The Shadow Girls Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by Henning Mankell

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Afterword

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Henning Mankell has become a worldwide phenomenon with his crime writing, gripping thrillers and atmospheric novels set in Africa. His prizewinning and critically acclaimed Inspector Wallander Mysteries are currently dominating bestseller lists all over the globe. His books have been translated into forty-five languages and made into numerous international film and television adaptations: most recently the BAFTA-award-winning BBC television series Wallander, starring Kenneth Branagh. Mankell devotes much of his free time to working with Aids charities in Africa, where he is also director of the Teatro Avenida in Maputo. In 2008, the University of St Andrews conferred Henning Mankell with an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters in recognition of his major contribution to literature and to the practical exercise of conscience.

  Also by Henning Mankell

  Kurt Wallander Series

  Faceless Killers

  The Dogs of Riga

  The White Lioness

  The Man Who Smiled

  Sidetracked

  The Fifth Woman

  One Step Behind

  Firewall

  Before the Frost

  The Pyramid

  The Troubled Man

  Fiction

  The Return of the Dancing Master

  Chronicler of the Winds

  Depths

  Kennedy’s Brain

  The Eye of the Leopard

  Italian Shoes

  The Man from Beijing

  Daniel

  Non-fiction

  I Die, but the Memory Lives on

  Young Adult Fiction

  A Bridge to the Stars

  Shadows in the Twilight

  When the Snow Fell

  The Journey to the End of the World

  Children’s Fiction

  The Cat Who Liked Rain

  The Shadow Girls

  Translated from the Swedish by

  Ebba Segerberg

  Henning Mankell

  1

  IT WAS ONE of the last days of the twentieth century.

  The girl with the big smile was awakened by the sound of raindrops hitting the tent cover above her head. As long as she kept her eyes closed she could imagine that she was still back in the village by the cold, clear river that spilled down the side of the mountain. But as soon as she opened her eyes she was thrown out into an empty and unfathomable world, one in which nothing of her past remained except disjointed images of her escape. She lay still and slowly let herself float up into consciousness, trying not to leave her dreams without preparing herself. These first few minutes of the morning often determined the way her day would turn out.

  During the three months in the refugee camp she had developed a morning ritual that helped her avoid being overcome with sudden panic. The most important thing was not to rush up from her uncomfortable cot with the misguided notion that something momentous was about to occur. By now she knew that nothing ever happened here. This was the first lesson she learned after she had dragged herself onto the rocky European beach and been greeted by guard dogs and armed Spanish border guards.

  Being a refugee meant being lonely. This was something that was true for them all, regardless of what country they had come from or what circumstances had forced them to flee. She didn’t expect her loneliness to leave her soon, in fact she had prepared herself to live with it for a long time.

  As she lay with her eyes closed she searched for a foothold in the confusion of all that had happened since her arrival. She was being held in a refugee camp in southern Spain, lucky to be one of the few survivors from that mouldering ship from Africa. She could still remember the air of expectation aboard. Freedom has a scent, she thought, which only grew more overpowering as land approached. Freedom, security, these were what they wanted. A life where fear, hunger, and hopelessness were not the only reality.

  It had been a cargo-hold of hope, she thought; although it was perhaps more correct to call it a cargo-hold of illusions. Everyone who had been waiting on the Moroccan beach that night and who had placed their lives in the hands of the ruthless human smugglers had been ferried over to the waiting ship. Sailors who were little more than shadows had forced them down into the cargo area, as if they were modern-day slaves.

  But there had been no iron chains around their ankles. What had ensnared them were their dreams, their desperation, all the fear that had driven them to break up from various hells-on-earth in order to make their way to freedom. They had been so close to their goal when the ship hit a reef and the Greek sailors had left in lifeboats, leaving the people in the cargo hold to save themselves.

  Europe let us down before we even arrived, she thought. I will never forget that, whatever happens to me in the future. She didn’t know how many people had drowned, nor would she ever find out. The cries for help still pulsated like a pain in her head. At first she had been surrounded by these cries, then one by one they had fallen silent. When she hit land she had praised her luck. She had survived; she had arrived. But for what? She had quickly tried to forget her dreams. Nothing had turned out as she had imagined.

  A harsh spotlight had picked her out as she lay on the cold and wet Spanish beach. The dogs had run up to her and then the soldiers surrounded her with their shiny weapons. She had survived. But that was all. Afterwards she had been placed in the refugee camp with its barracks and tents, leaky showers and dirty toilets. On the other side of the wire fence she could see the ocean that had released her, but nothing else, none of the future she had imagined.

  The people in the refugee camp, so varied in their language, dress and terrible experiences – imparted through a look or sometimes words – had only this in common: nothing to look forward to. Some had been there for many years. No country was willing to admit them and all of their energies were devoted to avoiding being sent back. One day, as she had been waiting in line for her daily rations, she spoke with a young man from Iran – or was it Iraq? It was often hard to know where people came from since they invariably lied about it in the hope that it would make their applications for asylum more attractive. He said that the camp was simply a large death chamber, a holding place where the clock ticked on relentlessly towards death. She had immediately understood what he meant but tried to ignore the thought.

