Depths

Chapter 160

He was walking beside the river, a winding path between dry nettles and patches of tall ferns.

It was the third day after his flight from Stockholm, Kristina Tacker and the baby. In the market square at Söderköping he had gone round the fish stalls looking for somebody who would be sailing home through Slätbaken and then turning off in the direction of Finnö. A couple of farm labourers from Kättilö were willing to take him with them, and wanted paying in aquavit. They were due to meet at the mouth of the river two days later, by which time the labourers hoped to have sold all the fish they had caught in their spare time to boost their income.

There was an opening by the side of the path, a clearing leading down to the brown river. He sat on a large stone and closed his eyes. Although he had been moving slowly without exerting himself, he was breathing heavily, as if he had been running. It was not only when he moved, but also when he was sitting down, or sleeping. He was still running.

Even before he went aboard the train that was to take him south he had written a letter to Kristina Tacker. He explained his sudden departure by telling her that the war had entered an unexpected and very worrying phase. As usual, everything was top secret, every letter he wrote to her, especially if it contained the slightest reference to the character of his work, meant that he was exposing himself, his wife and the baby to danger.

He sat at a table in the first-class dining room at the Central Station. His hand shook as he wrote the name Laura. He lost control of himself and burst into tears. A waitress watched him nervously but said nothing. He pulled himself together and started to invent his new, urgent mission.

He posted the letter at the railway station, bought a ticket to Norrköping and left Stockholm. Before Södertälje the train passed through a local forest fire. The smoke was like fog outside the windows.

That is what I am looking for, he thought. I can row into the fog, just like when I approached a remote skerry and found Sara Fredrika.

He continued as far as Söderköping and spent the night in the hotel on the bank of the canal. Without understanding why, he checked in under an assumed name. He called himself Ludwig Tacker, gave no occupational title and stipulated Humlegårdsgatan as his home address.

It was a sultry night. He lay awake, on top of the covers.

Nobody here knows who I am, he thought. I am safe at present. When my position can be fixed, I have gone astray.

As dawn broke, he went for a walk along the canal, strolled up to the top of Ramunderberget, went back to the hotel, had coffee and wrote another letter to his wife. He described himself as exhilarated, happy about the birth of their child, but at the same time very conscious of his duty.

It was a short letter. He sealed the envelope and left the hotel.

It was a hot day. Only when he came to the path meandering along the river did he feel anything that could remotely be described as cool.

Chapter 161

As he sat on the stone in the clearing, he started thinking. Should he extend his mission and make it longer than he had at first intended? The path next to the river, the warm, damp smell of mud, led his mind to other continents, perhaps Africa, or Asia. A courier could take his letters and post them in Sweden. Kristina Tacker would be worried about distant dangers, diseases, insects and snakes. There again, the distance would make his secret all the bigger, she would never tell anybody, not even her father. Besides, she knew nothing about naval ships. If he told her that there was a ship that could sail at the prodigious speed of eighty knots, she would not question it.

Kristina Tacker never questioned secrets.

He sat on the stone and played with the thought of expeditions to distant countries.

He made a measurement he had never attempted before. How far from the truth could he transport a fantasy before it collapsed in ruins?

There was no answer to that, of course. He also imagined transforming his sounding lead into a diving bell and descending into the depths himself. How strong a pressure would he be able to tolerate? Would the shell hold or would it shatter so that he was sent shooting back up to the surface and the real world once more?

It was already late afternoon when he left his stone and continued walking towards the mouth of the river. He imagined himself trudging along a path somewhere inside a steaming rainforest in a tropical land without a name.

Chapter 162

The boat was the same type as Sara Fredrika’s, but the sail was patched and the farm labourers drunk. They were asleep, tangled together among the empty herring barrels and baskets in the bottom of the boat. It was six o’clock when he woke them up. One of them, the older one called Elis, asked Tobiasson-Svartman if he had brought the aquavit with him. He showed them the bottles but said he had no intention of handing them over until they were south of Finntarmen and preferably had reached their destination.

And what was the destination? It was the younger man, Gösta, who asked.

‘It’s secret. A military operation,’ he replied. ‘I am to be dropped on a skerry and I shall be collected from there by a naval vessel.’

‘Which island?’ Gösta wondered.

‘I’ll show you when we get close to it.’

The men were hung-over and starting to moan, and wanted to wait until the next day before leaving the mouth of the river. But he cajoled them into setting out to sea right now, there was no time to waste. There was a following wind that would take them out of Slätbaken before they lay up for the night. Gösta sat at the tiller and Elis kept an eye on the sail. He cursed every time he tightened the sheet or let it go.

Tobiasson-Svartman made himself comfortable in the bows. He had his rucksack with the sounding lead between his legs. There was an acrid smell coming from the sea. He recognised it from his time aboard the Blenda.

They anchored for the night in a creek on the edge of the approach to Slätbaken. He had spent a night with Sara Fredrika on the other side of the narrow channel.

