipped into the deep-fryer.

We sat there for a long time without speaking. Then she stood up and went to refill her cup.

When she came back I told her how I had amputated the wrong arm of a patient. I hadn’t thought about what to say, it simply tumbled out, as if it were inevitable that I should now describe the incident that I had hitherto thought was the most significant happening in my life. At first she didn’t seem to understand that what I was telling her had actually happened to me. But the penny dropped in the end. That fatal mistake had happened twelve years ago. I was given a warning. That would hardly have been the end of my career if I had accepted it, but I thought it was unjust. I defended myself by insisting that I had been placed in an impossible situation. Waiting lists were growing longer and longer, but at the same time cutbacks were being enforced. All I did was work, day in and day out. And one day the safety net failed. During an operation shortly after nine o’clock in the morning, a young woman lost her healthy right arm, just above her elbow. It was not a complicated operation — not that an amputation is ever a routine matter, but there was nothing to make me aware that I had made a fatal mistake.

‘How is it possible?’ Louise asked when I had finished talking.

‘It just is possible,’ I said. ‘If you live long enough, you’ll realise that nothing is impossible.’

‘I’m intending to live for a long time,’ she said. ‘Why do you sound so angry? Why do you become so unpleasant?’

I flung my arms out wide.

‘That wasn’t my intention. Perhaps I’m tired. It’s nearly half past six in the morning. We’ve spent the whole night here. We need a few hours’ sleep.’

‘Let’s go home, then,’ she said, getting to her feet. ‘The hospital hasn’t rung.’

I remained seated.

‘I can’t sleep in that narrow bed.’

‘Then I’ll sleep on the floor.’

‘It’s not worth going home. We’ll have to return to the hospital as soon as we get there.’

She sat down again. I could see that she was just as tired as me. The man behind the counter had fallen asleep again, his chin hanging down towards his chest.

The neon lights on the ceiling continued to stare down at us, like the scheming eyes of a dragon.

Chapter 5

Dawn came as a relief.

We returned to the hospital at half past eight. It had started snowing, just a few flakes. I could see my tired face in the rear-view mirror. It made me wince, gave me a feeling of death, of inexorability.

I was on a downward path, hemmed in by my own epilogue. There were a few entries and exits still to go, but not much more.

I was so absorbed in my thoughts that I missed the turning for the hospital. Louise looked at me in surprise.

‘We should have turned right there.’

I said nothing, drove round the block and then took the correct turning. Standing outside the A&E entrance was one of the nurses who had received us during the night. She was smoking a cigarette and seemed to have forgotten who we were. In another age, I thought, she could have been in one of Caravaggio’s paintings.

We went in. The door to Harriet’s room was open. The room was empty. A nurse approached along the corridor. I asked about Harriet. She looked searchingly at us. We must have resembled a pair of woodlice that had crept out into view after a night spent under a cold stone.

‘Mrs Hörnfeldt is no longer here,’ she said.

‘Where have you sent her?’

‘We haven’t sent her anywhere. She simply went away. She got dressed and vanished.’

She seemed angry, as if Harriet had let her down personally.

‘But somebody must have seen her go, surely?’ I said.

‘The night staff kept checking regularly, but when they looked in at a quarter past seven, she had left. There’s nothing we can do.’

I turned to Louise. She made a movement with her eyes that I interpreted as a signal.

‘Did she leave anything behind?’ Louise asked.

‘No, nothing.’

‘Then she must have gone home.’

‘She ought to have informed us if she didn’t want to stay here.’

‘That’s the way she is,’ said Louise. ‘That’s my mother for you.’

We left through the A&E entrance.

‘I know what she’s like,’ said Louise. ‘I also know where she is. We have an agreement that we made when I was a little girl. The nearest cafe, that’s where we’ll meet. If we ever get separated.’

We walked round the hospital to the main entrance. There was a cafe area in the big foyer.

Harriet was sitting at a table with a cup of coffee. She waved when she saw us coming. She appeared almost cheerful.

‘We still don’t know what’s wrong with you,’ I said sternly. ‘The doctors ought to have been given an opportunity to check the samples they’ve taken.’

‘I’ve got cancer,’ said Harriet, ‘and I’m going to die. Time is too short for me to lie around in hospital and start panicking. I don’t know what happened yesterday. I expect I drank too much. I want to go home now.’

‘To my place, or to Stockholm?’

Harriet took hold of Louise’s arm and pulled herself up. Her walker was standing by a newspaper stall. She grasped at the handles with her frail fingers. It was impossible to understand how she had managed to pull me out of the forest pool.

When we got back to the caravan, all three of us lay down on the narrow bed. I lay on the outside with one knee on the floor, and soon fell asleep.

In my dreams, Jansson approached me in his hydrocopter. It carved its way towards me like a sharp saw cutting through ice. I hid behind a rock until he had gone away. When I stood up I saw Harriet standing on the ice with the wheeled walker. She was naked. Next to her was a large hole in the ice.

I woke up with a start. The two women were asleep. I thought of grabbing my jacket and getting out of there. But I stayed put. Soon, I fell asleep again.

We all woke up at the same time. It was one o’clock. I went outside for a pee. It had stopped snowing and the clouds had started to part.

We drank coffee. Harriet asked me to take her blood pressure as she had a headache. It was only slightly above normal. Louise wanted me to take her blood pressure as well.

‘One of my first memories of my father will be that he took my blood pressure,’ she said. ‘First the buckets of water, and now this.’

It was very low. I asked if she sometimes had bouts of dizziness.

‘Only when I’m drunk.’

‘Never on other occasions?’

‘I’ve never fainted in my life.’

I put my blood pressure monitor away. We had finished the coffee, and it was a quarter past two. It was warm inside the caravan. Perhaps too warm? Was it the stifling air, short of oxygen, that caused them to lose their tempers? But whatever the cause, I was suddenly attacked from two sides. It started with Harriet asking me what it felt like, having a daughter, now that I’d known about it for a few days.

‘What does it feel like? I don’t think I can answer that one.’

‘Your indifference is frightening,’ she said.

‘You know nothing about how I’m feeling,’ I said.

‘I know you.’

