A Treacherous Paradise (9 page)

She remained sitting on the capstan until she fell asleep. She woke up when she felt a mosquito biting her hand. She brushed it away, and thought that it wouldn’t matter anyway if she died.

The following day, the last one they would be spending in Lourenço Marques, she asked Halvorsen what the country they were in was called.

‘Portuguese East Africa,’ he said somewhat doubtfully. ‘If that can really be the name of an African country.’

He shook his head and pulled a face.

‘Slavery,’ he said. ‘The blacks are slaves. No more than that. I don’t think I’ve ever seen as many brutal people as I’ve seen here. And they are all white, like you and me.’

He shook his head again, and left her.

She had seen his disgust. Just as she had seen in the eyes of some of the black men their fury, and perhaps also a feeling similar to Halvorsen’s.

IT WAS DURING
that same day that the Swedish missionaries came on board the ship. Captain Svartman met them by the gangplank shortly before eleven o’clock in the morning. The women in long skirts and white safari helmets, and a small fat man with a club foot came on board. Hanna stopped what she was doing and watched the strangers. Captain Svartman handed them a suitcase full of post, then invited them into his cabin.

Halvorsen had told her that they had a mission station inland at a place called Phalaborwa. It was a long way from the coast. They must have been travelling by ox cart for over a week before arriving in Lourenço Marques.

‘Captain Svartman no doubt sent them a telegram when we were docked in Algiers,’ said Halvorsen. ‘So they would know roughly when we were due to arrive.’

Hanna had been doing some laundry and was about to hang it up to dry on one of the lines the deckhands rigged up for her whenever it was needed, but suddenly she discovered that one of the unknown women was standing in front of her.

The woman was pale, and very thin. She had a little scar along one side of her nose. Her eyes were dull, blue, and her lips narrow. She might have been about forty, perhaps younger.

Hanna thought she looked ill.

The woman said her name was Agnes.

‘Captain Svartman has told me,’ she said. ‘About your husband who has just died. Would you like us to pray together?’

Hanna was standing with several items of newly washed clothing in her hand. Did the woman mean that they should drop down on to their knees here on deck? She shuddered at the thought.

‘I’d be glad to help you,’ said Agnes.

Her voice was gentle. One of the crewmen spoke the same dialect, a bosun by the name of Brodin who came from the forests of Värmland. Was the woman standing there in front of Hanna really from Värmland?

She glanced at the woman’s left hand: no ring. So she was unmarried. And wanted to help. But how would she be able to do that? All Hanna wanted was to get her dead husband back. But he was 1,935 metres down below at the bottom of the sea, and would never return.

‘Thank you,’ she mumbled, ‘but I don’t need any help just now.’

Agnes observed her thoughtfully, then simply nodded and took her hand.

‘I shall pray for you, and ask for your deep sorrow to be made less painful,’ she said.

Hanna watched the missionaries leave the ship with the case of mail, and disappear into the town. She kept an eye on them until the last of them, the man with the club foot, was no longer visible.

Then she had a sudden urge to run after them, to go with them as far away from the sea as possible. But there was still something that formed an invisible barrier for her, preventing her from crossing over the gangplank. She was bound to Captain Svartman’s ship.

To her dead husband’s ship.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT,
and above all why, was something Hanna would never be able to understand. For the rest of her life the decision she made late that night, after the missionaries had left the ship, was totally incomprehensible. She had undressed and gone to bed. The heat was as oppressive as ever, and no currents of air disturbed the piece of cotton cloth hanging over the open brass-framed porthole. She had already fallen asleep, but suddenly sat up in her bunk wide awake. The thought that Hanna had inside her head was crystal clear, it filled the whole of her consciousness.

Hanna knew that she couldn’t stay on board. She couldn’t continue the voyage because her dead husband was still on board. She would succumb to her sorrow unless she left the ship.

She curled up on her bunk, sitting with her back against the bulkhead, and held her breath. She had made her decision and now she must leave the ship that very same night, as soon as the sailor guarding the gangplank had fallen asleep.

