Depths

Chapter 25

The evening before Lars Tobiasson-Svartman started on his mission, a petty officer came to his cabin to tell him that Captain Rake wanted to give him the final instructions.

He put on his naval jacket and hurried up the slippery companionway. The crescent moon kept appearing through the clouds. The Svea was anchored to the northeast of the Häradskär lighthouse.

He paused halfway up the stairs and gazed out over the dark sea to where the lights of gunboats could be seen. The Häradskär light had been turned off. He thought about all the shells, all the torpedoes out there. Every vessel was laden with the man-made fury known as dynamite or gunpowder.

The hardest place to estimate distances was over open water, but not when it was dark. He judged the nearest gunboat to be 140 metres distant, with a margin of error no greater than ten metres either way.

Before entering the captain’s quarters, he removed his dark blue naval cap.

Rake offered him a brandy. Normally, Tobiasson-Svartman never touched alcohol when he was working, but he could not bring himself to refuse it.

Rake emptied his glass and said: ‘They are very much concerned in Stockholm, and rightly so. They say on the wireless that Russian and German naval vessels have been sighted to the east of Gotland. But there haven’t been any reports of action. The whole of the Gotland coastline is crammed full of people with good hearing, straining to detect the sound of guns or torpedoes.’

‘There’s no concern worse than the sort you feel when you don’t know what’s going on,’ said Tobiasson-Svartman. ‘Concern based on knowledge is always easier to handle.’

Rake handed him the sheet of paper he was holding.

‘Nobody knows if any of these nations intend attacking Sweden. We are going to switch off all our lighthouses and creep down into our burrows.’

‘Are people worried more about the Russians or the Germans?’

‘Both. You don’t need to be one of the navy’s most experienced officers or even the Minister of Defence to know that. On the one hand both Germany and Russia have an interest in Sweden being kept out of the war. On the other hand both of them probably suspect that Sweden won’t be able to hang on to its neutrality in the long run. That could lead to either or both of them launching a pre-emptive strike. The other possibility, of course, is that they decide to leave us alone. Being an insignificant country can be both an advantage and a drawback.’

Tobiasson-Svartman read through the list of lighthouses that had been switched off, and which other navigation marks had been covered up or hastily dismantled. He could picture the sea charts. At night in total darkness it would be very difficult for a foreign warship to sail through the archipelago.

Rake had rolled out a chart on his table and placed an ashtray on each corner. It covered the area between Gotska Sandön and the southern tip of Gotland. He pointed at a spot out to sea.

‘A German convoy — comprising a couple of cruisers, a few small destroyers, torpedo boats, minesweepers and probably some submarines — has been seen here, travelling north. They are said to be travelling at speed, around twenty knots. They were on a level with Slite when they were spotted by a fishing boat from Fårösund. At four o’clock this afternoon they vanished into a belt of fog north-east of Gotska Sandön. At about the same time another fishing boat discovered a number of Russian ships also on their way north, but a bit further to the east. The skipper of the fishing boat was not sure of their exact course. He wasn’t sure about anything, in fact. He might well have been drunk. Even so, he can’t very well have imagined it all. In my view — and the Naval HQ in Stockholm agrees — the two convoys can hardly have been in contact with each other. We can assume that they are not cooperating and have different intentions. But what? Who are they aiming at? We don’t know. They could be diversionary moves, intended to create confusion. Uncertainty is always more difficult to cope with at sea than on land. But the lighthouses have been switched off anyway. Those in charge in Stockholm evidently don’t dare to take any risks.’

Rake picked up the bottle and looked questioningly at Tobiasson-Svartman, who shook his head and then regretted it immediately. Rake filled his own glass, but not to the brim this time.

‘Does this affect my mission?’

‘Only in that from now on, everything has to proceed at great speed. In wartime you can never assume that there will be plenty of time available. And that’s the situation we’re in now.’

The conversation with Rake was at an end. The captain seemed uneasy. He scratched at his forehead, which showed traces of red spots.

Tobiasson-Svartman left the captain’s quarters. The October evening was chilly. He paused on the compan-ionway and listened. The sea was booming away in the distance. He could hear somebody laughing in the gun room. He thought he recognised Anders Höckert’s voice.

He closed the door of his cabin and thought about his wife. She always used to go to bed early when he was away, she’d told him that in a letter the same year they were married.

He closed his eyes. After a few minutes of trying, he managed to conjure up her smell. It was soon so strong that it filled the whole cabin.

Chapter 26

It rained during the night.

He slept with his lead clutched tightly to his chest. When he got up, shortly before six, he had a nagging headache.

He wanted to run away, escape. But it was only that he was impatient at still not having embarked on his mission.

Chapter 27

At dawn on 22 October, Lars Tobiasson-Svartman transferred to the gunboat Blenda.

The waiting was over.

He was welcomed at the end of the gangway by the commanding officer, Lieutenant Jakobsson, who had a squint in his left eye and a deformed hand. He spoke with a pronounced Gothenburg accent, and despite his squint his expression seemed friendly and sincere. Tobiasson-Svartman could not help thinking that Jakobsson reminded him of some character he had seen in one of those newfangled films, or whatever they were called. One of the police officers, perhaps, who were forever chasing the star but never managed to catch him?

