The Demon of Dakar - Kjell Eriksson [13]
Manuel held the map spread out against the roof of the car and again looked up at the prison walls and the gate that kept Patricio locked inside. He suddenly understood why Patricio did not try to claim his fortune. He was ashamed and he wanted to punish himself. He could be living better, even shortening his sentence, but he was denying himself these possibilities. Filled with guilt and shame, he wanted to rot away in his cell.
Manuel studied the map and tried to memorize the names of the places along the way to Uppsala: Rimbo, Finsta, Gottröra, and Knivsta. It was as if the mapped-out terrain on the page spoke to him; the green and yellow irregular fields formed patterns that he tried to convert into images. He looked around. The trees that surrounded the institution were swaying in the wind, bowing down and straightening their backs. So similar to how it was back home and yet so foreign.
He had been in Sweden nine hours. He had traveled with only one goal: to check up on his brother. He had gone into debt in order to get the money for the ticket, had assured his mother that he would be careful and not do anything illegal. Was it illegal to persuade the drug dealers, the fat one and the tall one, to pay Patricio the ten thousand dollars that they had promised?
If Patricio didn’t want it, then it certainly would provide Maria with security in her old age. She would never again have to worry about money. It was the thought of this that convinced him.
He folded up the map, got in the car, and drove slowly out of the parking lot.
Six
The sign flashed “Dakar” with three stars, alternating in green and red. Eva Willman leaned her bicycle against the wall, although a sign expressly forbade this.
She had asked Patrik to look up Dakar online. He had received ten of thousands of hits. Dakar was the capital of the West African country of Senegal. Together, they had looked it up in the atlas and Eva felt as if she was embarking on a trip.
Patrik sat leaned over the kitchen table, tracing his index finger across the open pages.
“Timbuktu,” he said suddenly.
The multicolored nations, the straight lines that indicated borders, and the blue ones that followed the laws of nature, meandering across the map, joined up with other arteries and lead to the sea in a finely branched network of threads. Patrik smiled to himself.
The pale sunlight fell in through the window. The light and shade in his young face formed a continent of hope. There was absolute silence in the kitchen. Eva wanted to caress Patrik’s blond hair and downy face, but she let her hand rest on the back of the chair.
“Dakar is by the sea,” Patrik said and looked at her with an expression that was difficult to interpret. There is nothing to the west before America, only water.”
Now Eva was standing in front of a Dakar that was far from the sea. The closest you could come to the Atlantic around here was the Fyris river, a body of water that rarely evoked any dreams, a line that divided the city. It reminded Eva of her grandfather. He had been a construction worker his whole life, a communist, and an alcoholic—a life-threatening combination, especially for her grandmother who became the target of her husband’s frustration and hate. Only in her sixties did she manage to leave him.
In protest, Eva’s father had voted for the conservatives and had continued to do so from sheer habit, long after his ruddy father had shuffled off this mortal coil.
Eva’s inheritance was twofold, consisting in part of a hatred toward pretention and hypocrisy, against those in power, and in part a belief in the role of personal responsibility for one’s own well-being. She had always had difficulties reconciling herself with the collective, with those who spoke for the many but who did not always live as they preached. She had seen enough of that at the post office.
Her grandmother had worked as a waitress at the well-known hotel and restaurant Gillet in her youth, an experience that she constantly