Hanna tried one last time to convince herself that despite everything she really ought to continue to Australia, but the idea was impossible to countenance. She would never stand by the rail and watch icebergs, the marble palaces, floating past.

She packed her few belongings in the suitcase that had once been given to her by Forsman. She hesitated for ages, wondering whether to take with her Lundmark’s sailor’s kitbag. In the end she took only his peaked cap, his discharge book and the wedding photograph taken in the studio in Algiers. The last item she packed away was her Portuguese dictionary.

Hanna left her cabin shortly after four in the morning. The sailor by the gangplank was leaning against the rail, fast asleep, his head resting on his chest.

The cicadas were singing softly as she stepped over the rope and walked along the gangplank, and was then swallowed up by the darkness.

The crew spent all next day looking for her on board, but she had vanished. Captain Svartman sent Halvorsen and two able seamen ashore to search for her. The captain waited for as long as he could. But just before the African dusk fell, he gave the order to cast off.

Hanna Lundmark, the cook, had deserted. Captain Svartman suspected sadly that she had gone mad.

He wrote in the ship’s logbook: ‘The cook Hanna Lundmark has jumped ship. As she was recently widowed, the suspicion is that her sorrow has driven her out of her mind. The search for her was fruitless.’

But she was in fact lurking in the shadows of the harbour, unseen by anybody on board. She watched the ship leave port and head off eastwards.

A few days earlier she had been given fifty English pounds by Captain Svartman. This was the amount due to a widow of a crew member who died on board, paid by the shipping company’s insurance.

She booked into a cheap hotel in the harbour. She slept uneasily, disturbed frequently by nagging pains in her stomach.

When she woke up it was a warm day in July 1904. At roughly the same time the
Lovisa
came up against its first iceberg.

SHE WAS WOKEN
up by a screech that seemed to come from a human being in dire straits. It was much later that she discovered it was in fact the cry of a lone peacock that used to roam about in the hotel grounds. It was originally one of many based in the gardens surrounding the Portuguese governor’s palace, but one day it turned up outside the hotel and had never left. He used to screech every morning, and scared lots of residents with his angst-filled cries.

Peacocks were also associated with a legend, the origins of which were obscure. It had originated in the culture of the blacks, but had then spread to the white residents of the town. Every time a peacock displayed its magnificent tail, a human being somewhere was cured of an intolerable pain.

This peacock didn’t have a name. It moved around slowly, cautiously, as if brooding over its solitary fate.

And so Hanna woke up after her first night in Africa. What would she remember afterwards?

Perhaps the night was dream-like, a panoply of visions flitting hastily past? But at the same time there was also something very real: a nagging pain in her stomach. The heat was stifling, the brick walls in the room she had been sleeping in were dripping with damp. Lizards with shiny, almost transparent skin were clinging upside down to the ceiling above her head. There was a crackling sound from the dark floor where insects were lurking in the shadows. A mulatto woman with vigilant eyes had given her an oil lamp with a flickering flame that gave the impression of being the last breaths of a dying man.

And now: dawn. The cry of the peacock was still echoing in her ears. She walked over to the window on unsteady legs and watched the sun rising over the horizon. In her mind’s eye she relived the departure of the ship, slowly embarking on its voyage to Australia with a cargo that smelled of forests.

She washed her hands in a washbasin. She hid the pound notes she had received from Captain Svartman among her underclothes in the suitcase that Forsman had presented her with.

A filthy mirror was hanging on one of the brick walls. She recalled her father’s shaving mirror, and stood close up to it in order to see the reflection of her face.

She suddenly gave a start and turned round. The door of her room, with the figure 4 untidily written on a scrap of paper pinned to it, had been opened. The mulatto woman who had given her the oil lamp the previous evening was standing looking at her. Then she stepped inside and put a tray with some bread and a cup of tea on the only table there was in the room.

She was barefoot, and moved without a sound. She was wearing a loincloth and had naked, glistening breasts.

