After the Fire Read online

  Praise for Henning Mankell

  “Powerful fiction….Only Mankell can summon with such a dreamlike intensity the Nordic landscapes and climates he knows so well.”

  —The Guardian

  “Mankell is a master at developing varied atmo-spheres, creating deeply probed, vulnerable—and hence believable—characters.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Mankell writes with an uncommon grace and beauty.” —Bookreporter

  “Mankell is a master storyteller.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Mankell’s forte is matching mood to setting and subject.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  Henning Mankell

  AFTER THE FIRE

  Henning Mankell’s novels have been translated into forty-five languages and have sold more than forty million copies worldwide. He was the first winner of the Ripper Award and also received the Glass Key and the Crime Writers’ Association Golden Dagger, among other awards. His Kurt Wallander mysteries have been adapted into a PBS television series starring Kenneth Branagh. During his life, Mankell divided his time between Sweden and Mozambique, where he was the artistic director of the Teatro Avenida in Maputo. He died in 2015.

  www.henningmankell.com

  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

  AN EVENT IN AUTUMN

  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

  THE SHADOW GIRLS

  A TREACHEROUS PARADISE

  Nonfiction

  I DIE, BUT THE MEMORY LIVES ON

  QUICKSAND

  Young Adult Fiction

  A BRIDGE TO THE STARS

  SHADOWS IN THE TWILIGHT

  WHEN THE SNOW FELL

  JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE WORLD

  Children’s Fiction

  THE CAT WHO LIKED RAIN

  A VINTAGE BOOKS ORIGINAL, OCTOBER 2017

  English translation copyright © 2017 by Marlaine Delargy

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in Sweden as Svenska gummistövlar by Leopard förlag, Stockholm, in 2015. Copyright © 2015 by Henning Mankell. This translation originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Harvill Secker, an imprint of Vintage Publishing, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., London, in 2017. Published by agreement with Copenhagen Literary Agency Aps, Copenhagen.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Mankell, Henning, 1948–2015, author. | Delargy, Marlaine, translator.

  Title: After the fire / Henning Mankell ; translated by Marlaine Delargy.

  Other titles: Svenska gummistövlar. English.

  Description: New York : Vintage, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017027902 | ISBN 9780525435082 (paperback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Recluses—Sweden—Fiction. | Arson—Sweden—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Family Life. | FICTION / Psychological. | LCGFT: Psychological fiction.

  Classification: LCC PT9876.23.A49 S9413 2017 | DDC 839.73/74—dc23

  LC record available at https://​lccn.loc.gov/​2017027902

  Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN 9780525435082

  Ebook ISBN 9780525435099

  www.vintagebooks.com

  Cover design by Carson Dyle

  Cover photograph © Lauri Rotko/Folio Images/plainpicture

  v4.1

  a

  To Elise

  This is a freestanding continuation of Italian Shoes, which was first published in 2006. This narrative takes place eight years later.

  Much has he learned who knows sorrow.

  —The Song of Roland

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Also by Henning Mankell

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One: The Ocean of Emptiness

  Part Two: The Fox Runs Towards Golgotha

  Part Three: The Bedouin in the Bottle

  Part Four: The Emperor’s Drum

  Afterword

  PART ONE

  The Ocean of Emptiness

  CHAPTER 1

  My house burned down on an autumn night almost a year ago. It was a Sunday. The wind had got up during the afternoon and by the evening the anemometer indicated that the gusts measured over twenty metres per second.

  The wind was coming from the north and was very chilly in spite of the fact that it was still early autumn. When I went to bed at around half past ten I thought that this would be the first storm of the season, moving in across the island I had inherited from my maternal grandparents.

  Soon it would be winter. One night the sea would slowly begin to ice over.

  That was the first night I wore socks to bed. The cold was tightening its grip.

  The previous month, with some difficulty, I had managed to fix the roof. It was a big job for a small workman. Many of the slates were old and cracked. My hands, which had once held a scalpel during complex surgical procedures, were not made for manipulating broken tiles.

  Ture Jansson, who had spent his entire working life as the postman out here in the islands before he retired, agreed to fetch the new slates from the harbour although he refused to accept any payment. As I have set up an improvised surgery in my boathouse in order to deal with all his imaginary medical complaints, perhaps he thought he ought to return the favour.

  For years now I have stood there on the jetty by the boathouse examining his allegedly painful arms and back. I have brought out the stethoscope which hangs beside a decoy duck and established that his heart and lungs sound absolutely fine. In every single examination I have found Jansson to be in the best of health. His fear of these imaginary ailments has been so extreme that I have never seen anything like it in all my years as a doctor. He was simultaneously the postman and a full-time hypochondriac.