‘We haven’t met for nearly forty years! I’m not the same as I was then.’

‘You’re too cowardly to admit that what I say is true. You didn’t have the courage then to say that you wanted us to stop seeing each other. You ran away then, and you’re running away now. Can’t you bring yourself to tell the truth just once? Is there no truth in you at all?’

Before I had chance to say anything, Louise chipped in that a man who had abandoned Harriet in the way I had done could hardly be expected to react to an unexpected child with anything but indifference, perhaps fear, and at most with a bit of curiosity.

‘I can’t go along with that,’ I said. ‘I’ve apologised for what I did, and I couldn’t have known anything about a child because you never told me.’

‘How could I tell you when you’d run away?’

‘In the car on the way to the forest pool, you said you’d never tried to find me.’

‘Are you accusing a dying person of lying?’

‘I’m not accusing anybody.’

‘Tell it as it is!’ yelled Louise. ‘Answer her question!’

‘What question?’

‘Why you’re indifferent.’

‘I’m not indifferent. I’m pleased.’

‘I see no sign of pleasure in you.’

‘There’s not enough room in this caravan to dance on the table! If that’s what you’d like me to do.’

‘Don’t think for one moment I’m doing this for you,’ screeched Harriet. ‘I’m doing it for her sake.’

We yelled and shouted. The walls of the cramped caravan came close to collapsing. Deep down, of course, I knew that what they were saying was true. I had let Harriet down, and perhaps I hadn’t displayed enough ebullient happiness on meeting my daughter. Nevertheless, this was too much. I couldn’t take it. I don’t know how long we carried on with this pointless shouting and sparring. On several occasions I expected Louise to clench her boxer’s fists and give me a telling punch. I daren’t even begin to think about what level Harriet’s blood pressure reached. In the end I stood up, grabbed my bag and my jacket and shoes.

‘Go to hell, the pair of you!’ I yelled as I stormed out of the caravan.

Louise didn’t follow me out. Neither of them said a word. Everything was silent. I walked down to the car in my stockinged feet, got in and drove off. Not until I came to the main road did I stop, remove my soaking wet socks and put on my shoes over my bare feet.

I was still upset about the accusations. During the journey the exchanges came back to me in my head, over and over again. I sometimes changed what I had said, made my responses clearer, sharper. But what they had said was the same all the time.

I reached Stockholm in the middle of the night, having driven far too quickly; I slept in the car for a while until it became too cold, then continued as far as Södertälje. I hadn’t the strength to drive any further. I checked into a motel, and fell asleep the moment my head touched the pillow. At about one the next day I continued my journey south, having telephoned Jansson and left a message on his answering machine: could he collect me at half past five? I wasn’t sure how he felt about driving in the dark. I crossed my fingers and hoped he would check his messages and had some decent headlights on his hydrocopter.

Jansson was waiting when I arrived at the harbour. He told me he had been feeding the animals every day. I thanked him and said I was in a hurry to get home.

When we arrived, Jansson refused to accept any payment.

‘I can’t take a fare from my doctor.’

‘I’m not your doctor. We can settle up the next time you come.’

I remained standing on the jetty until he had disappeared behind the rocks and the lights had faded away. I suddenly noticed that my cat and my dog were sitting next to me on the jetty. I bent down to stroke them. The dog seemed to be thinner than he had been. I left my rucksack on the jetty, I was too tired to see to it.

There were three of us on this island, just as there had been three of us in the caravan. But nobody would be launching an attack on me here. It was a relief to enter my own kitchen again. I fed the animals, sat down at the kitchen table and closed my eyes.

I had difficulty in sleeping that night. I got out of bed again and again. It was full moon, the sky was clear. The moonlight oozed over the rocks and the white ice. I put on my boots and fur coat and went down to the jetty. The dog didn’t notice that I had gone out, and the cat opened an eye but didn’t stir from the sofa. It was cold outside. My suitcase had somehow burst open, shirts and socks had fallen out. For the second time, I left it to its fate.

It was while I was standing there on the jetty that I realised I had another journey to make. For twelve years I had succeeded in convincing myself that it wasn’t necessary, but the meeting with Louise and our long nocturnal conversation had changed all that. I was obliged to undertake this new journey. And I now wanted to do it.

Somewhere in Sweden there was a young woman who had lost an arm — the wrong arm amputated by me. She was twenty years old when it happened, so now she would be thirty-two. I could remember her name: Agnes Klarström. As I stood on the jetty, all the details came back to me — as if I had just reread her case notes. She came from one of the southern suburbs of Stockholm, Aspudden or Bagarmossen. It had all started as a pain in her shoulder. She was an outstanding swimmer and took part in competitions. For a long time she and her trainer assumed it was due to overexertion, but when it came to the point that she could no longer enter a pool without severe shoulder pains, she went to a doctor for a thorough examination. Then everything happened very quickly: a malignant bone tumour was confirmed, and amputation was the only possibility, despite the fact that it would be catastrophic for her swimming ambitions. Having been a swimming champion, she would be one-armed for the rest of her life.

I wasn’t even down for the operation — she was the patient of one of my colleagues. But his wife was involved in a serious car crash, and his operations list was farmed out somewhat haphazardly among the other orthopaedic surgeons. Agnes Klarström was assigned to me.

The operation took longer than an hour. I can still recall all the details, how the theatre nurses washed and prepared the wrong arm. It was my responsibility to check that the correct arm would be operated on, but I relied on my staff.

That was twelve years ago now. I had ruined Agnes Klarström’s life, and also my own. And what made matters even worse was that a subsequent examination of the arm with the tumour indicated that amputation had not been necessary.

It had never occurred to me that I would one day go to visit her. The only time I had ever spoken to her was immediately after the operation when she was still groggy.

It was two in the morning by now. I went back to the house and sat down at my kitchen table. I still hadn’t opened the door of my ant room. Perhaps I was afraid they would come teeming out if I did so.

I rang directory enquiries, but there was nobody in Stockholm of that name. I asked the operator, who said her name was Elin, to extend the search to the whole of Sweden.

There was one Agnes Klarström who could be the one I was looking for. She lived near Flen, some fifty miles west of Stockholm: the address suggested a farm in a village called Sångledsbyn. I made a note of the address and her telephone number.

