The Shadow Girls: A Novel

By Henning Mankell and Ebba Segerberg

From the New York Times–bestselling author: A story of one man’s awakening and “a heartfelt reminder of the many people whose struggles are never known” (The Plain Dealer).
 
Jesper Humlin, a poet of middling acclaim and underwhelming book sales, is facing a crisis. His boy-wonder stockbroker has squandered Humlin’s investments, and his editor, who says he must write a crime novel to survive, starts pitching and promoting the nonexistent book despite Humlin’s emphatic refusals. Then, when he travels to Gothenburg to give a reading, he finds himself thrust into a world where names shift, stories overlap, and histories are both deeply secret and in profound need of retelling.
 
Leyla from Iran, Tanya from Russia, and Tea-Bag, who is from Africa but claims to be from Kurdistan (because Kurds might receive preferential treatment as refugees)—these are the shadow girls who become Humlin’s unlikely pupils in impromptu writing workshops. Though he had imagined their stories as fodder for his own book, soon their intertwining lives require him to play a much different role.
 
Offering both surprising humor and heartrending tragedy, The Shadow Girls is a “passionate and entertaining” triumph that will astonish longtime fans of Mankell’s acclaimed Kurt Wallander novels as well as readers new to his work (The Daily Telegraph).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 16, 2012
• ISBN: 9781595588449

Book preview

Afterword

1

It was one of the last days of the twentieth century.

The girl with the big smile was awakened by the sound of raindrops hitting the tent cover above her head. As long as she kept her eyes closed she could imagine that she was still back in the village by the cold, clear river that spilled down the side of the mountain. But as soon as she opened her eyes she was thrown out into an empty and unfathomable world, one in which nothing of her past remained except disjointed images of her escape. She lay still and slowly let herself float up into consciousness, trying not to leave her dreams without preparing herself. These first few minutes of the morning often determined the way her day would turn out.

During the three months in the refugee camp she had developed a morning ritual that helped her avoid being overcome with sudden panic. The most important thing was not to rush up from her uncomfortable cot with the misguided notion that something momentous was about to occur. By now she knew that nothing ever happened here. This was the first lesson she learned after she had dragged herself onto the rocky European beach and been greeted by guard dogs and armed Spanish border guards.

Being a refugee meant being lonely. This was something that was true for them all, regardless of what country they had come from or what circumstances had forced them to flee. She didn’t expect her loneliness to leave her soon, in fact she had prepared herself to live with it for a long time.

As she lay with her eyes closed she searched for a foothold in the confusion of all that had happened since her arrival. She was being held in a refugee camp in southern Spain, lucky to be one of the few survivors from that mouldering ship from Africa. She could still remember the air of expectation aboard. Freedom has a scent, she thought, which only grew more overpowering as land approached. Freedom, security, these were what they wanted. A life where fear, hunger, and hopelessness were not the only reality.

It had been a cargo-hold of hope, she thought; although it was perhaps more correct to call it a cargo-hold of illusions. Everyone who had been waiting on the Moroccan beach that night and who had placed their lives in the hands of the ruthless human smugglers had been ferried over to the waiting ship. Sailors who were little more than shadows had forced them down into the cargo area, as if they were modern-day slaves.

But there had been no iron chains around their ankles. What had ensnared them were their dreams, their desperation, all the fear that had driven them to break up from various hells-on-earth in order to make their way to freedom. They had been so close to their goal when the ship hit a reef and the Greek sailors had left in lifeboats, leaving the people in the cargo hold to save themselves.

Europe let us down before we even arrived, she thought. I will never forget that, whatever happens to me in the future. She didn’t know how many people had drowned, nor would she ever find out. The cries for help still pulsated like a pain in her head. At first she had been surrounded by these cries, then one by one they had fallen silent. When she hit land she had praised her luck. She had survived; she had arrived. But for what? She had quickly tried to forget her dreams. Nothing had turned out as she had imagined.

A harsh spotlight had picked her out as she lay on the cold and wet Spanish beach. The dogs had run up to her and then the soldiers surrounded her with their shiny weapons. She had survived. But that was all. Afterwards she had been placed in the refugee camp with its barracks and tents, leaky showers and dirty toilets. On the other side of the wire fence she could see the ocean that had released her, but nothing else, none of the future she had imagined.

