Depths

Chapter 58

Their conversations were spasmodic.

He was close to her all the time in the cramped room, but it felt to him as if the distance between them grew.

Late in the afternoon she stood up and left the cottage. He made no move, but glanced surreptitiously at the window. He expected her to be standing there, watching him.

The window was empty.

He did not understand it. She was not behaving as she ought to have done. All the time when he was growing up he had kept his parents under constant observation. He would peer furtively through half-closed doors or use mirrors to see unnoticed into rooms where his parents were, together or alone or with others. In his imagination he bored invisible holes in the upstairs floor of the house they lived in at Skeppsbron, so that he could see down into his father’s office.

He had learned not to reveal his presence when he listened to their angry exchanges, watched them drinking themselves silly or, as was often the case with his mother, sitting alone, sobbing.

His mother always wept silently. Her tears seemed to tiptoe out of her eyes.

These memories shot through his mind, one after the other. He walked to the window, which was coated in a thin layer of salt spray.

He caught a glimpse of her walking along the path to the inlet. He assumed that she wanted to make sure her boat was securely moored.

He looked around the room. She had just put more wood on the fire. It smelled of juniper. The light from the flames danced round the walls. In one of them was a low door, closed. He tried the handle. It was not locked and led into a windowless closet. In one corner were a few wooden barrels; sheep shears and broken carding combs were scattered on the floor as well as some folded sacks for flour. On one of the walls hung a herring net, half finished. He made a mental inventory of the room and its contents, as if it were important to remember every detail.

Sara Fredrika still had not returned. In the big room was a corner cupboard, rickety, with rusty hinges. Did he dare to open it? Would the door fall off if he did? He pressed his hand against the cupboard frame and turned the key.

On the only shelf were two objects: a hymn book and a pipe. The pipe was similar to the one Lieutenant Jakobsson usually had in his mouth. He picked it up and sniffed at it. It seemed not to have been used for a long time. The remains of the burned tobacco were rock hard. It still smelled of old tar. He put the pipe down, eyed the hymn book without touching it, then closed the door.

He squatted down and felt under the bed. There was something there. He could feel that it was an old-fashioned shotgun, but he did not take it out. He pressed his face against the pillow, trying to find traces of her smell. All he could feel was that the pillow was damp.

Damp loneliness, he thought. That’s her fragrance. The thought excited him.

There had been a man in the house, a man who had left behind a well-used pipe and an old shotgun. Perhaps he was not gone altogether. Perhaps he was away selling fish in Slätbaken on the way to Söderköping. Autumn was ending, and there were markets all over Sweden.

The storm was still battering the walls. He tried to imagine the man, but was unable to give him a face.

The door flew open. Sara Fredrika was back. The cold wind rushed into the room.

‘I went to check the boats,’ she said. ‘I’ve never seen one like yours before.’

‘It’s a tender. We have four of them, in case we need to abandon ship. And we also have two quite big launches. If the ship starts to sink, nobody need be left behind. You may find it hard to believe, but the tender is classified as a warship.’

She poked at the fire. Her movements were precise and purposeful, he noticed, but she was trying to conceal a degree of worry or impatience. She sat down on the bunk. The fire was blazing away again, and he could see her clearly. Something was welling up inside him that he could not put his finger on. Somehow or other he felt tricked, deceived. The pipe in the corner cupboard belonged to somebody who had been in this cottage, who might even have built it, who had shared her bed and who might come back.

He eyed her as he had looked at the sailor with the snotty nose. He wanted to hit her. Quickly he moved his stool back to avoid that happening. In order to have something to say he said: ‘Do you not have any animals? I thought I saw a cat with bluish-grey fur. If there is such a thing as a cat with a touch of blue in its fur.’

‘There are no animals here.’

‘Not even a cat?’

‘I wouldn’t mind having a dog that could swim out and fetch the birds I shoot.’

‘But I thought I saw a cat?’

‘There is no cat. I know what there is on this skerry. There are two adders, one male and one female. I kill the young ones every spring. Maybe I ought to let one or two live so that the skerry doesn’t become snakeless if the parents upped and died or are caught by an eagle. There was a fox here once.’

She pointed to a fox fur lying on a bench.

‘Had it swum here?’

‘Sometimes the winters are so cold and long that ice forms on the sea even as far out as this, and occasionally further — as far as the outermost herring grounds. That’s when the fox came. It stayed when the ice melted. I shot it through the door when it was scavenging for food. It had seaweed and bits of stone in its stomach. I think it had gone mad and started chewing stones in desperation. I suppose it’s worse for a fox than for a person to be all alone. But it may be easier for animals to do away with themselves.’

‘Why?’ he said, surprised.

‘They have no god to be afraid of. Unlike me.’

He hoped she would start talking about herself. He did not care about the snakes and the fox. But she kept on about the animals.

‘Seals sometimes bask on the reefs north-west of Sandsänkan if it gets too crowded on their usual rocks. Occasionally a seal comes ashore here. But there are no animals apart from those. I think this is the only skerry out here where there aren’t any ants. I don’t know why.’