The dog was asleep. The cat was outside in the moonlight. I stood up and went to the room in which a half-finished mat was still stretched over the frame of my grandmother’s loom. It had always been a significant image as far as I was concerned: this is what death always looks like when it rudely interrupts and terminates our lives. On a shelf where there had previously been reels of thread, I stored various papers I had been keeping for many years. A thin file containing documents, from my rather poor school-leaving report that my father was so proud of that he learned it off by heart, to the accursed copy of the notes of the amputation. The file was sparse because I have always had no difficulty in discarding papers that most people regard as important to keep. On top was the will that a ridiculously expensive lawyer had drawn up for me. Now I was forced to change it, because I had acquired a daughter. But that was not the reason I had come to the room with the loom that still smelled of my grandmother. I took out the operation notes from 9 March 1991. I spread the sheet of paper out on the table in front of me and read it from first to last.

Every word was like a sharp stone paving the path to my ruin. From the very first words: Diagnosis: chondrosarcoma of the proximal humerus sin, to the last one of all, Bandaging.

Bandaging. That was all. The operation was over, the patient was wheeled away to the recovery room. Minus an arm, but still with that confounded tumour in the bone of the other upper arm.

I read: Pre-op assessment. Twenty-year-old right-handed woman, previously basically healthy, examined in Stockholm due to swollen left upper arm. MRI scan shows low-grade chondrosarcoma left upper arm. Subsequent scan confirms diagnosis, patient agrees to amputation of proximal humerus which allows adequate margin. Operation: intubation narcosis, sunbed position, arm exposed. Usual antibiotic prophylaxis. Incision from coracoid process along lower edge of deltoid to the anterior fold of the axilla. Ligation of a cephalic vein and detachment of pectoralis. Identification of vascular structure, ligation of veins and securing of arteries with double ligatures. Extrusion of nerves from wound, and division. Then separation of deltoid muscle from humerus, and of latissimus dorsi and teres major. Separation of long and short head of biceps, also of coracobrachialis slightly below amputation level. Humerus sawn off at surgical neck and filed. Stump covered by triceps, which are separated, and by coracobrachialis. Pectoralis sewn to lateral edge of humerus using osteo-sutures. Drain inserted and skin flaps stitched together with no tension. Bandaging.

I supposed Agnes Klarström must have read this text many times, and had it explained to her. She must have noticed that among all the Latin terms, an everyday word suddenly cropped up: she had been operated on in a ‘sunbed position’. As if she had been lying on a beach or a veranda, with her arm exposed, and the operating theatre lights the last thing she saw before she lost consciousness. I had submitted her to an outrageous injustice while she was resting on a sunbed.

Could it possibly be a different Agnes Klarström? She had been young then — maybe she had married and acquired a new surname? Her entry in the telephone directory had evidently not indicated if she was Miss, or Mrs, or had any other title.

It was a scary but also a crucial night. I could no longer run away. I must speak to her, explain what was impossible to explain. And tell her that in so many ways I had also amputated myself.

I lay awake on top of the bed for a very long time before falling asleep. When I opened my eyes again, it was morning. Jansson would not be delivering any post today. I would be able to cut my way into my hole in the ice without interruption.

I had to use a crowbar in order to break through the thick ice. My dog sat on the jetty, watching my exertions. The cat had vanished into the boathouse looking for mice. I finally managed to create a big enough hole and stepped down into the burning cold. I thought about Harriet and Louise, and wondered if I would have enough courage today to ring Agnes Klarström and ask her if she was the woman I was looking for.

I didn’t ring that day. Instead, in a fit of frenzied activity, I gave the house a spring clean, as there was a thick layer of dust everywhere. I managed to start my ancient washing machine and washed my bedlinen, which was so filthy that it could easily have been a homeless tramp who’d been sleeping in my bed. Then I went for a walk round the island, surveyed the icy wastes with my binoculars, and accepted that I must make up my mind what to do next.

An old woman standing on the ice, a daughter I didn’t know I had in a caravan. At the age of sixty-six I was having to accept that everything I’d thought was definite and done with was starting to change.

After lunch I sat down at the kitchen table and wrote two letters. One was to Harriet and Louise, and the other to Agnes Klarström. Jansson would be surprised when I handed over two letters. To be on the safe side, I secured them with Sellotape. I wouldn’t put it past him to try to read all my correspondence.

What did I write? I told Harriet and Louise that my fury had passed. I understood them, but I wasn’t able to see them at the moment. I had returned to my island to look after my abandoned animals. But I took it for granted that we should meet again soon. Our conversations and our social intercourse must continue, obviously.

It took a long time to write those few lines. By the time I thought I had written something that might suffice, the kitchen floor was covered in scrunched-up paper. What I had put wasn’t actually true. My fury had not passed, my animals could have survived for a while longer — Jansson could have managed. Nor was I entirely sure that I wanted to meet them again in the near future. I needed time to think things over. Not least to decide what to say to Agnes Klarström, if I could find her.

The letter to Agnes Klarström did not take long to write. I realised that I had been carrying it around in my head for many years. I just wanted to meet her, that was all. I sent her my address and signed it: she would no doubt never be able to forget that name. I hoped I was writing to the right person.

When Jansson arrived the following day, it had turned windy. I noted in my logbook that the temperature had fallen during the night, and the squally wind was veering between west and south-west.

Jansson was on time. I gave him three hundred kronor for collecting me, and insisted that he accepted the payment.

‘I’d like you to post these two letters for me,’ I said, handing them to him.

I had taped all four corners on each of them. He made no attempt to disguise his astonishment that I was holding two letters in my hand.

‘I write when I have to. Otherwise not.’

‘That picture postcard you sent me was very pretty.’

‘A fence covered in snow? What’s pretty about that?’

I was getting impatient.

‘How is the toothache?’ I asked, in an attempt to cover up my irritation.

‘It comes and goes. It’s worst up here on the right.’

Jansson opened his mouth wide.

‘I can’t see anything wrong,’ I said. ‘Talk to a dentist.’

