‘We’ll miss her,’ I said.
She nodded but didn’t say anything.
Jansson was waiting on the quayside.
‘Is it really true? Is Oslovski dead?’
‘You don’t know me very well if you think I’d lie about something like that.’
He pulled a face. ‘There are too many people dying. It’s like an epidemic.’
‘It’s just coincidence,’ I said. ‘Death is breathing down the back of our necks, but no one knows when the blow will fall.’
I stowed my bag and my groceries in the boat. I didn’t want to make this conversation any longer than necessary; I wanted to get home to my caravan. Jansson understood; he cast off and clambered aboard with some difficulty. That particular activity exposes the ageing process. About five years ago I had discovered that I could no longer leap easily into my boat without losing my balance. My joints had grown stiffer. Old age has arrived when you can no longer jump aboard. I watched as Jansson shuffled along, almost hating those stiff joints of his, and reversed away from the quayside. I sat in the prow, hunched against the wind and the autumn chill.
We travelled to my island in silence. Once again I was surprised not to see the house among the bare trees. I still hadn’t managed to get used to the blackened ruin.
Jansson skilfully hove to. The ability to come alongside a jetty with a barely noticeable bump hadn’t left the former postman. I lifted my bags ashore and was about to give Jansson his hundred-kronor note when he took off his cap. I knew this meant that he wanted to say something.
‘What do you want? Can’t it wait? I’ve had a long journey — I’m tired.’
‘My heart feels funny. I’m frightened.’
Under normal circumstances, when Jansson turns up with his aches and pains and asks me to examine him, I know from the start that it’s all in his mind. But this morning it was different. I nodded in the direction of the bench and climbed out of the boat. Jansson followed suit. I went into the boathouse and fetched my stethoscope. When I came out he was already taking off his thick jacket.
‘Take off your shirt and jumper too,’ I said.
Jansson did as I asked. He sat there, naked to the waist, his skin covered in goose bumps in the cold wind. I listened to his lungs and his heart, asked him to take deep breaths. His lungs sounded fine, but as soon as I picked up his heartbeat, I knew there was something wrong. I must have checked Jansson’s heart a hundred times over the years; I had never had any cause for concern. But now it was different: I could definitely hear an arrhythmia.
As I stepped back I could see the fear in his eyes. Jansson had become an old man.
‘It might be a good idea if you pop into the clinic, ask them to do an ECG,’ I said.
‘Is it serious?’
‘Not necessarily. It might be nothing, but at our age it’s a good idea to have an ECG now and again.’
‘Is it fatal?’
‘If you don’t go to the clinic, it could be. Put on your clothes and go home; tomorrow you can take the bus into town. The clinic will look after you.’
Jansson got dressed in silence as I put the stethoscope away. I came out of the boathouse to find him bent forward on the bench, hands clasped as if he had suddenly felt the need to say a prayer. He looked up at me as the door creaked shut.
‘Why don’t you tell me the truth?’
‘I am telling you the truth. You need to go to the clinic. Don’t worry unnecessarily. I just picked up a little murmur; I’m sure there’s an explanation, and medication can work wonders these days.’
‘I’ve been reading about the heart,’ he said. ‘It starts beating long before we’re born. I think a lot of people believe that doesn’t happen until the umbilical cord is cut.’
‘It happens on the twenty-eighth day,’ I said. ‘That amazing muscle starts working on the twenty-eighth day, and after that it usually stops only once. Death is the end of a race, after all, but we don’t charge through and break a tape. If the heart were a bird with wings, you could well have flown to the moon and back several times before it decides that it’s time for those wings to rest.’
Jansson nodded. I realised he knew all about the wonderful heart muscle’s life and death.
We sat in silence on the bench, two old men in a spot meant for major and minor truths. Jansson was sixty-nine years old, I was seventy. So together we were one hundred and thirty-nine. If I counted back in time, that took us to 1875, when surgeons operated wearing a starched collar, sometimes evening dress.
‘We’re not allowed to learn to die,’ Jansson said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘In the past death was a part of life. Now it’s completely separate. I remember I was six years old when my grandmother died. Her body lay on a door in the parlour at home. There was nothing odd about that. Death was a natural part of our lives. Not any more. We no longer learn to die in this country.’
I understood what Jansson meant. His fear was totally genuine, and yet there was something about his reaction that puzzled me. It was as if the Jansson I had known was casting off his skin, like a snake.
‘How do you learn to die?’ he whined.
I had no answer. Of all the dead people I have known while they were alive, none has given me a rational explanation of the ability to handle death, which sooner or later will catch up with me too.
We don’t just die alone. We never know how we are going to die, even if a medical diagnosis can be made.
As I sat there next to a worried Jansson I thought about a black and white photograph I had seen many years earlier — an image that had frightened me more than any photograph I have ever come across.
It must have been taken during the early 1950s. A chimney sweep on a roof in Stockholm decides that it is time to end his life. He is about sixty years old. He attaches a steel cable to one of his brushes, loops the cable around his neck, and fixes the other end to the square chimney. Then he balances on the ridge. He must have been standing there for quite a long time, because he has been spotted. Some men up a ladder are trying to persuade him not to go through with it; there must be a photographer up another ladder, but of course I can’t see him. Their efforts are in vain; the sweep throws himself off the roof. The camera clicks a fraction of a second before the cable is pulled tight, and the man dies as it breaks his neck and slices into the skin and sinews of his throat. The chimney sweep dangles there for ever in that final void. On his face is etched either determination or despair; I have never been able to decide which, in spite of the fact that I have spent many hours staring at that photograph.
Did the chimney sweep teach me to die? Does the picture reveal anything of the mystery hidden in that final moment? What is it about the chimney sweep’s leap out into the unknown that has both repelled and fascinated me over all these years?
This is what I have left, I thought. Sitting on a bench with another old man who also finds it difficult to clamber into his boat without hurting his knees or losing his balance. Here we sit, hunched in silence, complaining that we don’t know how to behave when death comes for us.
I didn’t like this. I didn’t want to sit here with Jansson, moaning and groaning about the misery of getting older. I nudged him with my elbow.
‘Do you want a cup of coffee?’
‘I was thinking about Oslovski. And now you’re shoving me as if you hate me.’
‘I don’t hate you,’ I said in astonishment. ‘Why would you think such a thing?’
‘You thumped me.’
‘I did no such thing, for God’s sake! I just gave you a nudge!’
‘I know you’ve always thought about killing me,’ Jansson went on. ‘Just as I learned to read a letter through the envelope, I can see what’s going on inside your head.’