A Treacherous Paradise by Henning Mankell Read Free Book Online Page A

shouldn’t I cling on to what I have?’
    ‘Will you still be here ten years from now?’ asked Hanna.
    Berta shook her head and burst out laughing. Although she was still young she had lost several of her upper teeth.
    ‘I can’t think that far ahead,’ she said. ‘Ten years? I don’t even know if I’ll still be alive then.’
    But Hanna persisted. There must be something that Berta dreamt about, surely?
    ‘Children,’ said Berta hesitantly. ‘I’d love to have some. But for that to happen I’d have to find a husband. And I haven’t. I want somebody who doesn’t drink or fight. Where can anybody find a man like that?’
    Whenever Hanna asked Berta a question, she answered it inside her own head with regard to herself. What did she want? Would she still be alive ten years from now? Or would she be dead as well? Who was the man she hoped to meet? Did she really hope to meet one? And what about children? Could she really think about having children when she was still a child herself in so many ways?
    Towards the end of February an unexpected thaw set in. In the evenings, if they had enough strength left, they would go for a walk through the town. Berta showed her round, did so with pride, with a sort of sense of both owning something and having responsibility. She knew something that Hanna didn’t. The town was hers.
    Occasionally Berta would ask a few questions about the place where Hanna lived before she had come to Sundsvall with Forsman: but Hanna soon noticed that Berta was not really all that interested in what little she had to tell. Or perhaps it was just that Berta had never seen anything but the town she lived in, and couldn’t imagine what it would be like by a river below a high mountain.
    Her relationship with Berta was something completely new for Hanna. During the time she lived in Forsman’s house she and Berta became close friends who dared to take each other into their confidence. Almost every evening they lay in the bed they shared, whispering. It seemed to Hanna that she had never before had a friend like Berta. The relationship she had had with her siblings and her mother had been quite different.
    They dared to talk about the difficult things in life. Love, children, men. Hanna soon realized that Berta had just as little experience as she did when it came to what life had in store for them.
    Sometimes in the evenings when they were out walking, always arm in arm, with their shawls wrapped tightly around their hair and chin, boys of about their own age who were loitering around would shout to them: but they never replied, just increased their pace – even if later, when they had gone to bed, they might giggle and talk about what had happened.
    We’re not there yet, Hanna thought; but one of these days we’ll stop and start talking to those boys.
    Most of the time they spent together, when they were not working, they devoted to helping each other to learn to read. They had realized from the start that their knowledge was more or less equally meagre. Berta had been given a dirty and well-thumbed ABC book by a cook who used to work at Forsman’s house. They would pore over it, spelling out words, testing each other, and before long they were secretly borrowing books from Forsman’s library, reading aloud to each other with increasing confidence.
    Hanna would never forget the moment when the individual letters stopped dancing around in front of her eyes. When they no longer made faces at her but formed words and sentences, and eventually whole stories that she could understand.
    It was also during that time that Hanna happened to acquire a Portuguese dictionary. Forsman sometimes sifted through his voluminous library and discarded books and booklets that were surplus to his requirements. One day Hanna had found the dictionary in a waste-paper basket. She thought that anything he’d thrown away she could keep if she fancied it, rather than taking it to the rubbish dump. She showed it to