A Treacherous Paradise

1

It is 1904. June. A scorching hot tropical dawn.

In this far distant here and now, a Swedish steamship lies motionless in the gentle swell. On board are thirty-one crew members, one of them a woman. Her name is Hanna Lundmark, née Renström, and she is working on board as a cook.

In all, thirty-two people were due to make the voyage to Australia with a cargo of Swedish heartwood, and planks for saloon floors and the living rooms of rich sheep farmers.

One of the crew has just died. He was a mate, and married to Hanna.

He was young, and keen to go on living. But despite being warned by Captain Svartman, he went ashore one day while they were topping up their supplies of coal in one of the desert harbours to the south of Suez. He was infected with one of the deadly fevers that are always a threat on the African coast.

When it dawned on him that he was going to die, he started howling in fear.

Neither of the men present at his deathbed — Captain Svartman and Halvorsen, the Ship’s Carpenter — could make out any last words that he uttered. He didn’t even say anything to Hanna, who was about to be widowed after a marriage lasting only one month. He died screaming and — eventually, just before the end — roaring in terror.

His name was Lars Johan Jakob Antonius Lundmark. Hanna is still mourning his death, having been devastated by what happened.

It is now dawn the day after his death. The ship is not moving. It has heaved to because there will shortly be a burial at sea. Captain Svartman does not want to delay matters. There is no ice on board to keep the corpse cold.

Hanna is standing aft with a slop pail in her hand. She is short in stature, high-breasted, with friendly eyes. Her hair is brown and gathered in a tight bun at the back of her head.

She is not beautiful. But in a strange way she radiates an aura suggesting that she is a totally genuine human being.

The here and now. She is here. On the sea, on board a steamship with two funnels. A cargo of timber, on its way to Australia. Home port: Sundsvall.

The ship is called Lovisa. She was built at the Finnboda shipyard in Stockholm. But her home port has always been on the northern Swedish coast.

She was first owned by a shipping company in Gävle, but it went bankrupt after a series of failed speculative deals. And she was then bought by a company based in Sundsvall. In Gävle she was called Matilda, after the shipowner’s wife, who played Chopin with clumsy fingers. Now she is called Lovisa, after the new owner’s youngest daughter.

One of the part-owners is called Forsman. He is the one who arranged for Hanna Lundmark to be given a job on board. Although Forsman has a piano in his house, there is nobody who can play it. Nevertheless, when the piano tuner comes on one of his regular visits, Forsman makes a point of being there to listen.

But now the mate Lars Johan Jakob Antonius Lundmark has died, killed by a raging fever.

It is as if the swell of the sea has become paralysed. The ship is lying there motionless, as if it were holding its breath.

That’s exactly what I imagine death to be like, Hanna Lundmark thought. A sudden stillness, unexpected, coming from nowhere. Death is like the wind. A sudden shift into the lee.

The lee of death. And then nothing else.

2

At that very moment Hanna is possessed by a memory. It comes from nowhere.

She recalls her father, his voice, which had become no more than a whisper by the end of his life. It was as if he were asking her to preserve and cherish what he said as a valuable secret.

A mucky angel. That’s what you are.

He said that to her just before he died. It was as if he were trying to present her with a gift, despite the fact — or maybe because of the fact — that he owned next to nothing.

Hanna Renström, my beloved daughter, you are an angel — a right mucky one, but an angel even so.

What exactly is this memory that she has? What were his exact words? Did he say she was stony, or mucky? Did he leave it up to her to choose, to decide for herself? Stony broke, or mucky? Now as she recalls that moment, she thinks he called her a mucky angel.

It is a distant memory, faded. She is so far distant from her father and his death. From there, and from then: a remote house on a bank of the cold, brown waters of the River Ljungan in the silent forests of northern Sweden. He passed away hunched up and contorted by pain on a sofa bed in a kitchen they had barely been able to keep warm.

He died surrounded by cold, she thinks. It was extremely cold in January, 1899, when he stopped breathing.

That was over five years ago.

The memory of her father and his words about an angel disappear just as quickly as they came. It takes her only a few seconds to return to the present from the past.

She knows that we always make the most remarkable journeys deep down inside ourselves, where there is no time or space.

Perhaps that memory was designed to help her? To throw her the rope she needs in order to climb over the walls confining her within an atmosphere of unremitting sorrow?

But she can’t run away. The ship has been transformed into an impregnable fortress.

There is no escape. Her husband really is dead.

Death is a talon that refuses to release its grip.

3

The pressure in the boilers has been reduced. The pistons are motionless, the engines ticking over. Hanna is standing by the rail with her slop pail in her hand. She is going to empty it over the stern. The mess-room boy had wanted to take it from her when she was on her way out of the galley, but she had clung on to it, protected it. Even if this is the day she is going to watch her husband’s body being tipped into the depths of the ocean, sewn into a canvas sailcloth, she does not want to neglect her duties.

When she looks up from the pail, which is filled with eggshells, it feels as if the heat is scratching at her face. Somewhere in the mist to starboard is Africa. Although she cannot see the faintest trace of land, she thinks she can smell it.

He who is now dead has told her about it. About the steaming, almost corrosive stench of decay which you find everywhere in the tropics.

He had already made several voyages to various destinations. He had managed to learn a few things. But not the most important thing: how to survive.

He would never complete this voyage. He died at the age of twenty-four.

It’s as if he was trying to warn her, Hanna thinks. But she doesn’t know what he was warning her about. And now he’s dead.

A dead man can never answer questions.

Somebody materializes silently by her side. It’s her husband’s closest friend on board, the Norwegian carpenter Halvorsen. She doesn’t know if he has a first name, despite the fact that they have been together on the same ship for more than two months. He is never called anything but Halvorsen, a serious man who is said to go down on his knees to be readmitted into the Church every time he comes home to Brønnøysund after a few years at sea, and then signs on again when his faith can no longer sustain him.

He has large hands, but his face is kind, almost feminine. His stubble seems to have been painted on and powdered by somebody trying to be cruel to him.

‘I gather there’s something you need to ask about,’ he says.

His voice sings. It sounds as if he’s humming when he speaks.

‘The depth,’ Hanna says. ‘Where will Lundmark’s grave be?’

Halvorsen shakes his head doubtfully. She suddenly has the impression that he is like a restless bird about to fly away.

He leaves her without a word. But she knows he will find out the answer to her question.

How deep will the grave be? Is there a sea bottom where her husband can rest in peace, in his sewn-up canvas shroud? Or is there no bottom, does the sea continue downwards into infinity?

She empties her pail of eggshells, watches the white seabirds dive down into the water to capture their prey, then wipes the sweat from her brow with the towel she has tied to her apron.

Then she gives way to the inevitable, and screams.

Some of the birds riding the upwinds, waiting for a new slop pail to be emptied, flap their wings and strive to escape from the sorrowful howl that hits them like hailstones.

The mess-room boy Lars peers out in horror from the galley door. He is holding a cracked egg in his hand, observes her furtively. Death embarrasses him.

Needless to say, she knows what he is thinking. She’s going to jump now, she’s going to leave us because her sorrow is too great to bear.

Her scream has been heard by many on board. Two sweaty deckhands naked from the waist up stand by the side of the galley and gape at her, next to where one of the long hawsers is coiled up like a gigantic snake.

Hanna merely shakes her head, grits her teeth and goes into the galley with her empty pail. No, she is not going to climb over the rail. She has spent the whole of her life keeping a stiff upper lip, and she intends to continue doing so.

The heat of the galley hits her hard. Standing next to the stoves is similar to the life of the stokers down below in the engine room. Women in the vicinity of boilers and lighthouses brings bad luck.

The older generation of seafarers is horrified by the thought of having women on board. Their presence means trouble. And also arguments and jealousy among the men. But when shipowner Forsman announced that he wanted Hanna to join the crew, Captain Svartman agreed. He didn’t worry too much about superstition.

Hanna picks up an egg, cracks it, drops the contents into the frying pan and throws the shell into the slop pail. Thirty living sailors must have their breakfast. She tries to think only about the eggs, not about the funeral that is in the offing. She is on board as cook: that situation has not changed as a result of the death of her husband.

That’s the way it is. She is alive, but Lundmark is dead.

4

Shortly afterwards Halvorsen returns and asks her to follow him: Captain Svartman is waiting.

‘We’re going to sound the depth,’ says Halvorsen. ‘If our ropes and lines aren’t long enough, the captain will select another place.’

She finishes frying the four eggs she has in the pan, then accompanies him as bidden. She suddenly feels dizzy, and stumbles: but she doesn’t fall, she manages to keep control of herself.

Captain Svartman comes from a long and unbroken line of seafarers, she is aware of that. He’s an old man, turned sixty. The tip of the little finger on his left hand is missing: nobody knows if that is congenital, or the result of an accident.

On two occasions he has been on a sailing ship that sank. On one of those occasions he and all the crew were rescued, on the other only he and the ship’s dog survived. And when the dog reached dry land it lay down in the sand and died.

Hanna’s dead husband once said that in fact the real Captain Svartman also died, together with the ship’s dog. After that catastrophe, the captain stayed on land for many years. Nobody knows what he did. Rumour has it that for part of that time he worked as a navvy and was a member of the vanguard sent out by state-owned Swedish Railways to build the controversial Inlandsbana — a railway line linking the south of Sweden with the north of the country following an inland route rather than the existing coastal railway: the Swedish Parliament was still arguing about it.

Then he suddenly went to sea again, now as the captain of a steamship. He was one of the select few who didn’t abandon the seafaring life once sailing ships began to die out, but chose to be part of modern developments.

He has never told anybody about those years he spent away from the sea — what he did, what he thought, not even where he lived.

He seldom says anything beyond the necessary minimum; he has as little faith in people’s ability to listen as he has in the reliability of the sea. He has lavender-coloured flowers in pots in his cabin, which only he is allowed to water.

So he has always been an uncommunicative sea captain. And now he has to establish the depth at which one of his dead mates will be buried.

Captain Svartman bows as Hanna approaches him. Despite the heat he is dressed in his full uniform. Buttons fastened, shirt pressed.

Standing next to him is the bosun, Peltonen, a Finn. He is holding a plumb bob, attached to a long, thin line.

Captain Svartman nods, Peltonen throws the bob over the rail and allows it to sink. The line slides between his fingers. Nobody speaks. At one point there is a black thread tied round the line.

‘A hundred metres,’ says Peltonen.

His voice is shrill. His words bounce away over the swell.

After seven black threads, 700 metres, the line comes to an end. The plumb bob is still hanging down there in the water, it hasn’t yet reached the bottom. Peltonen ties a knot and attaches the line to a new roll. There too is a black thread marking every hundred metres.

At 1,935 metres, the line goes slack. The bob has reached the sea bottom. Hanna now knows the depth of her husband’s grave.

Peltonen starts to haul up the line, winding it round a specially carved wooden board. Captain Svartman takes off his uniform cap and wipes the sweat from his brow. Then he checks his watch. A quarter to seven.

‘Nine o’clock,’ he says to Hanna. ‘Before the heat becomes too oppressive.’