The people in the refugee camp, so varied in their language, dress and terrible experiences – imparted through a look or sometimes words – had only this in common: nothing to look forward to. Some had been there for many years. No country was willing to admit them and all of their energies were devoted to avoiding being sent back. One day, as she had been waiting in line for her daily rations, she spoke with a young man from Iran – or was it Iraq? It was often hard to know where people came from since they invariably lied about it in the hope that it would make their applications for asylum more attractive. He said that the camp was simply a large death chamber, a holding place where the clock ticked on relentlessly towards death. She had immediately understood what he meant but tried to ignore the thought.

His eyes had been full of sorrow. They surprised her. Since she had grown to be a woman all she had seen in men’s eyes was a kind of hunger. But this thin man seemed not to have noticed her beauty nor her smile. This had frightened her. She could not stand the thought that men did not immediately desire her, nor that the long and desperate flight had been for nothing. She, like all the others who had been caught, lived in the hope that her ordeal would one day be over. Through some miracle someone would one day appear before her with a paper in his hand and a smile on his lips and say: Welcome.

In order not to drive herself insane she had to be very patient. She understood that. And patience could only arise if she did not allow herself any expectations. Sometimes people in the camp committed suicide, or at least made serious attempts. They were the ones who were not strong enough to stifle their own expectations and the burden of thinking that their dreams would one day be realised finally overcame them.

Therefore, every morning when she woke up, she told herself that the best she could do was to rid herself of hope. That and never mentioning her true country of origin. The camp was always a hotbed of rumours about which countries offered the best chances for asylum applicants. It was as if the camp were a marketplace of countries where the possibilities for entry were recorded on a kind of stock market. No investments were ever long-lasting or secure.

A short while after she arrived, Bangladesh had been highest on the list. For some reason that they never understood, Germany was granting immediate asylum to all people who could prove that they came from Bangladesh. During an intense few days people of all complexions and appearances waited in line in front of the exhausted Spanish bureaucrats and argued with great fervour that they had suddenly realised they were from Bangladesh. In this way at least fourteen Chinese refugees from the Hunan province made their way to Germany. A few days later Germany ‘closed’ Bangladesh, as they said in the camp. After three days of uncertainty a rumour was started that France was prepared to take a certain quota of Kurds.

She had been unsuccessful in her attempts to research where the Kurds actually came from or what they looked like. Nonetheless she stood in line with the others and when she at last stood in front of a red-eyed clerk with the name tag ‘Fernando’ she smiled her sweetest smile. Fernando simply shook his head.

‘Tell me what colour you are,’ he said.

She immediately sensed danger, but she had to say something. The Spanish didn’t like people who didn’t answer their questions. A lie was better than silence.

‘You are black,’ Fernando said in reply to his own question. ‘There are no black Kurds. Kurds look like me, not you.’

‘There are always exceptions. My father was not a Kurd, but my mother was.’

Fernando’s eyes seemed only to redden. She continued to smile. It was her strongest weapon, it always had been.

‘And what was your father doing in Kurdistan?’

‘Working.’

Fernando threw his pen down in triumph.

‘Ha! There is no Kurdistan. At least not in any official capacity. That is exactly the reason that Kurds are fleeing their country.’

‘How can they leave a country that doesn’t exist?’

But Fernando lost patience with her. He waved her away.

‘I should report the fact that you have been lying,’ he said.

‘I’m not lying.’

She thought she could suddenly see a spark of interest in his eyes.

‘You are speaking the truth?’

‘Kurds don’t lie.’

The spark in Fernando’s eyes died away.

‘Go,’ he said. ‘It is the best thing you can do. What is your name?’

She decided in that moment to give herself an entirely new name. She looked quickly around the room and her gaze fell on the teacup on Fernando’s table.

‘Tea-Bag,’ she replied.

‘Tea-Bag?’

‘Tea-Bag.’

‘Is that a Kurdish name?’

‘My mother liked English names.’

‘Is Tea-Bag even a name?’

‘It must be since that is what she called me.’

Fernando sighed and dismissed her with a tired wave. She left the room and did not let the smile leave her face until she was out in the yard and had found a place by the fence where she could be alone.

