Authors: Henning Mankell
Ytterberg thought for a while before replying.
“It’s remarkable that Louise hasn’t been to see her the entire time since he disappeared. What do you make of that?”
“I don’t make anything of it. But I wonder just as much as you do. Maybe we should go there together?”
“No, you go on your own. I’ll give them a call and tell them you have the right to see her.”
Wallander walked down to the edge of the quay and gazed out over the water while Ytterberg made his call. The sun was high in the clear blue sky. It’s full summer now, he thought. After a while Ytterberg came and stood beside him.
“All set,” he said. “But there’s something you should know. The woman I spoke to said that Signe von Enke doesn’t speak. Not because she doesn’t want to, but because she can’t. I don’t know if I understood everything correctly, but she seems to have been born without vocal cords. Among other things.”
Wallander turned to look at him.
“Among other things?”
“She’s evidently extremely handicapped. Lots of essential parts are missing. I have to say I’m glad it’s not me going there. Especially not today.”
“What’s special about today?”
“It’s such lovely weather,” said Ytterberg. “One of the first summer days this year. I’d rather not be upset if I can avoid it.”
“Did she speak with a foreign accent?” Wallander asked as they walked away from the quay. “The woman at Niklasgården, I mean.”
“Yes, she did. She had a lovely voice. She said her name was Fatima. I would guess she’s from Iraq or Iran.”
Wallander promised to get in touch later that day. He had parked outside the main entrance to city hall, and he just managed to drive off before an
alert parking attendant turned up. He drove out of town and pulled up outside Niklasgården about an hour later. When he entered the reception area he was received by an elderly man who introduced himself as Artur Källberg—he was on duty in the afternoons until midnight.
“Let’s start at the beginning,” Wallander said. “Tell me about Signe’s condition.”
“She’s one of our most severely affected patients,” Artur Källberg informed him. “When she was born, nobody thought she would live very long. But some people have a will to live that few ordinary mortals can begin to comprehend.”
“Can you be more precise?” Wallander asked. “What exactly is wrong with her?”
Källberg hesitated before answering, as if weighing whether Wallander would be able to cope with hearing all the facts; or possibly if he was worthy of hearing the full truth. Wallander became impatient.
“I’m listening,” he said.
“She’s missing both arms. And there’s something wrong with her vocal cords, which means that she can’t talk, plus congenital brain damage. She also has a malformation of the spine. That means her movements are incredibly limited.”
“Meaning what, exactly?”
“She has a small amount of mobility in her neck and head. For instance, she can blink.”
Wallander tried to envisage the horrific possibility that Linda might have given birth to a child with such severe disabilities. How would he have reacted? Could he imagine what this tragedy must have meant for Håkan and Louise? Wallander was unable to decide how he would have coped with it.
“How long has she been here?” he asked.
“During the early years of her life she was cared for in a home for severely handicapped children,” said Källberg. “It was on Lidingö, but it closed in 1972.”
Wallander raised his hand.
“Let’s be exact,” he said. “Assume that the only thing I know about this girl is her name.”
“Then perhaps we should stop calling her a girl,” said Källberg. “She’s about to turn forty-one years old. Guess when.”
“How on earth should I know?”
“It’s her birthday today. Under normal circumstances, her father would have come and spent the afternoon here with us. But as things stand, no one is coming.”
Källberg seemed troubled by the thought that Signe von Enke might be forced to endure a birthday without a visit.
One question was more important than any other, but Wallander decided to wait and do everything in order. He took his battered notebook out of his pocket.
“So,” said Wallander, “she was born on June 6, 1967, is that right?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Did she ever spend any time at home with her parents?”
“According to the case notes I’ve been through, she was taken directly from the hospital to the Nyhaga home on Lidingö. When it became necessary to expand the home, the neighbors were scared that their properties would go down in value. I don’t know exactly what they did in order to put a wrench in the works, but they not only prevented the expansion, they managed to get the home closed down completely.”
“So where was she transferred?”