She goes to the cabin she has shared with her husband. His was the upper bunk. They often shared the lower one. Without her knowing about it, somebody has taken away his blanket.

The mattress is lying there uncovered. She sits down on the edge of her own bunk and contemplates the bulkhead on the other side of the cramped cabin. She knows that she must now force herself to think.

How did she come to end up here? On a ship, swaying gently on a distant ocean. After all, she was born in a place about as far away from the sea as it’s possible to get. There was a rowing boat on the River Ljungan, but that was all. She sometimes accompanied her father in it when he went fishing. But when she said she wanted to learn to swim — she was about seven or eight at the time — he told her he couldn’t allow it. It would be a waste of time. If she wanted to bathe, she could do that by the bank of the river. If she wanted to get over to the other side, there was a boat and also a bridge.

She lies down on her bunk and closes her eyes. She travels back in her memory as far as she can, back into her childhood where the shadows grow longer and longer.

Maybe that is where she can hide away until the moment comes when her dead husband disappears into the sea for good.

Leaves her. For ever.

5

Her childhood, deep down there. As if at the bottom of an abyss.

That was Hanna’s first memory: the cold, writhing and twisting away inside the cavities in the wooden walls, close to her face as she slept. She would wake up over and over again, and feel how thin the gap was between the newspapers pasted on to the walls — there was no money for wallpaper in the squalid house in which she grew up — and the cold that was constantly trying to gnaw its way through the wood.

Every spring her father worked his way over the house, as if it were a ship on a slipway, patching and mending wherever possible, before the onset of the next winter.

The cold was a sea, the house a ship, and the winter an endless waiting. He would keep on filling the holes and gaps until the frosts arrived in full force. Then it was not possible to do any more, they would have to make the best of it. The house was launched into the winter yet again, and if there were still any leaks allowing the cold to seep through, that was too bad: there was nothing else he could do.

Her father was Arthur Olaus Angus Renström, a lumberjack who worked for Iggesund and shared a log hoist with the Salomonsson brothers who lived further down the river. He worked all out in the forest for next to nothing. He was one of the many men of the woods who never knew if the money they earned for their efforts would be sufficient to live on.

Hanna remembered her father as strong, and with a friendly smile. But also at times melancholy, lost in thoughts she knew nothing about. She sometimes had the impression that he had trolls in his head when he sat at the kitchen table, seemingly in a different world, with his hands like lead weights in his lap. He was sitting there in his own house, with the rest of his family, but nevertheless he wasn’t there at all. He was in a different world where stones had turned into trolls, reindeer moss had become hair, and the wind whispering through the pines was the chattering of voices of the dead.

He often used to speak about them. All those who had lived in the past. It frightened him to think about how few were living in the here and now, and how many more were already dead.

There was an illness, an epidemic that all women knew the name of: thumping sickness. It broke out when men had been hitting the bottle and thumped everybody within range — mostly their children and the women who tried to protect them. Her father certainly did drink to excess at times, albeit not very often. But he was never violent. And so his wife, Hanna’s mother, didn’t worry so much about the schnapps as about his melancholy. When he drank he became maudlin and wanted to sing hymns. Despite the fact that at other times he was keen to burn down churches and drive out the priests into the forests.

‘Without shoes,’ Hanna recalled him shouting. ‘Chase the priests out into the forests without shoes when the cold is at its worst. That’s where they should be banished to, into the forests, barefoot.’

Hanna’s maternal grandmother, who lived in a draughty cottage on the edge of Funäsdalen, scared the living daylights out of her when she talked about her damned son-in-law who would condemn all his offspring to hell as a result of his blasphemous prattle. There they would find in store for them scalding temperatures and sulphurous gases and red-hot coals under the soles of their feet. Her grandmother preached threats and punishments with evil eyes and didn’t hesitate to scare her grandchildren so much that they used to burst into tears and were unable to sleep at night. Hanna thought that the worst punishment of all was when her mother forced her to keep on visiting her grandmother.

She remembered how Grandma was always angry. The old woman never stopped complaining about her daughter. She couldn’t forgive Hanna’s mother for marrying that good-for-nothing Renström, despite her warnings. Why had she fallen head over heels for that man who had nothing to commend himself? He was small, bow-legged and bald even before he celebrated his twenty-fifth birthday. And he had Finnish blood in his veins, and he came from the depths of the forests — from as far away as Värmland, where it was impossible to distinguish between day and night.

Why couldn’t she have picked out a man from Hede or Bruksvallarna or somewhere where honest folk lived?

Hanna’s mother was called Elin. She submitted to her ancient mother, never contradicted her, accepted everything her mother said without a word of protest. Hanna could understand that it was possible to love somebody who treated you badly, no matter how odd that sounded. That must have been the relationship between Grandma and Elin.

Elin.

Hanna had always thought that it was a name that didn’t really suit her mother. Somebody called Elin ought to be slim and delicately formed, with hands like milk and fair hair hanging down over her back. But Elin Wallén, Elin Renström after her marriage, was powerfully built with lank reddish-brown hair, a large nose and teeth that were not quite regular. They gave the impression of wanting to jump out of her mouth and run away. Elin Renström was certainly not a beautiful woman. And she knew it. And perhaps she also regretted it, Hanna sometimes thought when she became old enough to take a critical look at her own face in her father’s cracked shaving mirror.

But her mother was by no means subdued as a result of her less than pretty appearance. She had qualities that she made the most of. She made up for her shortcomings by always keeping a strict eye on her family’s cleanliness. No matter how draughty and cold her house was, she made sure the floors, ceilings and walls were kept spotlessly clean; and the same applied to her children and her own body. Elin hunted down lice like a battalion of soldiers attacking an enemy. She filled and emptied the tin tub in which they all bathed, carried the water up from the river, heated it over the fire until it became warm, scrubbed everybody down, then carried up more buckets of water with which to wash all the dirty linen that was always piling up.

The four children also watched in admiration as their mother handled their father when he had came home tired and dirty from the forest. She would wash him in a way which suggested she was engaged in an act of eternal love. And he seemed to enjoy the touch of her hands as she scrubbed and dried him, clipped his rough and misshapen nails, and shaved him so closely that his cheeks became as smooth as those of a baby.

But Hanna’s first memory was the cold. The cold and the snow, which began to fall around the end of September, and didn’t release its grip until early June, when the last white patches finally melted away.

And of course there was also the poverty. That was not a memory as such, but the reality in which she lived while growing up. And it was also the thing that eventually forced her to leave her home by the river.

Hanna was seventeen years old then, her father was already dead, and she spent all her time helping her mother with her brothers and sisters since she was the eldest. They were poor, but they managed to keep the worst of their destitution outside the walls of their house.

Until the year 1903. That summer was afflicted by a long and severe drought, and then an early frost which killed off whatever the drought had failed to burn up.

That was the year when her life changed for ever.

The horizon had previously been a distant phenomenon. Now it came close. Like a threat.

6

Even if she didn’t want to remember it, it was a day she could never forget.

The middle of August, low clouds, an early morning. Hanna accompanied her mother to look at the devastation. Everything shrivelled and burnt. The earth was strangely silent. The flour they had left would barely last them until Advent. Nor would they have enough hay to feed their only cow over the winter.

As they walked through the dead field, on a slope down to the river, Elin saw her mother cry for the first time. All those long weeks while her father had been ill in bed and had eventually died, Elin had merely closed her eyes, shut out the inevitable end and the hopeless loneliness that was now in store for her. But she hadn’t cried, hadn’t screamed. Hanna had often thought about how her mother was directing all her pain inwards, to where she had hidden away somewhere inside her a secret source of strength that overcame all her pains and troubles.

It was then, as they were walking over the dead field and realized that destitution was now on their doorstep, that Elin started talking about how her daughter would have to go away. There was no future for Hanna there by the river. She would have to move to the coast in order to earn her living. When Elin and her husband had come to the bank of the river and taken over the unpromising little smallholding from one of her uncles, they’d had no choice. It was 1883, a mere sixteen years after the last great famine that had devastated Sweden. If famine was now on its way back, Hanna would have to leave while there was still time.

They were standing at the edge of the forest, where the silent field came to an end.

‘Are you chasing me away?’ Hanna asked.

Elin stroked her nose, as she always did when she was embarrassed.

‘I can cope with three children,’ she said, ‘but not four. You are grown up now, you can look after yourself, and make things easier both for you and for me. I don’t chase my children away. I just want to give you the opportunity of living your life. If you stay here all you can do is hope to survive, nothing more.’

‘What can I do down by the coast that would be of any use to anybody?’

‘The same as you do here. Look after children, work with your hands. There is always a demand for maids in towns.’

‘Who says so?’

It wasn’t her intention to contradict her mother, but Elin took it as impertinence and took tight hold of her arm.

‘I say so, and you must believe me when I say that I mean every word that passes my lips. I’m not doing it because it gives me any pleasure, but because I have to.’

She let go of Hanna’s arm, as if she had been guilty of assault and was now regretting it.

It dawned on Hanna that what her mother was doing was something extremely difficult.

She never forgot that moment. It was right then, and in that very place — at the edge of the grim landscape of famine, standing beside her mother who had just wept for the first time in her presence — that Hanna realized that she was who she was, and nobody else.

She was Hanna, and irreplaceable. Neither her body nor her thoughts could be replaced by anybody else. And it occurred to her that her father, who was now dead, had been just like her: a person who could not be replaced by anybody else.

Is this what it means to be an adult? she thought, her face turned away because she had the feeling that her mother could read her thoughts. Exchanging the insecurity of a child for a different unknown — the knowledge that the only possible answers are the ones you can provide yourself?

They returned to the house, which was hidden away in a copse comprising a few birch trees and a single mountain ash. Her brother and sisters were indoors, despite the fact that this autumn day was not particularly cold. But they played less and tended to be quiet when they were hungry. Their life was a never-ending wait for food, and not much else.

They stopped outside the door, as if Elin had decided never to allow her daughter inside again.

‘My uncle Axel lives in Sundsvall,’ she said. ‘Axel Andreas Wallén. He works in the docks. He’s a nice man, and he and his wife Dora don’t have any children. They had two boys, but both of them died, and after that they didn’t have any more. Axel and Dora will help you. They won’t turn you away.’

‘I don’t want to go to them as a beggar,’ said Hanna.

The slap came without warning. Afterwards, Hanna thought the blow was reminiscent of the impact from a bird of prey diving down at her cheek.

Elin might possibly have slapped her before, but in that case it would have been triggered mainly by fear. If Hanna had wandered off alone to the river in the spring when it was a raging torrent, and risked falling in and being drowned. But now Elin hit her as a result of irritation. It was the first time.

It was a slap given by a grown-up person to another grown-up. Who would understand why.

‘I don’t abandon my daughter in order to make her a beggar,’ said Elin angrily. ‘I only have your best interests at heart. There’s nothing for you here.’

Hanna had tears in her eyes. Not because of the pain — she had experienced much worse pain than that in her life.