The rain continued to fall on the roof of the tent. She pushed away all thoughts of Fernando and her failure to impersonate a Kurd. Instead she tried to recall the uneasy and wild dreams that had rushed through her head all night. But the only impressions still left were like the ruins of a burned house, the blurry shadows that had surrounded her as she slept, shadows that seemed to creep out of her head, put on strange plays and then disappear again into the depths of her brain. She had seen her father curled up on the rooftop in their village. He had been cursing his imaginary enemies, threatening to kill the living and raise the dead, and he had stayed up there until he fainted from exhaustion and rolled off, landing in the dry sand where Tea-Bag’s distressed mother had tearily pleaded with him to return to his senses.

But little of this remained when Tea-Bag awoke. There was only the fading impression of her father on the roof. There was nothing left of her other dreams, only the fleeting faces of people she wasn’t sure she recognised.

Tea-Bag pulled the dirty blanket up to her face. Was the dream trying to tell her that perhaps she was the one who was now on that rooftop, sharing the pain that her father had suffered? She didn’t know, didn’t find any answers. The rain fell steadily against the sailcloth of the tent and the thin light that came in through her eyelids told her it was seven or seven-thirty in the morning. She fumbled for the watch that she had stolen from that Italian engineer. But it had disappeared after the shipwreck. She still had very few memories from that night. There were no precise details, she could remember only their desperate attempts to survive, not to be pulled down and die a few metres from the land that meant freedom.

Tea-Bag opened her eyes and looked up at the tent. Outside she could hear people cough, sometimes saying words in a language she didn’t understand. They moved around slowly, just as she would do when she got up, the movements of a person without hope. A heavy, reluctant gait, since they had no goal. In the beginning she had kept track of the days with small white stones that she gathered down by the fence. But then they had lost meaning for her. During that time she had been sharing her tent with two other women, one from Iran and the other from Ghana. They had not got along well, had chafed in the limited space inside the tent. Refugees were loners; their fear meant they couldn’t stand to have people come too close to them, as if the sorrows and despair of others were a contagious disease.

The woman from Iran was pregnant when she first arrived. She had cried all night long because her husband had disappeared somewhere along the way during their long journey. When her contractions started the Spanish guards put her on a stretcher and Tea-Bag never saw her again after that. The girl from Ghana was an impatient type, someone who couldn’t see a fence without immediately plotting to climb over it. One night she and a couple of boys from Togo, who had sailed to Europe on a raft made of empty oil barrels that they had stolen from a Shell depot, had tried to climb the fence. But the dogs and the spotlights caught her and she never returned to the tent. Tea-Bag assumed she was now in the part of the camp where those labelled ‘difficult’ were held under stricter supervision.

Tea-Bag sat up in bed. Loneliness, she whispered, is my greatest source of suffering. I can walk out of this tent and immediately be surrounded by people. I eat with them, I walk along the fence and look at the sea with them, I speak with them, but still I am alone. All refugees are alone, all are surrounded by invisible walls. I have to get rid of all hope if I am to survive.

She put her feet on the ground and shivered from the cold. At the same moment she was again reminded of her father. He would always plant his feet firmly on the ground when confronted with an unexpected difficulty or anything he was not prepared for. This gesture was among her earliest memories, and connected with her understanding of the potential for mysterious action that even the people closest to her were capable of. Later, when she was six or seven, her father had explained to her that a person needed to have a secure foothold when facing unexpected troubles. If she remembered this rule she would also be able to remain in control.

She pressed her feet firmly into the ground and told herself that nothing special was going to happen this day. If something did occur, it would be a surprise, nothing she had been waiting for.

Tea-Bag sat up and waited for her strength to return, the strength to carry on another day in this camp in which people were forced to renounce their identities and were constantly searching for signs of where they might be welcome.

When she felt strong enough she got up, pulled the old nightgown over her head and put on a T-shirt that the girl from Ghana had given her. It had a Nescafé logo on the front. The logo obscured her identity in the same way that the camouflage uniforms had hidden the soldiers who took her father away.

She shook her head to rid herself of these thoughts. She could allow herself to dream about him sitting on the roof until he fell to the ground of exhaustion. She could think about the way in which he used to press his feet into the ground. But she could not allow herself to think about his disappearance, except sometimes in the evening. She felt strongest right before sunset, filled with supernatural powers for a few short minutes. Then it was as if she slowly started to sink, her pulse grew slower and her heart tried to mask its stubborn beat deep inside the hidden recesses of her body.

