Italian Shoes (25 page)

I stood there appealing to a place near Los Angeles called Mount Wilson. If Sima survived, I would pay for her to go there. I would find out who this Wilson was, the man who had given his name to the mountain.

There's nothing to prevent a god having a name. Why shouldn't the Creator have the name Wilson?

If she died, it would be my fault. If I'd gone downstairs when I heard her crying, she might not have injured herself. I'm a doctor, I ought to have understood. But above all else, I am a human being who ought to have recognised some of the enormous loneliness that a little girl can feel.

Without warning, I found myself longing for my father. I hadn't done so since he died. His death had caused me great pain. Even though we had never spoken intimately to each other, we had shared an unspoken understanding. He had lived long enough to experience my success in training to become a doctor – and never concealed his surprise and pride over it. During his final days, when he was confined to bed with his excruciatingly painful cancer that had spread from a little black spot on the heel of his foot to become metastases all over him that he compared to moss on a stone, he often spoke about the white coat that I would be privileged to wear. I thought his concept of power being embodied in that white coat was embarrassing. It was only afterwards that I realised he envisaged me as the one who would gain revenge on his behalf. He had also worn a white jacket, but people had trampled all over him. I would be the means through which he got his own back. Nobody belittled a doctor in a white coat.

I missed him now. And that magical trip to the black forest pool. I wanted to turn the clock back, I wanted to undo most of my life. My mother also flitted before my eyes. Lavender and tears, a life I had never understood. Had she carried around an invisible sword? Perhaps she was standing on the far bank of the river of life, waving to Sima?

In my mind, I also tried to talk to Harriet and Louise. But they remained silent, as if they thought I ought to be able to sort this out myself.

I went back inside and found a small waiting room
that was empty. After a while, I was informed that Sima's condition was still critical. She was going to be moved to an intensive care ward. I shared the lift with her. Both men in charge of her trolley were black. One of them smiled at me. I smiled back, and had an urge to tell him about that remarkable telescope on Mount Wilson. Sima was lying with her eyes closed; she had a drip and was being fed oxygen through a nose catheter. I bent over her and whispered into her ear: ‘Chara, when you are well again you will visit Mount Wilson and see that there is somebody standing on the moon who looks remarkably like you.'

A doctor came and said nothing was certain, but that they would probably need to operate and that Sima was not reacting to anything they attempted. He asked me several questions, but I had to tell him that I simply didn't know if she was suffering from any illnesses, or if she had tried to commit suicide before. The woman who would be able to answer questions like that was on her way here.

Agnes arrived shortly after ten. It occurred to me to wonder how she could drive a car with only one arm. Did she have a specially adapted vehicle? But it wasn't important. I took her behind the curtain to where Sima was lying. Agnes sobbed quietly, but I didn't want Sima to hear anything like that and took Agnes out again.

‘There's no change,' I said. ‘But the very fact that you've come makes everything better. Try talking to her. She needs to know that you're here.'

‘Will she be able to hear what I say?'

‘We don't know. But we can hope.'

Agnes spoke to the doctor. No illnesses, no medication, no previous suicide attempts as far as she was aware. The doctor, who was about my age, said that the situation was unchanged but slightly more stable since Sima had been admitted. There was no reason for the moment to be unduly worried.

Agnes was relieved. There was a coffee machine in the corridor. Between us we managed to scrape together the necessary small change for two cups of awful coffee. I was surprised by the adroitness with which she used one hand where I needed two.

I told Agnes what had happened. She shook her head slowly.

‘She might well have been on the way to Russia. Sima always tries to climb mountains. She's never satisfied with walking along normal paths like the rest of us.'

‘But why should she want to come and visit me?'

‘You live on an island. Russia is on the other side of the sea.'

‘But when she gets to the island I live on, she tries to take her own life. I don't get it.'

‘You can never tell by looking at a person just how badly damaged he or she is inside.'

‘She told me a few things.'