Lieutenant Jakobsson inspired him with confidence. To his surprise, he was allocated the captain’s cabin.

‘This isn’t necessary,’ he insisted.

‘I’ll bunk with my second in command,’ said Lieutenant Jakobsson. ‘It’s a bit cramped and crappy on these gunboats, the more so as we’ve had to take on extra crew because of the particular nature of the mission. And my orders include that you have the best possible conditions in which to carry out your task. As I see it, a good night’s sleep is one of the cornerstones of human existence. And so I’m prepared to put up with my cabin-mate grinding his teeth in his sleep. It’s like sharing a cabin with a walrus. Assuming walruses grind their teeth, that is.’

He asked Jakobsson to tell him the history of the ship.

‘Parliament voted for it in 1873. She was the first of a series of gunboats, and none of the farmers who dominated parliament in those days had any idea about how many there should be. We have room for eighty tonnes of coal in the bunkers, and that’s enough to see us through 1,500 nautical miles. The engines are horizontal compounders, in accordance with the Wolf system. I’m not at all sure what’s special about the Wolf system, but it seems to work. She’s a good ship, but getting on in years. I suspect they’ll soon retire her.’

Tobiasson-Svartman went to his cabin. It was bigger than the one he’d had on the Svea. But it had a different smell to it. Like an anthill, he thought. As if there had been an anthill in the cabin, but it had been removed during the night.

He smiled at the thought. He imagined explaining to his wife about his first impressions of his cabin, and the smell of formic acid.

He went up on deck and asked Lieutenant Jakobsson to assemble the crew. It was a fine day, with a southerly breeze.

The crew consisted of seventy-one men. Eight of the ratings and a naval engineer had joined the ship to help with the expedition. What they knew about the work in store was little enough.

The crew assembled following a whistle from the second in command, whose name was Fredén.

Tobiasson-Svartman was always nervous when required to address a crew. To conceal his unease, he came across as strict and liable to lose his temper.

‘I will not stand for any slapdash work,’ he began. ‘Our mission is important. These are unsettled times and battle fleets are sailing round our coasts. We shall be remeasuring the depths of parts of the shipping route used by the navy, to the north and south of where we are now. There is no margin for error. A sounding that is out by even one metre could result in disaster for a ship. Shallows that are overlooked or wrongly positioned on a chart could wreak devastation.’

He paused and surveyed the crew, standing in a semicircle before him. Many of them were young, barely twenty. They eyed him expectantly.

‘We’ll be looking for what cannot be seen,’ he went on. ‘But because it cannot be seen, that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. There could be sandbanks just below the surface that have not previously been discovered or charted. There might also be unexpected depths. We shall be looking for both of these features. We’ll be mapping out a route along which our warships can proceed in safety. Any questions?’

Nobody had a question. The gunboat rocked up and down in the swell.

The rest of the day was spent establishing the necessary routines and organising reliable procedures. Lieutenant Jakobsson plainly had the confidence of his crew. Tobiasson-Svartman could see that he had been lucky. A naval officer forced to hand over his cabin to a colleague on a temporary, confidential mission could easily have reacted sourly, but Lieutenant Jakobsson did not seem put out. He gave the impression of being one of those rare people who do not conceal their true character behind a false front. In that respect Lieutenant Jakobsson was the opposite of himself.

The routines were duly established. Every fourth day he would report to Captain Rake. It was estimated that in ideal weather conditions the destroyer would pass their position every ninety-sixth hour. Rake had at his disposal cryptographers who would encode Tobiasson-Svartman’s reports and transmit them to Naval Headquarters. Within a few days the changes that needed to be made to the charts would be with the cartographers in Stockholm. The work would proceed at tremendous speed.

Late that afternoon Lieutenant Jakobsson fixed an exact bearing. They were three degrees north-north-east of the Sandsänkan lighthouse. According to the latest charts the depths around the Juliabåden buoy were twelve, twenty-three and fourteen metres.

Tobiasson-Svartman gave the order that the Blenda should stay where it was until the following day. This was where the measuring work would begin.

He studied the sea through his telescope, scrutinising the distant horizon, and the lighthouses within view. Then he closed his eyes, but without taking away the telescope.

He dreamed of the day when only in exceptional circumstances would he need the help of various instruments. He dreamed of the day when he himself had become the only instrument he needed.

Chapter 28

The following day. Three minutes past seven. Lars Tobiasson-Svartman was on deck. The sun was hidden behind low clouds. He was dressed in uniform. It was plus four degrees, and almost dead calm. A musty smell of seaweed was coming from the sea. He was tense, nervous about the work that was about to begin, afraid of all the mistakes waiting in store for him, mistakes he hoped not to make.

A submerged sandbank long used by herring fishermen, marked on the charts as Olsklabben, was 150 metres to the west of the ship. He had in one of his suitcases an archive that he always carried around with him. He had read in an old tax roll that this sandbank had been ‘used by fishermen and seal hunters since the sixteenth century and belonged to the Crown’.

