Read Online Sail of Stone by Åke Edwardson - Free Book Online Page A

she realized that it wasn’t a joke. She had realized so much about her father, and about her mother, when she returned. Her father’s gods had been many, and they still were. They waited out there in the light and the dark, during the horribly hot days and the dreadfully cold nights. He spoke with the gods, sometimes with the spirits, but the difference between gods and spirits seemed to be gratuitous.
    Some spirits were strong and powerful, like a lion that kills.
    Others were weaker, more diffuse, like the spirits of trees.
    Everything we encounter has power, her father had said. A lion, a snake, lightning, a river. All of them can kill people, and therefore they must be inhabited by strong spirits.
    The sea can kill people, she suddenly thought now. Why did she think of that? There was no sea around Burkina Faso.
    Her father had spoken about language. The most important art form in Africa was the art of speaking. In each language there are more than one thousand sayings, he had said.
    Dear God, she had thought on the Air France plane home, where do I come from? Where do I come from? Who am I?
    What will I become?
    She took another little sip of the wine, which was heavy, with a scent of oak and leather.
    What will I become?
    I am over thirty, and black as sin. There are other people like me in this white, innocent country. The people are white, and it’s white on the ground. Mom would have wanted to see me together with a nice black man. She did get to for a little while, but not as long as she wanted. Now none of that is interesting anymore.
    She thought of the dinner in the hotel restaurant again, the last one she and Dad had had together. The colonial clatter in the big room. The sand that refused to leave, despite determined appeals from the staff and guests. The wind that came in through the openings in the gigantic wooden blinds in the ridiculously big windows; ridiculously big because they offered no protection.
    The gods know that you are needed, Aneta, her father had said, and he had had a smile that only his daughter could see. Competent detectives are important in a modern country. Haven’t people had enough of police in this country? she’d asked. Those aren’t real police, he answered, and he knew everything about that while she knew nothing. Those aren’t good police. A proper society needs good police; then it will be a society that contains goodness.
    Had he been joking? It hadn’t sounded like it. What did it mean? In recent years, even before he returned, his speech and thoughts had begun to resemble aphorisms and riddles, as though he could see something no one else could see, or remembered things that were no longer to be found in anyone else. She had found it fascinating, and frightening. Her mother had found it crazy. Or pretended that it was not worth listening to.
    A proper society needs good police; then it will be a society that contains goodness. Suck on that, Aneta. Perhaps she would make a motionto the police conference suggesting that the sentence be engraved in gold or silver, maybe on their caps, even the ones on exhibit in the police building: a sentence everyone could rally around. Goodness. We all strived for it, and we caught those who didn’t in our arms and took them to a better place.
    That’s what our duty here in this world amounts to. She took another sip of wine. It’s nothing to joke about, nothing to become cynical about. And still it looks silly as hell in print, and sounds even worse out loud. Goodness looks sillier than evil in print and out loud.
    Evil is you and I. That’s what she thought now. It was a true thought, and it was her own.
    At night she dreamed of doors that closed and never opened. She saw faces with one side that laughed while the other cried. Faces became icons. Someone spoke to her and said that she couldn’t trust anyone. Not even you? she asked, because she was feeling secure at that point in the dream.
    Her father said to her that there