Jansson tried to close his mouth. There was a creaking sound. His jaw locked, and he stood there with his mouth half open. I could see that it was painful. He tried to speak, but it was impossible to understand what he said. I pressed gently with my thumbs on either side of his face, feeling for his jawbone, and massaged until he could close his mouth again.

‘That hurt.’

‘Try to avoid yawning or opening your mouth too wide for a few days.’

‘Is this an indication of some serious illness?’

‘Not at all. You don’t need to worry.’

Jansson drove off with my letters. The wind bit into my face as I walked back to the house.

That afternoon I opened the door to the ant room. Still more of the tablecloth seemed to have been swallowed up by the constantly growing anthill. But generally speaking, the room and the bed where Harriet had slept were still as they were when we’d left them.

Days passed and nothing happened. I walked over the ice until I came to the open sea. I measured the thickness of the ice in three different places. I didn’t need to consult my earlier logbooks in order to establish that the ice had never been as thick as this before, for as long as I’d lived on the island.

I peeped under the tarpaulin and tried to judge if I’d ever be able to put to sea again in my boat. Had it been beached for too long? Would I have the strength and energy to carry out the necessary repairs and spruce it up again? I replaced the tarpaulin without having answered my question.

One evening the telephone rang. A rare thing. More often than not it would be some telephone company or other urging me to change my supplier, or to install broadband. When they discovered where I lived and that I was an old-age pensioner, they usually lost interest. Besides, I haven’t the slightest idea what broadband is.

A female voice I didn’t recognise said: ‘Agnes Klarström here. I’ve received your letter.’

I held my breath. Didn’t say a word.

‘Hello? Hello?’

I said nothing. After further attempts to lure me out of my cave, she hung up.

So I’d found her. The letter had reached the address it was sent to. She lived near Flen.

There was an old map of Sweden in one of the kitchen drawers. I think it used to belong to my grandfather. He sometimes used to go on about how he would like to visit Falkenberg before he died. I’ve no idea why he wanted to go there; but he had never been to Stockholm, nor had he ever ventured outside the borders of Sweden. He took his dream of visiting Falkenberg with him to his grave.

I spread the map out over the table and located Flen. The scale wasn’t big enough for me to pin down Sångledsbyn. It would take me two hours at most to drive there. I had made up my mind: I was going to pay her a visit.

Two days later I walked across the ice to my car. I hadn’t left a note on my door this time or told Jansson. The dog and the cat had been supplied with sufficient food. The sky was blue, it was dead calm, plus two degrees. I drove north, turned off inland and reached Flen shortly after two in the afternoon. I found a book shop, bought a large-scale map and tracked down Sångledsbyn. It was only a couple of miles away from Harpsund, which is the location of the summer residence of Swedish prime ministers. Once upon a time, a man had lived there who made a fortune out of cork. He had left his home to the state. There was an oak tree in the grounds around which many a visiting foreign statesman, their retinue and their hosts had gathered — not many of the younger generation would ever have heard of them.

I knew all that about Harpsund because my father had once worked there as a waiter when the then prime minister, Tage Erlander, had been entertaining foreign guests. He never tired of talking about the men — they were all men, no women — sitting around the table conducting important discussions about world politics. This had been during the Cold War; he had made a special effort to move without making a noise, and could recall details of the menu, and the wines. Unfortunately there had also been an incident that came close to causing a scandal. He used to describe it as if he had been party to something top secret, and was chary about revealing any details to me and my mother. One of the guests had become extremely drunk. He had delivered an incomprehensible ‘thank you’ speech at the wrong time, which had caused a bit of a problem for the waiters: but they had saved the day and delayed the serving of the dessert, which had been about to begin. Shortly afterwards the drunken man had been found dead to the world on the lawn at the front of the house.

‘Fagerholm got himself drunk in most unfortunate circumstances,’ my father used to say in serious tones.

My mother and I never discovered who this Fagerholm was. It was only much later on, when my father had died, that I realised he must have been one of the Finnish trade union leaders of the day.

However, living close to Harpsund now was a woman whose arm I had cut off.

Sångledsbyn consisted of a few farms spread along the shore of an oval-shaped lake. The fields and meadows were covered in snow. I had taken my binoculars with me and climbed to the top of a hillock in order to get a better overview. People occasionally crossed over the farmyards, between outhouses and barns, or house and garage. None of those I saw could have been Agnes Klarström.

I gave a start. A dog was sniffing at my feet. A man in a long overcoat and wellington boots was standing on the road below. He shouted for the dog, and raised a hand in greeting. I hid my binoculars in a pocket and went down to the road. We spoke briefly about the view, and the long, dry winter.

‘Is there somebody in this village by the name of Agnes Klarström?’ I asked.

The man pointed at the house furthest away.

‘She lives there with her bloody kids,’ he replied. ‘I didn’t used to have a dog until that lot came here. Now everybody has a dog.’

He shook his head in annoyance, and continued on his way. I didn’t like what I’d heard. I didn’t want to get involved with something that would bring even more disorder into my life. I decided to go home and went back to the car. But something made me stay on even so. I walked through the village until I came to a cart track where the snowplough had been busy. If I went along it, I could approach the rear of the last house through a clump of trees.

It was late afternoon, and dusk would soon close in. I made my way along the track and stopped when I came to a spot where I could see the house through the trees. I shook the snow off some branches and created a good view. The house was obviously well looked after. A car was parked outside, with the cable from an engine heater trailing through the snow to an electric socket in the wall.

Suddenly a young girl appeared. She was looking straight at me and my binoculars. She produced something that had been hidden behind her back. It appeared to be a sword. She started running straight at me with the sword raised above her head.

I dropped my binoculars and fled. I stumbled over a tree root or a large stone and fell down. Before I could get to my feet, the girl with the sword had caught up with me.

She was glaring at me with hatred in her eyes.

‘Perverts like you,’ she said, ‘they’re everywhere. Peeping Toms skulking in the bushes with their binoculars.’

A woman came running after her. She stopped by the girl and snatched away the sword with her left and only hand — and I realised it must be Agnes Klarström. Perhaps, hidden away at the back of my subconscious mind, there was an image of the young girl from twelve years ago who had lain in the sunbed position in front of my well-scrubbed hands in their rubber gloves.