“She ended up on a sort of nursing-home merry-go-round. She went from one place to another, and spent a year in a home on Gotland, just outside Hemse. But she came here twenty-nine years ago, and she’s been here ever since.”
Wallander noted it all down. The image of Klara without any arms kept cropping up in his mind’s eye with macabre obstinacy.
“Tell me about her capabilities,” Wallander said. “You’ve done that already to an extent, but I’m thinking about how much she understands. Just how much is she aware of?”
“We don’t know. She only expresses herself by means of basic reactions, and even that is done via body language that can be hard to interpret for anyone who isn’t used to her. We regard her as a sort of infant with a long experience of life.”
“Is it possible to figure out what she’s thinking?”
“No. But nothing suggests that she’s aware of how great her suffering is. She never gives any indication of pain or despair. And if that is a reflection of the facts, it’s obviously something we can be grateful for.”
Wallander nodded. He thought he understood. But now he was ready to ask the most important question.
“Her father came to visit her,” he said. “How often?”
“At least once a month. Sometimes more. They weren’t short visits—he never stayed for less than several hours.”
“What did he do? If they couldn’t talk?”
“
She
can’t talk. He sat there and talked to her. It was very moving. He would sit there and tell her about everything, about everyday things, about
life in their own little world and also in the world at large. He spoke to her just as you would speak to another adult, without ever tiring.”
“What about when he was at sea? For many years he was in charge of submarines and other naval vessels.”
“He would always explain that he was going to be away. It was touching to hear him telling her all about it.”
“And who came to visit Signe when he was away? Her mother?”
Källberg’s answer was clear and cold, and it came without hesitation.
“She has never been here. I’ve been working at Niklasgården since 1994. She has never been to visit her daughter during that time. The only visitor Signe ever had was her father.”
“Are you saying that Louise never came here to see her daughter?”
“Never.”
“Surely that must be unusual?”
Källberg shrugged.
“Not necessarily. Some people simply can’t cope with the sight of suffering.”
Wallander put his notebook back in his pocket. He wondered if he would be able to interpret what he had scribbled down.
“I’d like to see her,” he said. “Assuming that wouldn’t upset her, of course.”
“There’s something I forgot to mention,” said Källberg. “She sees very badly. She perceives people as a sort of blur against a gray background. At least, that’s what the doctors say.”
“So she recognized her father by his voice?” Wallander wondered.
“Presumably, yes. That seemed to be the case, judging by her body language.”
Wallander stood up, but Källberg remained seated.
“Are you absolutely certain you want to see her?”
“Yes,” said Wallander. “I’m absolutely certain.”
That wasn’t true, of course. What he really wanted to see was her room.
They went out through the glass doors, which closed silently behind them. Källberg opened the door to a room at the end of a hallway. It was a bright room with a plastic mat on the floor. It held a couple of chairs, a bookcase, and a bed, on which Signe von Enke lay hunched up.
“Leave me alone with her,” Wallander requested. “Wait outside.”
After Källberg left, Wallander took a quick look around the room.
Why is there a bookcase here when the occupant is blind and unaware of what is going on around her?
He took a step closer to the bed and looked at Signe. She had fair, short-cropped hair and looked a bit like Hans, her brother. Her eyes
were open but staring vacantly out into the room. She was breathing irregularly, as if every breath caused her pain. Wallander felt a lump in his throat. Why did a human being have to suffer like this? With no hope of a life with even an illusory glimmer of meaning? He continued looking at her, but she seemed unaware of his presence. Time stood still. He was in a strange museum, he thought, a place where he was forced to look at an immured person. The girl in the tower. Immured inside herself.
He looked at the chair next to the window.
The chair Håkan von Enke usually sat in when he visited his daughter
. He moved over to the bookcase and squatted down. There were children’s books, picture books. Signe von Enke had not developed at all; she was still a child. Wallander went carefully through the bookcase, taking out books and making sure there was nothing hidden behind them.