The slap she had received confirmed what she had just been thinking: now she was alone in the world. She would have to leave and travel eastward, towards the coast, and she would never be able to return. What she left behind would sink deeper into oblivion for every metre a sleigh’s runners whisked her away.

It was early autumn, 1903. Hanna Renström was seventeen years old, and would be eighteen on 12 December.

A few months later she would leave her home for ever.

7

Hanna thought to herself: the time of sagas and make-believe is over. Now it’s time for real-life stories.

She realized that when Elin told her what was in store for her. It sometimes happened that businessmen from the coast who travelled over the mountains in winter to Norway for the Røros market didn’t take the usual and shortest route back home, along the River Ljusnan and down to Karböle. Some of them headed northwards after crossing the Sweden — Norway border and then, if the weather permitted it, turned off via Flatruet and along the River Ljungan so that they could do business in the villages on the riverbanks.

There was one businessman in particular, Jonathan Forsman, who usually travelled home via the villages north of Flatruet.

‘He has a big sleigh,’ said Elin. ‘On the way home it’s never as heavily laden as it is when he’s on his way to Røros. He’s bound to be able to make room for you. And he’ll leave you in peace. He won’t try to make advances to you.’

Hanna looked doubtfully at her. How could Elin be so sure? Hanna was well aware what life had in store for her, she had never been totally devoid of other young girls to talk to. Not least the girls who used to act as maids in the shacks up in the mountains when the farmers’ and shepherds’ flocks were grazing in their summer pastures: they had all kinds of strange tales to tell with a mixture of giggles and badly concealed discomfort. Hanna knew what it was like to blush, and what could happen inside her body, especially in the evenings, just before she fell asleep.

But that was all. How could Elin know what might or might not happen on a long sleigh-ride to the distant coast?

She asked her straight out.

‘He’s seen the light,’ said Elin promptly. ‘He used to be an awful man, just like most of those old devils with their sleighs. But since he became a Christian he’s a sort of good Samaritan. He’ll let you travel with him and won’t even ask for payment. And he’ll lend you one of his fur coats so that you won’t freeze.’

But Elin couldn’t be absolutely sure if he would come, or when. The usual time was shortly before Christmas, but there had been occasions when he didn’t turn up until into the New Year. And he had been known not to come at all.

‘He might also be dead, of course,’ said Elin.

When a sleigh set off and was swallowed up by flurries of snow, you never knew whether that might be the last you ever saw of a person, no matter how young or old he was.

Hanna would be ready to travel at any time after her birthday on 12 December. Jonathan Forsman was always in a hurry, never stayed anywhere longer than necessary. Unlike people who always had no end of time to spare, he was an important person and hence was always in a hurry.

‘He generally comes in the afternoon,’ said Elin. ‘He comes out of the forest to the north, heading southwards along the sleigh-tracks that skirt the edge of the bog and lead down to the river and the valleys.’

Every afternoon Hanna would go out and gaze in the direction of the forest as darkness began to fall. She sometimes thought she could hear the bells of a horse-drawn sleigh in the distance, but one never appeared. The forest door remained closed.

She slept badly all the time she was worrying and waiting, kept waking up and had incoherent dreams that frightened her, although she didn’t really understand why. But often her dreams were as white as snow: empty and silent.

One of her dreams kept recurring and haunting her; she was lying in the sofa bed with two of her siblings: the youngest of the family’s children, Olaus, and the sister closest to her in age, Vera, twelve years old. She could feel the warm bodies of her brother and sister up against her own; but she knew that if she were to open her eyes they would turn out to be different children lying there, unknown to her. And the moment she set eyes on them they would die.

Then she would wake up, and realize to her great relief that it had all been a dream. She would often lie there awake, watching the blue moonlight shining in through the low windows covered in ice crystals. Then stretch out her hand and feel the wooden wall and the newspaper covering it. Right next to her was the cold, writhing and twisting away in the ancient timber.

The cold is like an animal, she thought. An animal tethered in its stall. An animal wanting to break out.

The dream had a meaning that she didn’t understand. But it must have something to do with the journey she would have to make. What would be in store for her? What would be demanded of her? She felt awkward in both body and soul when she tried to imagine people living in a town. If only her father had still been alive: he would have been able to explain it to her, and prepare her for it. He had once been to Stockholm, and he’d also been to another big and remarkable town called Arboga. He could have told her that she didn’t need to be afraid.

Elin came from remote Funäsdalen and had never been anywhere else, apart from the short journey northwards with the man who became her husband.

Nevertheless, she was the one who had to answer when Hanna asked her questions. There simply wasn’t anybody else.

But Elin’s answers? Vague, taciturn. She knew so little.

8

One day at the beginning of November, when they were at the edge of the forest with an axe and a saw, collecting firewood for the winter, Hanna asked her mother about the sea. What did it look like? Did it run along a sort of giant furrow, like the river? Was it the same colour? Was it always so deep that you couldn’t reach the bottom?

Elin paused, held her aching back, and looked at her long and hard before answering.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘The sea is like a big lake, I think. I suppose there are waves. But I just don’t know if the sea has currents.’

‘But surely Renström must have told you? He said he’d been to sea, didn’t he?’

‘It might not have been completely true. Everything he said might have only happened inside his head. But all he ever said about the sea is that it was big.’

Elin bent down to pick up the twigs and branches they had sawed and chopped off. But Hanna didn’t want to give up just yet. A child stopped asking questions when it had the feeling that enough was enough: but she was grown up now, she had the right to go on asking.

‘I have no idea what is in store for me,’ she said. ‘Will I be living in a house with other people? Will I be sharing a bed with somebody else?’

Elin scowled and dropped a bundle of sawn-off branches into their birch-bark basket.

‘You are asking too many questions,’ she said. ‘I can’t tell you what you can expect to find. But there is no future for you here. At least there are people who can help you there.’

‘I only want to know,’ said Hanna.

‘Stop asking now,’ said Elin. ‘I’m getting a headache from all your questions. I don’t have any answers.’

They returned in silence to the house from whose chimney a thin column of smoke was rising vertically into the pale sky. Olaus and Vera were looking after the fire. But both Elin and Hanna made sure that they were never any further away from the house than would prevent them from climbing up on to a high rock, taking a look at the chimney and establishing that the fire had not gone out. Or that nothing even worse had happened: that it hadn’t crept out of the open hearth and begun jumping around the room like a madman.

It was snowing at night now, and there was frost every morning. But the really heavy snowfalls that never lasted for less than three days had still not come creeping over the western mountains. And Hanna knew that if there wasn’t sufficient snow, no sleigh would be able to approach through the forests from the main routes further south.

But a few days later the snow finally arrived. As almost always happened, it crept up silently during the night. When Hanna got up to light the fire, Elin was standing by the door which she had opened slightly.

She stood there motionless, staring out. The ground outside was white. There were low drifts against the walls of the house. Hanna could see the tracks of crows in the snow, perhaps also of a mouse and a hare.

It was still snowing.

‘This snow’s going to lay,’ said Elin. ‘It’s winter now. There’ll be no bare ground again until the spring, at the end of May or the beginning of June.’

It continued snowing the whole of the following week. At first the cold wasn’t too severe, only a few degrees below zero. But once the snow had stopped falling the sky became clear and the temperature dropped significantly.

They had a thermometer that Renström had bought at some market or other a long time ago. Or perhaps he had won it in an arm-wrestling competition, since he was so strong? The thermometer had an attachment enabling it to be fixed to an outside wall, but it was treated with great care: there was always a risk that somebody might be careless and break the little tube containing the dangerous mercury.

Extremely carefully Elin placed it out in the snow, at the side of the house that was always in shade. Now that the seriously cold weather had arrived, it was more than thirty degrees below zero for three days in succession.

During the coldest days they did nothing but tend the fire, make sure the cow and the two goats had something to chew at, and eat something of the little food they had for themselves. They used up all their strength in efforts to keep the cold at bay. Every extra degree below zero was like yet another enemy army added to those already besieging them.

Hanna could see that Elin was scared. What would happen if something broke? A window, or a wall? They had nowhere to flee to, apart from the little cattle shed where the animals were kept. But they were also freezing cold, and it was not possible to make a fire there.

It was during these bitterly cold days that Hanna felt for the first time that the imminent change in her life might not be so bad after all. An opening in a dark forest where sunlight suddenly shone down into an unexpected glade. A life that might possibly be better than the one she was living now, besieged by the armies of cold and famine? Her fear of the unknown suddenly became a longing for what might be in store for her. Away from the forests, in the fertile plains to the south-east.

But she said nothing about this to Elin. She remained silent about her vague longing.

9

On 17 December, shortly after half past two in the afternoon, they heard the sound of sleigh-bells coming from the forest. It was Vera who heard the horse. She had gone out to see if the hens had laid any eggs, despite the onset of winter. As she returned empty-handed along the narrow passage that had been dug between the metre-high drifts, she heard the bells. Elin and Hanna came running out when she shouted. The worst of the cold had receded, and it had been thawing during the day: but now there was a covering of new powdery snow over the frozen crust after a snowfall during the night.

The sound of the bells came closer, then they caught sight of the black horse looking like a troll or a bear at the edge of the forest. The driver, wrapped in furs, tightened the reins and came to a halt just outside the cottage, which was surrounded by deep snow and misery.

By then Elin had already told Hanna what she had expected to hear.

‘It’s Jonathan Forsman.’

‘How can you be sure?’

‘Nobody else has a black horse like his. And nobody else wears so many furs.’

Hanna could see that was true when the man in the sleigh had stood up and they all entered the cottage. He was wearing furs from both bears and wolves, had been sitting on a reindeer skin in his sleigh, and had a red fox fur wrapped round his neck. When he wormed his way out of all the furs, which were dripping with snow and sweat, it was like watching a man who had been sitting for too long in front of a fire. His face was red and unshaven, his sweaty hair was stuck to his forehead: but Hanna could see that Elin was right — the man who was going to take her away was neither malicious nor threatening. He was friendly, sat down on a stool beside the fire and gave Elin a present: a hymn book he had bought for her in Røros.

‘It’s in Norwegian,’ he said. ‘But the covers are attractive, genuine leather, and the gold embossing sparkles if you keep it clean. Besides, Elin Renström, you can hardly read in any case! Or am I wrong?’

‘I can puzzle out the words,’ said Elin. ‘If that amounts to reading, then I can.’

It was only in the evening, when the younger children were in bed, that Elin broached the subject of Hanna’s journey. They were sitting round the fire. Forsman was resting his enormous hands. Before the youngsters had gone to sleep, he had sung a hymn in his deep, resonant voice. Hanna had never heard a man sing like that before. The vicar who conducted services in Ljungdalen had a soft, squeaky voice. When he sung a hymn it sounded as if somebody was pinching him. But here was a man whose singing even silenced the cold that creaked and groaned in the walls.

Elin explained the situation. In just a few words, but nothing more was needed.

‘Can you take Hanna with you?’ she asked. ‘She has to go to Sundsvall, to relatives who will take care of her.’

Forsman listened thoughtfully.

‘Are you sure?’ he asked.

‘Why shouldn’t I be sure? What is there to be doubtful about?’

