The Demon of Dakar - Kjell Eriksson [106]
“Maria,” he mumbled, pulling his hand across the beautiful surface of the dining room table.
He took out a can of beer from the refrigerator, but only had one sip before he set it down. He opened cupboard after cupboard and viewed the multitude of glass and china. Who can afford this, he thought. And who can use it all? In the drawers, there were knives and gleaming utensils that had, for him, an unknown purpose. He picked up a knife whose extremely slender blade appeared to exclude it from all normal use, and weighed it in his hand but then tossed it back and closed the drawer with a bang.
He returned to the bedroom. One of Slobodan’s hands hung over the edge of the bed and Manuel picked it up and laid it across his stomach. Slobodan muttered something in his sleep.
The feeling of being an intruder grew stronger. What was he doing in the apartment? He looked at the man who now appeared to have settled in and was snoring heavily.
A freight train went by outside the window and Manuel walked over to the window. The coupled sections jerked and squeaked, and the mild thumping of the wheels against the track was soothing. He counted the cars, container after container, tank after tank; it seemed they were never going to end.
Once he had read a book about a man who was traveling through the United States on a freight train. Occasionally he worked temporarily on a farm or at a gas station, but mostly he wandered restlessly from state to state, looking for a woman he had once known and loved. Manuel did not remembered how the book ended—if the man reached his goal—but something of the anxiety and feeling of being an outsider that had plagued the rambler now gripped Manuel.
The clanging signals stopped, the bars at the nearby crossing were slowly raised, and Manuel stared at the disappearing lights of the last car until they were completely gone.
Slobodan suddenly snuffled. His heavyset body twisted as if in pain and he let out a sob. A rivulet of vomit ran down his cheek. Slobodan pulled his hand across his mouth in his sleep and muttered something.
It occurred to Manuel how easy it would be for him to end Slobodan’s life. The feeling had been in the back of his head ever since Feo had left him alone with the fat one. How easy it would be. Armas and Slobodan gone, their debts paid. But to what purpose? Would Angel come back to life or Patricio get out of prison because Slobodan died?
He turned his head and looked at the man in the bed. The fat one had appeared like a bhni guí’a, a man from the mountain, filled with promises and green bills, thundering and powerful. Now he lay there like a helpless colossus. Manuel would easily be able to suffocate him with a pillow and then disappear for good. No one would suspect foul play, everyone would believe that Slobodan had suffered a drunkard’s violent but natural death.
He recalled the story of Ehud. When Manuel and his brothers were small, their father would read aloud from the Bible in the evenings. He had reached all the way to the book of Daniel until his worsening sight put an end to all reading.
It was perhaps the fact that Ehud, like Manuel, was left-handed that had fixed the story in his mind. Edud murdered a king in secret. Manuel tried in vain to think of the king’s name. The king, who came from the land of Moab, was enormously fat. Ehud had been assigned the task of murdering the king and had thrust his sword into him. The sword sank to its hilt in the voluminous belly. Ehud fled, and managed to escape. The people rose up and freed themselves from their oppressors.
Am I Ehud, he asked himself. Is it right to kill another person?
Manuel weighed Slobodan’s life. Carried on a silent dialogue with death or, rather, himself, the man he could be, the man he was in actuality. This was how he experienced those hours in Slobodan Andersson’s darkened apartment. It was as if he were reasoning with an inner being who spoke to him, advised