Italian Shoes

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Winter is still very much with us.’

  ‘It certainly is.’

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

  ‘Eat some prunes.’

  ‘Could it be a symptom of something else?’

  ‘No.’

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

  ‘How did you celebrate New Year?’

  ‘I don’t celebrate New Year.’

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

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

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

  ‘Have you any post for me?’

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

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

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

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

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

  I sat down at the table.

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

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

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

  ‘I managed to get here, didn’t I?’

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

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

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘I’ll walk over the ice.’

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

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

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

  ‘Ture Jansson, postman.’

  It sounded as if he were reciting a noble rank.

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

  ‘Not at all. You don’t often ring.’

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

  ‘A lady with a wheeled walker?’

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

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

  ‘What time?’ he asked eventually.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  It was a very bad film.

  I slept fitfully that night.

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

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

  Uneasiness was persisting, whispering its silent warnings.

  CHAPTER 6

  IT WAS A clear, calm morning when we set off.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  The journey began badly.

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

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

  ‘It’s OK,’ said Harriet.

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

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

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

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

  We set off again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  We reached our destination the following day.

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

  My father tapped me on the shoulder.

  ‘Let’s go for a swim,’ he said.

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

  He looked at me in amusement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  We travelled through a winter wonderland.

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

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

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

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

  The lorry driver stood up and left the cafe.

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

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