‘That your relatives will look after her? Are they on Renström’s side?’

‘No, my side. The Walléns. If it had been Renströms I’d never have dreamt of sending her.’

Forsman contemplated his hands.

‘How long ago was it?’ he asked eventually. ‘That you spoke about it?’

‘Four years come this spring.’

‘A lot could have happened during that time,’ said Forsman. ‘But I’ll take her with me in any case. So let’s just hope there’s somebody there who’s prepared to accept her.’

‘Surely they can’t all have died over the last four years,’ said Elin firmly. ‘Unless there’s been some kind of plague we haven’t heard about up here in the mountains.’

Forsman now took a good look at Hanna for the first time.

‘How old are you?’ he asked.

‘I celebrated my eighteenth birthday the other day.’

Forsman nodded. He asked no more questions. The fire continued burning.

That night Forsman slept on the floor in front of the fire. He lay on his various fur coats spread out on the floorboards, covered only by the reindeer skin. His horse had been squeezed into the cowshed with the cow and the goats.

Hanna lay awake for ages. No man had slept in their cottage since her father died. Now there was somebody else snoring and snuffling in his sleep.

Forsman groaned as he breathed in and out, as if he was dragging a heavy burden behind him.

The next day an occasional snowflake came floating down from the heavens. The mercury indicated minus two degrees. Shortly after eight in the morning Hanna sat down in the sleigh with the two bundles of belongings Elin had prepared for her. She had wrapped herself up in all the warm clothes she possessed, and Forsman wrapped a couple more furs around her — she could barely move.

Her brother and sisters wept when she hugged them and said goodbye, first one at a time and then all of them in chorus.

But Elin merely shook her hand. This was the way it had to be. Hanna had decided not to look back once she had sat down in the sleigh. She was weeping deep down inside when Forsman cracked his whip and the black horse started pulling the sleigh. But she didn’t show it. Not for anybody.

She thought about her father as they set off. It was as if he were also standing there, next to Elin, watching her leave.

He had returned, just for that moment. He wanted to be present when it happened.

It was 1903, the year when famine once again afflicted the north of Sweden.

10

The journey by sleigh from Ljungdalen to the coast was supposed to take five days. That is what Jonathan Forsman had told Elin, almost as if he were making a promise.

‘It won’t take any longer than that,’ he said. ‘The going is good, just right for the sleigh, and I don’t have many business calls to make on the way that could delay us. We’ll only stop to eat and sleep. We’ll follow the river, then turn off to the north and make our way through the forest to Sundsvall. It’ll take five days, no more.’

But the journey did take longer. As early as the second day, before they’d even got as far as the forest that marked the border between the provinces of Jämtland and Härjedalen, they were hit by a sudden snowstorm that blew up from the east and that Forsman hadn’t anticipated. The sky had been blue, it had been cold and the going was good: but suddenly the clouds had started to pile up. Even the black horse, whose name was Antero, had started to be restless.

They stopped at an inn in överhogdal. Hanna was given a bed in a room shared by the inn’s maidservants: but she ate at the same table as Forsman, and was served the same food as he had. That had never happened before in her life.

‘We’ll set off again tomorrow,’ he said after saying grace and checking to make sure that she clasped her hands in prayer properly.

But that night the stormy winds veered to the north and then decided to call a halt. The snowstorm stayed put. They were snowed in and stuck at the dreary inn. Half a metre of snow fell in less than four hours, and the wind resulted in drifts that in places were as high as the building’s roof ridge.

It was the afternoon of the fourteenth day of the journey, just as dusk was falling, that they arrived in Sundsvall. Hanna had been counting the days, but hadn’t realized that this evening was in fact New Year’s Eve. The following day it would be 1904.

Forsman seemed to think that everything associated with the New Year was important. He pushed the horse hard in order to make sure that they reached the centre of town before midnight. New Year’s Eve had never been anything special for Hanna. She had usually been fast asleep when the New Year began. She couldn’t recall either her father or Elin regarding the dawn of a new year as anything special that deserved to be marked by being awake at midnight, or celebrating in any other way.

The fact that they had spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day together seemed to mean nothing much, or perhaps nothing at all as far as Forsman was concerned. It was the New Year that was important.

The long sleigh journey had taken place in silence when they were travelling through the forests or over the barren plains. Occasionally Forsman had shouted something to the horse, but he had never spoken to Hanna. He sat in front of her in the sleigh like a forbidding wall.

But the last day of their journey was different. He turned round to shout at her, and she shouted back at him as loudly as she could, in order to make herself heard.

Jonathan Forsman regarded the New Year as something holy.

‘God has created the turn of the year to make us think about the time that has passed and the time that is to come,’ he shouted at her in the back of the sleigh.

Before he saw the light, he had always indulged in heathen pastimes on New Year’s Eve. He had heated lumps of lead in the open fire and then dipped them into cold water in order to interpret the shapes they made as forecasts of the future. And he had never dared to enter the New Year without being dead drunk.

But now he was enlightened, he shouted at her. He was no longer afraid of anything.

When they reached Sundsvall, the town was enveloped by darkness and cold. Forsman pulled up on the edge of the town, in fact. Hanna was not yet able to check her vision of what Sundsvall would look like with the reality. Most of it was still in store for her as she wriggled her way out of the furs and stepped out of the sleigh.

Forsman’s house was built of stone, and comprised two imposingly large storeys. As he pulled up, hordes of people came teeming out of the front gate and the lodge. Antero was led away, and the sleigh was taken care of. All the furs and other contents of the sleigh were carried into the house. Hanna was bewildered by everything that was happening all around her, all these unknown people staring at her, some of them openly, others surreptitiously. She was used to meeting unknown people one at a time. Sometimes it had been vagrants who had wandered up north on the banks of the river, sometimes individual travellers or people carrying axes and saws that her father had brought home with him from the forest. But never anything like this, this teeming crowd of unknown people.

Forsman noticed her discomfort, and bellowed out in a loud voice that the girl accompanying him was Hanna Renström, who would be visiting relations in Sundsvall. But tonight, New Year’s Eve, she would be a guest in his home.

By midnight Forsman had gathered together all his family and all his employees, including his grooms and maids. He opened wide a window in the large room that Hanna had gathered was called ‘the drawing room’ and shouted to everybody to be silent. The clock in Sundsvall’s church struck twelve. Hanna could see that Forsman was counting the chimes silently as his eyes glazed over.

To her horror she gathered that he was on the point of bursting into tears. Never in her life had she imagined that a grown man could weep. She had a lump in her throat, and realized that something important was in fact happening as the chiming of the clock, carried by the cold air, penetrated the drawing room through the open window. Once the chimes had finished, Forsman started to sing a hymn and all those assembled there joined in — including Hanna, although she did so furtively.

She spent that night in a room shared by three of the maids employed in the house of stone. She shared a bed with a girl called Berta, who was about her own age. Berta smelled less than absolutely clean, and Hanna suspected that she might well smell no better herself. Berta pushed and shoved, claimed most of the bed space, and informed Hanna glumly that she would have to be up by five o’clock, despite the fact that it was New Year’s Day and was more or less regarded as a Sunday. But she would have to make the fires and heat up the tiled stoves with the firewood the skivvies brought in.

Berta soon fell asleep. But Hanna lay awake, thinking that there was something missing. It was some time before she realized what it was.

There was no creaking in the stone walls. The cold didn’t penetrate the stone walls like it did in the timber-built house she had grown up in.

And it was only then, as she lay in bed inside stone walls, that it finally dawned upon her that she was now living in an unknown world. She could no longer reach out her hand and touch her siblings, or hear Elin’s heavy breathing as she slept soundly in her bed.

She was somewhere else now, somewhere that was completely new and unknown to her.

She tentatively placed her hand on Berta’s warm body. She missed her brother and sisters who had always been around her. She was on her own now, and she didn’t know how she would be able to cope with the void that surrounded her.

11

The following day Forsman sent Jukka, the most trusted of his servants, to help Hanna to locate her relatives. He had been given the address where they were thought to live by Elin, but Sundsvall was not a town where streets and house numbers could always be relied on.

Even worse was the fact that Forsman, who was confident he knew everybody in the town, had never heard of a family called Wallén. But he hadn’t told Elin that. He thought that perhaps they lived at one of the sawmills in the vicinity of Sundsvall.

The cold was less severe now. Hanna could feel that it was no longer biting into her skin the way it had done during the long sleigh journey.

Forsman went out into the street with them.

‘If you don’t find the family, bring her straight back here,’ he told Jukka, who was standing with his fur hat in his hand.

Hanna thought that Jukka was somewhat cowed and insecure when confronted by his enormous employer in his voluminous fur coat. He was certainly over sixty, but was nevertheless afraid, like a little child worried it might receive a beating.

She couldn’t understand why this was.

They set off. As soon as Forsman had gone back inside, Jukka was transformed. He spat and walked with a swagger, elbowing aside anyone who got in their way, and seemed to be in charge of the snow-covered and inadequately cleared street.

Hanna observed the town she had come to in the pale wintry light. For each stone-built house they passed, there seemed to be ten tumbledown little wooden shacks that had grown up out of the ground. Like mushrooms, she thought. If the stone houses were edible, the wooden shacks were the sort of fungi you stamp on and don’t put in your basket.

She felt worried all the time. Would she be able to fit in here? Or was she the kind of person who would never feel at home in this town?

And then she came to the sea — but that was nothing like what she had expected either. There was a harbour with lots of big ships, some with masts, others with black funnels. But the water didn’t go on for ever, as her father had said it did. She could see land in all directions, and no sign of open water beyond the ice and a network of open channels.

Jukka urged her to keep moving whenever she stopped. He seemed to have just as little time as his employer, and was always in a hurry.

They walked along the icy edge of the harbour. Hanna almost slipped and fell over several times. Her shoes, made by a Lappish cobbler in Fjällnäs, were not suitable for the town’s stony and ice-covered pavements.

They came to a cluster of wooden houses which seemed to be hugging one another in order to keep warm.

Jukka stopped and asked a man pulling a sledge laden with firewood the way to the address he had been given, to the Walléns. The man, who had a large burn mark on one cheek and a very loud chesty cough, pointed and tried unsuccessfully to explain. Jukka soon lost patience, touched his cap as a gesture of thanks, and they continued walking.

‘It’s impossible to find anywhere in this damned town,’ he muttered in his sing-song dialect. ‘Completely impossible, but I think this is it even so.’

He had stopped in front of a two-storey wooden house with a lopsided roof, broken and patched-up windows and a door that threatened to fall out of its frame. Jukka knocked hard on the door. It was opened immediately by an old lady so wrapped up in shawls that the only parts of her that Hanna could see were her eyes and her nose.

‘Wallén,’ said Jukka. ‘Does the Wallén family live in this house?’

The old woman gave a start as if he had punched her. Then she said something he couldn’t understand.

‘Take that shawl off, damn you!’ he roared. ‘I’m here on behalf of Jonathan Forsman, the businessman. He wants to know if anybody called Wallén lives here. I can’t hear a word of what you are mumbling behind all those rags you’re wearing.’

