Late that night she made up her mind to go to Phalaborwa, the place the missionary Agnes had talked about on board the Lovisa the day after Hanna had arrived in Africa. She could go there and maybe find inspiration for what to do with her life. At the missionary station she would be able to discard the final remains of what she had become during her time in Africa.
She slept for a few hours before getting up as dawn broke. The wedding party was still in full swing. She looked out of the window and gave a start: Moses was standing there under a tree. He was staring up at her window. She shouted out, knowing that she wasn’t mistaken. Beside herself with happiness, she got dressed and hurried down into the garden. Moses was no longer there under the tree — but she knew what he was thinking. It was not appropriate for a black man to meet a white woman in the grounds of a hotel. And so he had withdrawn to somewhere discreet. She looked around and saw a dense clump of bushes next to the stone wall surrounding the hotel.
He was standing there, waiting for her. He wasn’t wearing his usual overalls, but was dressed in a shabby black suit. She was surprised that he had been allowed in: the blacks who worked in the hotel or in the park-like grounds all wore uniforms.
‘I climbed over the wall,’ he said. ‘They’d never have allowed me in. In the mines we learn how to climb over and past piles of fallen stone. There’s no wall a miner can’t climb over.’
She barely listened to what he was saying. Instead she stood close to him and felt how he put his arms round her.
‘How did you get here?’ she asked.
‘On another ship.’
‘When did you arrive?’
‘Yesterday.’
‘No doubt you know that I haven’t found your parents.’
‘I know.’
She looked at him.
‘Why did you come here?’
He took a step backwards and produced a little pouch from out of his pocket. Hanna recognized it immediately. He had once given a similar pouch to Isabel.
‘I wanted to give you this.’
‘Is it the same as you gave Isabel?’
‘Yes.’
‘You said then that it didn’t work on her because she was surrounded by too many white people who took away all its strength. Why are you giving it to me, then?’
‘Because you are not like the others. I know you are called Ana Branca. But that’s wrong. For me you are Ana Negra.’
Black Ana, she thought. Is that my real name?
‘Your last task in the life of the white woman you were born as is to find my parents,’ said Moses. ‘Once you’ve done that, you are one of us, Ana Negra.’
‘What will happen if I grow wings?’
‘You’ll fly to wherever I am.’
Without another word he handed over the pouch, climbed up the wall and disappeared over the other side. It all happened so quickly that she had no time to react.
She continued searching but didn’t find the parents. Nobody seemed to recognize their names. Every evening she went back to the hotel and contemplated the pouch lying on her table. And every morning she stood by the window, but Moses never reappeared.
In the end she gave up. Isabel’s and Moses’ parents had been swallowed up by the mass of black people: she would never be able to find them. What she wanted more than anything else — to see Moses standing down below in the hotel grounds once again, and then to run off with him over the high stone wall — would never become reality.
That evening she started packing her belongings. The pouch remained where it had been all the time, untouched. She had not changed her resolve to go to the missionary station.
In the end only her diary was left. She was determined to be rid of the notebook that she had tied a red ribbon around. She considered burning it, but changed her mind without really knowing why.
By chance she noticed that although the hotel was newly built, the parquet floor in her room was already cracking. When she poked a finger into one of those cracks, a piece of parquet came loose. She knelt down and pushed the diary into the gap, as far as it would go: then she replaced the loose piece.
She later summoned one of the hotel’s black caretakers who made sure that the crack was repaired.
She stayed for one more day and one more night at the Africa Hotel. All the wedding guests had left by now. The white yachts in the roadstead had weighed anchor and departed. The hotel seemed deserted.
That last evening she sat by the open window where the curtain was swaying slowly in the evening breeze. She emptied the contents of the leather pouch into her hand and swallowed them, washed down with a glass of water.
Nobody saw her leave, and afterwards nobody was able to confirm if she had rented a carriage or left Beira in a boat or on horseback.
When the hotel staff let themselves into her room the following day, her payment was lying in an envelope on the table.
Her suitcases were no longer there.
Nobody ever saw her again.
Afterword
As a general rule, everything I write is based on truth — it might be a big or a small truth, it can be crystal clear or extremely fragmentary; but nevertheless, there is always something based on real events that leads to the fiction in all my novels.
As in this particular case. It was Tor Sällström, author and Africa enthusiast, who mentioned in a conversation, almost in passing, some remarkable documents he had come across in old colonial archives in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique. According to what he read, at the end of the nineteenth century and perhaps also the beginning of the twentieth century, a Swedish woman had been the owner of one of the biggest brothels in the town, which in those days was called Lourenço Marques. She was mentioned because she had been a significant taxpayer.
After a few years, she is no longer mentioned in the documents. She apparently came from nowhere, and vanished just as mysteriously as she had appeared.
Who was she? Where did she come from? I did more research, but it seems her origins really were unknown, as was her fate. All conclusions had to be theories, more or less probable.
But we do know that Swedish ships berthed in Lourenço Marques, often carrying cargoes of timber to Australia. And most probably there were women crew members now and then, mainly cooks.
In other words, everything beyond those basic facts is speculation. Apart from the bureaucratic evidence in an old ledger. When it came to taxes gathered, colonial civil servants were scrupulous with the facts. Every year it was necessary to convince the government in Lisbon that the colony really was a profit-making venture.
So, she really did exist and lived in Lourenço Marques, because the archives do not lie. She paid impressive amounts of tax.
My story is therefore based on the little we know, and all that we don’t know.
Henning Mankell
Gothenburg, June 2011
Glossary
Tontonto Nickname of a home-brewed spirit with a high alcohol content
O Paraiso Paradise
Shangana A language spoken in southern parts of Mozambique
Capulana Piece of batik cloth used by women as a loincloth in Mozambique
Pau preto Very hard, black type of wood found in Africa
A Magrinha The thin one
Feticheiro/a Male or female witchdoctor
Xhipamanhine One of the oldest black settlements in Maputo, Mozambique. Maputo used to be called Lourenço Marques