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.
24
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.’
Felicia had lit a cigarette that she’d been keeping behind her ear. She looked searchingly at Hanna.
It struck Hanna that she had seen a similarly searching look before. It was when Elin had asked Forsman to take her to the coast with him. His expression had been similar as he looked at her, as if he were searching for a truth which was not obvious.
‘Do you have the strength to get out of bed?’ Felicia asked.
Hanna tried. She was still weak and her legs were shaking when she stood on the floor in a white nightdress which somebody must have put on her while she was asleep. Felicia helped her into a dressing gown which smelled strongly of perfume, and put a pair of slippers on her feet.
They went down the stairs to the inner courtyard which was deserted. Hanna had taken the Portuguese dictionary which she’d brought with her on the voyage. Felicia held her under one arm and led her into a garden surrounded by a stone wall.
It had been raining. The ground was soaking. Hanna thought it smelled like the riverbank after haymaking. The wet soil was bubbling and fermenting.
Felicia helped Hanna to sit down by a jacaranda tree in blossom. She remained standing herself.
‘Is it what I think?’ Hanna asked.
‘How can I know what you think?’ said Felicia.
Then she told her in a few words what had happened. Hanna had suspected what the stomach pains had indicated, and now it was confirmed. She had suffered an early miscarriage. Lundmark’s child had been rejected. A child without a father that didn’t want to be born.
‘I know so little,’ said Felicia.
‘It wasn’t a child that was rejected, just a lump of bloody goo that didn’t have a soul.’
Felicia rang the little bell standing on the table. A young waiter in a white jacket appeared and stood beside her chair.
‘Tea?’ she asked, looking at Hanna, who nodded.
They didn’t speak while waiting to be served tea. White butterflies that had been called back to life by the recent rain were hovering around the tree’s blue blossoms. The sound of prayers suddenly made itself heard from a minaret somewhere in the vicinity. Hanna was reminded of the call to prayer when she and Lundmark had married in Algiers.