The old woman removed the shawl that was covering her face. Hanna could see now that it was gaunt and hollowed, as if she was often left starving.

‘The Wallén family,’ said Jukka again, making his impatience obvious.

‘They’ve gone,’ said the old woman.

‘What do you mean, they’ve gone? Gone to heaven or hell? Give me a proper answer before I lose my temper.’

The old woman backed away, but Jukka placed his large boot between the door and the frame.

‘There’s only one old man left here in the house,’ she said. ‘They left him behind. I don’t know where they’ve gone to.’

Jukka sucked at his lips and tried to make up his mind what to say to that.

‘We’ll go in and talk to the old boy,’ he said eventually. ‘Show us where he lives!’

The old woman led them up a staircase. Pale-looking children were standing in doorways, staring wide-eyed at the strangers going past. Hanna noticed that there was a stale, acrid smell, as if the house was never aired.

They continued up to the attic floor where the old woman finally stopped outside a door, knocked, then immediately scurried away. When Jukka opened the door, he pushed Hanna inside.

‘Go and talk to your relative now,’ he said. ‘Either you’ll be living here, or you’ll have to come back home again with me.’

The room contained a bed, a Windsor-style chair and a cracked mirror hanging on one of the walls. Hanna could see a reflection of her face in it — a worried face, somebody she didn’t really recognize. Then she looked at the old man lying in the bed who was staring at her as if she had just descended from heaven.

She recalled what her father had said, the last words he had whispered secretly into her ear. About her being a mucky angel. Had he been right?

Was it really an angel the old man seemed to see standing in front of him? Or just a confused serving girl from the distant mountains?

12

Jukka was impatient.

‘Talk to the old boy now,’ he growled. ‘We don’t have time to just stand around gaping at him.’

He walked over to the window and opened it: it had been closed for so long that it was extremely difficult to move.

‘It stinks in here,’ he said. ‘A nasty stench of old man. The earth has already started to eat you up, without your noticing. Your body is already full of worms and maggots, chewing away at your flesh.’

Jukka glared expectantly at Hanna. She went up to the bed where the old man was lying. He had bits of old food in his beard, his nightshirt was sweaty and dirty. She explained who she was, what she was called, and who her father and mother were. The old man didn’t seem to understand, or maybe he hadn’t heard. She repeated what she had said, but louder.

In reply he raised a trembling hand. Hanna thought he was trying to greet her — but the hand was pointing to the window.

‘I’m cold,’ said the old man. ‘Close the window.’

Jukka was standing by the window as if on guard. He took a step forward, as if he were about to attack.

‘The room stinks,’ he said. ‘It needs airing. But do you realize who this is, standing here in front of you? Hanna Wallén. Are you a relative of hers, or not? If you can tell us yes or no, we can leave you in peace.’

But the old man didn’t understand. He started begging for food — he was hungry, and nobody gave him anything to eat any more.

Hanna tried again. Explained once again who she was, and talked at length about Elin. But it was no use. The old man in the filthy bed was living in a different world, in which the only thing that mattered was his hunger.

‘Come on,’ said Jukka. ‘Let’s go. This is a waste of time. We’ll talk to the old woman downstairs. She might know.’

If she’d been able to, Hanna would have run out of the house and not stopped until she was back home again with Elin and her brothers and sisters. Nobody wanted to take care of her, the whole journey had been in vain. She didn’t belong in this town. She’d been welcomed by a confused, bewildered old man, nobody else.

When Forsman heard about the failed expedition, he tore a strip off the cowering Jukka. Was he incapable of ferreting out where the family had gone to? Would that have been so difficult?

Forsman calmed down eventually, and said to Hanna in his usual friendly voice that he would personally take over responsibility for finding out where the family had gone to. She shouldn’t worry. People didn’t just disappear into thin air. He would no doubt be able to find the relatives she had come to meet.

‘In the meantime you can stay here,’ he said. ‘You can make yourself useful about the house. Help the other girls!’

Two days later he had some information to pass on to her. He called her into his office, where he was sitting at a desk, chewing away at a cigar stub.

‘That old man you met is just a sort of lodger,’ he said. ‘He’s not even a relative. He’s allowed to lie there in that bed until he dies. Then somebody else will take over the room. A whole family of dockers are lined up to move in. They’re no doubt hoping he’ll die as soon as possible because at the moment that family is living in a cattle shed. But nobody seems to know where the others have gone to.’

He looked hard at her. She was beginning to feel scared, but braced herself.

‘I think you should stay here for the time being,’ said Forsman. ‘We could do with another maid.’

She closed her eyes, and breathed out. She couldn’t make up her mind if that was due to relief or to joy. She tried to conjure up the sounds from the house by the river: but everything was silent, her thoughts were interrupted only by the noise of a cart clattering past in the street.

Forsman seemed to gather what she was thinking. He smiled. Hanna curtseyed, and left the room.

She said silently to herself: well, at least I’ve got something to do here now.

13

She worked together with Berta from then on. She followed her around, helped her out in her duties, and also allowed her to show her around the town in what little spare time they had. Most of the time was spent washing the clothes of everybody in the very large household, and also the sheets and tablecloths. There was a pump in the inner courtyard, and they fetched water from there to the laundry, which was next to the stables. Hanna couldn’t understand how Berta coped with the strenuous work, which kept her occupied for more than twelve hours a day. Berta had started working for Forsman when she was thirteen years old. She told Hanna that her father had died as a result of an accident at the sawmill in Essvik, her mother had died of consumption the following year, and the children had all gone their different ways. Berta kept coming back to her assertion that she had been lucky to get a job in Forsman’s household. Although it was hard work and not exactly uplifting, she had a roof over her head, a bed to sleep in and a meal three times a day. What had she to complain about? What right had she to do so?

‘If I were to leave, there would be at least ten girls queuing up outside in the street, hoping to take over my job,’ said Berta early one morning as they were standing by the pump, filling their buckets. ‘Why shouldn’t I cling on to what I have?’

‘Will you still be here ten years from now?’ asked Hanna.

Berta shook her head and burst out laughing. Although she was still young she had lost several of her upper teeth.

‘I can’t think that far ahead,’ she said. ‘Ten years? I don’t even know if I’ll still be alive then.’

But Hanna persisted. There must be something that Berta dreamt about, surely?

‘Children,’ said Berta hesitantly. ‘I’d love to have some. But for that to happen I’d have to find a husband. And I haven’t. I want somebody who doesn’t drink or fight. Where can anybody find a man like that?’

Whenever Hanna asked Berta a question, she answered it inside her own head with regard to herself. What did she want? Would she still be alive ten years from now? Or would she be dead as well? Who was the man she hoped to meet? Did she really hope to meet one? And what about children? Could she really think about having children when she was still a child herself in so many ways?

Towards the end of February an unexpected thaw set in. In the evenings, if they had enough strength left, they would go for a walk through the town. Berta showed her round, did so with pride, with a sort of sense of both owning something and having responsibility. She knew something that Hanna didn’t. The town was hers.

Occasionally Berta would ask a few questions about the place where Hanna lived before she had come to Sundsvall with Forsman: but Hanna soon noticed that Berta was not really all that interested in what little she had to tell. Or perhaps it was just that Berta had never seen anything but the town she lived in, and couldn’t imagine what it would be like by a river below a high mountain.

Her relationship with Berta was something completely new for Hanna. During the time she lived in Forsman’s house she and Berta became close friends who dared to take each other into their confidence. Almost every evening they lay in the bed they shared, whispering. It seemed to Hanna that she had never before had a friend like Berta. The relationship she had had with her siblings and her mother had been quite different.

They dared to talk about the difficult things in life. Love, children, men. Hanna soon realized that Berta had just as little experience as she did when it came to what life had in store for them.

Sometimes in the evenings when they were out walking, always arm in arm, with their shawls wrapped tightly around their hair and chin, boys of about their own age who were loitering around would shout to them: but they never replied, just increased their pace — even if later, when they had gone to bed, they might giggle and talk about what had happened.

We’re not there yet, Hanna thought; but one of these days we’ll stop and start talking to those boys.

Most of the time they spent together, when they were not working, they devoted to helping each other to learn to read. They had realized from the start that their knowledge was more or less equally meagre. Berta had been given a dirty and well-thumbed ABC book by a cook who used to work at Forsman’s house. They would pore over it, spelling out words, testing each other, and before long they were secretly borrowing books from Forsman’s library, reading aloud to each other with increasing confidence.

Hanna would never forget the moment when the individual letters stopped dancing around in front of her eyes. When they no longer made faces at her but formed words and sentences, and eventually whole stories that she could understand.

It was also during that time that Hanna happened to acquire a Portuguese dictionary. Forsman sometimes sifted through his voluminous library and discarded books and booklets that were surplus to his requirements. One day Hanna had found the dictionary in a waste-paper basket. She thought that anything he’d thrown away she could keep if she fancied it, rather than taking it to the rubbish dump. She showed it to Berta, who was not interested in a foreign language she would never have any use of.

But Hanna kept the dictionary and learnt a few words and phrases that she didn’t even know if she was pronouncing correctly.

The late winter continued to be mild in 1904. As early as the middle of March the sailors, who had been spending the winter ashore when the ice prevented them from going to sea, began to gather restlessly in the harbour and on the jetties where sailing boats were beached. Berta explained to Hanna that there were fewer and fewer sailing boats nowadays: more and more owners were buying steamships instead. But there were still sailing ships carrying cargo along the coast, or over to Finland, and perhaps even to the Baltic countries. Quite a few carried timber and fish down to Stockholm, while others headed northwards.

Before long sailing boats would disappear altogether, and be replaced by steamships.

14

One morning Hanna was summoned unexpectedly to Forsman’s office. He didn’t often want to talk to her alone. Every time it did happen, she was worried that he might flare up and start complaining about her work or her behaviour.

When she entered the room she found that Forsman was not alone. Sitting on a chair was a man in uniform she had never seen before. She paused in the doorway and curtseyed. Forsman nodded to her and put his glowing cigar into an ashtray.

The man in uniform was older than Forsman. He observed her closely.

‘This is Captain Svartman,’ said Forsman. ‘He is master of a ship of which I am part-owner. She’s called Lovisa, and will soon be setting off on a long voyage to Australia with a cargo of Swedish timber, felled in forests owned by me and sawn up in a sawmill owned by me.’

Forsman paused abruptly, as he usually did when he wanted to give people time to digest what he had said. Hanna searched her mind for a country called Australia, but failed to find it. However, Forsman had said it would be a long voyage. So Australia couldn’t be a neighbouring country.

‘I’ve been thinking about your future,’ Forsman said suddenly, with such emphasis that Hanna gave a start. ‘I think you can make more of yourself than just a maid here in my house. I think I can see in you qualities that suggest you could have a bright future. Exactly what will become of you I don’t know. It’s just that I suspect you have a will of your own. And so I’ve decided that you will sail to Australia and back with Captain Svartman. You will work on board as a cook. You’ll be the only woman on the ship, but everybody will know that you are under my special protection.’

