Italian Shoes (6 page)

‘You don't know them.'

‘Them?'

‘I was married twice. My first wife was called Birgit, and she was a nurse. After two years we had no more to say to each other. And she wanted to retrain as a mining engineer. What did I care for stones and gravel and mine shafts? My second wife was called Rose-Marie, and was an antiques dealer. You can't imagine how often I left the operating theatre after a long day and accompanied her to some auction sale or other, and then had to ferry home an old cupboard from some peasant's kitchen. I lost count of how many tables and chairs I had to soak in lye in an old bathtub in order to get rid of the paint. That lasted for four years.'

‘Have you any children?'

I shook my head. Once upon a time, ages ago, I had imagined that when I grew old, I would have children to lighten the darkness of my old age. It was too late now – I'm a bit like my boat, out of the water and covered by a tarpaulin.

I looked at Harriet.

‘Do you have any children?'

She eyed me for a long time before answering.

‘I have a daughter.'

It struck me that she could have been my child, had I not abandoned her.

‘She's called Louise,' said Harriet.

‘That's a lovely name,' I said.

I stood up and made coffee. Morning was now in full swing. I waited until the water started to boil, counted to seventeen, and then let it brew. I took two cups from the cupboard, and sliced up the loaf of bread that had thawed by now. We were a couple of OAPs sitting down to coffee in the middle of January. We were one of the thousands of coffee mornings that take place every day in this country of ours. I wondered if any of the others were taking place in circumstances anything remotely like the one in my kitchen.

After drinking her coffee, Harriet withdrew into her anthill room and closed the door.

For the first time in many years I skipped my winter bath. I hesitated for some considerable time, and was about to get undressed and fetch the axe when I changed my mind. There would be no more winter baths for me until I had taken Harriet to the forest pool.

Instead of my dressing gown I put on a jacket and walked down to the jetty. There had been an unexpected change of weather: a thaw had set in, and the snow stuck to my boots.

I had a few hours to myself. The sun broke through the clouds, and melting snow and ice began dripping from
the boathouse roof. I went inside, fetched one of my tins of tar and opened it. The smell calmed me down. I almost fell asleep in the pale sunlight.

I thought back to the time when Harriet and I were together. I felt that nowadays I belonged to an epoch that no longer existed. I lived in a strangely barren landscape for those who were left over, who had lost their footing in their own time and were unable to live with the innovations of the new age. My mind wandered. When Harriet and I were together, everybody smoked. All the time, and everywhere. The whole of my youth was filled with ashtrays. I can still recall the chain-smoking doctors and professors who trained me to become a person with the right to wear a white coat. In those days, the postman who delivered mail to the skerries was Hjalmar Hedelius. In winter he would skate from island to island. His rucksack must have been incredibly heavy, and that was before the modern obsession with junk mail.

My rambling thoughts were broken by the sound of an approaching hydrocopter.

Jansson had already been to the widow Mrs Åkerblom, and was now heading for me at full speed, bringing all his aches and pains. The toothache that had been pestering him before Christmas had gone away. The last time he moored by my jetty, he had asked me to examine a few brown moles that had formed on the back of his left hand. I calmed him down by assuring him that they were normal developments as a man grew older. He would outlive all the rest of us on the islands. When we pensioners have gone, Jansson will still be chugging along
in his old converted fishing boat, or rushing around in his hydrocopter. Unless he's been made redundant, of course. Which will almost certainly be his fate.

Jansson glided up to the jetty, switched off the engine and began wriggling out of all his coats and hats. He was red in the face, his hair was standing on end.

‘A Happy New Year to you,' he said when he was standing on the jetty.

‘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.

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 headland. 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.