She was wearing a blue jacket, zipped up to her neck. The empty right sleeve was fastened to her shoulder with a safety pin. The girl by her side was eyeing me with contempt.

I wished Jansson could have come to rescue me. For the second time recently the ice under my feet had given way, and I was drifting without being able to clamber ashore.

Chapter 6

I stood up, brushed off the snow and explained who I was. The girl started kicking out at me, but Agnes snapped at her and she slunk away.

‘I don’t need a guard dog,’ said Agnes. ‘Sima sees absolutely everything that’s going on, everybody who approaches the house. She has the eyes of a hawk.’

‘I thought she was going to kill me.’

Agnes eyed me up and down, but didn’t respond.

We went into the house and sat down in her office. Somewhere in the background rock music was blaring out at top volume. Agnes seemed not to hear. When she took off her jacket, she did it just as quickly as if she’d had two arms and two hands.

I sat down on a visitor chair. Her desk was empty. Apart from a pen: nothing else.

‘How do you think I reacted when I received your letter?’ Agnes asked.

‘I don’t know. I suppose you must have been surprised. Perhaps furious?’

‘I was relieved. At last, I thought! But then I wondered: Why just now? Why not yesterday, or ten years ago?’

She leaned back in her chair. She had long, brown hair, a simple hairslide, bright blue eyes. She gave the impression of being strong, decisive.

She had placed the samurai sword on a shelf next to the window. She noticed me looking at it.

‘I was once given it by a man who was in love with me. When we fell out of love, for some strange reason he took the scabbard with him, but left this incredibly sharp sword with me. Maybe he hoped I would use it to split open my stomach in desperation after he’d left me?’

She spoke quickly, as if time was short. I told her about Harriet and Louise, and how I now felt duty-bound to track her down, and find out if she was still alive.

‘Did you hope I wouldn’t be? That I’d died?’

‘There was a time when I did. But not any more.’

The telephone rang. She answered, listened to what was said, than replied briefly but firmly. There were no empty places in her home for errant girls. She already had three teenagers to look after.

I entered a world I knew nothing about. Agnes Klarström ran a foster home where she lived with three teenage girls who, in my day, would have been classified as tearaways. The girl Sima came from one of Gothenburg’s sink estates. It wasn’t possible to say for certain how old she was. She had come to Sweden as a lone refugee, hidden in a long-distance lorry via the southern port of Trelleborg. During her journey from Iran, she had been advised to dump all her identification papers the moment she set foot on Swedish soil, change her name and lose all traces of her original identity to avoid deportation should she be caught. All she had was a slip of paper with the three Swedish words it was assumed she needed to know.

Refugee, persecuted, alone.

When the lorry eventually stopped outside Sturup airport, the driver pointed to the terminal building and said she should go there and look for a police station. She was eleven or twelve at the time; now she was about seventeen, and the life she had led in Sweden meant that she only felt safe with the samurai sword in her hands.

One of the other girls in the household had run away two days ago. There was no fence round the property, no locked doors. Nevertheless, anybody who left was regarded as a runaway. If it happened too often, Agnes would eventually lose patience. When found, the girl in question would be faced with a new home where the gates would be substantial and the keyrings large.

The runaway, an African from Chad, called Miranda, had probably gone to stay with one of her friends who, for some reason, was called Teabag. Miranda was sixteen and had come to Sweden with her family as a refugee, as part of a UN quota.

Her father was a simple man, a carpenter by trade and very religious, who had soon buckled in the face of the endless cold weather and the feeling that nothing had turned out as he had hoped. He had locked himself into the smallest of the three rooms in which the large family lived, a room with no furniture, only a small pile of African sand that had been in their battered suitcases when they arrived in their new homeland. His wife used to place a tray with food and drink outside the door three times a day. During the night, when everybody else was asleep, he would go to the bathroom, and perhaps also go out for lonely walks around town. At least, they assumed he did, because they would sometimes find wet footprints on the floor when they woke up the next morning.

Miranda eventually found this too much to bear, and one evening she had simply left, perhaps hoping to go back to where she came from. The new homeland had turned out to be a dead end. Before long she was being picked up by the police for petty theft and shoplifting and ended up being shunted around from one penal institution to another.

And now she had run away. Agnes Klarström was furious, but was determined not to rest until the police had made a determined effort to find her and bring her back.

There was a photograph of Miranda pinned up on the wall. The girl’s hair was plaited and arranged artistically, clinging to her skull.

‘If you look carefully, you notice that she has plaited in the word “fuck” next to her left temple,’ said Agnes.

I could see that she was right.

There was also a third girl in the foster home that was Agnes Klarström’s mission and source of income. She was the youngest of the three, only fourteen, and a skinny creature reminiscent of a timid caged animal. Agnes knew next to nothing about her. She was a bit like the child in the old folk tale who suddenly finds herself standing in a town square, having forgotten her name and where she came from.

Late one evening two years previously, an official at the railway station in Skövde had been about to close down for the night when he found her sitting on a bench. He told her to leave, but she didn’t seem to understand. All she could do was hold up a piece of paper on which it said ‘Train to Karlsborg’, and he began to wonder which of the pair of them was going mad, as there hadn’t been a train from Skövde to Karlsborg for the last fifteen years.

A few days later she started appearing on newspaper placards as ‘The Railway Child in Skövde’. Nobody seemed to recognise her, although there were pictures of her wherever you looked. She didn’t have a name, psychologists examined her, interpreters who spoke every language under the sun tried to get her to say something, but nobody had any idea where she came from. The only clue to her past was the mysterious slip of paper with the words ‘Train to Karlsborg’. They turned the little town of Karlsborg on the shores of Lake Vättern inside out, but nobody recognised her and nobody could understand why she had been waiting for a train that stopped running fifteen years ago. An evening newspaper had conducted a poll of its readers and given her the name Aida. She was given Swedish citizenship and a personal identity number after doctors agreed that she must be about twelve years old, thirteen at most. Because of her thick, black hair and olive-coloured skin, it was assumed that she came from somewhere in the Middle East.