Forsman fell silent again and contemplated his cigar, which had gone out. Hanna felt there was something she needed to say immediately.

‘I must ask Elin for permission,’ she said. ‘I can’t go off on a voyage without my family knowing about it.’

Forsman nodded thoughtfully and leaned forward over his desk. He picked up a sheet of paper and held it up for Hanna to see.

‘Your mother’s writing is like a spider crawling over a page,’ he said. ‘Her spelling is awful. And she has no idea where to put a full stop or a comma. But she knows what I’ve proposed to you, and she gives you her permission to go.’

Hanna realized now that Forsman was continuing to take responsibility for her, as he had promised. It was clear that the idea of her going on a long voyage on one of his ships had been planned for some considerable time. It took a long time for letters to pass between Sundsvall and the distant mountains.

‘In just over a month the ship will have all its cargo on board and be ready to sail,’ said Forsman. ‘Between now and then you will go on board every morning. There’s an old ship’s cook by the name of Mörth who will teach you the ropes. You’ll be given some money to pay for the equipment and clothing you’ll need, and you’ll be paid a good wage during the voyage — more money than you would ever be able to earn as a maid. That’ll be all now, but don’t hesitate. I know this is something right up your street.’

Hanna left the room. She could feel a cold sweat under her blouse.

It was the next day, a Sunday when they had a few hours off work, before Hanna told Berta about what had happened. The sun was shining, and melted snow and ice was dripping from the roofs. They had climbed up a little hill just outside the town where there was a tree trunk that somebody had turned into a bench, using an axe. It was still winter, but the midday sun was quite warm. They spread out their overcoats and sat down. Hanna hadn’t prepared anything in advance, but she suddenly had the feeling that now was the time to take Berta into her confidence. She told her everything, and said that she was dreading the task that Forsman had arranged for her. How on earth would she be able to cope with being ship’s cook on a voyage to Australia?

‘I wish it had been me he’d asked,’ said Berta. ‘I wouldn’t have hesitated to go.’

‘But it’s so far away,’ said Hanna, and explained how she had found Australia on the brown globe of the world Forsman had beside his billiard table.

She had been horrified when she discovered that Australia was on the other side of the world.

‘I want to stay in Forsman’s house,’ she said. ‘Who will do all my work while I’m away?’

‘Is this drudgery really something to aspire to?’ said Berta in surprise. ‘Besides, it’s not really necessary to have an extra maid in this household.’

Berta sounded quite definite in her comments. It was as if she understood what was worrying Hanna — but it could also be that Berta was jealous of her. Hanna had the nasty feeling that Berta might prefer not to have her around.

‘It’s up to you to make the decision,’ said Berta. ‘There’s nothing I’d like more for you to stay on here. If for no other reason than you lie still at night. I can’t put up with sharing a bed with somebody who kicks and tosses and turns all night.’

They both burst out laughing, but soon became serious again.

‘Talk to Forsman if you are hesitant about it,’ said Berta. ‘He’s the one who has the final say.’

They said no more about the voyage just then. Instead they sat there gazing out over the town and the seemingly endless stretch of white ice beyond the wooded hills. When it became too cold, they stood up and made their way back down the icy path. First Berta slipped, then Hanna. They laughed, then held each other’s hands as they continued down the slope. Hanna was thinking about what saddened her most: that she would lose the friend she had made in Berta.

The following day she plucked up courage and knocked on the door of Forsman’s office. He shouted ‘Come in’, and raised an eyebrow in surprise when she stepped over the threshold.

‘What do you want?’

She remained standing in the doorway. What should she say, in fact?

‘Come on in,’ he said. ‘Come to my desk! I’m expecting some men from whom I’m going to buy some timber. Tell me what you want. Are you unwell, or what’s the matter?’

‘I’m fine,’ said Hanna, curtseying when she spoke to him.

‘What is it then? I don’t like you standing here curtseying unnecessarily.’

‘I would like to stay here,’ she said in a voice so low that Forsman had to lean forward over his desk in order to hear her.

‘I don’t know what’s in store for me on that ship,’ she said. ‘But here I think I do a good job.’

Forsman leaned back in his desk chair again. His large hands rested heavily on his stomach, where his waistcoat was unbuttoned. He eyed her intently.

‘You must go on that voyage. It’s best for you. Believe me.’

He stood up. The interview was over. Hanna curtseyed and hurried out.

It felt as if she were running.

15

The hymn book was similar to the one Forsman had given Elin that day in December the previous year, when the sleigh they had been waiting for finally emerged from the edge of the forest. Now it was time for her to board the ship full-time, it was Hanna’s turn to get one. She had joined the crew, and had signed a contract and an insurance agreement.

By then she had been taught all the things she needed to know by the old cook Mörth, who couldn’t resist groping her but stopped immediately when she thrust his hand away. Then he would wait until the following day before trying again. Even if she disliked the fact that he wouldn’t leave her alone, he really did his best to teach her how to prepare good food for the crew. He urged her to keep track of essential stores, and which of the harbours they visited would be most suitable for restocking. He made a map and drew up a list for her, and she realized that without Mörth she would never have been able to prepare herself properly for the voyage.

Forsman took her to one side after he had presented her with the hymn book. He seemed embarrassed, almost emotional, as if he had been drinking. Which she knew he hadn’t been.

‘I hope all goes well for you,’ he said. ‘May God watch over all you do. But I’m also on call if needs be, I promise you that.’

Her farewells to the stone-built house and its occupants were short. But Berta and she had made a pact: it was holy, they assured each other, and must not be broken. They had vowed to write to each other until they met again. They had learnt to read and write together, and now it had become clear that there was a purpose behind it all. And if it turned out that Hanna never returned to Sundsvall, at least they would be able to meet in the letters they exchanged.

Forsman accompanied her to the ship. A man in uniform she had never seen before was waiting for them at the top of the gangplank. He was young, barely more than four or five years older than she was. He was wearing a peaked cap and a dark blue tunic, was fair-haired, and stood at ease with a burnt-out pipe in his hand.

Hanna stepped out on to the gangplank. When she arrived on board, the unknown man was waiting for her.

She curtseyed, then regretted it. Why on earth should she curtsey to one of the sailors?

She heard heavy steps behind her. It was Forsman, coming on board with the captain.

‘Third Mate Lundmark,’ said Captain Svartman. ‘This is our cook, Hanna Renström. If you look after her well, perhaps you will get some decent food on the voyage.’

Lundmark nodded. His smile made Hanna feel insecure. Why did he look at her so intently?

But now she knew who he was, at least.

There was a light breeze blowing over Sundsvall’s harbour that April day. She closed her eyes and listened to the noise of the wind and the waves. The forest, she thought. The waves sound just like it did up there in the mountains when there was a wind blowing. Irrespective of whether the wind was cold or warm.

She suddenly longed to be with Elin and her brother and sisters. But there was no going back, just now there was only this steamship with its cargo of aromatic, newly sawn planks, about to set off for Australia.

‘Lars Johan Jakob Antonius Lundmark,’ said a voice right next to her. It was the third mate who had stayed behind while the captain and Forsman headed for Svartman’s cabin. ‘Lars after my father,’ he continued. ‘Johan after my paternal grandfather, Jakob after my elder brother who died, Antonius after the doctor who once cured my father’s blood poisoning. Do you know who I am now?’

‘I’m called Hanna,’ she said. ‘I only have one name. That has always been enough for me.’

She turned on her heel and went to her own cabin. Apart from Captain Svartman, she was the only member of the crew who had a cabin to herself. She sat down on the bunk bed with the hymn book in her hand. When she opened it up, she found two shiny one-krona coins inside.

She went back on deck. The mate was no longer there. She stood by the railing until Forsman emerged from the captain’s cabin.

‘Thank you for the money,’ she said.

‘Money is a good way of helping the word of God to fruition,’ said Forsman. ‘A bit of travel money won’t do you any harm.’

He stroked her awkwardly on the cheek, then left the ship on the gangplank which swayed noticeably under his weight.

The whole ship seemed to lean on one side as it bade farewell to its owner.

16

Nine hours later, on 23 April 1904, the steamship Lovisa weighed anchor and set off for Perth.

The ship sounded a farewell with its foghorn. Hanna stood by the rail aft, not far from her cabin, but had the feeling that she was still standing down there, on the quay.

She had left a part of herself behind. She didn’t know who she now was. The future — uncertain, unknown — would reveal that to her.

She stood behind her cabin, under a projecting roof, and looked down at the swirling foam whipped up by the propeller. Drifting snow, she thought. Now I’m on my way to a world where it never snows, where there are deserts, and the dry sand whirls around in temperatures that are beyond my comprehension.

Suddenly the saw that the mate was standing beside her. Looking back, what she first noticed about him were his fingernails. They were clean and neatly cut, and she recalled how Elin used to sit crouched over her father’s nails, devoting endless effort and tenderness to her efforts to make them neat and clean.

She wondered who cut the third mate’s nails. She understood from something Captain Svartman had said that Lundmark was unmarried. Svartman had also asked her if she had a fiancé waiting for her to return home. When she said she hadn’t, he seemed to be pleased. He had muttered something about preferring that not too many of his crew had close family connections.

‘In case anything happens,’ he had added. ‘All the sea offers us is the unexpected.’

Lundmark looked at her with a smile.

‘Welcome aboard,’ he said.

Hanna looked at him in surprise. It was Forsman speaking. Lundmark had imitated his voice with astonishing accuracy.

‘You sound like him,’ she said.

‘I can if I want to,’ said Lundmark. ‘Even a third mate can have a shipowner’s voice hidden away inside him.’

A distant call from the bridge cut short their conversation. The black smoke from the funnels was sinking down on to the deck. She had to turn away to prevent it from making her eyes hurt.

Hanna had a fifteen-year-old boy by the name of Lars to help her with the preparation of food. He was also sailing for the first time. He was an orphan, and scared stiff. When he shook hands with her, she could feel how he was ready to snatch his hand away from her if she were to squeeze it too tightly.

Captain Svartman had asked for pork and brown beans this first day of the voyage.

‘I’m not superstitious,’ he’d said, ‘but my best voyages have always started with my crew being fed with pork and beans. There’s no harm in repeating what has already proved itself to be a good thing.’

In the evening, when she had made all the necessary preparations for the next morning’s breakfast and sent the mess-room boy to bed, she went out on deck. They had now left the archipelago behind them, and were heading southwards. The sun was setting over the forests on the starboard side.

All at once Lundmark appeared by her side again. They stood there together, watching the sun as it slowly vanished.

‘Starboard,’ he said without warning. ‘There’s a reason for everything. It’s an odd word, but it means something even so. Star has nothing to do with stars, it comes from “steer”. In the old days a helmsman would stand with a steering oar in the aft of the ship, and he would have it on his right because then he could use his right arm to move it, and a man’s right arm is usually stronger than his left. So the right-hand side was called “steerboard”, and that gradually changed into “starboard”.’

‘What about “port”?’ she wondered.

Lundmark shook his head.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘But I’ll find out.’