He found what he was looking for behind a row of Babar the Elephant books. Not a photo album this time, but then he hadn’t expected to find that. He hadn’t been at all sure of what exactly he was looking for, but there was something missing from the apartment in Grevgatan, he was convinced of that. Either somebody had weeded out documents, or Håkan had done it himself. And if it had been him, where could he have hidden something but in this room? Among the Babar books, which he and Linda had both read when they were children, was a thick file with hard black covers, held closed by two thick rubber bands. Wallander hesitated: should he open it here and now? Instead he slipped off his jacket and fit the book into the capacious inside pocket. Signe was still lying there with her eyes open wide, motionless.
Wallander opened the door. Källberg was poking a finger into the soil of a potted plant that badly needed watering.
“It’s very sad,” said Wallander. “Just looking at her makes me break into a cold sweat.”
They went back to reception.
“A few years ago we had a visit from a young art school student,” said Källberg. “Her brother lived here, but he’s dead now. She asked permission to sketch the patients. She was very good—she had brought drawings with her to show what she could do. I was in favor of it, but the board of trustees decided it would be a breach of the patients’ privacy.”
“What happens when a patient dies?”
“Most of them have a family. But one or two are buried quietly with no family present. On such occasions as many of us as possible try to attend. There’s not a lot of turnover among the staff here. We become a sort of new family for patients like that.”
After taking his leave, Wallander drove to Mariefred and had a meal in a
pizzeria. There were a few tables on the sidewalk, and he sat outside over a cup of coffee after he had finished eating. Thunderclouds were building up on the horizon. A man was playing an accordion in front of a little store not far away. His music was hopelessly out of tune—he was obviously a beggar, not a street musician. When Wallander couldn’t put up with it anymore, he drained his coffee and returned to Stockholm. He had just stepped in through the door of the apartment in Grevgatan when the phone rang. The ringing echoed through the empty rooms. Nobody left a message on the answering machine. Wallander listened to the earlier messages, from a dentist and a seamstress. Louise had been given a new appointment after a cancellation—but when was that? Wallander noted the dentist’s name: Sköldin. The seamstress simply said, “Your dress is ready.” But she left no name, no time.
It suddenly started pelting down rain. Wallander stood by the window, looking into the street. He felt like an intruder. But the disappearance of the von Enkes had significance for other people’s lives, people close to him. That was why he was standing there now.
After an hour or more the rain eased up—it had been one of the heaviest downpours to affect the capital that summer. Basements were flooded, traffic lights were out of order due to shorts in the electric cables. But Wallander noticed none of that. He was fully occupied with the ledger Håkan von Enke had hidden in his daughter’s room. It was clear after only a few minutes that he was faced with a hodgepodge of documents. There were short haiku poems, photocopied extracts from the Swedish supreme commander’s war diary from the fall of 1982, more or less obscure aphorisms Håkan von Enke had formulated, and much more—including press clippings, photographs, and some smudged watercolors. Wallander turned page after page of this remarkable diary, if you could call it that, with the growing feeling that it was the last thing he would have expected of von Enke. He started by leafing through the book, trying to get an overall sense of it. Then he started again at the beginning, reading more carefully this time. When he finally closed it and stretched his back, it struck him that it had thrown no new light on anything at all.
He went out for dinner. The heavy rain had passed. It was nine o’clock by the time he returned to the empty apartment. He turned once again to the pages inside the black covers, and started working his way through the contents for the third time.
He told himself he was searching for the
other
contents, the invisible writing between the lines.
It must be there somewhere. He was sure of that.
It was nearly three in the morning when Wallander got up from the sofa and walked over to the window. It had started raining again, but only a drizzle now. He forced his weary brain to return to that party in Djursholm when Håkan had told him about the submarines. Wallander felt sure that even then there were documents hidden among Signe’s Babar books. It was Håkan’s secret room, safer than a bank vault. What made Wallander so sure was that von Enke had dated some of the papers. The last date was the day before his seventy-fifth birthday party. He had visited his daughter at least once more after that, the day before he disappeared. But he hadn’t written anything then.