The sun broke through the clouds. He noticed a drift net, gliding through the water. He did not realise what it was at first. Perhaps some tufts of seaweed had been disturbed by the anchor? Then he realised it was a net that had broken loose. There were dead fish caught in the mesh, and the carcass of a duck.

It occurred to him that he was looking at an image of freedom. The drift net stood for freedom. A prison that had broken loose, with some of its dead prisoners still clinging to their bars that were the mesh.

Freedom is always taking flight, he thought. He watched the net until it had drifted out of sight. Then he turned to Lieutenant Jakobsson, who had come to stand beside him.

‘Freedom is always taking flight,’ he said.

Jakobsson looked at him in surprise.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Oh, nothing. Just a line from a poem, I think. Maybe something of Rydberg’s? Or Fröding?’

There was a long pause. Then Lieutenant Jakobsson clicked his heels and saluted.

‘Breakfast is served in the wardroom. Somebody who is used to the space available on a destroyer will find that everything is much more cramped on a gunboat. Here we cannot have crew members who make sweeping gestures. You can speak loudly, but not wave your arms about.’

‘I don’t expect special privileges, and very seldom do I wave my arms about.’

When he had finished breakfast, which consisted mainly of an over-salty omelette, it was a quarter past eight Two grey-painted launches, each seven metres long, were lowered into the water. Sub-Lieutenant Welander, the naval engineer, took command of one of the launches, and Tobiasson-Svartman the other. Each of the boats carried three oarsmen and a rating selected to take charge of the sounding lines.

They started sounding along a line leading south-west from Sandsänkan lighthouse. Tobiasson-Svartman’s aim was to find out if it were possible for ships with a bigger draught than the ones given on the present chart to pass this far into the archipelago, shielded by the surrounding skerries and rocks.

Sounding lines were lowered and raised, depths established and compared with the figures on the charts. Tobiasson-Svartman was in overall charge, giving instructions when necessary. He took some measurements himself as well, the brass of his instrument gleaming as it glided up and down through the water. Readings were noted down in a diary.

The sea was calm. There was a strange atmosphere of peace around the boats, the sounding leads sinking and rising, the figures being called out, repeated then noted down. The oarsmen rowed as noiselessly as they could. Every sound bounced back and forth over the water.

On board the Blenda Lieutenant Jakobsson smoked his pipe and talked non-stop to one of the stokers about a leaking cooling tube. It was a friendly chat, like good-natured conversation outside church after a service.

Tobiasson-Svartman squinted into the sun and estimated the distance to the Blenda as sixty-five metres.

They progressed gradually westwards. The two launches proceeded with slow, steady strokes of the oars, on a parallel course, five metres apart.

Chapter 29

Shortly after eleven in the morning they found a depth that did not correspond to the depth recorded on the chart. The disparity was considerable, all of three metres. The correct depth was fourteen metres, not seventeen. They checked the surrounding depths, but found no deviations from the figures on the chart. They had stumbled upon an unexpected projection deep below the surface. Some sort of narrow and pointed rock formation in the middle of an area where the rest of the bottom was flat.

Tobiasson-Svartman had found the first of the points he was looking for. A wrong measurement that he could correct. A depth had become less deep.

But in his heart of hearts he was looking for something quite different. A place where the sounding lead never reached the bottom: a point where the sounding line ceased to be a technical instrument and was transformed into a poetic tool.

Chapter 30

The stretch where they were measuring at present curved round a series of small rocks and shallows to the south of the skerry known as Halsskär at the edge of the open sea. The west side had never been charted. There was a possibility that they might find a channel sufficiently deep and wide to take a vessel with a draught as big as the destroyer Svea.

In his travelling archive he found a note to the effect that until the eighteenth century the skerry had been called Vratholmen. He tried to discover why this barren little island no more than one thousand metres in diameter would have had its name changed. A person can change his name for any number of reasons. He had done so himself. But why a skerry at the edge of the open sea?

Could the original name have something to do with wrath, with anger? Records showed that it had been called Vratholmen for at least 250 years. Then, at some time between 1712 and 1740, its name had changed. From then on, there was no Vratholmen, only Halsskär.

He thought about the riddle for some time, but he could find no plausible answer.

In the evening, after copying his own and Sub-Lieutenant Welander’s notes into the main expedition record book, he went on deck The sea was still calm. Some ratings were busy repairing the gangway. He paused and gazed out at Halsskär.

Suddenly, there was a flash of light. He screwed up his eyes. It did not happen again. He went to his cabin and fetched his telescope. There was nothing to be seen on the smooth rocks apart from darkness.

Later that night he wrote a letter to his wife. It was a scrappy description of days that could hardly be distinguished from one another.

He did not write anything about Rudin. Nor did he mention the drift net he had seen that morning.

Chapter 31

The following day, as dawn broke, he clambered into one of the tenders tied to the Blenda’s stern. He unfastened the painter and rowed towards Halsskär. It was dead calm, and the sea smelled of salt and mud. He rowed through the gentle swell with powerful strokes and found a tiny cove on the west side of the skerry where he could land without getting his feet wet. He beached the tender, tied the painter round a large stone then leaned back against the sloping cliff.