It soon became a habit. Every evening Hanna and the third mate would stand there talking to each other. If it was raining or very windy, they would shelter under the projecting roof of her cabin.

But she never had an answer as to why it was called ‘port’.

17

This is amazing, she thought. Every morning when I wake up my bed has moved on. I’m in a different place from where I was when I went to sleep.

But something else about her was beginning to change as well. She had started looking forward to her meetings with Lundmark. They talked tentatively about who they were, where they had come from, and she didn’t flinch one evening when he suddenly put his arm round her.

They were in the English Channel at the time, edging slowly forward through a bank of fog that loomed up in front of them like a wall. Foghorns were sounding eerily from various directions. They made her think of a flock of animals that had broken up, and was now trying to reassemble. Captain Svartman was always on the bridge whenever they passed through fog, and he had ordered extra lookouts to stand guard. Occasionally black ships with slack sails or ships with smoking funnels would appear out of all the whiteness and glide past, sometimes far too close, making Svartman shake his head in disapproval and give orders to slow down even more. For two days and two nights they were almost motionless. All accessible lamps and lanterns were kept burning on deck, Hanna found it difficult to sleep and frequently left her cabin, but she was always careful not to get in the way.

The next day Captain Svartman asked Hanna to look for the mess-room boy who had disappeared. She found him in the food store, hidden away. He was trembling with fear. She comforted him and took him out on deck, where Svartman pressed a lantern into his hand.

‘Work cures everything,’ he said.

A few days later the fog started to disperse. They increased speed again. Hanna heard talk of something called the Bay of Biscay, through which they would soon be passing.

One evening Lundmark suddenly started talking seriously about himself. He was the only child of a merchant in Timrå who had gone bankrupt and afterwards was scarcely able to keep squalor and famine at bay. His mother was a taciturn woman who could never reconcile herself to the fact that she had only managed to bring one child into the world. She regarded it as both disappointing and shameful.

He had always longed to go to sea. Was always running down to the shore to watch ships coming and going. At the age of thirteen he had signed on as an apprentice on a small cargo boat plying between Sundsvall and Söderhamn. His mother and father had tried to stop him, and even threatened to send the sheriff’s officer after him if he went through with it. But when he persisted they seemed to become resigned to the inevitable, and allowed him to do what he had decided was to be his future.

Before falling asleep that night she thought about what the third mate had told her. He had spoken to her in confidence, something that hitherto only Berta had done.

The next day he continued with his story. But he also began asking her about the life she had led before coming to Forsman’s house and then to the ship she was now sailing on. She didn’t think she had anything much to tell him, but he listened attentively even so and seemed to be genuinely interested.

And so they continued their conversation, every evening if the wind wasn’t too strong or Captain Svartman hadn’t ordered Lundmark to carry out some extra duty or other outside his normal routine.

Hanna realized that her feelings for Lundmark were different from anything she had previously experienced in her life. They couldn’t be compared with those she had shared with Elin and her siblings, nor even the close friendship she had formed with Berta. She spent every moment of the day looking forward to his arrival behind the galley: longing for their meeting.

One evening he presented her with a little wooden sculpture of a mermaid. He had bought it in an Italian port on a previous voyage, and thereafter took it with him on all the ships he signed on to.

‘I can’t possibly accept it,’ she said.

‘I want you to have it,’ he said. ‘I think it looks like you.’

‘What can I give you in return?’ she asked.

‘I have everything I need,’ said Lundmark. ‘That’s the way I feel at the moment.’

They stood there in silence for a while. Hanna wished him goodnight and went to her cabin. Later, when she peered through the door she could see him still standing there by the rail. He was gazing out over the sea as darkness fell. He had his legs apart, and his officer’s cap in his hand.

The following morning she was sitting in the galley, descaling a freshly caught fish which was to be the sailors’ dinner. A shadow fell over her. When she looked up it was Lundmark standing there. He went down on one knee, took her hand which was full of glistening fish scales, and asked her to marry him.

Until that moment they had done nothing but talk to each other; but everybody else on board had regarded them as a pair, she knew that, since none of the other men had approached her at all.

Had she been expecting this to happen? Had she been hoping it would? No doubt she had occasionally had such a thought, the idea that she was sailing together with him, not with a ship laden with timber. Despite the fact that she had only met him when the ship was about to leave Sundsvall.

She said ‘Yes’ without hesitation. She made up her mind in a flash. He kissed her face, then stood up and left to attend the meeting the mates had with the captain every morning.

They stopped in Algiers in order to take on board more coal — Hanna knew by now that this was called ‘bunkering’. The Swedish consul, a Frenchman who had once visited Stockholm in his youth and fallen in love with the city, found an English Methodist minister who was prepared to marry the couple. Captain Svartman produced the necessary documents and was a witness to the marriage together with the consul and his wife, who was so moved by the brief ceremony that she burst into tears. Afterwards the captain took them to a photographer’s and paid for a wedding photograph out of his own pocket.

That same evening she moved into Lundberg’s cabin. The second mate, whose name was Björnsson, moved into the ship’s cramped hospital cabin — Hanna would retain her own cabin, Captain Svartman was reluctant to take it away from her. But if anybody on board fell seriously ill, it would be used to accommodate them.

Captain Svartman was positively inclined towards their marriage. But as they left Algiers that same evening their wedding night was ruined by the fact that the prearranged timetable of duties came into operation, and Lundberg had to take his turn as lookout. There was no question of Captain Svartman giving him the evening off — his benevolence didn’t stretch that far. And it would never have occurred to Lundmark to ask for special treatment.

So Hanna had become a wife, Fru Lundmark. Both bride and bridegroom were shy and insecure. The solidly built third mate had been transformed into a little child, scared stiff of causing injury or offence. They embraced cautiously, as they barely knew each other yet. Their lovemaking was low-key, not yet uninhibited passion.

When they passed through the Suez Canal, they both happened to be off duty at the same time — an infrequent occurrence. They stood by the ship’s rail, contemplating the beaches, the tall palm trees, the camels slowly waddling along, the naked children diving into the waters of the canal.

What Hanna found hardest to get used to was sleeping with him lying by her side. Sleeping alongside a brother or sister or Berta had been one thing: but now she was sharing a bed with a big, heavy man who often tossed and turned and woke her up.

She felt both secure and restless in the situation she now found herself in, together with him; but at the same time she also felt an intense longing to be back in the life she had led in that remote river valley in the mountains.

At night, after making love, they would talk to each other in the dark, always in whispers as the bulkheads were thin and they were surrounded by other people.

In the darkness and the warmth, he now confided in her that he hoped one day to become the captain of his own ship.

‘I’ll achieve that if you help me,’ he said. ‘Now that I have you by my side, I think it’s possible.’

She took his hand. Thought about what he had said. And suddenly felt an overwhelming desire to be able to tell Elin about everything that was happening in her life.

When Elin had said that there was no other option, Hanna had to go to the coast, she had been right. But what would she think now about the voyage Hanna was now embarked upon?

I must write to her, Hanna thought. One day Elin will receive a letter. I’ll enclose a copy of our wedding photo. She must see the man I’ve married.

18

She was aroused from her memories by the question that still remained unanswered, a bridge between the past and where she found herself now: did she know who she was? Two months after she had left Sundsvall, she became Lundmark’s wife, and was now waiting for him to be buried.

She had no answer. Everything was silent around her and inside her. She could not answer the question of who she was or who she had become.

The ship was motionless in the steaming heat. The pressure in the steam boilers was kept low while they waited for the burial at sea to take place. Once that was over, the engine-room telegraph would give the command ‘Full steam ahead!’, and the stokers would once again start shovelling coal into the firebox.

But just now the soot-covered men from the engine room had come up on deck and washed away the worst of the dirt. There was only one man left down below to make sure that nothing caught on fire, or that one of the boilers didn’t go out.

Captain Svartman went in person to collect Hanna. He knocked carefully on the door of the cabin she had shared with her dead husband. Now she will have to live there alone, Svartman thought. What shall I do if she is scared of the loneliness? What shall I do with a widow on board?

He opened the door. She was sitting on the edge of the bunk, staring at her hands. In her thoughts she had just been reminding herself of the long journey that had begun in a remote river valley. She had met a man, they had become a couple, but now he was gone.

They had been together for two months. Then the fever that had suddenly struck him down after he had gone ashore in Sudan had killed him. But she was still there. And now he was going to be buried.

When she got up from the bunk she had the feeling that she was on her way to her own funeral. Or perhaps to her execution? Yet again she found herself alone, but now in a much worse situation than ever before. Why should she travel to the other side of the world when the man who had belonged to her no longer existed? Who was she accompanying now? Apart from Captain Svartman, on the way to the starboard side of the ship, the one facing land, the African coast hidden away in the sunny haze and out of sight even with the aid of a telescope?

There was a lookout on the bridge, an able seaman, one of the younger ones. But everyone else had assembled by the side of the soft coffin made out of sailcloth and standing on two trestles next to the rail. The grey cloth was wrapped up in a Swedish flag. It was stained and frayed. Hanna suspected it was the only flag on board. Captain Svartman was not the kind of person who made plans for what to do if one of his crew were to die. Only somebody who behaved rashly and broke his rules could get into trouble. Like the third mate now lying there on the trestles, and soon to be tipped overboard into the sea.

Hanna looked at the men who were standing in a semicircle. None of them could bring themselves to look her in the eye. Death was embarrassing, it made them self-conscious and insecure.

She looked up at the sky, and the sun that was broiling hot even though it was so early in the morning. In her thoughts she suddenly found herself back in the sleigh, behind Forsman’s broad back.

Then it was the cold, she thought. Now it’s the heat. But in a way they are the same.

And the movement. Then it was a sleigh, now it was a ship slowly, almost imperceptibly, swaying in the swell.

Captain Svartman was dressed in his uniform and with white gloves: in his hand was the book with instructions for how to conduct a burial at sea. He read in a monotonous but loud voice. He had no fears when it came to carrying out his duties as captain.

Hanna suspected that more than anything else Svartman was angry because somebody had ignored his exhortations and gone ashore, even though he must have been aware of the danger he was exposing himself to.

The man who was about to be buried had died completely unnecessarily. A man who had been stupid and not listened to what Captain Svartman had to say to him.

Hanna had the feeling that Svartman was not simply mourning the loss of his third mate. He also felt that he’d been let down.

19

The ceremony was short. Captain Svartman did not deviate from the set text, added nothing personal. He fell silent when he came to the end of the order of service and nodded to his second mate, who had a good singing voice and launched into a hymn. Oddly enough he had chosen a Christmas hymn.

Shine over sea and shore, star in the distance.

The rest of the crew joined in, mumbling, with here and there a jarring false note. Hanna glanced furtively at them. Some were not singing at all.

Which ones were thinking about the man who had died? Some were, no doubt. Others, perhaps most of them, were just grateful that they were still alive.

When the hymn was over Captain Svartman nodded at Hanna, inviting her to step forward. He had explained to her that there were not really any rules or traditions with regard to what a widow in the crew should do as a final farewell to her husband during a burial at sea.