Aida didn’t speak a word for two years. Only when every other possibility had been exhausted and Agnes Klarström took her in was any progress made. One morning Aida came to the breakfast table and sat down. Agnes had been talking to her ever since she’d arrived, trying to stir up some reaction in Aida, and now she asked in a friendly tone what she would like.

‘Porridge,’ she said in almost perfect Swedish.

After that, she started talking. The psychologists who came flocking round assumed that she had picked up the language by listening to everything said by all those trying to make her speak. A significant fact supporting this theory was that Aida knew and understood a large number of psychological and medical terms that would otherwise hardly be normal vocabulary for a girl of her age.

She talked, but she had nothing at all to say about who she was, or what she was supposed to do in Karlsborg. Whenever anybody asked her what her name was, she replied as one might have expected:

‘I’m called Aida.’

She appeared on all the newspaper placards again. There were voices muttering in dark corners, suggesting that she had fooled everybody and that her silence had been a smokescreen to overcome all resistance and guarantee her full citizenship in Sweden. But Agnes thought there was a different explanation. The very first time they had met, Aida had stared at her amputated arm. It was as if the sight of it rang a bell with her, as if she had been swimming in deep water for years, but had now finally reached the shallows where she could stand up. Perhaps Agnes’s stump signified something Aida recognised and made her feel secure. Perhaps she had seen people having limbs chopped off. Those doing the chopping were her enemies, and those on the receiving end were the only people she could trust.

Aida’s silence was due to her having seen things that no human being, least of all a young child, should ever be exposed to, and consequently she never said anything about her past life. It was as if she was slowly liberating herself from the remains of horrific experiences, and might now be in a position slowly to start on a journey towards a life worth living.

And so Agnes Klarström now ran her little foster home caring for these three girls, with financial support from various local councils. Lots of people were begging her to open her doors to more girls skulking around in the outer reaches of society. But she refused: in order to provide the help and feeling of security necessary to make a real impact, she needed to keep her activities on a small scale. The girls in her care often ran away, but they nearly always came back again. They stayed with her for a long time, and when they finally left her for good, they always had a new life in store for them. She never took in more than three girls at a time.

‘I could have a thousand girls if I wanted,’ she said. ‘A thousand abandoned, wild girls who hate being alone and the feeling of not being welcome wherever they go. My girls realise that without money all you receive is contempt. So they disfigure themselves, they stab people they’ve never met before — but deep down they are screaming in pain from a wound they don’t understand.’

‘How come you got involved in all this?’

She pointed at the arm I had amputated.

‘I used to be a swimmer, as you might recall. There must have been something about that in my records. I wasn’t just a hopeful, I really could have become a champion. Won medals. I can say, without bitterness, that my strong point was not my legs, but the strength I had in my arms.’

A young man with a ponytail marched into the room.

‘I’ve told you before that you must knock first,’ she shouted. ‘Out you go! Try again!’

The young man gave a start, went out, knocked and came in.

‘Half right. You must wait until I tell you to come in. What do you want?’

‘Aida’s upset. She’s threatening everybody. Mainly me. She says she’s going to strangle Sima.’

‘What’s happened?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe she’s just miserable.’

‘She’ll have to learn to cope with that. Leave her alone.’

‘She wants to speak to you.’

‘Tell her I’m coming.’

‘She wants you to come now.’

‘I’ll be there in a minute.’

The young man left the room.

‘He’s not up to it,’ she said with a smile. ‘I think he needs somebody snapping at his heels all the time. But he doesn’t mind my criticising him. After all, I can always blame everything on my arm. He’s come to me thanks to some unemployment benefit scheme or other. His dream is to be in one of those television reality programmes where the participants get to screw each other in front of the cameras. If he can’t manage that, then he hopes to become a presenter. But simply helping my girls seems to be beyond him. I don’t think Mats Karlsson is going to make much of a career for himself in the media.’

‘You sound cynical.’

‘Not at all. I love my girls, I even love Mats Karlsson. But I’m not doing him a favour by encouraging his flawed dreams, or letting him think that he’s making a positive contribution here. I’m giving him an opportunity to see himself for what he is, and perhaps carve out a meaningful life. Maybe I’m wrong in underestimating him. One day he might have his long hair cut off, and try to make something of his life.’

She stood up, escorted me out into a lounge and said she would be back shortly. The rock music coming from somewhere upstairs was still excessively loud.

Melted snow was dripping from the roof outside the windows, songbirds were flitting around like hastily formed shadows.

I gave a start. Sima had entered the room behind my back, without a sound. This time she wasn’t holding a sword. She sat down on a sofa and tucked her legs underneath herself. But she was on guard the whole time.

‘Why were you watching me through your binoculars?’

‘You weren’t the one I was looking at.’

‘But I saw you. Paedophile!’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘I know your type! I know what you’re like.’

‘I came here to meet Agnes.’

‘Why?’

‘That’s something between us.’

‘You fancy her, do you?’

I was shocked, and blushed.

‘I think it’s time to conclude this conversation.’

‘What conversation? Answer my question!’

‘There’s nothing to answer.’

Sima looked away, and seemed to have tired of trying to talk to me. I felt offended. The accusation that I was a paedophile was beyond anything I could ever have imagined. I looked furtively at her. She was intent on chewing her fingernails. Her hair seemed to be a mixture of red and black, and was tousled, as if she had combed it while in a temper. Behind that hard exterior, I thought I could discern a very small girl in clothes much too big and black for her.

Agnes came into the room. Sima immediately withdrew. The lion-tamer had arrived, and the beast had slunk away, I thought. She sat down on the same chair that Sima had occupied, and tucked her legs underneath her, as if she were imitating her foster-daughter.

‘Aida is a little girl, and words have suddenly started pouring out of her,’ she said.

‘What’s happened?’

‘Nothing at all. She’s just been reminded of who she is. A big, hopeless nothing, as she puts it. A loser among lots of other losers. If somebody started a Loser Party in Sweden, there’d be no shortage of members to contribute lots of experience. I’m nearly thirty-three years old. What about you?’

‘Twice that.’

