Italian Shoes by Henning Mankell Page A

we’d made to an island in Lake Mälaren. I had no recollection of it.
    But I nodded when Harriet asked me if I remembered. Of course I did. I remembered everything that had happened to us.
    The snow was piled up high on both sides of the road; there were few turn-offs, and most of them hadn’t beenploughed. Something from my youth came back to me without warning. Logging roads. Or perhaps I should say emotions connected with a logging road.
    I’d spent a summer with one of my father’s relations in Jämtland, up in the north. My grandmother was ill, so I couldn’t spend the summer on her island. I made friends with a boy whose father was a district judge. We had paid a visit to the court archives, and when nobody was looking we’d opened a bundle of documents comprising records of proceedings and police investigations. We were fascinated by accounts of paternity cases, with all the amazing but compelling details of what had gone on in the back of motor cars on Saturday nights. The cars had always been parked on logging roads. It seemed to us that everybody had been conceived on the back seat of a motor car. We devoured case notes on the cross-examination of young men hauled up before the courts, who described reluctantly and laconic ally what had happened, or not happened, in the cars parked on the various logging roads. It was always snowing, there were never any simple and straightforward truths to rely on, there was always considerable doubt when it came to deciding if the young man was lying his way out of a corner, or if the equally young woman was right in insisting that it was him and nobody else, that back seat and no other back seat, that logging road and no other logging road. We gorged ourselves on the secret details, and I think that until reality caught up with us many years later, we dreamed about one day sharing the back seat of a car parked on snow-covered logging roads with desirable young women.
    That’s what life was all about. What we longed for always took place on a logging road.
    Without really knowing why, I began telling Harriet about it. I’d started to turn off automatically into every side road we came to.
    â€˜I’ve no intention of telling you about my experiences on the back seat of motor cars,’ she said. ‘I didn’t do it when I was going with you, and I don’t do it now. There are always humiliating moments in the life of every woman. What most of us find worst is what happened when we were very young.’
    â€˜When I was a doctor, I sometimes used to talk to my colleagues about how many people didn’t seem to know who their real father was. A lot of young men lied their way out of it, and others accepted a responsibility that wasn’t actually theirs. Even the mothers didn’t always know who the father was.’
    â€˜All I can remember about those distant and hopeless attempts at erotic adventure was that I always seemed to smell so peculiar. And the young man crawling over me smelled funny too. That’s all I can remember. The excitement and confusion and the strange smells.’
    Suddenly, we were confronted by an enormous monster of a combined log harvester trundling towards us. I slammed on the brakes, and skidded into a snowdrift. The driver of the monster jumped down and pushed while I reversed the car. After considerable difficulty, I managed to back out of the drift. I got out. The man was powerfully built and had chewing-tobacco stains round his mouth. In some strange way he seemed to be areproduction of the enormous machine he’d been driving, with all its prehensile claws and cranes.
    â€˜Is yer lost?’ he asked.
    â€˜I’m looking for a forest pool.’
    He squinted at me.
    â€˜In t’woods?’
    â€˜Yes, a forest pool.’
    â€˜Dunnit ’ave a name?’
    â€˜No, it doesn’t have a name.’
    â€˜But tha’s efter it ollt’ sem? Thez a helluva lotta