A Treacherous Paradise (42 page)

Hanna took her meals in her cabin, served by one of the thin men she had seen in the galley. She ate very little, spent most of the time resting on her bunk or standing in the stern, tracing the contours of the dark continent through the heat haze.

At one point the steam engine broke down. They drifted for almost a full day before the mechanic managed to trace and repair the fault so that they could continue their voyage to Beira.

It was dusk when she walked along the gangplank and set foot in the unknown town. She was followed by two crew members who had been ordered by Captain Fortuna to carry her luggage and accompany her to the Africa Hotel. That was where she would stay while she was searching for Isabel’s parents.

As she entered through the illuminated doors, she was astonished by the splendour surrounding her on all sides. She had thought the hotel Pandre stayed in was the most palatial she had ever seen in her life, but the Africa Hotel in Beira exceeded anything she could possibly have dreamt of. She moved into the second-largest suite in the hotel as the marriage suite was already booked. That first evening she was served a meal in her room, and drank champagne for only the second time in her life: the first time was the evening when she and Senhor Vaz had married.

The following day she started looking for Isabel’s parents. She had been assisted by the hotel to recruit two African men who could show her around the slum districts where she assumed Isabel’s parents would live. With the aid of the two men she spent over a week combing all the outlying settlements around Beira. As she had never visited any of the African districts in Lourenço Marques, it came as a shock for her to discover the conditions in which black people lived. She discovered squalor and suffering way beyond her imagination. Every evening she would sit in her lovely rooms in a state of petrified horror. She almost stopped eating altogether while the search was taking place. At night she had a succession of nightmares, nearly all of which transported her back to the river and the mountains where she failed to find the home she had left so long ago.

But after a few days she noticed something else when she made her repeated visits to the black settlements. She discovered an unexpected lust for life among the poorest of the poor. The slightest reason for feeling joy was not tossed disdainfully aside, but seized with both hands. People supported one another, even though they had virtually nothing that they could share.

One evening she tried to note down in her diary what it was she thought she had discovered, once she had managed to dig down deeper under the surface of all the poverty and squalor.

She wrote: ‘Amidst this incomprehensible poverty I can see islands of wealth. Happiness that ought not to exist, warmth that should never really have survived. This discovery enables me to see in the white people who live here a different kind of poverty among all their riches and well-being.’

She read through what she had written. She thought she hadn’t quite managed to work out exactly what she had experienced; but nevertheless she felt that for the first time she had seen the reality of the black people and their lives. Until now, her perspective had been twisted.

Perhaps, coming from the most poverty-stricken level of society in Sweden, she had more in common with blacks than she had previously realized.

The next day she continued her search for Isabel’s parents. Every step she took, every person she saw, convinced her that what she had written the previous night had been correct.

For the first time she was struck by a totally unexpected thought: perhaps I might be able to feel at home here after all. She realized that she was not just searching for Isabel’s parents: she was also searching for an entirely new way of looking at herself.

During the days she was looking for Isabel’s parents, the hotel was making preparations for a major wedding celebration. A Portuguese prince was going to marry an English duchess. At anchor in the roadstead were several large yachts that had made the journey from Europe. Hanna was the only person staying at the hotel who was not one of the wedding guests. Needless to say, she received an invitation even so, seeing as she was on the spot. She accepted, and despite everything had to acknowledge that she felt safe and secure to be surrounded by white people after all the misery and squalor she had encountered in the African settlements.

She was on the point of giving up: she didn’t think she would ever be able to find Isabel’s parents and tell them that Isabel was dead. She paid her two guides, and watched them stare at the many banknotes she handed over with amazement, almost fear.

The wedding was due to take place that same evening. Hanna spent the afternoon in the shady part of the hotel grounds, so as not to disturb the intensive preparations.

She suddenly found an elderly man standing in front of her, a white man wearing a dark suit. He must have been about sixty. Hanna wanted to be left in peace, and at first found his presence importunate: but she noticed that his friendliness seemed to be genuine, and that he was simply looking for somebody to talk to.

They watched the colourful birds with long beaks flying around the bushes and flowers.

‘I’m on my way,’ said the man suddenly.

‘Aren’t we all?’ Hanna responded.

‘My name’s Harold ffendon,’ said the man. ‘I used to be called something completely different – I can no longer recall what. But my father was called Wilson, John Wilson, and was never known as anything but Jack. Now I’m on my way to what in his time was known as Van Diemen’s Land.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘It’s called Tasmania nowadays. But when my father lived there it was a notorious penal colony – England sent many of its worst criminals there either to die, or simply to disappear from the city streets in their homeland. My father had stolen a pair of shoes in the city of Bristol and for that he was exiled for fifteen years. When he’d served his sentence he chose to stay on there. He became a sheep farmer, but he also learnt the art of building organs. He’s dead now, but I intend to go out there and live close to where he did.’

‘How come you have ended up here?’

‘It’s a long way to Australia.’

Yes, Hanna thought: it’s a very long way to Australia. I never got there. I also ended up here.

‘You can see icebergs on the way there,’ she said.

‘I know,’ said ffendon. ‘Many of the ships taking criminals to Australia and Van Dieman’s Land never got there. Some of them were sunk by icebergs.’

The conversation died away, just as quickly as it had begun. Ffendon suddenly stood up, bowed and held out his hand.

‘I need help to complete my journey,’ he said. ‘I’m ashamed to admit it, but I’m asking for help even so.’

Hanna went up to her room, fetched fifty English pounds and returned to the garden.

‘How did you know that I had a bit of money to spare?’ she asked.

‘You give the impression of not being worried about anything,’ said ffendon. ‘A person like that either believes in God, or has plenty of money. You didn’t seem to be a believer, so as far as I was concerned there was only one other possibility left.’

‘Good luck with your journey,’ she said, handing over the money.

She watched him leave. If he really would go to Tasmania or if he’d gamble away the money, she had no idea. She didn’t really care.

Hanna attended the wedding ceremony itself, saw the handsome young couple and recalled the simplicity of the occasion when she and Lundmark had married in Algiers. But at the reception afterwards, her chair at one of the round tables was empty. She had gone back to her room in order to work out where she would go next. Where was the Tasmania that she could head for? What choices did she have? Did she have any choice in fact? Or should she simply stay on at the Africa Hotel until her money ran out?

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.

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.