‘Sixty-six. That’s old. Thirty-three isn’t much at all. But it’s enough to realise that there has never been so much tension in this land of ours as there is today. But nobody seems to have noticed. At least, none of the people you might think ought to have their fingers on the pulse. There’s an invisible network of walls in Sweden, and it’s getting worse by the day — dividing people up, increasing the distance between them. Superficially, the opposite might seem to be the case. Get on a tube train in Stockholm and go to the suburbs. It’s not very far in terms of miles, but nevertheless, the distance is enormous. It’s rubbish to talk about entering another world. It’s the same world. But every station on the way out from the city centre is another wall. When you eventually get to the outskirts, it’s up to you if you choose to see the truth of the matter or not.’

‘And what is the truth?’

‘That what you think is the periphery is in fact the centre, and it’s slowly recreating Sweden. The country is slowly rotating, and outer and inner, near and far, centre and outskirts are changing. My girls exist in a no-man’s-land in which they can see neither backwards nor forwards. Nobody wants them, they are superfluous, rejected. It’s no wonder that every morning when they wake up, the only thing they can be sure about is their own worthlessness, staring them in the face. So they don’t want to wake up! They don’t want to get out of bed! They’ve had bitterness drilled into them since they were five, six years old.’

‘Is it really as bad as that?’

‘It’s worse.’

‘I live on an island. There aren’t any suburbs there, just little skerries and rocks. And there certainly aren’t any screwed-up girls who come running at you wielding a samurai sword.’

‘We treat our children so badly that, in the end, they have no means of expression except through violence. That used to apply to boys only. Now we have incredibly tough girl gangs who don’t think twice about inflicting harm on others. We really have reached rock bottom when girls are so desperate that they think their only choice is to behave like the very worst of the gangsters among their boyfriends.’

‘Sima called me a paedophile.’

‘She calls me a whore when the mood takes her. But the worst thing is what she calls herself.’

‘What does she say?’

‘That she’s dead. Her heart can’t cope. She writes strange poems, and then leaves them on my desk or in my pockets without saying a word. It could well be that ten years from now, she’ll be dead. Either by her own hand or somebody else’s. Or she’ll have an accident, full of drugs or other shit. That’s a highly probable end to the wretched saga of her life. But I can’t give up on her. I know she has an inner strength. If only she can overcome that feeling of uselessness that pursues her everywhere. I have no alternative but to succeed with her. She’s riddled with decay and disillusionment: I have to revitalise her.’

She stood up.

‘I must get on to the police and nag them to put more effort into looking for Miranda. Why don’t you take a walk to the barn, and then we can continue our conversation later?’

I left the room. Sima was peering out from behind the curtains, following my every move. Several kittens were clambering over the bales of hay in the barn. Horses and cows were in boxes and pens. I recognised vaguely the smell from my very earliest childhood when my grandparents used to keep animals on the island. I stroked the horses’ muzzles, and caressed the cows. Agnes Klarström seemed to have her life under control. What would I have done if a surgeon had done the same to me? Would I have become a bitter wino and rapidly drunk myself to death on a park bench? Or would I have won through? I don’t know.

Mats Karlsson came into the barn and started feeding the animals with hay. He worked slowly, as if he were being forced to do something he hated doing.

‘Agnes asked me to tell you to go back to the house,’ he said suddenly. ‘I forgot to say.’

I went back inside. Sima was no longer at the window. There was a light breeze, and it had started snowing again. I felt cold and tired. Agnes was standing in the hall, waiting for me.

‘Sima’s run away,’ she said.

‘But I saw her only a few minutes ago.’

‘That was then. She’s disappeared now. In your car.’

I felt for the car key in my pocket. I knew I had locked the car. As you grow older, you find you have more and more keys in your pocket. Even if you live alone on a remote island in the archipelago.

‘I can see that you don’t believe me,’ she said. ‘But I saw the car leaving. And Sima’s jacket is nowhere to be seen. She has a special getaway jacket she always wears when she does a runner. Maybe she believes it has the power to make her invulnerable, invisible. She’s taken that sword with her as well. The stupid girl!’

‘But I have the car keys in my pocket.’

‘Sima used to have a boyfriend — his name was Filippo — a nice guy from Italy, who taught her all there is to know about opening locked cars and starting engines. He would always steal cars from outside swimming pools or buildings containing illegal casinos. He knew that the car owners would be preoccupied for quite a long time. Only hopeless amateurs steal cars from ordinary car parks.’

‘How do you know all this?’

‘Sima told me. She trusts me.’

‘But nevertheless she steals my car and vanishes.’

‘You could interpret that as a sign of trust. She expects us to understand what she’s done.’

‘But I want my car back!’

‘Sima usually burns out engines. You took a risk in coming here. But you couldn’t know that, of course.’

‘I met a man with a dog. He used expressions like “bloody kids”.’

‘So do I. What sort of a dog was it?’

‘I don’t know. It was brown and shaggy.’

‘Then the man you met was Alexander Bruun. A former swindler who worked in a bank and cheated customers out of their money. He was arrested for fraud, but wasn’t even sent to prison. Now he’s living the life of Riley on all the money he embezzled and the police never found. He hates me, and he hates my girls.’

She rang the police from her office and explained what had happened. I grew increasingly worried as I listened to what sounded like a cosy chat with a police constable who didn’t seem to think there was anything urgent about catching the runaway who was evidently intent on smashing up my already ailing car.

She hung up.

‘What are they going to do?’ I asked.

‘Nothing.’

‘But they have to do something, surely?’

‘They haven’t the resources available to start looking for Sima and your car. It will eventually run out of petrol. And so Sima will abandon it and take a train or a bus. Or steal another car. She once came back on a milk float. She always comes back eventually. Most people who run away don’t have any specific destination in mind. Have you never run away?’

It seemed to me that the only honest answer to that was that I’d been running away for the last twelve years. But I didn’t say that. I didn’t say anything at all.

We had dinner at six o’clock. Agnes, Aida, Mats Karlsson and me. Aida had laid places for the two girls who had run away.

We ate a tasteless fish au gratin. I ate far too quickly, as I was worried about my car. Aida seemed to be inspired by the fact that Sima had run away, and spoke non-stop. Karlsson listened attentively and kept encouraging her, while Agnes ate in silence.