The Blenda was anchored off the east side of Halsskär. He was alone. No sound reached him from the ship.

The skerry was resting in the sea. It was like being in a cradle, or on a deathbed, he thought. All the voices hidden in the cliff were whispering. Even rocks have memories, as do waves and breakers. And down below, in the darkness where fish swam along invisible and silent channels, there were also memories.

The barren skerry was a poor and destitute being, devoid of desires. The only vegetation on the rocky islet was patches of lichens, clumps of heather, occasional tufts of grass, short, windswept juniper bushes and some strips of seaweed at the edge of the water.

The skerry was a mendicant friar who had renounced all earthly possessions and wandered alone through the world.

He was all of a sudden overcome by a powerful longing for his wife. The next time he saw Captain Rake he would ask him to post the letter he had written to her.

Only then could he count on receiving a letter from her. He was married to a woman who answered letters, but was never the first to write.

He climbed to the top of the cliff. The rocks were slippery and he kept stumbling. From the summit he could see the Blenda, riding at anchor in the distance. He had his telescope with him and aimed it at the ship. Watching people and things through a telescope always gave him a feeling of power.

Lieutenant Jakobsson was standing by the rail, peeing out over the water. He was holding his penis in his deformed hand.

Tobiasson-Svartman put the telescope down. What he had seen disgusted him. He took a deep breath.

From now on he would feel repugnance towards Jakobsson. Every time they sat down at table together he would have to fight back the image of the man peeing through the rail, using his deformed hand.

He wondered what would happen if he wrote in the letter to his wife: ‘This morning I surprised the ship’s master with his trousers down.’

He sat down in a rocky hollow where the ground was dry and closed his eyes. After a few seconds he had conjured up the smell of his wife. It was so strong that when he opened his eyes he half expected to see her there on the skerry, standing close to him.

Shortly afterwards he climbed down to the tender and rowed back to the gunboat.

That same afternoon they progressed as far as Halsskär and began a methodical search for a sufficiently deep channel along the west side of the skerry.

Chapter 32

It took them seven days of hard, relentless work to confirm that it was possible to route the navigable channel on the west side of Halsskär. All the ships in the Swedish Navy, apart from the largest of the battleships, would be able to pass with a satisfactory safety margin.

At dinner, consisting of poached cod with potatoes and egg sauce, he told Lieutenant Jakobsson what they had established. He was not absolutely certain that he was allowed to pass on such details, but on the other hand it seemed odd not to be able to speak openly with a man who could observe what was going on with his own eyes.

‘I’m impressed,’ said Jakobsson. ‘But I have a question: Did you know in advance?’

‘Know what?’

‘That it was deep just there? That it was deep enough for the big naval vessels?’

‘Hydrographic surveyors who guess their way forward are seldom successful. The only thing I know for sure is that it’s impossible to predict what is hidden under the surface of the sea. We can pull up mud and fish and rotten seaweed from the sea, but we can also bring up some significant surprises.’

‘It must be a remarkable feeling, to look at a sea chart and tell yourself that you were responsible for its accuracy.’

The conversation was interrupted by Jakobsson’s second in command, Fredén, appearing to announce that the Svea had been sighted, heading northwards.

Tobiasson-Svartman quickly finished his meal and hurried to write up the latest of his data. He checked through the notes briefly, then signed the record book.

Before leaving his cabin he wrote another short letter to his wife.

The destroyer towered over the Blenda. As it was almost perfectly calm, a gangplank was laid out to act as a bridge between the two vessels.

Captain Rake had a bad cold. He asked no questions, merely accepted the record book and passed it on to one of the cryptographers. Then he offered Tobiasson-Svartman a brandy.

‘Bosun Rudin?’ Tobiasson-Svartman asked. ‘How is he?’

‘I’m afraid he died during the operation,’ Rake said. ‘It’s very sad. He was a good bosun. Besides, with his death my personal statistics look less good.’

Tobiasson-Svartman suddenly felt sick. He hadn’t expected Rudin to be dead, and for a moment he lost his self-possession.

Rake was watching him intently. He had noticed the reaction.

‘Are you not well?’

‘I’m fine, thank you. It’s just that my stomach has been a bit upset these last few days.’

Neither of them spoke. The shadow of Bosun Rudin passed through the cabin.

They took another glass of brandy before Tobiasson-Svartman left.

Chapter 33

On 31 October, early in the afternoon, the central east coast of Sweden was struck by a storm that forced the hydrographers to stop work. It was not without a degree of satisfaction that Tobiasson-Svartman ordered the launches back to the mother ship. Early that morning, when he had checked the weather, all the indications were that a storm was approaching. At breakfast he had asked Jakobsson what he thought about the weather prospects.

‘The barometer is falling,’ Jakobsson said. ‘We might get a strong southerly wind approaching gale force, but probably not until after nightfall.’

More probably by this afternoon, Tobiasson-Svartman had thought. And the wind is going to be more of an easterly. And it will be storm force. But he said nothing. Neither at breakfast, nor when the storm hit them.

