Italian Shoes Read Free

ferrying four youngsters to and from the village school. This year there are only seven of us left, and only one is under the age of sixty. That’s Jansson. As the youngest, he is dependent on the rest of us keeping going, and insisting on living out here on the remote islands. Otherwise there’ll be no job for him.
    But that’s irrelevant to me. I don’t like Jansson. He’s one of the most difficult patients I’ve ever had. He belongs to a group of extremely recalcitrant hypochondriacs. On one occasion a few years ago, when I’d examined his throat and checked his blood pressure, he suddenly said he thought he had a brain tumour that was affecting his eyesight. I said I didn’t have time to listen to his imaginings. But heinsisted. Something was happening inside his brain. I asked him why he thought that. Did he have headaches? Did he have dizzy spells? Any other symptoms? He didn’t give up until I’d dragged him into the boathouse, where it was darker, and shone my special torch into his pupils, and told him that everything seemed to be normal.
    I’m convinced that Jansson is basically as sound as a bell. His father is ninety-seven and lives in a care home, but his mind is clear. Jansson and his father fell out in 1970, and then Jansson stopped helping his father to fish for eels and went to work at a sawmill in SmÃ¥land instead. I’ve never understood why he chose a sawmill. Naturally, I can understand his failing to put up with his tyrannical father any longer. But a sawmill? I really have no idea. However, since that trouble in 1970, they’ve not spoken to each other. Jansson didn’t return from SmÃ¥land until his father was so old that he’d been taken into a home.
    Jansson has an older sister called Linnea who lives on the mainland. She was married and used to run a cafe in the summer – but then her husband died. He collapsed on the hill down to the Co-op, whereupon she closed the cafe and found Jesus. She acts as messenger between father and son.
    Jansson’s mother died many years ago. I met her once. She was already on her way into the shadows of senility, and was convinced I was her father, who had died in the 1920s. It was a horrible experience.
    I wouldn’t have reacted so strongly now, but I was different in those days.
    I don’t really know anything more about Jansson, apartfrom the fact that his first name is Ture and he’s a postman. I don’t know him, and he doesn’t know me. But whenever he sails round the headland, I’m generally standing on the jetty, waiting for him. I stand there wondering why, but I know I’ll never get an answer.
    It’s like waiting for God, or for Godot; but instead, it’s Jansson who comes.
    I sit down at the kitchen table and open the logbook I’ve been keeping for the past twelve years. I have nothing to say, and there’s nobody who might one day be interested in anything I write. But I write even so. Every day, all the year round, just a few lines. About the weather, the number of birds in the trees outside my window, my health. Nothing else. If I want, I can look up a particular date ten years ago and establish that there was a blue tit or an oystercatcher on the jetty when I went down there to wait for Jansson.
    I keep a diary of a life that has lost its way.
    The morning had passed.
    It was time to pull my fur hat down over my ears, venture out into the bitter cold, stand on the jetty and wait for the arrival of Jansson. He must be frozen stiff in his hydrocopter when the weather’s as cold as this. I sometimes think I can detect a whiff of strong drink when he clambers on to the jetty. I don’t blame him.
    When I stood up from the kitchen table, the animals came to life. The cat was the first to the door, the dog a long way behind. I let them out, put on an old, moth-eatenfur coat that belonged to my grand father, wrapped a scarf round my neck and