  His eyes had been full of sorrow. They surprised her. Since she had grown to be a woman all she had seen in men’s eyes was a kind of hunger. But this thin man seemed not to have noticed her beauty nor her smile. This had frightened her. She could not stand the thought that men did not immediately desire her, nor that the long and desperate flight had been for nothing. She, like all the others who had been caught, lived in the hope that her ordeal would one day be over. Through some miracle someone would one day appear before her with a paper in his hand and a smile on his lips and say: Welcome.

  In order not to drive herself insane she had to be very patient. She understood that. And patience could only arise if she did not allow herself any expectations. Sometimes people in the camp committed suicide, or at least made serious attempts. They
were the ones who were not strong enough to stifle their own expectations and the burden of thinking that their dreams would one day be realised finally overcame them.

  Therefore, every morning when she woke up, she told herself that the best she could do was to rid herself of hope. That and never mentioning her true country of origin. The camp was always a hotbed of rumours about which countries offered the best chances for asylum applicants. It was as if the camp were a marketplace of countries where the possibilities for entry were recorded on a kind of stock market. No investments were ever long-lasting or secure.

  A short while after she arrived, Bangladesh had been highest on the list. For some reason that they never understood, Germany was granting immediate asylum to all people who could prove that they came from Bangladesh. During an intense few days people of all complexions and appearances waited in line in front of the exhausted Spanish bureaucrats and argued with great fervour that they had suddenly realised they were from Bangladesh. In this way at least fourteen Chinese refugees from the Hunan province made their way to Germany. A few days later Germany ‘closed’ Bangladesh, as they said in the camp. After three days of uncertainty a rumour was started that France was prepared to take a certain quota of Kurds.

  She had been unsuccessful in her attempts to research where the Kurds actually came from or what they looked like. Nonetheless she stood in line with the others and when she at last stood in front of a red-eyed clerk with the name tag ‘Fernando’ she smiled her sweetest smile. Fernando simply shook his head.

  ‘Tell me what colour you are,’ he said.

  She immediately sensed danger, but she had to say something. The Spanish didn’t like people who didn’t answer their questions. A lie was better than silence.

  ‘You are black,’ Fernando said in reply to his own question. ‘There are no black Kurds. Kurds look like me, not you.’

  ‘There are always exceptions. My father was not a Kurd, but my mother was.’

  Fernando’s eyes seemed only to redden. She continued to smile. It was her strongest weapon, it always had been.

  ‘And what was your father doing in Kurdistan?’

  ‘Working.’

  Fernando threw his pen down in triumph.

  ‘Ha! There is no Kurdistan. At least not in any official capacity. That is exactly the reason that Kurds are fleeing their country.’

  ‘How can they leave a country that doesn’t exist?’

  But Fernando lost patience with her. He waved her away.

  ‘I should report the fact that you have been lying,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not lying.’

  She thought she could suddenly see a spark of interest in his eyes.

  ‘You are speaking the truth?’

  ‘Kurds don’t lie.’

  The spark in Fernando’s eyes died away.

  ‘Go,’ he said. ‘It is the best thing you can do. What is your name?’

  She decided in that moment to give herself an entirely new name. She looked quickly around the room and her gaze fell on the teacup on Fernando’s table.

  ‘Tea-Bag,’ she replied.

  ‘Tea-Bag?’

  ‘Tea-Bag.’

  ‘Is that a Kurdish name?’

  ‘My mother liked English names.’

  ‘Is Tea-Bag even a name?’

  ‘It must be since that is what she called me.’

  Fernando sighed and dismissed her with a tired wave. She left the room and did not let the smile leave her face until she was out in the yard and had found a place by the fence where she could be alone.

  *

  The rain continued to fall on the roof of the tent. She pushed away all thoughts of Fernando and her failure to impersonate a Kurd. Instead she tried to recall the uneasy and wild dreams that had rushed through her head all night. But the only impressions still left were like the ruins of a burned house, the blurry shadows that had surrounded her as she slept, shadows that seemed to creep out of her head, put on strange plays and then disappear again into the depths of her brain. She had seen her father curled up on the rooftop in their village. He had been cursing his imaginary enemies, threatening to kill the living and raise the dead, and he had stayed up there until he fainted from exhaustion and rolled off, landing in the dry sand where Tea-Bag’s distressed mother had tearily pleaded with him to return to his senses.

  But little of this remained when Tea-Bag awoke. There was only the fading impression of her father on the roof. There was nothing left of her other dreams, only the fleeting faces of people she wasn’t sure she recognised.