The Blenda tossed and turned in the rough seas. The engines were at full throttle, to keep the ship heading into the wind. He was alone at the meal table for two days. Lieutenant Jakobsson suffered badly from seasickness and did not appear. Tobiasson-Svartman had never had that problem, not even during his early days as a cadet For some reason, that gave him a bad conscience.

Chapter 34

The storm blew itself out during the night of 2 November.

When Tobiasson-Svartman came out on deck at dawn ragged clouds were scudding across the sky. The temperature was climbing. They could restart their depth sounding. His overall plan had incorporated time to make up for delays and he was confident that they would still finish on time. He had allowed for three severe storms.

He checked his watch and saw that it was time for breakfast.

Then he heard a shout. It sounded like a lamentation. When he turned round he saw a rating leaning over the rail, gesticulating wildly with his hand. Something in the water had attracted the sailor’s attention.

Lieutenant Jakobsson and Tobiasson-Svartman hurried to where the sailor was standing. Half of Jakobsson’s face was covered in shaving foam.

There was a dead body bobbing up and down in the water by the side of the ship. It was a man lying face downwards. His uniform was not Swedish. But was it German or was it Russian?

Ropes and grappling irons were used to hoist the body on board. The ratings turned him on his back. The face was that of a young man. He had blond hair. But he had no eyes. They had been eaten by fish, eels or perhaps birds. Lieutenant Jakobsson groaned out loud.

Tobiasson-Svartman tried to grab hold of the rail, but fainted before he could reach it When he came round, Jakobsson was bent over him. Some drops of the white lather dripped on to Tobiasson-Svartman’s forehead. He sat up slowly, waving away the crew members who were trying to help him.

Feelings of humiliation were swelling up inside him. Not only had he lost control of himself, he had shown weakness in full view of the crew.

First Rudin had died, and now this body had been pulled up from the sea. That was too much, more than he could bear.

Before today Tobiasson-Svartman had only ever seen one dead body in all his life. That was his father, who had suffered a massive heart attack one evening when he was getting changed. He had died on the floor beside his bed, just as Tobiasson-Svartman had put his head round the door to tell him that dinner was ready.

At the moment of death Hugo Svartman had pissed himself. He lay there with his stomach uncovered and his eyes wide open. He was holding a shoe in one hand, as if to defend himself.

Tobiasson-Svartman had never managed to forget the sight of that fat, half-naked body. He often thought that his father had decided to punish him one last time by dying before his very eyes.

The dead man was very young. Lieutenant Jakobsson bent down and placed a handkerchief over the empty eye sockets.

‘The uniform is German,’ he said. ‘He belonged to the German Navy.’

Jakobsson unbuttoned the dead man’s tunic. He produced some soaking wet documents and photographs from the inside pockets.

‘I don’t have much experience of dead sailors,’ he said. ‘That doesn’t mean of course that I’ve never fished dead men out of the sea. I don’t think this man has been in the water all that long. He doesn’t appear to have any wounds to suggest that he died in battle. Presumably he fell overboard by accident.’

Jakobsson stood up and ordered the body to be covered. Tobiasson-Svartman accompanied him into the mess. When they had sat down, and the papers and photographs were laid out on the table, Jakobsson realised that half of his face still had shaving foam on it. He shouted for the steward to bring him a towel and wiped his face clean. When Tobiasson-Svartman saw the half-shaved face, he could not help but burst into insuppressible laughter. Lieutenant Jakobsson raised an eyebrow in surprise. It occurred to Tobiasson-Svartman that this was the first time he had laughed out loud since coming on board the Blenda.

The idea of Lieutenant Jakobsson as a comic figure in a cinematographic farce came to him for the second time.

Chapter 35

Lieutenant Jakobsson started going through the dead sailor’s papers. Carefully he separated the pages of a military pay book.

‘Karl-Heinz Richter, born Kiel 1895,’ he read. ‘A very young man, not twenty. Short life, violent death.’

He was, with difficulty, deciphering the water-damaged writing.

‘He was a crew member of the battleship Niederburg,’ he said. ‘I think the Naval Headquarters in Stockholm will be surprised to hear that the Niederburg operating in the Baltic.’

Tobiasson-Svartman thought to himself: One of the smaller battleships in the German Navy, but even so it has a crew of more than eight hundred men. One of the heavy German naval vessels that could travel at impressively high speeds.

Jakobsson was poring over the photographs. One was a miniature in a glazed frame.

‘Frau Richter presumably,’ he said. ‘A woman with a friendly smile sitting in a photographer’s studio, never dreaming that her son will drown and have this photograph with him. A pretty face, but a bit on the plump side.’

He scrutinised the miniature more closely.

‘There’s a little blue butterfly behind the photograph,’ he said. ‘Why, we shall never know.’

The other photograph was blurred. He studied it for a long time before putting it down.

‘It could just possibly be a dog. A Swedish foxhound, perhaps. But I’m not sure.’

He handed over the photographs and the documents. Tobiasson-Svartman also thought it could be a dog, but he too was unsure about the breed. The woman, who was most probably Karl-Heinz Richter’s mother, looked cowed and scared. She seemed almost to be crouching before the photographer. And she was really fat.