‘I see no sign of a rifle,’ he said. ‘But you say you shot a fox?’

She pointed under the bed she was sitting on.

‘I have a shotgun. And crampons for my boots. And also a seal club. My father made it. He was born in 1851 and died when I was a little girl. No picture of him exists, nothing. A photographer from Norrköping visited the islands in the 1890s, but my father didn’t want to have his picture taken. He ran away and hid in a rock crevice somewhere. Some of the old men out here used to believe they would lose the ability to aim straight at seabirds if they had their photo taken. There was a lot of superstition in the archipelago when I was a girl. That seal club is the only thing I have that belonged to my father. A club covered in dried seal blood instead of a face.’

He tried cautiously to wheedle out an answer to what really interested him.

‘Are there any other people on this skerry?’

‘Not any more. There used to be.’

‘That’s hard to understand.’

‘Understand what? That anybody would stay here? I’ve stayed here. But there’ll be no one when I’ve gone. When I leave, the island will revert to what it used to be. The snakes will be able to live in peace. They might multiply. There might be so many of them that no humans will dare to land here any more. Once, a long time ago, people rowed out to here. They used their ribs as oars. Now they’ve all gone. Even the stones that were carried up here from the shore to make the foundations for the houses have started to go away. I go out and look at them. It’s like trying to watch the elevation of the land. You would have to stand in the same place for very many years to check if the land really was rising. It’s the same with the stones they lugged up here, the first of the people who came to the skerry hundreds of years ago. Now the stones are slowly sliding back again, to the places they were taken from.’

He listened in astonishment. Ribs used as oars? Stones that move? What was she talking about?

‘I’m not used to people,’ she said. ‘Not since I became alone.’

‘Why do you live here on your own?’

‘Is there more than one answer?’

‘Either you have chosen to do so, or you haven’t.’

‘Who would choose loneliness?’

‘Some people would. You can shut yourself away in a house, but you can also do it on an island where the sea is a sort of terrifying moat.’

‘I don’t understand that. I’m twenty-seven years old, nothing can scare me any more.’

‘I just wonder what happened.’

A massive gust of wind shook the cottage to its foundations.

‘One of these days it can simply collapse,’ she shouted, in a sudden burst of emotion. ‘I’ll let it fall to bits all round me.’

She went on talking, in long sentences. She expressed herself clearly, as only people who talk a lot to themselves can. Afterwards, when she had fallen silent, abruptly, as if she regretted having spoken, he realised that he could no longer hear the wind. Had the storm blown over so soon?

He listened. She had shrunk back into the shadows again.

Then the wind started once more.

She had spoken without hesitation, known in detail exactly what she wanted to say. It was as if she had told the story many times, but only to herself, the story of why she was alone on Halsskär. Or perhaps, in the evenings, in the darkness, she had practised so that she could tell the story to somebody she hoped might one day come to the skerry.

He had the feeling that he had come to Halsskär for one specific reason. He had come so that she would have somebody to listen to her.

Chapter 59

The man whose pipe was here was called Nils Ferdinand Persson.

He had been Sara Fredrika’s husband.

The story began several years ago when they were newly married and worked as domestic servants for a relative of hers, Axel Theodor Homeros Lundberg. He was well-to-do, owned farms in both Gusum and in the archipelago near Finnö and as far north as Risö. They did not enjoy working for Lundberg. He was miserly and vindictive, and the only things he seemed to like were his riding boots, which he was forever treating with seal fat. No one was allowed to touch them, not even his wife, who was scared stiff of getting a beating. They stuck it for a year, but left in acrimonious circumstances and went to live on one of the islands near Turmulefjärden. It was a very poor smallholding, but at least there was nobody there polishing boots and shouting at them. They stayed there for a year, then heard that there was an abandoned cottage on Halsskär. They were able to secure the lease cheaply, for practically nothing — a barrel of herring every spring and autumn, that was all.

They sailed out to Halsskär one chilly Sunday in March. It had been a severe winter and the ice had not altogether loosened its grip. Her husband said that nothing could be worse than loud-mouthed gentleman farmers. Houses could be made windproof, nets and drift nets could be patched up and repaired, but nobody could shut the mouth of a gentleman farmer who bellowed and yelled.

They moved in as summer approached, made repairs on the house and started to prepare for whatever was in store: autumn, winter, ice, isolation.

Every now and then farmers from the inner archipelago would appear, sailing along the channel known as Märsfjärden that led to Halsskär and Krampbådorna. They were heading for the herring fishing grounds or shooting birds, and were astonished to see Sara Fredrika and her husband. Hadn’t Halsskär been abandoned a century ago? In 1807 an old spinster lived there, but she froze to death and was pecked to the bone by gulls and crows. Ever since then the skerry had been uninhabited. The outhouses had collapsed, the jetties in the inlet had rotted away and the houses that could be dismantled were moved, plank by plank, to the green islands closer to the mainland.

It was said that Nils Ferdinand Persson and his wife Sara Fredrika had their noses in the air, and people with noses in the air ire the first to fall.