  On one occasion he insisted he had toothache, at which point I refused to have anything to do with his problem. I don’t know whether he went to see a dentist on the mainland or not. I wonder if he’s ever had a single cavity. Perhaps he was in the habit of grinding his teeth while he was asleep, and that’s what caused the pain?

  On the night of the fire I had taken a sleeping tablet as usual and dropped off almost immediately.

  I was woken by a light being switched on. When I opened my eyes, I was surrounded by a dazzling brightness. Beneath the ceiling of my bedroom I could see a band of grey smoke. I must have pushed off my socks in my sleep when the room got hot. I leaped out of bed, ran down the stairs and into the kitchen through that harsh, searing light. The clock on the wall was showing nineteen minutes past midnight. I grabbed my black raincoat from
the hook by the back door, pulled on my wellington boots, one of which was almost impossible to get my foot into, and rushed outside.

  The house was already in flames, the fire roaring. I had to go down to the jetty and the boathouse before the heat became unbearable. During those first few minutes I didn’t even think about what had caused this disastrous conflagration; I just watched as the impossible unfolded before my eyes. My heart was pounding so hard I thought it would be smashed to pieces inside my chest. The fire was ravaging me in equal measure.

  Time melted away in the heat. Boats began to arrive from the other islands and skerries, the residents rudely woken from their sleep, but afterwards I was unable to say how long it took or who was there. My gaze was fixed on the flames, the sparks whirling up into the night sky. For one terrifying moment I thought I saw the elderly figures of my grandmother and my grandfather standing on the far side of the fire.

  There are not many of us out here on the islands in the autumn, when the summer visitors disappear and the last of the yachts return to their home harbours, wherever those might be. But someone had seen the glow of the fire in the darkness, the message had been passed along, and everyone wanted to help. The coastguard’s firefighting equipment was used to pump up seawater and spray it on the burning building, but it was too late. All it changed was the smell. Charred oak timbers and wall panels, burned wallpaper and linoleum flooring combined with salt water to give off an unforgettable stench. When dawn broke all that remained was a smoking, stinking ruin. The wind had dropped – the storm had already moved on, heading towards the Gulf of Finland – but it had fulfilled its spiteful task, working together with the blaze, and now there was nothing left of my grandparents’ pretty house.

  That was when I first thought to ask myself: how had the fire broken out? I hadn’t lit any candles or left any of the old paraffin lamps burning. I hadn’t had a cigarette or used the wood-burning stove. The electrical wiring throughout the house had been renewed just a few years ago.

  It was as if the house had set fire to itself.

  As if a house could commit suicide as a result of weariness, old age and sorrow.

  I realised I had been mistaken about a key aspect of my life. After performing an operation that went disastrously wrong and led to a young woman losing her arm, I moved out here many years ago. Back then I often thought that the house in which I was living had been here on the day when I was born, and that it would still be here on the day when I no longer existed.

  But I was mistaken. The oak trees, the birches, the alders and the single ash tree would remain here after I was gone, but of my beautiful home in the archipelago only the foundations, hauled to the island across the ice from the long-defunct quarry at Håkansborg, would remain.

  My train of thought was interrupted as Jansson appeared beside me. He was bare-headed, wearing very old dark blue overalls and a pair of motorcycle gloves that I recognised from the winters when the ice had not been thick enough to drive across, and he had used his hydrocopter to deliver the post.

  He was staring at my old green wellingtons. When I looked down I realised I had pulled on two left boots in my haste. Now I understood why it had been so difficult to put one of them on.

  ‘I’ll bring you a boot,’ Jansson said. ‘I’ve got a few pairs back at home.’

  ‘There might be a spare pair down in the boathouse,’ I suggested.

  ‘No. I’ve been to look. There are some leather shoes and some old crampons people used to fix onto their boots when they went out on the ice clubbing seals.’

  The fact that Jansson had already been rooting around in my boathouse shouldn’t have surprised me, even if on this occasion he had done it out of consideration. I already knew that he was in the habit of going in there. Jansson was a snooper. From an early stage I had been convinced that he read every postcard that passed through his hands when the summer visitors bought their stamps down by the jetties.

  He looked at me with tired eyes. It had been a long night.

  ‘Where will you live? What are you going to do now?’

  I didn’t reply because I didn’t have an answer.

  I shuffled closer to the smoking ruin. The boot on my right foot was chafing. This is what I own now, I thought. Two wellingtons that aren’t even a pair. Everything else is gone. I don’t even have any clothes.

  At that moment, as I grasped the full extent of the disaster that had befallen me, it was as if a howl swept through my body. But I heard nothing. Everything that happened within me was soundless.