‘There are two possibilities,’ Jakobsson said. ‘Either it was a banal accident A sailor falls overboard in the dark. Nobody notices. It doesn’t even have to be dark for such an accident to occur. It could have happened in broad daylight. It only takes two or three seconds to fall into the water from the deck of a ship. Nobody sees you, nobody hears when you fall in with a splash and struggle with the sea that relentlessly sucks all the heat out of you and then pulls you under. You die from hypothermia, in a state of extreme panic. Anybody who’s been close to drowning talks about a very special kind of fear that can’t be compared to anything else, not even the terror you feel when making a bayonet charge on enemy forces shooting at you for all they are worth.’

He broke off, as if he had lost the thread. Tobiasson-Svartman could feel his stomach churning.

‘But there could also be another explanation,’ Jakobsson said. ‘He might have committed suicide. His angst had got the better of him. Young people most especially can take their own lives for the strangest reasons. A broken heart, for instance. Or that vague phenomenon the Germans call “Weltschmerz”. But even homesickness is not unknown as a reason for servicemen taking their own lives. Mother’s apron strings are more important than life. If you lose your grip on the apron strings, the only alternative is death.’

He reached for the miniature.

‘It’s not impossible that this woman has been over-protective as far as her son is concerned, and made his life without her impossible.’

He studied the image for a while before putting it down again.

‘One could speculate about other reasons, of course. He might have been badly treated by his officers or fellow crewmen. I thought the lad looked little and scared even in death — he looked quite like a girl, in fact. All that was missing were the pigtails. Perhaps he couldn’t put up with being at the bottom of the pecking order. Even so, it needs a special sort of courage to throw yourself into the water. Courage or stupidity. Often enough it boils down to the same thing. Especially among soldiers and sailors.’

Lieutenant Jakobsson stood up.

‘I don’t want the man on board any longer than necessary. Death weighs heavily on a ship. A crew gets nervy when they have a dead body as cargo. We’ll bury him as soon as possible.’

‘Doesn’t there have to be a post-mortem?’

Jakobsson thought for a moment before replying.

‘I’m in command of this ship and so I make the decisions. We can’t be certain that the man hasn’t been ill. People can carry an infection even when they are no longer breathing. I’m going to bury him as soon as possible.’

He paused in the doorway.

‘I need some advice,’ he said. ‘You are presumably the best qualified person to give it in the whole of the Swedish Navy.’

‘What?’

‘I need a spot that’s suitably deep. Ideally somewhere close where we can sink the body. Maybe you could check your charts and find somewhere?’

‘That won’t be necessary. I know a suitable place already.’

They went on deck and walked to the rail. It was strangely silent on board. Tobiasson-Svartman pointed to the northeast.

‘There is a crack in the sea floor 250 metres from here. It never gets wider than thirty metres and it runs as far as Landsortsdjupet. As you know, that’s the deepest part of the whole Baltic Sea, in excess of 450 metres. The location I’m talking about is 160 metres deep. If you want anything deeper than that you’ll have to sail several nautical miles north.’

‘That will be fine. On land they bury coffins only two metres deep. At sea, 160 metres should be more than enough.’

The body was sewn into a tarpaulin. Various pieces of scrap metal from the engine room were lashed around the corpse. While the sea-coffin was being prepared, Lieutenant Jakobsson finished shaving.

The ship moved in accordance with the instructions given to the helmsman by Tobiasson-Svartman. It struck him that this was the first time he’d been in de facto command of a Swedish naval vessel. Even if it was only for 250 metres.

Chapter 36

The burial took place at nine thirty.

The crew gathered on the afterdeck. The carpenter had rigged up a plank between two trestles. The body wrapped in the tarpaulin was laid with the foot end next to the rail. The ship’s three-tailed flag was at half mast.

Lieutenant Jakobsson followed the ritual laid down in his instruction book. He was holding a hymnal. The crew mumbled out the hymn. Jakobsson had a loud voice, but he sang out of tune. Tobiasson-Svartman only moved his lips. The seagulls circling the ship joined in the singing. After the hymn, Jakobsson read the prescribed prayer over the dead body, then the plank was tilted and the body slid over the rail and entered the water with a muffled splash.

The ship’s foghorn sounded eerily. Jakobsson kept the crew to attention for a full minute. When they dispersed there was no sign of the body.

Jakobsson invited Tobiasson-Svartman to a glass of aquavit in the mess. They toasted each other and the lieutenant asked: ‘How long do you think it took for the body to sink down to the mud or sand or whatever there is at the bottom just there?’

‘It’s mud,’ said Tobiasson-Svartman. ‘It’s always mud in the Baltic.’

He made a rapid calculation in his head.

‘Let’s assume the body and the metal weigh a hundred kilos and the distance to the bottom is 160 metres. That would mean it would take two to three seconds for it to sink one metre. And so it will have taken the body about six minutes to reach the bottom.’

Jakobsson thought that over for a while.

