A Bridge to the Stars

A Bridge to the Stars - Henning Mankell



1

The dog.
That was what started it all.
If he hadn't seen that solitary dog, nothing might have happened. Nothing of what later became so important that it changed everything. Nothing of what was so exciting at first, but became so horrible.
It all started with the dog. The solitary dog he'd seen that night last winter when he'd suddenly woken up, got out of bed, tiptoed out to the window seat in the hall and sat down.
He had no idea why he'd woken up in the middle of the night.
Maybe he'd had a dream?
A nightmare that he couldn't recall when he woke up. Or maybe his dad had been snoring in the bedroom next to his own? His dad didn't often snore, but sometimes there might be an occasional one, a bit like a roar, and then it would be all quiet again.
Like a lion roaring in the winter's night.
But it was when he was sitting by the window in the hall that he saw the solitary dog.
The window had been covered in ice crystals, and he'd breathed onto the glass so that he could see out. The thermometer showed nearly thirty degrees below zero. And it was then, as he sat looking out of the window, that he'd caught sight of the dog. It ran out into the road, all on its own.
It stopped underneath the streetlamp, looked and sniffed in all directions, and set off running again. Then it vanished.
It was a familiar kind of dog, common in northern Sweden. A Norwegian elkhound. He'd managed to see that much. But why was it running around just there, all alone in the wintry night and the cold? Where was it heading for? And why? And why did it look and sniff in all directions?
He'd had the impression that the dog was frightened of something.
He'd started to feel cold, but he stayed in the window, waiting for the dog to come back. But nothing happened.
There was nothing out there, only the cold, empty winter's night. And stars glittering in the far distance.
He couldn't get that solitary dog out of his mind.
Lots of times that winter he'd woken up without knowing why. Every time, he got out of bed, tiptoed over the cold cork tiles and sat down on the window seat, waiting for the dog to come back.
Once he fell asleep on the window seat. He was still there at five in the morning when his dad got up to make coffee.
'What are you doing here?' his father asked after shaking him and waking him up.
His father was called Samuel, and he was a lumberjack. Early every morning he would go out into the forest to work. He chopped trees down for a big timber company with an unusual name. Marma Long Tubes.
He didn't know what to say when his dad found him asleep on the window seat. He couldn't very well say he'd been waiting for a dog. Dad might think he was telling lies, and Dad didn't like people who didn't tell the truth.
'I don't know,' he said. 'Maybe I was sleepwalking again?'
That was something he could claim. It wasn't absolutely true, but it wasn't a lie either.
He used to sleepwalk when he was little. Not that he remembered anything about it. It was something his dad had told him about. How he'd come walking out of his bedroom in his nightshirt, into the room where his father was listening to the radio or studying some of his old sea charts. Dad had taken him back to bed, but in the morning he couldn't explain why he'd been wandering around in his sleep.
That was ages ago. Five years ago. Nearly half of his life. He was eleven now.
'Go back to bed,' said his dad. 'You mustn't sit here and catch your death of cold.'
He snuggled back into bed and listened to his dad making coffee, preparing the sandwiches he would take into the forest with him, and eventually he heard the front door closing.
Then everything was quiet.
He checked the alarm clock by his bed, on a stool he'd been given as a present for his seventh birthday.
He hated that stool. It was his birthday present, but he'd really wanted a kite.
He felt angry every time he saw it.
How could anybody give a stool to somebody who wanted a kite?
He could sleep for two more hours before he'd have to get up and go to school. He pulled the blanket up to his chin, curled up and closed his eyes, and the first thing he saw was that dog running towards him. It was running silently through the winter's night, and perhaps it was on its way to a distant star?
But now he was sure that he was going to catch that dog. He would entice it into his dream. They could be friends there, and it wouldn't be as cold as it was outside in the wintry night.
He soon fell asleep, the lumberjack's son, whose name was Joel Gustafson.
It was in the winter of 1956 that he saw that solitary dog for the first time.
And that was the winter when it all happened.
All that stuff that started with the dog . . .