Tea-Bag folded back the flap of the tent door. It had stopped raining. A damp mist clung to the camp, over the long row of barracks and the tents that looked like dirty fettered animals. People were slowly wandering around as if towards a goal that only existed inside of them. Guards were patrolling the fence with gleaming weapons and dogs that seemed relentlessly intent on picking out danger from the sea. Danger in the form of leaky ships with cargo holds filled to the brim with desperate people, or curiously crafted rafts and rowboats, even doors that some people used as floatation devices.

I am here, Tea-Bag thought. I am in the centre of things here, in the centre of my life. There is nothing behind me: there may not be anything ahead. I am here, that is all. I am here and I am not waiting for anything.

Another day had begun. Tea-Bag walked over to one of the barracks where the women’s showers were located. As usual there was a long line. She had to wait for about an hour until it was her turn. She closed the door behind her, took off her clothes and stepped into the spray of water. She was reminded of the night she almost drowned. The difference, she thought to herself as she soaped her body, the difference is something I’ll never understand. I survived without knowing why, but I also don’t know what it is like to be dead. Once she had dried herself off and put her clothes back on she stepped outside to let the next woman in line take her place, a fat girl with a black scarf wrapped over her head so that only two eyes looked out like dark holes. Tea-Bag wondered absently if the girl took off the scarf when she washed herself.

She walked on between the rows of barracks and tents. Whenever she met someone’s eye she smiled. In an open area under a hastily erected iron roof she received some food, doled out by two heavyset and sweaty Spanish women who maintained a ceaseless conversation with each other. Tea-Bag sat down at a plastic table, wiped away a few breadcrumbs and started to eat. Every morning she was afraid that she would lose the will to eat. Sometimes it seemed as if the ability to feel hunger was what kept her alive.

She ate slowly as a way to make the time go by. She thought about the watch that lay on the bottom of the sea. She wondered if it still worked or if it had stopped at that moment when she herself ought rightfully to have died alongside the others. She searched for the name of the Italian engineer whom she stole the watch from that lonely night when she had sold her body in order to get the money together for the trip. Cartini? Cavanini? She didn’t know if it was his first or last name. Not that it mattered.

She got up from the table and walked over to the women who were still doling out portions from their huge pots while they continued their endless conversation. Tea-Bag put her dish with the other dirty dishes on a trolley and walked down to the fence to look out at the sea. There was a ship far out towards the horizon.

‘Tea-Bag,’ she heard someone say.

She turned around. Fernando was looking at her with his red eyes.

‘There’s someone who wants to speak to you,’ he said.

She was immediately on guard.

‘Who?’

Fernando shrugged.

‘Someone who wants to talk to someone. Anyone. It might as well be you.’

‘No one wants to talk to me.’

She was even more suspicious now, using her big smile as a way to keep Fernando at bay.

‘If you don’t want to talk to him I’ll find someone else.’

‘Why would he want to speak to me?’

Tea-Bag sensed danger; she hoped an opening in the fence would suddenly appear so she could jump through. To ward off the threat she made her smile even wider.

‘A reporter. Someone who has taken it into his head to write a story on refugees.’

‘What kind of a story?’

‘I’m assuming he’s writing an article for the paper.’

‘And he’s going to write about me?’

Fernando made a face.

‘I’ll ask someone else if you don’t want to do it.’

He turned and started to walk away. Tea-Bag had the feeling she was about to make one of the most important decisions of her life.

‘I’ll talk to him, if he wants to talk to me.’

‘Just remember that it won’t be to your advantage if you criticise the camp.’

Tea-Bag tried to understand what he was getting at. The Spanish guards always spoke a language where the most important message lay beneath the surface.

‘What would be to my advantage?’

Fernando stopped and took out a piece of paper from his pocket.

‘I am pleased to say that the Spanish authorities treat us with the utmost compassion and humanity,’ he read aloud.

‘What is that, exactly?’

‘That’s what you should say. Everyone who works here has a copy of it. Someone in the Ministry of the Interior wrote it. That’s what you should say to the journalist. It could be to your advantage.’

‘My advantage? How?’

‘So you will continue to be treated with compassion.’

‘What exactly do you mean by compassion?’

‘To help you reach your goal.’

‘What goal?’

‘The goal you have set for yourself.’

Tea-Bag had the feeling she was walking around in a circle.

‘Does that mean I can leave the camp?’

‘Actually it will mean the reverse. You can stay on.’

‘But that’s what would happen anyway.’

‘Don’t be too sure. You could be deported to your homeland. Wherever that really is.’