They were also visited by people from Åland and Finland, who were hunting seals illegally. They would shake their heads and shout warnings to them in their incomprehensible language.

Autumn arrived in September. The first storm was quite unexpected, it blew in from the east in the middle of the night and it was sheer luck that they did not have any nets out. They soon learned their lesson, and every day as night closed in they would keep a close eye on the sea, and try to identify signs indicating that dangerous winds might be approaching.

In November one of the sheep — they had two, but no cow — slipped from a rock and broke its leg. Then the surviving one died, and they were even more isolated, if that were possible.

On the morning of Christmas Day, six months after they had settled on the skerry, catastrophe struck. They had laid out nets a few days earlier when the weather was cold and clear with virtually no wind, just a gentle breeze from the south. The nets were in two shallows and did not need too many heavy stones to anchor them. They had experienced good catches there ever since early December. As the shallows had no name, Nils Ferdinand christened one of them Sara Rocks and the other Fredrika Shallows.

The storm came late on Christmas Eve. It attacked from the south, charging towards them with a dense blizzard as the first line of assault. When dawn came it was obvious that if they were not to lose their nets they would have to go out and take them in. The winds were storm force, but that couldn’t be helped, they had no choice. They launched the boat and managed to haul in one of the nets. Then came a colossal wave that crashed into the starboard side of the boat and capsized it.

When she managed to get out of the floating coffin she saw her husband. He had become enmeshed in the net he had been trying to take in, and it was writhing around him like a sea monster. He fought and screamed, but was dragged down and she was unable to do anything except cling to an oar and the stern seat that had broken loose, struggle back to land and crawl to the cottage, half frozen.

That was her story. She had hewn it from deep inside her as if sculpting a block of stone with violent blows from a chisel. A block of stone, a headstone for her husband.

She said no more. It was getting dark when she finished. The shadows were lengthening.

He sat on his stool and watched while she made a soup. They ate in silence.

Tobiasson-Svartman thought: It must be like staring straight into Hell, watching somebody you love die screaming.

Chapter 60

That night he lay on the floor close to the fire.

His ‘bed’ comprised the pelt of the mad fox, some rag mats and sealskins. His ‘pillow’ was some logs of wood covered by his sweater. He spread the oilskin coat over him and worried that the draught would make him ill.

She had offered him the bunk. For one intoxicating moment he had thought she was inviting him to share it with her. Did she suspect what he was thinking? He could not be sure. She stroked her hair away from her face and asked him again. He shook his head, he could sleep on the floor.

She wrapped herself up in a thick quilt that he assumed was stuffed with feathers from the birds she had shot. She turned her back to him. Her breathing became deeper. She was asleep. When he adjusted the logs under his head he could hear that she had woken up, listened, then gone back to sleep.

I am not a danger as far as she is concerned, he thought. I’m not a temptation, I’m nothing.

The embers in the fire died down. He opened his pocket watch and managed with difficulty to make out the hands. It was half past nine. The cold from the floor had already started to penetrate through the skins.

The storm was still raging. The wind came and went in powerful gusts.

Chapter 61

His thoughts wandered to his wife moving around in their warm flat in Wallingatan. No doubt she was still awake. Last thing at night she would usually walk around from room to room, smoothing the heavy curtains in the windows, adjusting cloths and covers, straightening out a crease in a carpet.

He worked out distances, lived by checking where he was in relation to others. His wife looked for irregularities, in order to put them right. Before shutting the bedroom door behind her she would check that the flat’s front door was locked and that the maid had put the light out in her room behind the kitchen.

He realised that he was having difficulty in picturing her face here in the darkness. It was in the shadowy part of his memory, he could not get through to her. Nor could he conjure up her voice, that tense, slightly harsh tone with just a hint of a lisp, barely noticeable.

He sat up. The woman in the bunk gave a snore. He held his breath.

‘I love my wife,’ he whispered softly, ‘but also the woman in the bunk next to me. Or at least, I desire her and am jealous of the man who died screaming, tangled up in a herring net. I hate that accursed pipe she keeps hidden in her cupboard.’

Again he was tempted to creep into her bed. Perhaps that was what she expected, perhaps he had not grasped her intention when she spread the skins out on the floor. Perhaps something he could never have imagined was in store for him in this draughty little cottage.

He recalled with dismay his and Kristina Tacker’s wedding night. They had spent it in a hotel, one of the suites at the Grand Hotel, paid for by her rich father. They had groped after each other in the darkness, tried to ignore each other’s angst over what was about to happen. All he had hitherto experienced was some torn and well-thumbed photographs, which had been passed round furtively in various wardrooms, pictures taken in French photo studios. They showed fat women, their legs wide apart and their mouths open wide, with stuffed lion heads on the walls behind them. And he had undergone a degrading experience in a squalid room in Nyhavn. He was serving as a cadet on board the Loke, an old frigate that was due for the scrapyard but was making an official naval visit to Copenhagen. One evening he was off duty and got drunk in several harbourside cafés, together with the ship’s mate and a petty officer. Late on he had become separated from the others, and in his drunken state had ended up in a room with a toothless old whore who dragged off his trousers, and kicked him out with a mocking laugh when it was all over. He had vomited in the gutter, a group of Danish urchins had stolen his cap, and for that he had received an almighty dressing-down from the captain the following day.