‘So perhaps you have some idea.'

At about three o'clock, a nurse came to say that Sima's condition had stabilised. If we wanted to go home, we could. She would phone us if there was any change. As we had nowhere to go to we stayed there for the rest of
the day and all night. Agnes curled up on a narrow sofa and dozed. I spent most of the time on a chair leafing through well-thumbed magazines in which people I'd never heard of, pictured in dazzlingly bright colours, trumpeted to the world how important they were. We occasionally went to get something to eat, but we were never away for long.

Shortly after five in the morning, a nurse came to the waiting room to inform us that there had been a sudden change. Serious internal bleeding had occurred, and surgeons were about to operate in an attempt to stabilise her condition.

We had taken things too much for granted. Sima was suddenly drifting away from us again.

At twenty past six the doctor came to see us. He seemed to be very tired, sat down on a chair and stared at his hands. They hadn't been able to stop the bleeding. Sima was dead. She had never come round. If we needed support, the hospital offered a counselling service.

We went in together to see her. All the tubes had been removed, and the machines switched off. The yellow pallor that makes the newly dead look like a waxwork had already taken a grip of her face. I don't know how many dead people I have seen in my life. I have watched people die, I have performed post-mortem examinations, I have held human brains in my hands. Nevertheless, it was me who burst into tears; Agnes was in so much pain that she was incapable of reaction. She grasped my arm;
I could feel that she was strong – and I wished that she would never let go.

I wanted to stay there, but Agnes asked me to go back home. She would stay with Sima, I had done all that I could, she was grateful, but she wanted to be on her own. She accompanied me to my taxi. It was a beautiful morning, still chilly. Yellow coltsfoot were in bloom on the verge leading up to A&E.

A coltsfoot moment, I thought. Just now, this morning, when Sima was lying dead inside there. Just for a brief moment she had sparkled like a ruby. Now it was as if she had never existed.

The only thing about death that scares me is its utter indifference.

‘The sword,' I said. ‘And she had a case as well. What do you want me to do with that?'

‘I'll be in touch,' said Agnes. ‘I can't say when. But I know where to find you.'

I watched her go back into the hospital. A one-armed sorrowful angel, who had just lost one of her wicked but remarkable children.

I got into the taxi and said where I wanted to go to. The driver eyed me suspiciously. I realised that I made a dodgy impression, to say the least. Dishevelled clothes, cut-down wellington boots, unshaven and hollow-eyed.

‘We usually ask for payment in advance for long journeys like this,' the driver said. ‘We've had some bad experiences.'

I felt in my pockets and realised that I didn't even have my wallet with me. I turned to the driver.

‘My daughter has just died. I want to go home. You'll be paid. Please drive slowly and carefully.'

I started to weep. He said nothing more until we pulled up at the quayside. It was ten o'clock. There was a slight breeze that hardly disturbed the water in the harbour. I asked the taxi driver to stop outside the red wooden building that housed the coastguard. Hans Lundman had seen the taxi approaching and had come out of the door. He could see from my face that the outcome had not been good.

‘She died,' I said. ‘Internal bleeding. It was unexpected. We thought she was going to make it. I need to borrow a thousand kronor from you to pay for the taxi.'

‘I'll put it on my credit card,' said Lundman, and headed for the taxi.

He'd finished his shift several hours previously. I realised that he had stayed on in the hope of being there when I got back to the quayside. Hans Lundman lived on one of the islands in the southern archipelago.

‘I'll take you home,' he said.

‘I don't have any money at home,' I said. ‘I'll have to ask Jansson to take some out of the bank for me.'

‘Who cares about money at a time like this?' he said.

I always feel at ease when I'm at sea. Hans Lundman's boat was an old converted fishing vessel that progressed at a stately pace. His work occasionally forced him to hurry, but he never rushed otherwise.

We berthed at the jetty. It was sunny, and warm. Spring had sprung. But I felt devoid of any such feelings.