  Tea-Bag pulled the dirty blanket up to her face. Was the dream trying to tell her that perhaps she was the one who was now on that rooftop, sharing the pain that her father had suffered? She didn’t know, didn’t find any answers. The rain fell steadily against the sailcloth of the tent and the thin light that came in through her eyelids told her it was seven or seven-thirty in the morning. She fumbled for the watch that she had stolen from that Italian engineer. But it had disappeared after the shipwreck. She still had very few memories from that night. There were no precise details, she could remember only their desperate attempts to survive, not to be pulled down and die a few metres from the land that meant freedom.

  *

  Tea-Bag opened her eyes and looked up at the tent. Outside she could hear people cough, sometimes saying words in a language she didn’t understand. They moved around slowly, just as she would do when she got up, the movements of a person without hope. A heavy, reluctant gait, since they had no goal. In the beginning she had kept track of the days with small white stones that she gathered down by the fence. But then they had lost meaning for her. During that time she had been sharing her tent with two other women, one from Iran and the other from Ghana. They had not got along well, had chafed in the limited space inside the tent. Refugees were loners; their fear meant they couldn’t stand to have people come too close to them, as if the sorrows and despair of others were a contagious disease.

  The woman from Iran was pregnant when she first arrived. She had cried all night long because her husband had disappeared somewhere along the way during their long journey. When her contractions started the Spanish guards put her on a stretcher and Tea-Bag never saw her again after that. The girl from Ghana was an impatient type, someone who couldn’t see a fence without immediately plotting to climb over it. One night she and a couple of boys from Togo, who had sailed to Europe on a raft made of empty oil barrels that they had stolen from a Shell depot, had tried to climb the fence. But the dogs and the spotlights caught her and she never returned to the tent. Tea-Bag assumed she was now in the part of the camp where those labelled ‘difficult’ were held under stricter supervision.

  Tea-Bag sat up in bed. Loneliness, she whispered, is my greatest source of suffering. I can walk out of this tent and immediately be surrounded by people. I eat with them, I walk along the fence and look at the sea with them, I speak with them, but still I am alone. All refugees are alone, all are surrounded by invisible walls. I have to get rid of all hope if I am to survive.

  She put her feet on the ground and shivered from the cold. At the same moment she was again reminded of her father. He would always plant his feet firmly on the ground when confronted with an unexpected difficulty or anything he was not prepared for. This gesture was among her earliest memories, and connected with her understanding of the potential for mysterious action that even the people closest to her were capable of. Later, when she was six or seven, her father had explained to her that a person needed to have a secure foothold when facing unexpected troubles. If she remembered this rule she would also be able to remain in control.

  She pressed her feet firmly into the ground and told herself that nothing special was going to happen this day. If something did occur, it would be a surprise, nothing she had been waiting for.

  Tea-Bag sat up and waited for her strength to return, the strength to carry on another day in this camp in which people were forced to renounce their identitie
s and were constantly searching for signs of where they might be welcome.

  When she felt strong enough she got up, pulled the old nightgown over her head and put on a T-shirt that the girl from Ghana had given her. It had a Nescafé logo on the front. The logo obscured her identity in the same way that the camouflage uniforms had hidden the soldiers who took her father away.

  She shook her head to rid herself of these thoughts. She could allow herself to dream about him sitting on the roof until he fell to the ground of exhaustion. She could think about the way in which he used to press his feet into the ground. But she could not allow herself to think about his disappearance, except sometimes in the evening. She felt strongest right before sunset, filled with supernatural powers for a few short minutes. Then it was as if she slowly started to sink, her pulse grew slower and her heart tried to mask its stubborn beat deep inside the hidden recesses of her body.

  Tea-Bag folded back the flap of the tent door. It had stopped raining. A damp mist clung to the camp, over the long row of barracks and the tents that looked like dirty fettered animals. People were slowly wandering around as if towards a goal that only existed inside of them. Guards were patrolling the fence with gleaming weapons and dogs that seemed relentlessly intent on picking out danger from the sea. Danger in the form of leaky ships with cargo holds filled to the brim with desperate people, or curiously crafted rafts and rowboats, even doors that some people used as floatation devices.

  I am here, Tea-Bag thought. I am in the centre of things here, in the centre of my life. There is nothing behind me: there may not be anything ahead. I am here, that is all. I am here and I am not waiting for anything.

  *

  Another day had begun. Tea-Bag walked over to one of the barracks where the women’s showers were located. As usual there was a long line. She had to wait for about an hour until it was her turn. She closed the door behind her, took off her clothes and stepped into the spray of water. She was reminded of the night she almost drowned. The difference, she thought to herself as she soaped her body, the difference is something I’ll never understand. I survived without knowing why, but I also don’t know what it is like to be dead. Once she had dried herself off and put her clothes back on she stepped outside to let the next woman in line take her place, a fat girl with a black scarf wrapped over her head so that only two eyes looked out like dark holes. Tea-Bag wondered absently if the girl took off the scarf when she washed herself.