That was the sum total of his experience, and he had never asked his wife how much she knew about what was coming. It deteriorated into a convulsion with both of them scratching like tigers and in the end they had retreated to opposite sides of the bed, she crying and he confused. But as time went by they had worked it out and sealed a relationship, always in the dark, not very often.

He lay awake, listening to Sara Fredrika’s breathing. He could hear that she was not asleep. He stood up, went to her bed and crept inside. To his surprise she received him willingly, naked, warm, wide open. It was, soon afterwards, as if all distance had ceased to exist. The storm could carry on raging for another day, perhaps more.

He had time. He had come close to her.

Chapter 62

When he opened his eyes the next morning, the storm had abated.

All was silent, and he tried to orientate himself. Silence could be large or small, but it always came from somewhere; there was a southern silence, and a northern one, and an eastern and a western.

Silence was invariably under way.

Sara Fredrika’s bed was empty. She must be a very silent person. He was a light sleeper and normally woke up every time his wife got out of bed. But he had heard nothing when Sara Fredrika left the cottage.

It was cold, the embers had gone out and turned white. Without warning, the room was filled with Kristina Tacker’s fragrance. He knew that she would never discard him, she would never turn in secret to another man. In the early years he had followed her like a shadow when she woke up in the middle of the night and slunk out of the bedroom. But all she ever did was go to the bathroom or pour herself a glass of water from the carafe that was on the table in the drawing room. Sometimes she would pause in front of the shelves containing the china figurines: lost in thought, so far away that he thought she might never return.

He never said anything to her. He did not think she noticed him following her.

He sometimes thought that they were like ships in crowded channels. Channels with leading lights, meaning that you had to keep a lookout straight ahead and astern, but not to either side.

The floor was cold. He stood up, put on his boots, jumper and jacket and went out. The wind had not died down completely, it still crashed into the rocks at irregular intervals. He looked around, but could not see her. He walked to the inlet where the boats were moored. Before he reached there, he took cover in a hawthorn thicket.

She was sitting in the stern of her boat, baling it out. Her skirt was hoisted over her knees, and she was holding on to a lock of hair with her teeth. He observed her and decided to christen her Sara Fredrika Kristina. But he could not imagine her in the silent rooms in the flat in Wallingatan. He could not picture her wearing a long skirt, adjusting with deft fingers the china figurines. He could not conjure her up with her skirt hoisted above her knees when he said goodbye to her in the hall before setting out on one of his missions.

Not being able to find a place for her in his life made him so upset that he started panting. He backed out of the bushes and clambered up on to a rock from which there was a more open view of the sea, and where the wind was more biting.

He thought about what he had said to her the previous evening, about his wife and daughter being killed. Whenever he lied to his father he felt ill or suffered diarrhoea. Terror was at home in his stomach, and always tried to flee through the dark passages of his guts.

But now? Having killed off Kristina without her knowing was a special triumph.

He contemplated the Blenda, riding the waves some way out to sea. He tried briefly to erase the ship from his consciousness. No Lieutenant Jakobsson, no crew, an empty sea, navigable channels meaningless. The only thing in existence was this rock, and Sara Fredrika. But it was not possible to erase the ship, nor the ship’s master, nor the navigable channels; it was not possible to erase himself.

He went down to the path again, stamped on the stones so as not to surprise her. When he got there he saw how dirty her skirt was. There were layers of muck. The light was clearer now that the clouds had scudded away, and it was not possible to disguise the filth. He could see that her hair was matted and sticky thanks to all the grease and sea salt. Her hands were black, her neck coated in dirt. But she did wash, he thought, confused. I saw her naked. The dirt must have some recent cause.

She had stowed away the baler and left the boat. As he approached her now, he noticed that she smelled of everything associated with being unwashed, of sweat and urine. Why hadn’t he noticed that before, in the cottage? Why now, out in the open?

‘It wasn’t much of a storm,’ she said. ‘The weather was impatient.’

‘They say that a storm lasts for three days,’ he said. ‘It takes three days for a storm to declare itself the winner.’

I’m talking rubbish, he thought. I know nothing about a storm lasting for three days, I know nothing about what people ought to believe or not believe about a storm.

‘Now you can row back to the ship,’ she said.

He held out his hand. She hesitated before shaking it. Then she took back her hand, like a shot. Like a fish that changes its mind and spits out the bait it has tasted.

She went back to the cottage and fetched his oilskin coat. He untied the painter, the boat scraped over the stony bottom and he jumped aboard.

There is still a possibility, he thought. A moment when everything could change. I can confess that what I told her yesterday was a he.

But, of course, he said nothing. She remained on the shore, watching him.

She did not raise a hand to wave. A bit like when you know that somebody who is leaving will never return, he thought.

Chapter 63

The days grew shorter, darker, and the sea more choppy.

One afternoon a lone seal swam past, on its way to a distant reef. Flocks of migrating birds headed south, especially at dusk.