‘There's a boat out there at the Sighs,' I said. ‘Moored there. It's stolen.'

He understood.

‘We'll discover it tomorrow,' he said. ‘It just so happens that I'll be passing there on patrol tomorrow. Nobody knows who stole it.'

We shook hands.

‘She shouldn't have died,' I said.

‘No,' said Lundman. ‘She really shouldn't.'

I remained on the jetty and watched him reverse out of the inlet. He raised his hand in farewell, then was gone.

I sat down on the bench. It was much later when I returned to my house, where the front door was standing wide open.

THE OAKS WERE
unusually late this year.

I recorded in my logbook that the big oak tree between the boathouse and what used to be my grandparents' henhouse didn't start turning green until 25 May. The cluster of oaks around the inlet on the north side of the island – the inlet that for some incomprehensible reason had always been known as the Quarrel – started to come into leaf a few days earlier.

They say that the oaks on these islands were planted by the state at the beginning of the nineteenth century, so that there would be ample timber to make the warships being built in nearby Karlskrona. I remember lightning striking one of the trees when I was a child, and my grandfather sawing down what remained of the trunk. It had been planted in 1802. Grandfather told me that was in the days of Napoleon. I had no idea who Napoleon was at the time, but I realised that it was a very long time ago. Those annual rings had dogged me throughout my life. Beethoven was alive when that oak was still a sapling. The tree was in its prime when my father was born.

As so often out here in the archipelago, summer came gradually, but you could never be certain that it was here to stay. My feeling of loneliness usually decreased as it
grew warmer. But that was not the case this year. I just sat there with my anthill, a sharp sword and Sima's half-empty suitcase.

I often spoke to Agnes on the telephone during this period. She told me that the funeral had taken place in Mogata church. Apart from Agnes and the two girls who lived with her – the ones I had met: Miranda and Aida – the only other person to attend was a very old man who claimed to be a distant relative of Sima's. He had arrived by taxi, and seemed so frail that Agnes was afraid he would drop dead at any moment. She had not managed to establish just how he was related to Sima. Perhaps he had mistaken her for somebody else? When she showed him a photograph of Sima, he hadn't been at all sure that he recognised her.

But so what? Agnes had said. The church ought to have been full of people bidding farewell to this young person who had never had an opportunity to discover herself, or explore the world.

The coffin had been adorned with a spray of red roses. A woman from the parish, accompanied by a restless young boy in the organ loft, sang a couple of hymns; Agnes said a few words, and she had asked the vicar not to go on unnecessarily about a conciliatory and omniscient God.

When I heard that the grave would only bear a number, I offered to pay for a headstone. Jansson later delivered a letter from Agnes with a sketch of the stone, how she thought it ought to look. Above Sima's name and dates, she had drawn a rose.

I rang her the same evening and asked if it shouldn't
be a samurai sword instead. She understood my way of thinking, and said she had considered it herself.

‘But it would cause an uproar,' she said.

‘What shall I do with her belongings? The sword and the suitcase?'

‘What's in the suitcase?'

‘Underclothes. A pair of trousers and a jumper. A scruffy map of the Baltic and the Gulf of Finland.'

‘I'll come and collect it. I'd like to see your house. And above all, I want to see the room where it happened.'

‘I've already said that I ought to have gone down to her. I shall always regret not having done so.'

‘I'm not accusing you of anything. I just want to see the place where she began to die.'

Initially she planned to visit me during the last week of May, but something cropped up. She cancelled her visit twice more. The first time Miranda had run away, and the second occasion she was ill. I had put the sword and the case with Sima's clothes in the room with the anthill. One night I woke up out of a dream in which the ants had engulfed the case and the sword in their hill. I raced downstairs and wrenched open the door. But the ants were still continuing to climb and conquer the dining table and the white tablecloth.

I moved Sima's belongings to the boathouse.

Jansson later told me that the coastguards had found a stolen motorboat moored in the Sighs. Hans Lundman was as good as his word.