The Return of the Dancing Master by Henning Mankell Page A

laboratory assistants were very gentle with him, he felt increasingly weary. He spent many hours at the hospital every day, having blood drawn for testing. He also talked to the doctor on two more occasions. Each time he had lots of questions, but never got around to asking any of them. In fact, there was only one question he really wanted answered: was he going to survive? And if that question couldn’t be answered with any degree of certainty, how much time did he, for sure, have left? He’d read somewhere that death was a tailor who measured people for their final suit, invisibly and in silence. Even if he did survive, he had the feeling that his lifespan had already been measured out. It was much too early for that.
    The second night he went to Elena’s in Dalbogatan. He hadn’t phoned in advance as he usually did. The moment she saw him in the doorway, she knew something was wrong. Lindman had tried to make up his mind whether or not to tell her, but he wasn’t sure right up to the moment he rang the doorbell. He barely had time to hang up his jacket before she asked him what was wrong.
    â€œI’m sick,” he’d said.
    â€œSick?”
    â€œI’ve got cancer.”
    That left him with no more defenses. He might as well tell the truth now. He needed somebody to confide in, and Elena was his only choice. They sat up long into the night, and she was sensible enough not to try to console him. What he needed was courage. She brought
him a mirror and said, Look, the man on her sofa was very much alive, not a corpse, that was how he should approach the situation. He stayed the night, and lay awake long after she had gone to sleep.
    He got up at dawn, quietly, so as not to wake her, and left the building as discreetly as possible. But he didn’t go straight back to Allégatan: instead he made a long detour around Ramna Lake and turned towards home only after he’d reached Druvefors. The doctor had said that they would finish all the necessary tests today. He’d asked if he could go away, possibly abroad, before the treatment started, and she said he could do whatever he liked. He had a cup of coffee when he got home, and played back his answering machine. Elena had been worried when she woke up and found that he’d left.
    Shortly after ten he went to the travel agent’s in Vasterlanggatan. He sat down and started going through the brochures. He’d more or less made up his mind that it would be Mallorca when the thought of Herbert Molin came to him. He knew then and there what he was going to do. He wasn’t going to fly to Mallorca. If he did, all he would do was wander around a place where he knew no one, worrying about what had happened and what was going to happen. If he went to Harjedalen, he would be no less alone—since he didn’t know anybody up there either—but he would be able to devote his attention to something other than himself and his problems. What he might be able to do, he wasn’t sure. Nevertheless, he left the travel agent’s, went to the bookshop in the square, and bought a map of the neighboring provinces of Jamtland and Harjedalen. When he got home he spread it out over the kitchen table. He figured it would take him twelve to fifteen hours to drive there. If he got too tired, he could always spend the night somewhere on the way.
    In the afternoon he went to the hospital for the final tests. The doctor had already given him an appointment for when he should return to start his treatment. He’d noted it in his diary in his usual sprawling handwriting, as if he were recording some holiday or somebody’s birthday. On Friday, November 19, 8:15 A.M.
    When he returned home he packed his suitcase. He looked up the weather on teletext and saw that the temperature in Ostersund was forecast at between 5° and 10° C. He assumed there would be no significant difference between Ostersund and Sveg. Before going to bed it