He suddenly felt pangs of guilt. It was as if he were no longer being taken south, but was descending the sounding line inside himself. He found it difficult to breathe.

It was not until the fire had died out and the farm labourers had fallen asleep that he could feel his panic subsiding.

He looked at the sleeping labourers. I envy them, he thought. But between their lives and mine is a distance that can never be bridged.

Chapter 163

They were between Rökholmen and Lilla Getskär when Gösta asked once again where he wanted to be put ashore.

The wind had freshened during the night and they were making good progress after a night’s rest.

‘Halsskär,’ Tobiasson-Svartman told him.

The man looked at him in astonishment.

‘That bare bit of rock near the open sea? Near the lighthouses and the seal rocks?’

‘There is a Halsskär south of Västervik and another way up north off Härnosönd. But I’m hardly going to be going all that way.’

‘What the hell are you going to do on that godforsaken bloody place? A madwoman lives there. Is that who you’re going to see?’

‘I don’t know anything about the island being inhabited. I have my orders. That’s where I’m going to be collected from.’

The fisherman seemed amused.

‘They say that all the bloody Finnish hunters without a licence wandering around the outer archipelago stop off there to get a bit of leg-over on the way out and again on the way back,’ Elis said.

Tobiasson-Svartman was cold as ice. But even if he could have killed them, he wanted to know about the rumours.

‘You mean there’s a trollop living on the skerry? How on earth did she end up there?’

‘Her husband drowned,’ said Gösta. ‘How else could she make a living? I’ve seen her. A really filthy little scrubber. You’d have to be as randy as hell if you wanted to shag that.’

‘Does she have a name?’

‘Sara. Though some people say Fredrika.’

The men had nothing to add. The dinghy was making good headway. He was beginning to recognise the islands now, the channels were opening out, the ice that had covered the water was a distant memory.

He imagined the farm labourers dead, deep down at the bottom of the sea.

Late in the afternoon the sailing dinghy steered into the inlet where Sara Fredrika’s boat was moored. He handed over two litre bottles and jumped ashore.

‘If anybody asks, you had no passengers with you from Söderköping,’ he said.

‘Who would ask us?’ Gösta said. ‘Who cares if a couple of bloody farm yokels have anybody in the boat with them?’

‘There’s a war on, and what I’m doing is top secret. If you say a single word once you get back on shore you could end up in prison for life.’

He watched them go, heading south. They were talking eagerly, but he did not think they would say anything about him. He had frightened them.

He looked at the nets, corves, sinkers, all the other equipment. The boat was securely moored, it did not need to be beached when the water level was high. He looked towards the path and all the greenery clinging to the little crevices and along the sides of the rocks.

He tried to build a room around himself, but no walls wanted to rise up.

Chapter 164

The first thing he saw by the cottage was a cat, staring at him with watchful eyes. He had the impression it was the same cat as he had killed in his fury.

He despised the supernatural. Human beings worked constantly to make their gods unnecessary. He was an individual who made scientific measurements: one day time and perhaps also space would be measured and controlled by scales of measurements hitherto unknown. The supernatural was shadows dancing in the remains of a childhood fear of the dark. Normally he could always resist the supernatural. But the cat scared him.

It ran away as he approached the window.

Sara Fredrika was asleep on the bunk. He contemplated her enormous stomach.

She must have heard him, or sensed movement outside the window, turned her head to look, and squealed in delight. He opened the door and took her in his arms. She was warm and sweaty, steam was rising from her body. He immediately abandoned all thought of Kristina Tacker and Laura.

Now he was able to build the walls. There was nothing outside Halsskär, nothing that he could no longer control. He held all distances in his hands.

‘How did you get here?’ she asked. ‘I didn’t hear anything. I didn’t sense anything either.’

‘I sailed here with some farmhands from an island further south. From Lofthammar, they said.’

‘Sailing this way? Where from?’

‘Norrköping.’

‘How did you find them?’

‘In the harbour. They had bought a sailing dinghy, or got it in exchange, I couldn’t quite work out what they did. But I was lucky. I’d have had to go to Söderköping otherwise.’

Not even the farm labourers belong to my story, he thought. I’m walking on water, leaving no tracks behind me.

‘You’ve got a new cat,’ he said.

‘I got it from Helge. I hadn’t asked for a similar one, and Helge said he hadn’t seen the one I had before. It’s good company. But it misses its mice, there aren’t any on this skerry. And it’s frightened of the snakes.’

They went indoors. Everything was as he remembered it. Nobody else seemed to have been in the cottage since he left. Nevertheless, he had a strange feeling of uneasiness, a suspicion that, even so, everything had changed since he was last here.

It was a while before he saw it.

Her eyes had changed. She looked at him in a different way.

Something had in fact happened.

Chapter 165

He asked her that evening.

A storm had blown in from the west, the thunderclaps were so strong that the cottage walls shook. She had a pain in her back and lay down on the bed.

‘Nothing has happened,’ she said. ‘They threw the cat ashore from the boat. I’ve been waiting for you, nothing else.’

