The Man from Beijing by Henning Mankell Read Free Book Online Page B

injustice for the rest of her life.
    She left her desk chair and went to lie down on the sofa. She had paid for it herself and put it in her office instead of the uncomfortable armchair provided by the National Courts Administration. She had learned from Anker to hold a bunch of keys in her hand and close her eyes. When she dropped the keys, it was time to wake up. But she needed a short rest. Then she would finish writing her judgment, go home to bed, and produce a clean copy the next day. She had worked through everything there was to work through and confirmed that there was no question of a guilty verdict.
    She dozed off and dreamed about her father, of whom she had no personal memories. He had been a ship’s engineeer. During a severe storm in the middle of January 1949 the steamship
Runskär
had sunk in the Gävlebukten, with all hands on board. His body had never been found. Birgitta Roslin had been four months old at the time. The image she had of her father came from the photographs in her home. The picture she rememberedbest was of him standing by the rail of a ship, smiling, his hair ruffled and his shirtsleeves rolled up. Her mother had told her it was a ship’s mate holding the camera, but Birgitta Roslin had always imagined that he was actually smiling at her, despite the fact that the photograph was taken before she was born. He kept reappearing in her dreams. Now he was smiling at her, just as he did in the photograph, but then he vanished as if swallowed up by fog.
    She woke with a start. She realized immediately that she had slept for far too long. The key-ring trick hadn’t worked. She had dropped it without noticing. She sat up and checked the clock: it was already six. She had slept for more than five hours. I’m shattered, she thought. Like most other people, I don’t get enough sleep. There’s too much going on in my life that worries me.
    She called her husband, who had begun to wonder where she was. It was not unusual for her to spend the night on the sofa in her office after they’d quarreled, but this was not the case now.
    Staffan Roslin had been a year ahead of her at Lund, where they both studied law. Their first meeting was at a party given by mutual friends. Immediately Birgitta knew he was the man for her, swept off her feet by his eyes, his height, his large hands, and his inability to stop blushing.
    But, after completing his studies, Staffan did not take to the law. He decided to retrain as a railroad conductor, and one morning he appeared in the living room dressed in a blue-and-red uniform and announced that at 12:19, he would be responsible for departure 212 from Malmö to Alvesta, and then on to Växjö and Kalmar.
    He became a much happier person. By the time he chose to abandon his legal career, they already had four children: first a son, then a daughter, and finally twins, both girls. The children had arrived in rapid succession, and she was amazed when she thought back to those days. How had they managed it? Four children within six years. They had left Malmö and moved to Helsingborg, where she was appointed a district judge.
    The children were grown up now. The twins had flown the nest the previous year, to Lund, where they shared an apartment. But she was pleased that they were not studying the same subject and that neither of them had ambitions to become a lawyer. Siv, who was nineteen minutes older than her sister Louise, had eventually decided, after much hesitation, to become a veterinarian. Louise, who had a more impetuous temperament than her twin sister, had tried her hand at several things, soldclothes in a men’s store, and in the end decided to major in political science and religious studies in college. Birgitta had often tried to coax out of her what she wanted to do with her life, but she was the most withdrawn of the four children and rarely said anything about her innermost thoughts. Her mother suspected that Louise was the daughter most like herself. Her