Lars Tobiasson-Svartman used the term ‘Chapter’ in his private diary concerning the various stages of the depth-sounding mission. Now the Chapter involving Sandsänkan and Halsskär would soon be concluded. The new navigable channel would reduce the north-south passage by a little more than one nautical mile. Another advantage was that ships would be able to come rather sooner into the protection afforded by the islands from mines and U-boat attacks.

So far his mission had enjoyed good fortune. Apart from the matter of the unanticipated underwater ridge, his soundings had gone far better than expected.

But there was one thing that disturbed Tobiasson-Svartman. When he returned to the mother ship after the storm, Lieutenant Jakobsson had made no attempt to conceal his anger at Tobiasson-Svartman’s absence. He was openly sceptical, hardly bothered to speak to him and asked no questions about the night spent on the skerry. At first Tobiasson-Svartman thought that his superior’s unsympathetic behaviour was a passing phase, but it persisted. He made cautious attempts to find out why. Jakobsson went into his shell, and did not speak over dinner.

Captain Rake had returned to take charge of his ship. Tobiasson-Svartman wrote a long letter to Kristina Tacker and handed it over for delivery three days after his night on Halsskär.

When he read through what he had written, he had the sense that what he was putting into the envelope was a packet of silence. The words had no meaning. He had written about the storm, but nothing about the night on the skerry. He wrote about life on board ship, the food and the outstandingly good cook, and nice things about Lieutenant Jakobsson. But none of it was true, none of it about what he was thinking. He was mapping navigable channels so that other people would be able to travel in safety, but the charts he was mapping for himself led to chaos.

When he sealed the envelope he had the vague idea that he was lying to avenge himself, to get his own back because his wife never dropped any of her china figurines.

Chapter 64

Captain Rake had a very nasty case of eczema on his cheeks and forehead. Tobiasson-Svartman felt uncomfortable when he saw Rake’s face. Red patches fused together forming raised islands; yellow abscesses seemed on the point of bursting in this archipelago of spots.

Rake himself appeared unconcerned. He spoke enthusiastically about the war. The German invasion of France was going exactly as intended under the so-called Schlieffen Plan.

‘It’s one of the most detailed war strategies ever made,’ Rake said. ‘General Schlieffen devoted the last part of his life to working out the best way for Germany to crush France once and for all. He found the solution in the end. The route through Belgium, the closing in on Paris by armies forming an extensive right flank. Every eventuality is covered in this unique plan. How many railway wagons are needed to transport the troops, horses, guns and stores; precise calculations of how fast each train must travel so as to avoid jams. A great many military engineers have been turned into advanced railway administrators. Sadly, Schlieffen died some years ago and so is unable to see his strategy realised. Everything is going well. Too well, some might think. There’s just one thing missing in Schlieffen’s plan. Recognition of the fact that not everything can be planned. No war can be won without a moment of improvisation. Just as no significant work of art can be created without that element of irrationality that is in fact the artist’s talent.’

They were drinking brandy. The cryptographer collected the main record book, Rake continued talking about the war and took Tobiasson-Svartman’s letter. He had no letter from Kristina Tacker to deliver.

They shook hands on the port wing of the bridge. It was cold, and dead calm. The sky was clear.

‘Sweden will probably stay out of the war,’ Rake said. ‘Only time will tell if that’s the best thing that could have happened.’

Tobiasson-Svartman negotiated the steeply sloping gangway on to the deck of the Blenda. He was about to go into his cabin when he noticed the smell of pipe tobacco. He turned and saw Lieutenant Jakobsson standing by one of the gun turrets. His face was in shadow. His pipe glowed. Tobiasson-Svartman found himself feeling uneasy. The shadow of the commanding officer alarmed him.

Chapter 65

Four days before they were due to complete the soundings at Sandsänkan he rowed out to Halsskär again. He did not know why he wanted to see her again: the smell of sweat and urine was a kind of barrier between them. Nevertheless, he was tempted by it.

The sea was calm, dark clouds came rolling in from the south-east, the thermometer was falling. The water had an acrid smell to it, as if it were secreting some unknown substance.

He moored the tender in the inlet. The nets were hanging on the drying rack, damp and smelling of fish. He lifted the lid of a corf kept firmly in place by some stones at the side of her boat. There was a thrashing and splashing inside. He stuck down his hands and felt the scales of the writhing fish. Something stung him in the palm of the hand, a dorsal fin or a pair of teeth. He pulled his bleeding hand away. Reacting in fury, he struck out like a reptile. He overturned the corf and let the fish wriggle their way to freedom.

He remembered the drift net he had seen on one of the first mornings as he leaned over the Blenda’s rail. That was in the distant past now, a vague memory of an image standing for the impossible terms of freedom.

He stood the corf up again and walked away. He went to rinse his hand in the spring water, and then he lay down behind the usual rocks and aimed his telescope at the cottage. There was no smoke coming out of the chimney, the door was closed. It started to snow, a faint white glimmer in the air.

She had made no sound, but she was immediately behind him when he turned round. She was looking him straight in the eye, as if ready to pounce.

