Italian Shoes

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

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

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

  Then I suddenly remembered.

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

  Aftonlöten.

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

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

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

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

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

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 I’d thought that lingonberry juice was so outdated now that it barely existed any more.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

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

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

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

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

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

  It was called Fnussjen.

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

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

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

  ‘I can manage, thank you.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Is yer lost?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m looking for a forest pool.’

  He squinted at me.

  ‘In t’woods?’

  ‘Yes, a forest pool.’

  ‘Dunnit ’ave a name?’

  ‘No, it doesn’t have a name.’

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Perhaps.’

  He nodded, and thought it over.

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

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

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

  He held out his hand, and introduced himself.

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

  ‘No, she’s not my mother.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Which petered out.

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

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

  I didn’t know. But we had arrived.

  CHAPTER 9

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘It isn’t a lake. It’s a pool.’

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

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

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

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