After the Fire by Henning Mankell
However, I was under no illusions. One day she would go away, to another newspaper, a TV company, another town. I didn’t know how I would react when that day came, but I still had Louise and her family, who were also my family.
Louise promised to come to my house-warming; she would bring Ahmed and Muhammed too, not just Agnes.
But during all those weeks as the house progressed I kept thinking about Jansson, Oslovski, Nordin. I couldn’t for the life of me understand why I should stop communicating with old friends just because they were dead. I carried on talking to them, listening to them, remembering them. I carried on trying to picture Jansson’s death, Nordin’s final moment, and I wondered whether Oslovski had had time to realise that death had come to call on her in the garage with her 1958 DeSoto Fireflite.
In these people I saw myself, and during that spring and summer when my house was being built I also came to understand that other people must see themselves in me.
July was unusually warm, followed by a great deal of rain in the first weeks of August.
I moved in on 27 August, even though several of the rooms were still unfurnished. Lisa Modin arrived in the evening and stayed overnight. In her own room, of course. The following day Kolbjörn would pick up Louise, Agnes and the rest of my family from the harbour and bring them over.
Early in the morning I went for my dip, then checked my blood pressure on the bench that was now part of a defunct clinic.
I was an old man, but as a doctor I was able to tell myself that I was fine.
I walked right to the end of the jetty and threw my stethoscope in the water. It drifted towards the seabed like a dead snake.
At that moment I saw something; I couldn’t believe my eyes, but then I realised it actually was a perch. It wasn’t very big, but there was absolutely no doubt in my mind.
A fish had returned and presented itself to me like a gift.
The stethoscope had settled on the bottom. In a few days it would be buried in the mud, which ultimately consumed everything.
As I stood there on the jetty, my telephone rang. It was Margareta Nordin.
She told me that my wellington boots had finally arrived. There was no mistaking the joy in her voice.
I went up to the house that had risen from the ruins. I thought about the day almost ten years ago when I had removed the enormous anthill from under the dining table in the living room. That too had been a day of great joy.
In the new dining room I placed a table I had found among the dead swallows in the loft at the boathouse. On the table was the glass jar containing birdlime and the remnants of the old birdcage. I would often leaf through the Guide to the Capture and Care of Songbirds at night before I fell asleep.
One day I would understand why my grandparents had spent their time catching birds with lime spread on twigs. I had no intention of giving up. It was a task that suited an old man like me.
I contemplated the apple tree, which I had washed with soap and water. It had regained its original colour, but I didn’t know whether it would bear fruit.
Beneath the floor of the house, buried in the ground, lay the tin containing Giaconelli’s shoe buckle. It gave me a sense of security to think that the buckle had survived the fierce flames.
It was already late August.
Soon the autumn would come.
But the darkness no longer frightened me.
AFTERWORD
There may be some readers who think they recognise the islands, bays, skerries and people in this novel, in spite of the fact that no archipelago in the world can be laid on top of my geographical and human map to produce a perfect match.
I often think about the invisible postglacial rebound when I write. It is a constant, even though we are unable to perceive it with our eyes or our other senses. A shoreline is always something unfinished, slipping away, drifting. A piece of fiction relates to reality in the same way. There may be similarities between the two, but above all it is the difference that determines what has happened and what could have happened.
That is the way it must be because the truth is always provisional, always changeable.
Henning Mankell
Antibes, March 2015
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Henning Mankell, After the Fire