‘Why are you lying here? What do you want? What have I done to you?’

‘Nothing. I was looking for you, I lay down here to wait.’

‘With a telescope?’

‘I like to study details.’

‘What have I done?’ she repeated.

‘Nothing. I didn’t mean to frighten you.’

‘You don’t frighten me. What could frighten me, after all I’ve been through?’

She grabbed hold of his arm.

‘Help me get away from here,’ she said.

Her voice was hoarse, almost snarling. He could see the change in her face.

‘I’m dying here,’ she said. ‘Help me to get away. Let me come with you on the ship. Take me anywhere, as long as it’s away from here. I can’t live here any longer.’

‘I can’t take you on a warship. Don’t you have any family?’

She shook her head impatiently.

‘My family is at the bottom of the sea. I row around and fish feed at the site of my husband’s grave. I sometimes expect bits of his body to come up with the nets. An arm, a foot, his head. I can’t put up with that thought. I have to get away.’

‘I don’t think I can help you.’

Her face was close to his. It was like during the night. All the smells had gone.

‘I’ll do absolutely anything to avoid having to stay here.’

She ran her hands over his body. He pushed her gently away and stood up.

‘I’ll come back,’ he said. ‘I must think this over. I’ll come back. In a few days. Three days, four at most.’

He hurried down to his boat. There was still snow in the air. He rowed away from Halsskär and could see her on a rock, watching him go.

She would have to wait for four days. After the fifth day the ship would already have left.

He rowed with long, vigorous strokes and longed to be back at home. Kristina Tacker sat on the stern seat, smiling at him.

His mission would soon be over.

Chapter 66

The next day he completed the last of the soundings.

All that was left to be done now was a final check of the area sounded. It would take two days if the weather stayed fine.

The barometer was climbing, the worst of the snowy weather had moved away southwards.

For the last time he sent his lead plunging down to the bottom. Once again he had the overwhelming hope that this would be the moment when he discovered the place where there was no bottom, the point where the whole of his life would be dismantled and changed, but also be given a meaning. The lead stopped at nineteen metres. He made his final note. He had sent his lead down to the seabed 5,346 times since they started work on this mission.

They rowed back to the Blenda. The ratings seemed exhilarated, and rowed at full speed. Tobiasson-Svartman knew that for ages they had spent much of their free time cursing under their breath this boring task they had been ordered to perform.

Mats Lindegren, the sailor Tobiasson-Svartman had hit, still sat as far away from him as possible. His lip was no longer swollen, but he never looked Tobiasson-Svartman in the eye.

Lieutenant Jakobsson was standing, pipe in hand, as they winched the two launches on board. He was still uncommunicative. Tobiasson-Svartman was pleased that they would soon take leave of each other and never meet again.

He reported that the mission was complete. Jakobsson nodded, without speaking. Then he lit his pipe, inhaled deeply, coughed, and fell down on to the deck as if he had been struck a violent blow by an unseen fist.

He fell without a sound. Everything came to a standstill, the ratings stopped operating the winch’s ropes and tackle, Tobiasson-Svartman was holding his notebook and lead in his hands.

The first to react was Lindegren. He knelt down and placed his fingers on the officer’s neck. Then he stood up and saluted. His dialect was so hard to understand that he had to repeat what he said before Tobiasson-Svartman could understand.

‘I believe Lieutenant Jakobsson is dead.’

Tobiasson-Svartman stared at the man lying on his back. He was holding his pipe in his right hand, staring fixedly at a point over Tobiasson-Svartman’s head.

Lieutenant Jakobsson was carried to his cabin. Fredén, who had had some medical training, took Jakobsson’s pulse in several places before corifirming that he was dead. The time of death was entered into the logbook. Fredén took over command of the ship. His first duty was to write a report of what had happened for Naval Headquarters in Stockholm.

The radio telegraphist went to his cabin to send the message.

For a moment Fredén was alone with Tobiasson-Svartman. Both were shaking.

‘What did he die of?’

Fredén pulled a face.

‘Difficult to say. It happened so quickly. Jakobsson was still comparatively young. He drank no more than anybody else, didn’t get blind drunk in any case. Didn’t exactly overeat either. He occasionally used to complain about pains in his left arm. Nowadays some doctors regard that as an indication that the heart is not as healthy as it might be. The way he simply fell over could suggest a massive heart attack. Either it was his heart or a blood vessel burst in his brain.’

‘He always seemed to be healthy.’

‘Hymn 452,’ Fredén said. ‘“My life’s a journey unto death.” We sing that whenever we have a burial on board. We sung it for the German sailor we picked up. Strangely, not many people seem to realise that Wallin, the man who wrote it, knew what he was talking about. He reminds us all of what is in store for us, if only we listen.’

He excused himself and went on deck to assemble the crew and tell them what they already knew, namely that Lieutenant Jakobsson was dead.

Tobiasson-Svartman looked at the dead man again. This was the third dead person he had seen in his life, the third dead man. First his father, then the German sailor and now Lieutenant Jakobsson.