When we’d finished eating, Aida and Mats cleared away and took care of the washing-up. Agnes and I went out to the barn.

I apologised to her. I explained as clearly as I could what had gone wrong that fateful day. I spoke slowly and at length, so as not to omit any details. But the fact was that I could have explained what had happened in just a few words. Something had taken place that should never have been possible. Just as an airline pilot has ultimate responsibility and has to ensure that a thorough test of his aeroplane has been done before he takes off, I had a responsibility to ensure that it was the correct arm that had been washed and exposed for amputation: and I had failed in that responsibility.

We each sat on our bale of hay. She looked hard at me all the time as I talked. When I finished, she stood up and fed the horses with carrots from a sack. Then she came to sit beside me on the bale of hay.

‘My God, but how I’ve cursed you!’ she said. ‘You will never be able to understand just how much it means to somebody who loves swimming to be forced to give it up. I used to imagine how I would track you down, and cut off your arm with a very blunt knife. I would wrap you up in barbed wire and dump you in the sea. There’s a limit to how long you can keep hatred going. It can give you a sort of illusory strength, but the fact is that it’s nothing more than an all-consuming parasite. The girls are all that matter now.’

She squeezed my hand.

‘Anyway, that’s enough of that,’ she said. ‘If we go on we’ll only get sentimental. I don’t want that. A person with only one arm can easily get emotional.’

We went back into the house. Very loud music was coming from Aida’s room. Screeching guitars, thumping bass drums. The walls were vibrating. The mobile phone Agnes had in her pocket rang. She answered, listened, said a few words.

‘That was Sima,’ she said. ‘She sends you her greetings.’

‘Sends me her greetings? Where is she?’

‘She didn’t say. She just wanted Aida to phone her.’

‘I didn’t hear you saying anything about her coming back here with my car.’

‘I was listening. She did all the talking.’

Agnes got to her feet and went upstairs. I could hear her shouting to make herself heard through the music. I had found Agnes Klarström, and she hadn’t shouted at me. She hadn’t drowned me in a torrent of accusations. She hadn’t even raised her voice when she described how she wanted to kill me in her dreams.

I had a lot to think about. Within a few short weeks three women had unexpectedly entered my life. Harriet, Louise and now Agnes. And perhaps I should add Sima, Miranda and Aida.

Agnes returned. We drank coffee. There was no sign of Mats Karlsson. The rock music continued thudding away.

The doorbell rang. When Agnes answered it, there were two policemen with a girl I assumed must be Miranda. The officers were holding her arms as if she were dangerous.

She had one of the most beautiful faces I had ever seen. A Mary Magdalene gripped by Roman soldiers.

Miranda said nothing, but I gathered from the conversation between Agnes and the police officers that she had been caught by a farmer in the act of trying to steal a calf. Agnes protested indignantly — why on earth would Miranda want to steal a cow? The conversation became more and more heated, the policemen seemed tired, nobody was listening to what the others said, and Miranda just stood there.

The police left, without it having become clear whether or not the alleged attempt to steal a calf had succeeded. Agnes asked Miranda a few questions in a stern voice. The girl with the beautiful face answered in such a low voice that I couldn’t catch what she said.

She went upstairs, and the loud music stopped. Agnes sat down on the sofa and examined her fingernails.

‘Miranda is a girl I would have loved to have as my own daughter. Of all the girls who have been here, who’ve come and gone, I think she is the one who will do best in life. As long as she discovers that horizon she has inside her.’

She showed me to a room behind the kitchen, where I could sleep. She left me to it as she had a lot to do in the office. I lay down on the bed and pictured my car in my mind’s eye. Smoke was coming from the engine. Next to Sima in the passenger seat was the newly sharpened sword. What would my grandparents have said if they’d still been alive and I’d tried to tell them about all this? They would never have believed me, never have understood. What would my browbeaten and kicked-around waiter of a father have said? My weeping mother? I switched off the light and lay there in the darkness, surrounded by whispering voices telling me that the twelve years I had spent on my island had robbed me of contact with the world I lived in.

I must have fallen asleep. I was woken up by the feel of something cold against my neck. The bedside lamp was switched on. I opened my eyes and saw Sima standing over me, with the sword pressed against my neck. I don’t know how long I held my breath until she removed the sword.

‘I liked your car,’ she said. ‘It’s old and it doesn’t go very fast, but I liked it.’

I sat up. She placed the sword on the window ledge.

‘The car’s standing outside,’ she said. ‘It’s not damaged.’

‘I don’t like people taking my car without permission.’

She sat down on the floor, her back against the radiator.

‘Tell me about your island,’ she said.

‘Why should I? How do you know I live on an island?’

‘I know lots of things.’

‘It’s a long way out to sea, and just now it’s surrounded by ice. In the autumn, storms can be so bad that they throw boats up on to land if you don’t moor them properly.’

‘Do you really live there all alone?’

‘I have a cat and a dog.’

‘Don’t you feel scared of all that empty space?’

‘Rocks and juniper bushes don’t often run at you with a sword. It’s people who do that.’

She sat there for a moment without saying anything, then got to her feet and picked up the sword.

‘I might come and visit you one of these days,’ she said.

‘I very much doubt that.’

She smiled.

‘So do I. But I’m often wrong.’

I tried to go back to sleep. I gave up at about five o’clock. I got dressed and wrote a note to Agnes, saying that I’d gone home. I slid it under the locked door of her office.

The house was asleep when I drove off.

There was a smell of burning from the engine, and when I stopped for petrol at an all-night filling station, I also topped up the oil. I arrived at the harbour shortly before dawn.

I walked out on to the pier. A fresh wind was getting up. Despite the vast stretch of ice, the wind brought with it the salty smell of the open sea. A few lamps illuminated the harbour, where a few abandoned fishing boats were gnawing at the car tyres.

I waited for it to get light before starting off for home over the ice. I had no idea how I was going to adjust my life in order to cope with everything that had happened.

Standing alone out there on the pier, in the bitterly cold wind, I started to cry. Every single door inside me was swinging back and forth in the wind, which seemed to be getting stronger all the time.