The Fifth Woman by Henning Mankell Page A

on one of his legs he didn’t move. For a moment she was afraid that he was dead, but then she heard him gasping.
    He’s weak, she thought. Soon the waiting will be over.
    After she had given him his food, and let him use the hole, she pulled him back to his place again, and filled in the hole. When she had washed the dishes and tidied up the kitchen, she sat down at the table and had a cup of coffee. From her handbag she took out her personnel newsletter and leafed through it. According to the new salary table, she would be getting 174 kroner more each month, backdated from the first of July. She looked at the clock again. She seldom went ten minutes without checking it. It was part of her identity. Her life and her work were held together by precise timetables. And nothing bothered her more than not being able to meet schedules. Excuses were unacceptable. She always regarded it as a personal responsibility. She knew that many of her colleagues laughed at her behind her back. That hurt her, but she never said a word. The silence was a part of her too. But it hadn’t always been that way.
    I remember my voice when I was a child. It was strong, but not shrill. The muteness had come later. After I saw all the blood, and my mother when she almost died. I didn’t scream that time. I hid in my own silence. There I could make myself invisible.
    That’s when it happened. When my mother lay on a table and, sobbing and bleeding, robbed me of the sister I had always waited for.
    She looked at the clock. They would be here soon. It was Wednesday, time for their meeting. If she had her preference, it would always be on Wednesdays, that would create regularity. But her work schedule didn’t permit it, and she had no control over that schedule.
    She set out five chairs. She didn’t want any more people than that to visit her at once. The intimacy might be lost. It was hard enough as it was to create sufficient trust that these silent women would dare to speak. She went into the bedroom and took off her uniform. For each article of clothing she removed, she muttered a prayer. And she remembered.
    It was my mother who told me about Antonio. The man she had met in her youth, long before the Second World War, on a train between Cologne and Munich. They couldn’t find seats, so they ended up squeezed close together in the smoky corridor. The lights from the boats on the Rhine had glimmered outside the dirty windows, and Antonio told her that he was going to be a Catholic priest. He said that the mass started as soon as the priest changed his clothes. As a prelude to the holy ritual, the priests had to undergo a cleansing procedure. For each garment they took off or put on they had a prayer. Each garment brought them a step closer to their sacred task.
    She had never forgotten her mother’s recollection of the meeting with Antonio in the train. And since she had realised that she was a priestess, dedicated to the sacred task of proclaiming that justice was holy, she too had begun to view her change of clothes as something more than simply exchanging one set of garments for another. But the prayers she offered up were not part of a conversation with God. In a chaotic and absurd world, God was the ultimate absurdity. The mark of the world was an absent God. She directed her prayers to the child she had been, before everything fell apart. Before her mother robbed her of what she wanted most of all. Before the sinister men had towered up before her with eyes like writhing, menacing snakes.
    She changed her clothes and prayed herself back to her childhood. She laid her uniform on the bed. Then she dressed in soft fabrics with gentle colours. Something happened inside her. It was as if her skin altered, as if it too was shifting back to its infant state. Last, she put on a wig and glasses. The final prayer faded inside her. Ride, ride a cock-horse  . . .
    She looked at her face in the big mirror. It wasn’t Sleeping Beauty that awoke from