Death is silence, he thought. That’s all. Trees fallen, their roots exposed.

Above all silence. Death announces its approach by silencing men’s tongues.

For a second he felt as if he himself were falling. He was forced to grab hold of the chest of drawers and close his eyes. When he opened them again, it looked as though Lieutenant Jakobsson had changed his position.

He hurried from the cabin.

Chapter 67

An invisible veil of mourning was being pulled over the ship.

It was dusk when Fredén assembled the ship’s crew on the foredeck, and some of the searchlights were already lit. The arc lamps crackled away as night-flying insects flew into the filaments and were roasted.

Tobiasson-Svartman thought it was like watching something on a stage. A play was about to begin. Or, perhaps better, the last act and epilogue. The end of Lieutenant Jakobsson’s story.

Lieutenant Fredén spoke very briefly. He urged the crew to master their emotions and maintain discipline. Then he dismissed them.

Tobiasson-Svartman could not sleep that night, even though he was hugging his lead. He got up at midnight, dressed and went out on deck. His mission was over, he was surrounded by death, there was a woman on a skerry when he desired and he both longed for and dreaded the imminent meeting with his wife. He had measured the depth of the sea around the Sandsänkan lighthouse, but he had not succeeded in coordinating his discoveries with the navigable channels inside himself.

The ship was rocking gently in the swell. He had the feeling of being a large animal padding round a cage. The cold night made him shiver. He set off round the ship. The sailors on watch saluted him, and he nodded in reply. Suddenly he found himself outside the door of Jakobsson’s cabin. Now that the ship’s master was dead he no longer felt he needed to use his title when he thought about him.

He wondered where Fredén was sleeping. Until now he had been sharing a cabin with Jakobsson.

The dead man was still there. There was a lantern on the table, he could see the light under the door. He opened it and went in. Somebody had placed a white handkerchief over Jakobsson’s face. The pipe had been taken from his grasp before his hands had been crossed over his chest. Tobiasson-Svartman contemplated Jakobsson’s chest, as if there might be a trace of a forgotten breath.

He opened the drawer in the bureau attached to the wall. It contained a few notebooks and a framed photograph. It was of a woman. He looked furtively at the photograph. She was very beautiful. He stared at the picture as if bewitched. She was one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen. On the back was the name Emma Lidén.

He sat down and started thumbing through the notebooks. To his surprise he saw that Jakobsson had been keeping a private diary in parallel with the official logbook.

Tobiasson-Svartman glanced at the man lying with a handkerchief over his face. It felt both dangerous and amusing to penetrate his private world. He leafed through to the date when he had joined the ship.

It took him an hour to read to the end. Jakobsson had made the last entry only a couple of hours before he died. He had noted ‘a pain in my left arm, some slight pressure over my chest’ and reflected on why his bowel movements had been so sluggish these last few days.

Tobiasson-Svartman was shaken. The man who ended his life with a worried comment about a stomach upset had been in possession of colossal strength, of both love and hatred.

Emma Lidén was his secret fiancée, but she was already attached to another man and had several children. The diaries were full of notes about letters exchanged and then burned, of a love that exceeds all bounds, that is a blessing without equal, but can never be anything but a dream. The phrase ‘woke up in tears again this morning’ was repeated at regular intervals.

Tobiasson-Svartman tried to picture it. The man with the pipe and the shrivelled hand, weeping in his cabin. But the image was no more than a blur.

He could never have imagined that Jakobsson had hated him so intensely, but the lieutenant had taken a dislike to him the moment he stepped on board. ‘I will never be able to trust that man. Both his reserved manner and his smile seem to be false. I have an illusion on board.’

Tobiasson-Svartman tried to recall the moment when he had met the Blenda’s master for the first time. His own impression had been quite different. Jakobsson must have been a man turned inside out. He had not been who he was.

Tobiasson-Svartman read every diary entry for the period that he had been on board. Jakobsson never referred to him by his name, only as ‘the sea-measurer’, a term exuding deeply felt contempt. It sounds like a grub, he thought. A beetle that hides in the cracks of his ship.

The hatred that emerged from the diary was shapeless, like a lump of mud that spread out over the pages. Jakobsson never vouchsafed the reason for his antagonism and hatred. Tobiasson-Svartman was no more than ‘a mud-dipper, repulsive, stuck-up and stupid. He also smells like sludge. He has mud in his mouth, he is a man rotting away.’

It was almost one thirty by the time he closed the last of the diaries. A half-empty bottle of brandy was sticking up out of a jackboot. He removed the cork and drank. He pulled the handkerchief aside and tipped some drops of brandy into Jakobsson’s nostrils and eyes. Then he opened Lieutenant Jakobsson’s trousers, eyed his wrinkled, shrivelled penis and poured brandy over that as well. He put the bottle back in the jackboot, put the handkerchief back in place and left the cabin with the diaries in his hand.

Once back in his own cabin he took out the oilskin pouch he used for his sounding notes, put the diaries inside it, together with some steel edging he had kicked loose from the floor.

He went out on deck, walked to a point by the rail where none of the lookouts could see him, and dropped the diaries into the sea.