‘That ought to be enough to save my crew from worrying if he’ll be coming back up to the surface again. Sailors can be as superstitious as hell. But the same applies to commanding officers if things are really bad.’

He poured himself another drink, and Tobiasson-Svartman did not say no.

‘I shall spend a lot of time wondering about why he drowned,’ Jakobsson said. ‘I know I’ll never know the answer, but I won’t be able to forget him. Our meeting was brief. He lay on the deck of my ship under a piece of grey tarpaulin. Then he departed again. Even so, he will be with me for the rest of my life.’

‘What will happen to his belongings? The miniature, the picture of the dog? His pay book?’

‘I’ll send them to Stockholm together with my report. I assume they’ll eventually be sent to Germany. Sooner or later Frau Richter will find out what happened to her son. I know of no civilised nation where the procedures for dealing with dead soldiers and sailors are not meticulously observed.’

Tobiasson-Svartman stood up to prepare for resuming work. Lieutenant Jakobsson raised a hand to indicate that he had something more to say.

‘I have a brother who’s an engineer,’ he said. ‘He has been working for a number of years at the German naval yards in Gotenhafen and Kiel. He tells me that the German shipbuilders are considering making incredibly big vessels. With a deadweight of getting on for 50,000 tonnes, half of which is accounted for by the armour-plating. In some places that will be thirty-five centimetres thick. These ships will have crews comprising two thousand men and more, they’ll be floating towns with access to everything you can think of. Presumably there’ll be an undertaker or two on board as well. I suppose one of these days ships like that will come into being. I wonder what will happen to the human race, though. We could never have skin thirty-five centimetres thick, a skin that could withstand the biggest shells. Will the human race survive? Or will we end up fighting wars that never end, with nobody able to remember how they started, and nobody able to envisage them ending?’

Jakobsson poured himself another drink.

‘The war that’s being fought now could be the beginning of what I’m talking about. Millions of soldiers are going to die simply because one man was murdered in Sarajevo. Some insignificant Crown prince. Does that make any sense? Of course it doesn’t. The bottom line is that war is always a mistake. Or the result of absurd assumptions and conclusions.’

Jakobsson did not appear to expect any comment. He replaced the bottle in its cupboard, then left the mess.

Just as he stepped out on to the deck he swayed and stumbled. But he did not turn round.

Tobiasson-Svartman remained in the mess, thinking over what he had just heard.

How thick was his own skin? How big a shell would it be able to resist?

What did he know about Kristina Tacker’s skin, apart from the fact that it was fragrant?

For a moment he was overcome by utter panic. He was transfixed, as if poison were spreading all over his body. Then he got a grip on himself, took a deep breath and went on deck.

Chapter 37

They started work again and managed to complete eighty soundings before dusk.

That evening they were served baked flounder, potatoes and a thin, tasteless sauce. Lieutenant Jakobsson was very subdued and did no more than poke at his food.

Tobiasson-Svartman copied the day’s notes into the main record book. When he had finished he felt restless and went on deck.

Once again it seemed to him that there was something glinting on Halsskär. As before, he put it down to his imagination.

That night he slept clutching his sounding lead. He cleaned it thoroughly every day, but he thought it smelled of mud from the bottom of the sea.

Chapter 38

He woke up with a start. It was dark in the cabin. The lead was next to his left arm. Water was lapping gently against the hull as the ship slowly rolled. He could hear the nightwatchman coughing on deck. It did not sound good, it had a rattling quality. The man’s footsteps faded away as he moved aft.

He had been dreaming. There had been horses, and men whipping them. He had tried to intervene, but they ignored him. Then he understood that he was about to be whipped himself. At that point he woke up.

He checked his watch, hanging by the side of his bunk. A quarter past five. Not yet dawn.

He thought about the flash he thought he had seen on two occasions now. But surely Halsskär was just a barren rock? There could not be any kind of light there.

He lit the paraffin lamp, dressed, took a deep breath and examined his face in the mirror. It was still his own.

When he was a child — all the time he was growing up, in fact — he had looked like his mother. Now, as he grew older, his face had begun to change and he thought he could see more of his father every time he looked in a mirror.

Was there yet another face within him?

Would he ever be able to feel that he looked like himself and nobody else?

Chapter 39

It was hazy over the sea when he came out on deck.

The watchman with the hacking cough was sitting on the capstan, smoking. He jumped up when he heard footsteps. Hid his fag behind his back. Then he succumbed to a violent coughing fit. Scraping and rasping noises seemed to be tearing his chest.

Tobiasson-Svartman clambered into one of the tenders and untied the painter. The watchman, who had recovered from his coughing fit, asked breathlessly if the officer required an oarsman. Tobiasson-Svartman declined the offer.

The sun had not risen over the horizon as he rowed towards Halsskär. The rowlocks squeaked forlornly. In order to get to the skerry as directly as possible he lined his tender up with the starboard wing of the bridge, and did not need to change course at all. He rowed with powerful strokes and beached the boat at the same place as last time.

Halsskär gave the impression of having been crushed by a giant’s hand. There were deep ravines and hollows, muddy soil had accumulated in depressions and provided a footing for moss campion and occasional clumps of wormwood. Lichens were creeping over the rocks, and sparse red heather.

