‘There are no conversations on my island for me to overhear,’ I said.
‘You always used to eavesdrop on my telephone conversations, despite the fact that you pretended to be uninterested and thumbed through a book or a newspaper. That’s how you tried to hide your big ears. Do you remember?’
I was upset. She was right, of course. I’ve always been an eavesdropper, ever since the time when I used to listen in to the angst-ridden conversations between my father and mother. I have stood behind half-open doors and listened to my colleagues, to patients, to people’s intimate conversations in cafes or on trains. I discovered that most conversations contained small, almost unnoticeable lies. I used to ask myself if that’s the way it’s always been. Has it always been necessary for conversations between people to contain barely noticeable elements of untruth in order to get anywhere?
The conversation in the next room had come to an end. Harriet was tired. She lay down and closed her eyes.
I put on my jacket, and went out to explore the deserted little town. Wherever you looked was blue light oozing out of barred windows. The occasional moped, a car travelling far too fast, then silence again. Harriet wanted me to meet her daughter. I wondered why. Was it to show me that she had managed perfectly well without me, that she had borne the child I hadn’t been privileged to give her? I felt pangs of sorrow as I trudged through the wintry evening.
I paused at a brightly lit ice rink, where a few young people were skating around with bandy sticks and a red ball. I suddenly felt very close to my own younger days. The crackling sound of skates on ice, of stick against ball, the occasional shout, skaters falling over only to scramble to their feet again immediately. That’s how I remembered it, although in fact I had never laid my hands on a bandy stick: I had been shunted off to an ice-hockey rink, where the play was no doubt a lot more painful than what I was watching taking place.
Get back on your feet as soon as you fall.
That was the message to be learned from the freezing cold ice-hockey rinks of my youth. A lesson to be applied to the life that was in store for us.
Always scramble up again when you fall down. Never stay down. But that was precisely what I had done. I had stayed down after making my big mistake.
I watched them playing, and soon picked out a very little boy, the smallest of them all, albeit fat — or perhaps he was wearing more protective clothing than the rest? But he was the best. He accelerated quicker than any of the others, dribbled the ball with his stick without even needing to look at what he was doing, feinted with astonishing speed, and was always in exactly the right position to receive a pass. A fat little lad who was a faster skater than any of the others. I tried to imagine which of the skaters out there was most like me at their age. Which one would I have been, with my much heavier ice-hockey stick? Certainly not the little boy who could skate so fast and had a much better ball sense than most. I would have been one of the also-rans — a blueberry that could be picked and replaced with any other blueberry around.
Never stay down if you don’t have to.
I had done what you should never do.
I went back to the hotel. There was no night porter. The room key opened the outside door. Harriet had gone to bed. One of the brandy bottles was standing on her bedside table.
‘I thought you must have run away,’ she said. ‘I’m going to sleep now. I’ve taken a dram and a sleeping pill.’
She turned on to her side, and was soon asleep. I cautiously took hold of her wrist and measured her pulse: 78 beats per minute. I sat down on a chair, switched on the television, and watched a news broadcast with the sound turned down so low that not even my eavesdropping ears were able to hear a word of what was said. The pictures seemed to be the same as usual. Bleeding, tortured, suffering specimens of humanity. And then a series of well-dressed men making endless pronouncements, displaying no sign of sympathy, only arrogant smiles. I switched off the television and lay down on the bed. I thought about the young female police officer with the blonde hair before falling asleep.
At one o’clock the next day we were approaching Hudiksvall. It had stopped snowing, and there was no ice on the roads. Harriet pointed out a road sign to Rångevallen. The surface was terrible, destroyed by monster tree-felling machines. We turned off again, this time on to a private road. The forest was very dense. I wondered what kind of a person Harriet’s daughter was, living like this so remotely in the depths of the forest. The only question I had put to Harriet during our journey was whether Louise had a husband or any children. She didn’t. Logs were stacked in various appropriate places by the roadside. The road reminded me of the one that had led to Sara Larsson’s house.
When we eventually came to a clearing, I saw several ruined buildings and dilapidated fences. And a large caravan with a tented extension.
‘We’re here,’ said Harriet. ‘This is where my daughter lives.’
‘In the caravan?’
‘Can you see any other building with a roof that hasn’t collapsed?’
I helped her out of the car, and fetched her walker. There was the sound of an engine coming from what might once have been a dog kennel. It could hardly be anything else but a generator. There was a satellite dish on the roof of the caravan. We stood there for several minutes without anything happening. I felt an intense desire to return to my island.
The caravan door opened. A woman emerged.
She was wearing a pink dressing gown and high-heeled shoes. It seemed to me anything but easy to estimate her age. She had a pack of cards in one hand.
‘This is my daughter,’ said Harriet.
She pushed her walker through the snow to where the woman was trying to stand steadily on her high heels.
I stayed where I was.
‘This is your father,’ said Harriet to her daughter.
There was snow in the air. I thought of Jansson, and wished to goodness that he could have come to collect me in his hydrocopter.
The Forest
Chapter 1
My daughter doesn’t have a well of her own.
Needless to say, there was no running water in her caravan; nor was there any sign of a pump anywhere on the site. In order to fetch water, I had to follow a path down the slope, through a copse, and eventually to another deserted farm with glassless windows and suspicious crows perched on the chimneys. In the yard was a rusty pump which produced water. As I raised and lowered the handle, the rusty iron screamed in pain.
The crows were motionless.
This was the first thing my daughter had asked me to do for her. To fetch two buckets of water. I’m just thankful that she didn’t say anything else. She could have yelled at me and told me to clear off, or she could have been overcome with joy at finally meeting her father. But all she did was ask me to fetch some water. I took the buckets and followed the path through the snow. I wondered if she would normally go herself in her dressing gown and high-heeled shoes. But what I wondered most of all was what had happened all those years ago, and why nobody had told me anything about it.
It was 250 yards to the abandoned farm. When Harriet said that the woman standing by the caravan was my daughter, I knew immediately that she was telling the truth. Harriet was incapable of lying. I searched my memory for the moment when she must have been conceived. As I trudged through the snow, it struck me that the only possibility was that Harriet had discovered she was pregnant after I’d disappeared. So the moment of conception must have been a month or so before we parted.
I tried hard to remember.