Somewhere in the distance one of the watchmen started coughing. The moon was half full, and its reflection formed a path over the water between the ship and the Sandsänkan lighthouse.

He remained by the rail for a long time. Even if he did not recognise himself in what the diaries had said about him, he could not get away from the fact that, as far as Jakobsson was concerned, it was the truth. It was what he had taken with him into death. No one could bring it back.

Chapter 68

On 2 December an easterly gale was blowing over the sea to the north of Gotland.

The Svea had appeared on the horizon at about nine in the morning. That afternoon Tobiasson-Svartman packed his bags and said goodbye to the officers. He thanked the ratings who helped him with his work the previous day. Mats Lindegren did not put in an appearance, however; but Tobiasson-Svartman had not ordered him to turn up.

Later in the evening he was invited to a little party in the gunroom. Fredén, the new commanding officer, had given his permission on condition that they were not too noisy, in view of the fact that they had a dead man on board. One of the petty officers and the chief engineer had good singing voices and performed some sea shanties. They had drunk punch laced with liberal quantities of aquavit. When they were all drunk, of course, they started talking about the dead man. Several of the officers present maintained that Lieutenant Jakobsson had approved of and been impressed by Tobiasson-Svartman’s work. He did not need to make an effort in order to appear surprised. But he did not feel up to staying long at the impromptu party and withdrew, saying he had some reports to finish.

The last he heard before dropping off to sleep was the deep but unclear male voices singing, possibly in Italian.

When he left the gunboat and walked along the gangway for the last time, he glanced over his shoulder, as if to make sure that Jakobsson had not returned to life.

Two ratings helped carry his bags to the same cabin as he had occupied at the beginning of his mission.

He stood quite still in the cabin. He was back at the beginning once more.

Captain Rake welcomed him on board. He had shaved off all his hair and gave the impression of being very tired. His left eye was infected and running. His eczema was in full bloom.

They sat down. Captain Rake served brandy, despite the fact that it was not yet noon.

‘I’m a man who lives in accordance with strict routines,’ Rake said. ‘I hate any form of lax discipline. People can never achieve dignity if they don’t recognise the importance of obeying both themselves and others. But now and then I allow myself one little step from the straight and narrow. One example is the occasional indulgence in a glass of spirits before lunch, and possibly even two.’

They drank each other’s health.

‘All these dead bodies,’ muttered Rake out of the blue. ‘On the way here my bosun Rudin died. Then you fished up that corpse wearing the uniform of a German sailor. And now Lieutenant Jakobsson. Was it his heart?’

‘His heart or his brain.’

Rake nodded and stroked his shaven head. Tobiasson-Svartman noticed that Rake’s finger was shaking.

‘It’s the tiny blood vessels we can’t see that can be our weakest point,’ Rake said. ‘When they burst we are sent into free fall, which leads to death and the grave, or paralysis and an iron lung, to an instant’s agony or long-drawn-out and horrific suffering.’

He screwed up his eyes and stared hard at Tobiasson-Svartman.

‘What is your weakness? You don’t need to tell me if you don’t want to, of course. It’s a man’s right not to reveal the misery he is saddled with. Weakness and misery are the same thing in my book. It’s merely a question of which word you choose.’

It seemed to Tobiasson-Svartman that his weakness was a woman who lived alone on a skerry half a nautical mile south-west of the destroyer he was on. But he did not say so. Rake was somebody he was now looking forward to saying goodbye to for ever.

‘I have many weaknesses,’ he said. ‘It’s not possible to pick just one.’

Rake stood up to indicate that the conversation was over.

‘My question was a general one. We are expecting to dock at Skeppsbron tomorrow at nine in the morning. I’m afraid we can’t travel at top speed.’

‘Engine trouble?’

‘An unfortunate decision made by Naval Headquarters. In a mistaken attempt to nurse the engines, top speeds are allowed only in actual battle situations. There are very few engineers and officers with technical qualifications at headquarters. Engines need to be stretched, not often but regularly. Otherwise there is a bigger risk of engine trouble when it really matters.’ Rake gave a laugh. ‘It’s the same with people. We too need to be forced to work at the limit of our abilities. The difference between a machine and a person isn’t all that great.’

Rake opened the cabin door and looked forward to seeing him at table that evening.

Tobiasson-Svartman went back to his cabin and lay down on his bunk. He was soon fast asleep.

He awoke with a start an hour or more later. A plaintive scraping sound was spreading through the ship’s hull, indicating that anchors and cables were being pulled aboard. He got up, put on his jacket and went out on deck. The Blenda was out of sight. The Svea’s engines were throbbing, smoke was pouring out of the four big funnels. The ship turned slowly on its own axis and then set course to the north-east.

He stared hard at Halsskär, but could see nothing. The sea was frighteningly deserted.

There’s something I don’t understand, he thought. A warning. I am right now making a mistake, but I do not know what it is.

Halsskär faded into the mist.

Tobiasson-Svartman thought about the spot he had been looking for, the point where his sounding lead never reached the bottom of the sea.