Hanna wanted to know immediately what the coloured lady was called. Just now she was living in a world where the only name she knew was her own. But she couldn’t bring herself to say anything. The silent woman left, and the door closed behind her.

Hanna drank the tea, which was very sweet. When she put the cup back on its saucer she felt full. She put her hand on her brow. It was hot. Was it the heat of the room? She didn’t know.

The stomach pains Hanna had felt during the night returned. She lay down on the bed and closed her eyes. The nagging pain came and went in waves. She dozed off, but woke up with a start. She put her hand on her groin. It was wet. When she looked at her hand it was covered in blood. She screamed and sat up in bed.

Death, Hanna thought, trembling. It was not only Lundmark whose time was up: the same applies to me. She was shivering with fear, but forced herself to stand up and stagger as far as the door. She found herself in a corridor that ran round an inner courtyard. She needed to cling on to the rail so as not to fall down. In the inner courtyard, paved with stone, was a black piano: someone was sitting there, polishing the keys with a linen rag.

She must have made a noise that she wasn’t aware of. The man polishing the keys of the piano stopped, turned round and looked at her. She raised her blood-covered hands, as if she were appealing to anybody who was prepared to come and help her.

I’m dying, Hanna thought. Even if he doesn’t understand what I say, he must surely recognize a cry for help.

‘I’m bleeding,’ she screamed. ‘I need help!’

She was on the point of passing out, but managed to stagger back to her room. It felt as if life was draining out of her. She was already on her way down to the same sea bottom as Lundmark.

Somebody touched Hanna’s shoulder. It was the same woman who had just served her tea. She carefully lifted up Hanna’s nightdress, looked at her lower abdomen, then let it fall again. Her face betrayed nothing of her thoughts.

Hanna longed for the coloured woman to be transformed into Elin. But Elin was not the woman standing in front of her, Elin lived in a different world. As if in a mist, Hanna thought she could see her mother standing outside the grey house, gazing at the mountain on the other side of the river.

The coloured woman turned on her heel and left the room. Hanna could see that she was in a hurry.

I shall find out what her name is, she thought, because I refuse to die.

I’m not going to sink down. Not yet.

HANNA WAS WOKEN
up by the curtain fluttering against the widow as the door opened. It wasn’t the mulatto woman returning, but a different woman altogether. She was jet black, with skin that seemed to glisten and her hair in tight plaits apparently stuck to her skull. Her lips were red, heavily made-up. All she was wearing was a thin dressing gown with a pattern of fire-breathing dragons and demons over her silken underclothes.

Her voice was husky, perhaps she was hoarse or had been indulging in too many cigarettes and an excess of alcohol. To Hanna’s surprise, as if what was taking place before her very eyes was in fact no more than an extension of her confused dreams, the half-naked woman began talking to her in a language she immediately recognized, even though she had never heard it spoken before. When Hanna arrived at the hotel the woman who gave her the room key had spoken a language she knew was English. She didn’t understand it at all, but with the help of her hands and single words she had managed to make it clear that she was looking for a room.

But now this unknown black woman was standing in front of her and bringing to life the dictionary she had once taken out of Forsman’s waste-paper basket. So this was how the language she had tried to learn a few words of actually sounded.

Much of what the woman said at first was totally incomprehensible to Hanna, but then she began to recognize an occasional word here and there, and managed to guess rather than understand what was being said.

The woman pointed at Hanna’s Swedish discharge book, which was lying on the bedside table. From what she said Hanna gathered that she had once lived with a Swedish sailor called Harry Midgård, who was a terrible man when he was drunk. Hanna suspected that he had worked on a Norwegian whaling ship.

The woman wiped sweat from her neck with the back of her hand.

‘Felicia,’ she said. ‘I’m Felicia.’

Felicia? The name meant nothing to Hanna, but nevertheless she had the feeling that her memory was starting to return.

‘How long have I been asleep?’ she asked.

‘This is the fourth day you’ve been here.’