Daniel (41 page)

The old man thanked him. For coming the long distance in the jeep from the land whose name he couldn't pronounce and restoring Daniel's spirit to the desert, to the place where he should have lived and also been buried.

When the man stopped a woman stood up. She was carrying a tiny baby on her back and she came and stood in front of him.

‘Her name is Be,' said the old man.

He looked into her eyes and thought that Daniel's mother might have looked just like her. He also knew that from this moment on she would always think that she was the mother of that boy, the boy who lay buried so far away.

Afterwards they got up and walked away. Soon he could hardly see them, only a drawn-out line of black dots in the dazzling sunlight.

 

In the archives in Windhoek he found no documents that could tell him anything more about Daniel and Hans Bengler, or about Wilhelm Andersson; nothing that he didn't know already. On the other hand, he spent the whole day leafing through huge folders full of photographs that an English photographer named Frank Hodgson had taken during his travels in what was then called German South-West Africa in the 1870s, the period when Daniel had made his long journey to Sweden.

One of the photographs depicted a man, a woman and a boy. They were posed stiffly in front of the photographer's camera. The boy stood in the foreground. He was much like Daniel, the way he looked in the photograph taken at the studio in Lund. He thought that they might have looked like this, Be and Kiko and Daniel, who at that time had an entirely different name - which no one would ever know.

Then he left the National Archives. The hot, dry wind outside the cool air-conditioned building library hit him like a wall.

 

Two days later he drove back the same way he had come. When he reached the spot where he had told his story, he stopped and got out of the car. In Windhoek he had bought a telescope. He looked through it, scanning the horizon, but the desert was empty. He couldn't see any people anywhere. He didn't dare wait too long, since he wanted to make it to Ghanzi before dark.

The desert stayed empty. He drove on. Just before sundown he arrived in Ghanzi.

Several years later he wrote this book, which has now come to an end.

This is a novel. That means that the events and characters depicted in this book have no direct models in real life. It also means that any similarities with historical events or persons should be considered pure coincidence.

The novel does not necessarily depict what actually happened. The task of the novel is to portray what might have happened.

 

Henning Mankell
Mozambique, April 2000

© 2000 by Henning Mankell

English translation © 2010 by Steven T. Murray

All rights reserved.

 

No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the publisher.

 

Requests for permission to reproduce selections from this book should be mailed to: Permissions Department, The New Press, 38 Greene Street, New York, NY 10013.

 

First published as
Vindens son
by Norstedts Förlag, Stockholm
Published in Great Britain by Harvill Secker, London, 2010
Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2010
Distributed by Perseus Distribution

 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

 

Mankell, Henning, 1948-

[Vindens son. English]

Daniel : a novel / Henning Mankell ; translated from the Swedish by Steven T. Murray. p. cm.

Originally published in Swedish as Vindens son.

eISBN : 978-1-595-58632-2

PT9876.23.A49V5613 2011

839.73'74—dc22

 

2010027425

 

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