Italian Shoes (7 page)

‘It's OK,' said Harriet.

I looked at her. Perhaps there's no need to be frightened of elks that appear from nowhere when you're shortly going to die?

The car was well and truly stuck. I fetched a spade from the boot, cleared the snow away from around the front wheels, broke off some fir branches and laid them on the road behind the wheels. I then reversed out of the drift with a sudden spurt, and we were able to continue our journey.

After another six or seven miles, I could feel the car starting to pull to the left. I pulled over and got out. We had a puncture in a front tyre. It occurred to me that the journey could hardly have started any worse than this. It is not a pleasant experience, kneeling down in snow and ice, messing about with nuts and bolts and handling dirty tyres. I have not been deserted by the surgeon's demand for cleanliness during an operation.

I was soaking in sweat by the time I'd finished changing the tyre. I was also angry. I would never be able to find the pool. Harriet would collapse, and no doubt a relative or friend would turn up and accuse me of acting irresponsibly, undertaking such a long journey with somebody that ill.

We set off again.

The road was slippery, the snow piled up at the sides of the road very high. We met a couple of lorries, and passed an old Volvo Amazon parked on the hard shoulder: a man was just getting out with his dog. Harriet said nothing. She was gazing out through the passenger window.

I started thinking about the journey to the pool I'd made with my father a long time ago. He had just been sacked again for refusing to work evenings at the
restaurant that had employed him. We drove north out of Stockholm and spent the night in a cheap hotel just outside Gävle. I have a vague memory of it having been called Furuvik, but I may be mistaken. We shared a room; it was in July, very stuffy, one of the hottest summers of the late forties.

As my father had been working at one of Stockholm's leading restaurants, he had been earning good money. It was a period when my mother cried unusually little. One day, my father came home with a new hat for her. On that occasion she cried tears of happiness. That very same day he had served the director of one of Sweden's biggest banks, who was very drunk even though it was an early lunch, and he had given my father far too big a tip.

As I understood it, being given too large a tip was just as degrading for my father as being given too little, or even no tip at all. Nevertheless, he had converted the tip into a red hat for my mother.

She didn't want to come with us when my father suggested that we should go on a trip to Norrland and enjoy a few days' holiday before he needed to start looking for work again.

We had an old car. No doubt my father had started saving up for it at a very early age. Early in the morning, we clambered into that selfsame car and left Stockholm, taking the main road to Uppsala.

We spent the night at that hotel I think might have been called Furuvik. I remember waking up shortly before dawn and seeing my father standing naked in front of the window, gazing out through the thin curtain.
He looked as if he'd been petrified in the middle of a thought. For what seemed like an eternity but was probably just a brief moment, I was scared to death and convinced that he was about to desert me. It was as though only a shell were standing there in front of me, nothing else. Inside the skin a large vacuum. I don't know how long he stood there immobile, but I clearly recall my breathless fear that he was going to abandon me. In the end he turned round, glanced at me as I lay there with the covers pulled up to my chin and my eyes half closed. He went back to bed, and it was not until I was sure he was asleep that I turned over and lay with my head pressed up against the wall, and went back to sleep.

We reached our destination the following day.

The pool was not large. The water was completely black. On the opposite side to where we were standing, cliffs towered up; but either side was dense forest. There was no shore as such, no transition between water and forest. It was as if the water and the trees were locked together in a trial of strength, with neither being able to cast the other to one side.

My father tapped me on the shoulder.

‘Let's go for a swim,' he said.

‘I don't have any swimming trunks with me.'

He looked at me in amusement.

‘Who do you think does? Who do you think's going to see us? Dangerous forest goblins hiding in among the trees?'

He started to undress. I observed his large body surreptitiously, and felt embarrassed. He had an enormous belly
that bulged out and wobbled when he removed his underpants. I followed suit, nervously aware of my own nakedness. My father waded out and then flopped down into the water. His body seemed to be surging forward like a gigantic whale, causing chaos in every part of the pool. The mirror-like surface was shattered in his wake. I waded out and felt the chill of the water. For some reason I had expected the water to be the same temperature as the air. It was so hot in among the trees that steam was rising. But the water was cold. I took a quick dip, then hurried to get out.

My father swam round and round with powerful strokes and kicks that created cascades of icy water. And he sang. I don't recall what he sang, but it was more a bellow of delight, a fizzing cataract of black water that transmogrified into my father's headstrong singing.

As I sat in the car with Harriet by my side, it occurred to me that there was nothing else in my life that I could recall in such vivid detail as the time at the pool with my father. Although it had happened fifty-five years ago, I could see the whole of my life summed up in that image: my father swimming alone and naked in the forest pool. Me, standing naked among the trees, watching him. Two people belonging together, but already quite different.

That's the way life is: one person swims, another watches.

I started to reassess returning to the pool. It was now more than a matter of keeping a promise I'd made to Harriet. I would also have the pleasure of seeing again something I never thought I would.

We travelled through a winter wonderland.

Freezing fog hovered over the white fields. Smoke was rising from the chimneys. Small icicles were hanging down from the thousands of dishes pointing their metallic eyes towards distant satellites.

After a few hours, I stopped at a petrol station. I needed to top up the windscreen washer fluid, and we also had to eat. Harriet headed for the grill bar attached to the petrol station. I watched how cautiously she moved, one painful step at a time. By the time I got there, she had already sat down and started eating. The day's special was smoked sausage. I ordered a fish fillet from the main menu. Harriet and I were just about the only diners. A lorry driver was sitting at a corner table, half asleep over a cup of coffee. I could read from the logo on his jacket that his job was to ‘Keep Sweden Going'.

What are we doing? I wondered. Harriet and I, on our journey northwards? Are we keeping our country going? Or are we peripheral, of no significance?