He followed the shore northwards. Here and there he had to move inland when the cliffs became too steep. The terrain was in constant conflict with him, cliffs turned into precipices, rocks were slippery, every obstacle he overcame gave way to a new one.

After ten minutes he was covered in sweat. He was deep down in a crevice with steep rock walls on either side, and he could no longer see the sea. He was surrounded by stone. A snake had shed its skin at the bottom of the fissure. He continued clambering over the rocks, saw the sea once more and came to the edge of an inlet that seemed to have been carved out of the cliffs.

He stopped dead.

As far in as you could go was a rickety jetty. Moored there was a dinghy. A sail was furled around the mast, situated towards the bows. On the shore were some fishing nets hanging from hooks attached to poles that had been driven down among the stones. There was also a big washtub made of tarred oak, a heap of stones for weighing down the nets, and some floats made of bark and cork.

He stood motionless, taking in what he saw. He was surprised to find that a skerry so far out in the archipelago, next to the open sea, was being used by fishermen and bird-hunters. They could not very well be seal-hunters as there were no rocks or skerries in the vicinity of the Sandsänkan lighthouse where grey seals were known to bask. You would have to go further into the archipelago for that, to the shallows east of Harstena.

He continued walking along the shore towards the sheltered inlet, and noted that the dinghy was well looked after. The sail furled round the mast was not patched and the sheets were whole rather than being knotted together from odds and ends of line. The nets, hanging neatly from the hooks, were small-meshed and evidently intended for catching herring. Furthest in was a well-worn path leading towards dense thickets of dog rose and sea buckthorn. The path meandered on beyond the thickets and between two large outcrops. Beside it, to his surprised delight, he observed a freshwater spring.

Then he came upon a patch of level ground and a little cabin squatting in the shadow of a cliff wall. It had a brick chimney, and a thin wisp of smoke was rising skywards. The foundation was of rough stones, and the walls were made of grey planks, varying in width, none of them planed. The roof was patched with moss, but its base was a layer of turf. There was only one window. The door was closed. There was a little vegetable patch alongside the cabin. Nothing was growing in it at present, but somebody had made the effort of covering it with bunches of seaweed, to act as fertiliser. Further away, next to the cliff wall, was a potato patch. He estimated it to be twenty square metres. It too was blanketed in seaweed mixed with old, dried potato haulm.

At that very moment the door opened. A woman emerged from the cabin. She was wearing a grey skirt and a dishevelled cardigan; she was carrying an axe, and her hair was long, golden and braided into a plait tucked into her cardigan. She caught sight of him and gave a start. But she was not scared and did not raise the axe.

Tobiasson-Svartman was embarrassed. He felt as if he had been caught in the act, without knowing what the act was. He raised his hand to the peak of his cap and saluted her.

‘I didn’t mean to come creeping up on you,’ he said. ‘My name is Lars Tobiasson-Svartman, I’m a commander but not the master of the naval vessel that’s anchored off the east side of the skerry.’

Her eyes were bright and she did not lower her gaze.

‘What are you doing? I’ve seen the boat. It anchors here day after day.’

‘We’re sounding depths and checking if the sea charts are reliable.’

‘I’m not used to seeing ships lying at anchor out here among the shallows. Even less to finding people on the island.’

‘The war has made it necessary.’

She did not take her eyes off him.

‘What war?’

He could tell that she was genuine. She did not know. She walked out of the door of a cabin on Halsskär and did not know that there was a major war in progress.

Before answering, he glanced at the door, to see if her husband might put in an appearance.

‘There has been war for several months now,’ he said. ‘A lot of countries are involved. But here in the Baltic it’s mainly the German and Russian Fleets stalking each other and hoping to strike a telling blow.’

‘What about Sweden?’

‘We’re not involved. But nobody knows how long that will last.’

Silence. She was young, could not have been thirty. Her face was entirely honest, like her voice.

‘How’s the fishing going?’ he asked politely.

‘It’s hard.’

‘No herring about, then? Any cod?’

‘There are fish about. But it’s hard.’

She put the axe down on a chopping block. Next to it was a collection of branches and driftwood for making firewood.

‘I rarely have visitors,’ she said. ‘I’ve nothing to offer you.’

‘Oh, that’s all right. I’m going back to my ship now.’

She looked at him. He thought she had a pretty face.

‘My name’s Sara Fredrika,’ she said. ‘I’m not used to being with people.’

She turned and vanished into the cabin.

Tobiasson-Svartman stared for ages at the closed door. He hoped against hope that it would open and that she would come out again. But the door remained closed.

Then he went back to the Blenda. Lieutenant Jakobsson was smoking by the rail as he clambered on board.

‘Halsskär? Is that what the skerry’s called? What did you find there?’

‘Nothing. There was nothing on it.’

They continued with their work, lowering and raising the sounding leads through the water.

All the time he was thinking about the woman who had emerged from the cabin and looked him straight in the eye.

Towards mid-afternoon a wind got up from the south-west.

Just as they finished work for the day it started raining.