‘I don’t have a homeland.’

‘You will be deported to the country of last domicile.’

‘They won’t accept me.’

‘Of course not. You will be sent back whereupon we deport you again. You will find yourself in what we call the circular route.’

‘And what is that?’

‘A route in which you circulate.’

‘Around what?’

‘Around yourself.’

Tea-Bag shook her head. She didn’t understand. There was nothing that could make her as frustrated as when she didn’t understand.

‘I’ve heard of a man who claimed to be from a central African republic,’ Fernando continued. ‘He has now lived in an Italian airport for twelve years. No one wants him. Since no one will pay his airfare it has turned out to be cheapest simply to let him remain at the airport.’

Tea-Bag pointed to the note Fernando held in his hand.

‘That’s what you want me to say?’

‘Just this. Nothing else.’

Fernando gave her the note.

‘He’s waiting in my office. He also has a photographer with him.’

‘Why?’

Fernando sighed.

‘They always do.’

Two men were waiting outside Fernando’s office. One was short with red hair and a raincoat that flapped in the wind. He was carrying a camera. Next to him was a tall and thin man. Tea-Bag thought he looked like a palm tree. His back was slightly bent and he had bushy hair that stood out like palm fronds. Fernando pointed to Tea-Bag then left them alone. Tea-Bag smiled and the man who looked like a palm tree smiled back at her. He had bad teeth. The other man picked up his camera. His raincoat rustled.

‘My name is Per,’ said the palm-tree man. ‘We’re doing a series on refugees. We’re calling it People without a face. We want to tell your story.’

Something about the way he spoke rubbed her up the wrong way. She sent him a blinding smile. She was furious.

‘But I have a face.’

Per looked puzzled.

‘We mean it in a symbolic way. People without a face. People like you who are trying to come to Europe without being welcome.’

For the first time since she had been here, Tea-Bag suddenly felt an urge to defend the camp, the red-eyed guards, their dogs, the fat women who doled out the meals, the men who emptied the latrines. All this she wanted to defend, just as she wanted to defend the other refugees in the camp and those who never made it that far, who drowned or committed suicide in their despair.

‘I won’t speak to you,’ she said, ‘until you have apologised for saying that I have no face.’

Then she turned to the man in the raincoat who was constantly moving about and snapping pictures of her.

‘I don’t want you to take any more pictures of me.’

The photographer flinched as if she had slapped him and put his camera down. Tea-Bag wondered if she had made a mistake. Both of the men in front of her seemed friendly and their eyes were not red from exhaustion. Tea-Bag quickly decided to retreat.

‘You may speak to me,’ she said. ‘And you may take your pictures.’

The photographer immediately started working again. Some children who were drifting around the camp stopped and looked at them. I’m speaking for them, Tea-Bag thought. Not only for me but for them.

‘So how are things here?’ the reporter asked.

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘What it sounds like. Life here in the camp.’

‘I am treated with compassion and humanity, I am happy to say.’

‘It must be terrible to be in the camp. How long have you been here?’

‘A few months. A thousand years.’

‘What is your name?’

‘Tea-Bag.’

The man asking the questions had still not said anything that could provide a door for her, a door through which she could escape.

‘Excuse me?’

‘My name is Tea-Bag. Just as yours is Paul.’

‘Per. Where do you come from?’

Careful now, she thought. I don’t know what he wants from me. He may have a door somewhere but he could also be someone who wants to send me back, someone who wants to reveal my secrets.

‘I almost drowned. Something hit me in the head. I have lost my memory.’

‘Have you been examined by a doctor?’

Tea-Bag shook her head. Why was he asking all these questions? What did he want? She became suspicious again and tried to retreat.

‘I am treated with compassion and humanity by the Spanish authorities.’

‘How can you say that? You’re a prisoner here!’

He has a door, Tea-Bag decided. He is simply trying to determine if I am worthy of it. She had to restrain herself so she would not throw herself into his arms and embrace him.

‘Where do you come from?’ Now she was the one asking the questions.

‘Sweden,’ he said.

What kind of place was that? A town, a country, the sign on a door? She didn’t know. The names of so many cities and countries were constantly circulating around the camp like swarms of bees. But had she heard the name ‘Sweden’ before? Maybe, she couldn’t be sure.

‘Sweden?’

‘That’s in Scandinavia, in northern Europe. That’s where we come from. We are writing a series on people without faces, refugees