  Jansson appeared beside me once more. He has a curious way of moving, as if he has paws instead of feet. He comes from nowhere and suddenly materialises. He seems to know how to stay out of another person’s field of vision all the time.

  Why hadn’t his wretched house on Stångskär burned down instead?

  Jansson gave a start as if he had picked up on my embittered thought, but then I realised I had pulled a face, and he thought it was because he had come too close.

  ‘You can come and stay with me, of course,’ he offered when he had recovered his equilibrium.

  ‘Thank you.’

  Then I noticed my daughter Louise’s caravan, which was behind Jansson in a grove of alders alongside a tall oak tree that had not yet lost all its leaves. The caravan was still partly concealed by its low branches.

  ‘I’ve got the caravan,’ I said. ‘I can live there for the time being.’

  Jansson looked surprised but didn’t say anything.

  All the people who had turned up during the night were starting to head back to their boats, but before they left they came over to say they were happy to help with whatever I needed.

  During the course of a few hours my life had changed so completely that I actually needed everything.

  I didn’t even have a matching pair of wellingtons.

  CHAPTER 2

  I watched as one boat after another disappeared, the sounds of the different engines gradually dying away.

  I knew who each person was out here in the archipelago. There are two dominant families: the Hanssons and the Westerlunds. Many of them are sworn enemies who meet up only at funerals or when there is a fire or a tragedy at sea. At such times all animosity is set aside, only to be resurrected as soon as normal circumstances resume.

  I will never be a part of the community in which they live despite all those long-running feuds. My grandfather came from one of the smaller families out here, the Lundbergs, and they always managed to steer clear of any conflict. In addition, he married a woman who came from the distant shores of Åland.

  My origins lie here in the islands, and yet I do not belong. I am a runaway doctor who hid in the home I inherited. My medical expertise is an undoubted advantage, but I will never be a true islander.

  Besides, everyone knows that I am a winter bather. Every morning I open up the hole I have made in the ice and take a dip. This is regarded with deep suspicion by the permanent residents. Most of them think I’m crazy.

  Thanks to Jansson I knew that people were puzzled by the life I led. What did I do, out here all alone on my island? I didn’t fish, I wasn’t a part of the local history association or any other organisation. I didn’t hunt, nor did I appear to have any interest in repairing my dilapidated boathouse or the jetty, which had been badly affected by the ice over the past few winters.

  So, as I said, the few remaining permanent residents out here regarded me with a certain measure of distrust. The summer visitors, however, who heard about the retired doctor, thought how fortunate I was to be able to retire to the tranquillity of the archipelago and escape the noise and chaos of the city.

  The previous year an impressive motor launch had moored at my jetty. I went down to chase the unwanted visitors away, but a man and a woman carried ashore a crying child who had erupted in a rash. They had heard about the doctor living on the island and were obviously very worried, so I opened up my boathouse clinic. The child was placed on the bench next to the
area where my grandfather’s fishing nets still hung, and I was soon able to establish that it was nothing more than a harmless nettle rash. I asked a few questions and concluded that the child had had an allergic reaction after eating freshly picked strawberries.

  I went up to my kitchen and fetched a non-prescription antihistamine. They wanted to pay me of course, but I refused. I stood on the jetty and watched as their ostentatious pleasure craft disappeared behind Höga Tryholmen.

  I always keep a good store of medication for my own private use, and several oxygen cylinders. I am no hypochondriac, but I do want access to drugs when necessary. I don’t want to risk waking up one night to find that I am having a heart attack without being able to administer at least the same treatment as I would receive in an ambulance.

  I believe that other doctors are just as afraid of dying as I am. Today I look back and regret the decision I made when I was fifteen years old to enter the medical profession. Today I find it easier to understand my father, a permanently exhausted waiter; he looked at me with displeasure and asked if I seriously thought that hacking away at other people’s bodies was a satisfactory choice in life.

  At the time I told him I was convinced that I was doing the right thing, but I never revealed that I didn’t think I had any chance whatsoever of gaining the qualifications to train as a doctor. When I succeeded, much to my own astonishment, I couldn’t go back on my word.

  That’s the truth: I became a doctor because I had told my father that was what I was going to do. If he had died before I completed my training, I would have given up immediately.

  I can’t imagine what I would have done with my life instead; I would probably have moved out here at an earlier stage, but I have no idea how I would have earned a living.

  The last boats disappeared into the morning mist. The sea, the islands, greyer than ever. Only Jansson and I were left. The stinking ruin was still smoking, the odd flame flaring up from the collapsed oak beams. I pulled my raincoat more tightly over my pyjamas and walked around the remains of my house. One of the apple trees my grandfather had planted was a charred skeleton; it looked like something from a theatre set. The intense heat had melted a metal water butt, and the grass was burned to a crisp.