Italian Shoes
- Автор: Манкелль Хеннинг
- Год: 2009
- Язык: английский
- Год: Harvill Secker
- ISBN: 978-1-846-55099-7
- Жанр: Роман, новелла
Электронная книга - «Italian Shoes». Краткое содержание книги:
‘I didn’t hear you saying anything about her coming back here with my car.’
‘I was listening. She did all the talking.’
Agnes got to her feet and went upstairs. I could hear her shouting to make herself heard through the music. I had found Agnes Klarström, and she hadn’t shouted at me. She hadn’t drowned me in a torrent of accusations. She hadn’t even raised her voice when she described how she wanted to kill me in her dreams.
I had a lot to think about. Within a few short weeks three women had unexpectedly entered my life. Harriet, Louise and now Agnes. And perhaps I should add Sima, Miranda and Aida.
Agnes returned. We drank coffee. There was no sign of Mats Karlsson. The rock music continued thudding away.
The doorbell rang. When Agnes answered it, there were two policemen with a girl I assumed must be Miranda. The officers were holding her arms as if she were dangerous.
She had one of the most beautiful faces I had ever seen. A Mary Magdalene gripped by Roman soldiers.
Miranda said nothing, but I gathered from the conversation between Agnes and the police officers that she had been caught by a farmer in the act of trying to steal a calf. Agnes protested indignantly — why on earth would Miranda want to steal a cow? The conversation became more and more heated, the policemen seemed tired, nobody was listening to what the others said, and Miranda just stood there.
The police left, without it having become clear whether or not the alleged attempt to steal a calf had succeeded. Agnes asked Miranda a few questions in a stern voice. The girl with the beautiful face answered in such a low voice that I couldn’t catch what she said.
She went upstairs, and the loud music stopped. Agnes sat down on the sofa and examined her fingernails.
‘Miranda is a girl I would have loved to have as my own daughter. Of all the girls who have been here, who’ve come and gone, I think she is the one who will do best in life. As long as she discovers that horizon she has inside her.’
She showed me to a room behind the kitchen, where I could sleep. She left me to it as she had a lot to do in the office. I lay down on the bed and pictured my car in my mind’s eye. Smoke was coming from the engine. Next to Sima in the passenger seat was the newly sharpened sword. What would my grandparents have said if they’d still been alive and I’d tried to tell them about all this? They would never have believed me, never have understood. What would my browbeaten and kicked-around waiter of a father have said? My weeping mother? I switched off the light and lay there in the darkness, surrounded by whispering voices telling me that the twelve years I had spent on my island had robbed me of contact with the world I lived in.
I must have fallen asleep. I was woken up by the feel of something cold against my neck. The bedside lamp was switched on. I opened my eyes and saw Sima standing over me, with the sword pressed against my neck. I don’t know how long I held my breath until she removed the sword.
‘I liked your car,’ she said. ‘It’s old and it doesn’t go very fast, but I liked it.’
I sat up. She placed the sword on the window ledge.
‘The car’s standing outside,’ she said. ‘It’s not damaged.’
‘I don’t like people taking my car without permission.’
She sat down on the floor, her back against the radiator.
‘Tell me about your island,’ she said.
‘Why should I? How do you know I live on an island?’
‘I know lots of things.’
‘It’s a long way out to sea, and just now it’s surrounded by ice. In the autumn, storms can be so bad that they throw boats up on to land if you don’t moor them properly.’
‘Do you really live there all alone?’
‘I have a cat and a dog.’
‘Don’t you feel scared of all that empty space?’
‘Rocks and juniper bushes don’t often run at you with a sword. It’s people who do that.’
She sat there for a moment without saying anything, then got to her feet and picked up the sword.
‘I might come and visit you one of these days,’ she said.
‘I very much doubt that.’
She smiled.
‘So do I. But I’m often wrong.’
I tried to go back to sleep. I gave up at about five o’clock. I got dressed and wrote a note to Agnes, saying that I’d gone home. I slid it under the locked door of her office.
The house was asleep when I drove off.
There was a smell of burning from the engine, and when I stopped for petrol at an all-night filling station, I also topped up the oil. I arrived at the harbour shortly before dawn.
I walked out on to the pier. A fresh wind was getting up. Despite the vast stretch of ice, the wind brought with it the salty smell of the open sea. A few lamps illuminated the harbour, where a few abandoned fishing boats were gnawing at the car tyres.
I waited for it to get light before starting off for home over the ice. I had no idea how I was going to adjust my life in order to cope with everything that had happened.
Standing alone out there on the pier, in the bitterly cold wind, I started to cry. Every single door inside me was swinging back and forth in the wind, which seemed to be getting stronger all the time.
The Sea
Chapter 1
It was the beginning of April before the thaw came. This was the longest the sea had been frozen during all the years I had lived here. I could still walk over the channels to the mainland at the end of March.
Jansson came by in his hydrocopter every third day, and reported on the condition of the ice. He thought he could recall a winter in the 1960s when the ice had remained for as long as this in the outer archipelago.
The white-painted landscape was dazzling when I climbed up the hill behind the house and gazed towards the horizon. Sometimes I hung Grandfather’s ice prods round my neck, collected an old ski pole and went for wintry walks around the skerries and rocks where the old herring-fishing grounds used to be: my grandfather and his father before him used to land catches that nobody nowadays could even dream of. I walked around the skerries where nothing grows and remembered how I used to row out to them as a child. You could find all kinds of remarkable flotsam and jetsam hidden in the crevices. I once discovered a doll’s head, and on another occasion a watertight box containing several 78 rpm gramophone records. My grandfather asked somebody who knew about such things, and heard that they were German songs from the war that had ended when I was a little boy. I didn’t know where the records were now. On another rocky islet I had found a large waterproof logbook that some raving or desperate sea captain had thrown into the sea. It had been from a cargo ship taking timber from the sawmills of northern Sweden to Ireland, where it was used for housebuilding. The vessel had weighed 3,000 tons and was called Flanagan. Nobody could say how or why the logbook had ended up in the water. Grandfather had spoken to a retired schoolteacher who used to spend his summers on Lönö, in what used to be the cottage of a former pilot, Grundström. He had translated the text, but there was nothing unusual noted in the logbook on the day it had been thrown into the sea. I can still remember the date: 9 May 1947. The last entry had been a note about ‘greasing the anchor gear as soon as possible’. Then nothing more. The logbook was incomplete, but had been thrown into the sea. It had been on its way from Kubikenborg with a cargo of timber for Belfast. The weather was fine, the sea almost dead calm, and a note made that morning said there was a south-easterly breeze blowing at one metre per second.
As the long winter progressed, I often thought about that logbook. It seemed to me that my life after the catastrophic error was a bit like throwing my unfinished logbook into the sea and then sailing on without leaving any trace behind. The insignificant notebook I was now keeping, recording such things as vanished waxwings and the ill health of my pets, wasn’t even of any interest to me. I made notes because it was a daily reminder of the fact that I was living a life of no substance. I wrote about waxwings to confirm the existence of a life in a vacuum.