Harriet chewed away at her smoked sausage. I observed her wrinkled hands, and thought about how they had once upon a time caressed my body and filled me with a sense of well-being that I had hardly ever found again later in life.

The lorry driver stood up and left the cafe.

A girl with a heavily made-up face and a dirty apron served me my fish. Somewhere in the background I could hear the faint sound of a radio. I could gather that it was the news, but I had no idea what was being said. Earlier in my life I was the kind of person who was always eager
to discover the latest news. I would read, listen and watch. The world demanded my presence. One day two little girls drowned in the Göta Canal, another day a president was assassinated. I always needed to know. During my years of increasing isolation on my grandparents' island, that habit had gradually deserted me. I never read the newspapers, and watched the television news only every other day at most.

Harriet left most of the food on her plate untouched. I fetched her a cup of coffee. Snowflakes had begun to drift down outside the window. The cafe was still empty. Harriet took her walker and disappeared into the toilet. When she came back, her eyes were glazed. It worried me without my being able to explain why. I could hardly blame her for trying to deaden the pain. Nor could I very well take responsibility for her secret drinking.

It was as if Harriet had read my thoughts. She suddenly asked me what I was thinking about.

‘About Rome,' I said evasively. I don't know why. I once attended a conference for surgeons in Rome that had been exhausting and badly organised. I skipped the last two days and instead explored the Villa Borghese. I moved out of the big five-star hotel where the conference delegates were staying, and moved to Dinesens' Guest House where Karen Blixen once used to be a regular guest. I flew from Rome convinced that I would never return.

‘Is that all?'

‘That's all. I wasn't thinking about anything else.'

But that wasn't true. I had in fact returned to Rome two years later. The major catastrophe had taken place,
and I rushed away from Stockholm in a frenzy in order to find peace and quiet. I remember dashing to Arlanda airport without a ticket. The next flights to southern Europe were to Madrid and Rome. I chose Rome because the travelling time was shorter.

I spent a week wandering round the streets, my mind full of the great injustice that had stricken me. I drank far too much, occasionally got into bad company, and was mugged on my last evening. I returned to Sweden severely beaten up, with my nose looking like a blood-soaked dumpling. A doctor at the Southern Hospital straightened it out and gave me some painkillers. After that, Rome was the last place on earth I ever wanted to visit again.

‘I've been to Rome,' said Harriet. ‘My whole life has revolved around shoes. What I thought was just a coincidence when I was young, working in a shoe shop because my father had once worked as a foreman at Oscaria in Örebro, turned out to be something that would affect the whole of my life. All I've ever done, really, is wake up morning after morning and think about shoes. I once went to Rome and stayed there for a month as an apprentice to an old master craftsman who made shoes for the richest feet in the world. He devoted as much care to each pair as Stradivari did to his violins. He used to believe feet had personalities of their own. An opera singer – I can no longer remember her name – had spiteful feet that never took their shoes seriously or showed them any respect. On the other hand, a Hungarian businessman had feet that displayed tenderness towards their shoes.
I learned something from that old man about both shoes and art. Selling shoes was never the same again after that.'

We set off again.

I had started to think about where we should spend the night. It wasn't dark yet, but I preferred not to drive in bad light. My sight had deteriorated in recent years.

The winter landscape's uniformity gave it a special kind of beauty. We were travelling through country where practically nothing happened. Though now as we passed over the brow of a hill we both noticed a dog sitting by the side of the road. I braked in case it suddenly darted out in front of the car. When we'd passed it, Harriet remarked that it had a collar. I could see in the rear-view mirror that it had started following the car. When I slowed again, it caught up with us.

‘It's following us,' I said.

‘I think it's been abandoned.'

‘Why do you think that?'

‘Dogs that run after cars usually bark. But this one isn't barking.'

She was right. I pulled up on the hard shoulder. The dog sat down, its tongue hanging out of its mouth. When I reached out, it didn't move. I took hold of its collar, and saw that it had a disc with a telephone number. Harriet took out her mobile phone and dialled the number. She handed the phone to me. Nobody answered.

‘There's nobody there.'

‘If we drive off, the dog may run after us until it drops dead.'

Harriet took the phone and called directory enquiries.

‘The owner is Sara Larsson, who lives at Högtunet Farm in Rödjebyn. Do we have a map?'

‘Not a sufficiently large-scale one.'

‘We can't just leave the dog on the road.'

I got out and opened the back door. The dog immediately jumped in and curled up. A lonely dog, I thought. No different from a lonely person.

After five or six miles we came to a little village with a general store. I went in and asked about Högtunet Farm. The shop assistant was young and wearing a baseball cap back to front. He drew a map for me.

‘We've found a dog,' I said.

‘Sara Larsson has a spaniel,' said the shop assistant. ‘Perhaps it's run away?'

I returned to the car, gave Harriet the hand-drawn map and drove back the way we'd come. All the time the dog lay curled up on the back seat. But I could see that it was alert. Harriet guided me into a side road hidden between banks of snow carved by the snowplough. It was disorientating entering this white corridor, all sense of direction lost. The road meandered along between fir trees heavily laden with snow. Though the road had been ploughed nothing had been through since last snowfall.

‘Look – animal tracks in the snow,' said Harriet. ‘They're leading back towards the main road.'

The dog had sat up on the back seat, its ears cocked, staring out through the windscreen. It kept shuddering,
perhaps feeling cold. We drove over an old stone bridge. Ramshackle wooden fencing was just visible by the side of the road. The forest opened up. On a hillock ahead of us was a house that hadn't seen a coat of paint for many years. There was also an outhouse and a partially collapsed barn. I stopped and let the dog out. It ran to the front door, scratched at it, then sat down to wait. I noticed that no smoke was coming from the chimney and the outside light over the front door was not on. I didn't like what I saw.