‘Place your hand on the sailcloth,’ he had suggested. ‘As we don’t have any flowers on board, your hand can be the symbol of a final farewell.’

He could have sacrificed one of his potted plants, she thought. Broken off one of the flowers and given it to me. But he didn’t.

She did as he had suggested, and placed her right hand on the flag. Tried to conjure up Lundmark in her mind’s eye. But although he had only been dead for a few days, it seemed that she was already having difficulty in recreating his face.

Death is like a fog, she thought, which slowly envelops the person who is passing away.

She took a pace backwards, Captain Svartman nodded again, four able seamen stepped forward, lifted up the plank and tipped the dead body overboard. Captain Svartman had picked his strongest sailors because the sailcloth contained not only a dead body but also several sinkers weighing many kilos, in order to make sure that the cloth coffin really did sink to the bottom of the sea.

1,935 metres. Her husband was going to have a much deeper grave than the deepest grave on land. It would take almost thirty minutes for the dead body to reach the bottom. Halvorsen had told her that objects sink very slowly at great depths.

The sea burial was over, the crew returned to their work. Only a few minutes later there was a clattering noise in the engine room. The ship was moving again, the interval was over.

Hanna remained standing by the rail. There was no longer anything to be seen in the water. She turned away and went straight to the galley where the mess-room boy had begun preparing lunch. She put on her apron — and then discovered that a deckhand had been sent to help out in the kitchen.

‘Even though my husband is dead, I shall do my job,’ she said.

She didn’t wait for a reply but climbed down the ladder to the storeroom to fetch the potatoes that needed to be boiled for the meals that still remained to be served that day.

The potatoes were duly peeled. She emptied the buckets of peel overboard and went back into the galley. Halvorsen was busy repairing a cupboard with racks for saucepans and frying pans. Her husband’s best friend on board. He has also lost a companion, she thought. He’s also wondering why the third mate took it into his head to go ashore on that unhappy occasion.

She continued her work with the mess-room boy and the deckhand. But when Halvorsen had finished what he was doing he tapped her on the shoulder and beckoned her to follow him out. She asked the mess-room boy to keep an eye on her saucepans, and followed after him.

He was looking down at the deck when he spoke to her, never looked her in the eye.

‘What are you going to do now?’ he asked.

That was a question she’d had neither the strength nor the courage to ask herself. What could she do? What choice did she have?

She was honest with him, and said she didn’t know.

‘I’ll help you,’ he said. ‘Just so that you know. If I can.’

Halvorsen didn’t wait for a response, but turned on his heel and headed towards the bows. She thought about what he had said. And gathered that her husband had asked him to help her in his desperation when he realized how ill he was.

It was Lundmark speaking with Halvorsen’s voice. A voice from the deep. A voice that was very good at imitating others.

20

They berthed in an African town by the name of Lourenço Marques. The town was small and sparsely populated, reminiscent of Algiers perhaps, with white-fronted houses climbing up a slope. At the top of the hill was a white hotel. The name of the town was impossible to pronounce, so the crew called it Loco — a word she recognized from her Portuguese dictionary, meaning ‘mad’.

Halvorsen had been there before. He urged Hanna not to sleep with the porthole open as there were mosquitoes that carried the dreaded malaria. And she should never wear anything with short sleeves, even though the evenings were warm.

He offered to go ashore with her. They could go for a walk through the town, perhaps stop at one of the countless small restaurants and eat the grilled fish, the prawns deep-fried in oil, or the lobster that was the best in the world.

But she declined. She wasn’t yet ready to go anywhere with another man, even if Halvorsen had the best of intentions. She remained on board and thought about the fact that in two days’ time they would set sail due east over the big ocean that separated the African continent from Australia.

One night as they were lying in their cramped bunk, whispering, Lundmark had told her that sometimes ships heading for Australia came across icebergs. Although they were sailing on warm seas, some of these icebergs — as big as palaces built of marble — could drift a long way north before they were completely melted by the heat. Captain Svartman had told him that, and everything Captain Svartman said was true.

She stood by the ship’s rail, watching African porters dressed in rags carrying provisions on board supervised by Captain Svartman. A white man, bearded and tanned, wearing a khaki suit, was in charge of the porters. It seemed to Hanna that the movements of his hands gave the impression that he was lashing their shoulders with an invisible whip. The porters were thin, frightened. Now and again she would meet their scared, shifty eyes.

Sometimes she thought she could also see something different: fury, perhaps hatred. But she couldn’t be sure.

The white man’s voice was shrill, as if he hated what he was doing, or just wanted it to come to an end as quickly as possible.

Sometimes when the gangplank was not being used she thought that despite everything she might cross over it, and set foot on the African continent one more time.

But she never did. The rail continued to be her unsurmountable border.

The first night she lay awake in the heat. Halvorsen had said that she could leave the porthole open as long as she covered it carefully with a thin cotton cloth. He had given her a piece of suitable material that he had bought for her while he was ashore.

Now she lay there in the dark, listening to the cicadas, and beyond them occasional drumbeats and something that might have been a song, or perhaps the cry of a nocturnal bird.

The static heat was so stifling that she got dressed and went out on deck. A sailor was guarding the gangplank, which was blocked at night by a thick rope. She went forward to the bows of the ship and sat down on a capstan.

All around her the ship was in darkness, apart from the hurricane lamp by the gangplank. A fire was burning down below on the quay. Men were sitting around it, their faces lit up by the flames. She shuddered. She didn’t know why. Perhaps she was afraid, perhaps it was all the unaddressed sorrow that had been accumulating inside her.

She remained sitting on the capstan until she fell asleep. She woke up when she felt a mosquito biting her hand. She brushed it away, and thought that it wouldn’t matter anyway if she died.

The following day, the last one they would be spending in Lourenço Marques, she asked Halvorsen what the country they were in was called.

‘Portuguese East Africa,’ he said somewhat doubtfully. ‘If that can really be the name of an African country.’

He shook his head and pulled a face.

‘Slavery,’ he said. ‘The blacks are slaves. No more than that. I don’t think I’ve ever seen as many brutal people as I’ve seen here. And they are all white, like you and me.’

He shook his head again, and left her.

She had seen his disgust. Just as she had seen in the eyes of some of the black men their fury, and perhaps also a feeling similar to Halvorsen’s.

21

It was during that same day that the Swedish missionaries came on board the ship. Captain Svartman met them by the gangplank shortly before eleven o’clock in the morning. The women in long skirts and white safari helmets, and a small fat man with a club foot came on board. Hanna stopped what she was doing and watched the strangers. Captain Svartman handed them a suitcase full of post, then invited them into his cabin.

Halvorsen had told her that they had a mission station inland at a place called Phalaborwa. It was a long way from the coast. They must have been travelling by ox cart for over a week before arriving in Lourenço Marques.

‘Captain Svartman no doubt sent them a telegram when we were docked in Algiers,’ said Halvorsen. ‘So they would know roughly when we were due to arrive.’

Hanna had been doing some laundry and was about to hang it up to dry on one of the lines the deckhands rigged up for her whenever it was needed, but suddenly she discovered that one of the unknown women was standing in front of her.

The woman was pale, and very thin. She had a little scar along one side of her nose. Her eyes were dull, blue, and her lips narrow. She might have been about forty, perhaps younger.

Hanna thought she looked ill.

The woman said her name was Agnes.

‘Captain Svartman has told me,’ she said. ‘About your husband who has just died. Would you like us to pray together?’

Hanna was standing with several items of newly washed clothing in her hand. Did the woman mean that they should drop down on to their knees here on deck? She shuddered at the thought.

‘I’d be glad to help you,’ said Agnes.

Her voice was gentle. One of the crewmen spoke the same dialect, a bosun by the name of Brodin who came from the forests of Värmland. Was the woman standing there in front of Hanna really from Värmland?

She glanced at the woman’s left hand: no ring. So she was unmarried. And wanted to help. But how would she be able to do that? All Hanna wanted was to get her dead husband back. But he was 1,935 metres down below at the bottom of the sea, and would never return.

‘Thank you,’ she mumbled, ‘but I don’t need any help just now.’

Agnes observed her thoughtfully, then simply nodded and took her hand.

‘I shall pray for you, and ask for your deep sorrow to be made less painful,’ she said.

Hanna watched the missionaries leave the ship with the case of mail, and disappear into the town. She kept an eye on them until the last of them, the man with the club foot, was no longer visible.

Then she had a sudden urge to run after them, to go with them as far away from the sea as possible. But there was still something that formed an invisible barrier for her, preventing her from crossing over the gangplank. She was bound to Captain Svartman’s ship.

To her dead husband’s ship.

22

What happened next, and above all why, was something Hanna would never be able to understand. For the rest of her life the decision she made late that night, after the missionaries had left the ship, was totally incomprehensible. She had undressed and gone to bed. The heat was as oppressive as ever, and no currents of air disturbed the piece of cotton cloth hanging over the open brass-framed porthole. She had already fallen asleep, but suddenly sat up in her bunk wide awake. The thought that Hanna had inside her head was crystal clear, it filled the whole of her consciousness.

Hanna knew that she couldn’t stay on board. She couldn’t continue the voyage because her dead husband was still on board. She would succumb to her sorrow unless she left the ship.

She curled up on her bunk, sitting with her back against the bulkhead, and held her breath. She had made her decision and now she must leave the ship that very same night, as soon as the sailor guarding the gangplank had fallen asleep.

Hanna tried one last time to convince herself that despite everything she really ought to continue to Australia, but the idea was impossible to countenance. She would never stand by the rail and watch icebergs, the marble palaces, floating past.

She packed her few belongings in the suitcase that had once been given to her by Forsman. She hesitated for ages, wondering whether to take with her Lundmark’s sailor’s kitbag. In the end she took only his peaked cap, his discharge book and the wedding photograph taken in the studio in Algiers. The last item she packed away was her Portuguese dictionary.

Hanna left her cabin shortly after four in the morning. The sailor by the gangplank was leaning against the rail, fast asleep, his head resting on his chest.

The cicadas were singing softly as she stepped over the rope and walked along the gangplank, and was then swallowed up by the darkness.

The crew spent all next day looking for her on board, but she had vanished. Captain Svartman sent Halvorsen and two able seamen ashore to search for her. The captain waited for as long as he could. But just before the African dusk fell, he gave the order to cast off.

Hanna Lundmark, the cook, had deserted. Captain Svartman suspected sadly that she had gone mad.

He wrote in the ship’s logbook: ‘The cook Hanna Lundmark has jumped ship. As she was recently widowed, the suspicion is that her sorrow has driven her out of her mind. The search for her was fruitless.’

But she was in fact lurking in the shadows of the harbour, unseen by anybody on board. She watched the ship leave port and head off eastwards.

A few days earlier she had been given fifty English pounds by Captain Svartman. This was the amount due to a widow of a crew member who died on board, paid by the shipping company’s insurance.

She booked into a cheap hotel in the harbour. She slept uneasily, disturbed frequently by nagging pains in her stomach.

When she woke up it was a warm day in July 1904. At roughly the same time the Lovisa came up against its first iceberg.