He listened carefully and could detect a change in her voice. Something had happened, but what? He ought not to ask any more, not just now.

During the night he had the feeling that she was keeping her distance. It was barely noticeable, but it was a fact. She was suspicious, maybe unsure. But what could have happened?

He was afraid. Somehow she knew now that he was married, that no woman and no daughter had fallen over a cliff.

He slid out of bed cautiously, but she woke up.

‘Where are you going?’

‘I just need to go out for a moment.’

‘My back’s hurting.’

‘Go back to sleep. It’s only just getting light.’

‘How shall I be able to give birth here?’

‘I’ll sail for help when the time comes.’

The storm had subsided. The sparse grass was wet, water was running down the rocks. The cat emerged from a crack in the rock underneath the cottage and followed him down to the inlet, where he plucked a little flounder from the corf. He threw it to the cat.

Could she have found out something about him despite everything? He tried to go back over all the many things that had happened since they first met, but he could not hit upon anything.

It occurred to him that the deserter might have floated up to the surface or been caught in one of her nets. But that could not have been the case. The body could not have reappeared, the sinker was securely fastened. Besides, she did not have any nets that would go as deep as that.

He walked round the island with the cat the single member of his retinue. He climbed to the highest point, and was reminded of Lieutenant Jakobsson, peeing over the rail. Distant memories, he thought. Like dreams.

He wondered if it would be possible to sink his sounding lead through the darkness that exists below the surface of all dreams.

On the far horizon he caught a glimpse of a ship heading north. He did not have his telescope with him and could not make out if it was a warship.

The cat suddenly vanished.

Still he could not understand what had happened.

Chapter 166

The heatwave continued.

Sara Fredrika had difficulty in moving, her back ached and she complained that she could not keep cool. He went fishing and did whatever had to be done. When he was busy with the nets, cleaning fish or carrying water he was able to feel totally relaxed, the walls around him were constantly there. Occasionally he would see Kristina Tacker and the newly born baby in his mind’s eye. Did she know what he had done, that he had denied her existence to another woman? Yet how could she know?

Early one morning in the middle of August when he was on the way to Jungfrugrunden to take up some nets, he stopped rowing. There was no wind, just a gentle swell.

He realised that he was near the spot where the two German sailors were lying at the bottom of the sea. He could row there, tie the rope in the stern of the boat round the sinker beside it, throw it and himself overboard, and it would all be over at last.

Perhaps that was the only bottomless depth he could hope to find? Sinking towards death, unaware of what happened to him after his lungs had filled with seawater?

He took tight hold of the oars and started rowing again.

The net he pulled aboard contained a lot of fish. Any thoughts about death vanished immediately.

Sara Fredrika came down to the shore to help him gut the catch. She moved with difficulty, and the pain in her back made her pull faces.

They did not say much to each other.

Chapter 167

The next day he cleaned his sounding lead and started measuring the depths around Halsskär. He would record the reading in a notebook then lower his lead once again.

It was as if he were listening to two voices, a never-ending conversation between sea and land. Every wave or swell brought with it a fragment of a story, every slab of rock made its contribution.

He put the sounding lead on the floor of the boat. Before, he had always thought there was a never-ending struggle between the sea and the rocks. Now he realised that was incorrect. It was an embrace that never lost its element of lust. A slowly increasing intimacy, he thought. The elevation of the land progresses invisibly, the rocks and the sea rely on each other.

He turned his back on Halsskär and gazed out to sea. The horizon was empty. He had the vague impression that there was something missing, something that ought to be there had vanished.

Chapter 168

When he reached home she was sitting outside the cottage, waiting.

Her eyes were blazing.

He stopped, not wanting to get too close to her.

She threw two wooden sticks that dropped at his feet. He did not see what they were at first. Then he saw the dried-out bit of rope fastening the two pins together. His ice prods. The ones he had stuck into the deserter’s eyes.

He turned icy cold. He was sure he had pushed them inside the dead man’s clothes before kicking the sinker into the ice hole and watching the corpse vanish into the depths.

He looked at her. Was there anything else? Was this only the beginning?

‘What’s that on them?’ she asked.

‘I don’t understand what you mean.’

‘They are yours, aren’t they?’

‘Of course they are mine. But they vanished into thin air. I don’t know what happened to them.’

‘Pick them up!’

He bent down. There was a dark colour dried into the light brown wood. It looked like dark brown rust. Blood, no doubt. The deserter’s blood.

‘I still don’t know what you mean.’

‘There’s blood on them.’

‘It could be anything. Why should it be blood?’

‘Because I recognise it. My husband once cut himself with a knife. It was a deep wound, I thought it would never stop bleeding. I’ll never forget that colour. Dried blood on light-coloured wood. The colour I saw when I thought my husband was going to die.’

She almost burst into tears, but managed to control herself.

‘I found them on the shore. The last time I walked round the skerry before I became so fat that I dared not trust myself on the rocks any more. I shouldn’t have risked it that time either.’

‘I must have mislaid them.’

She was looking hard at him. He realised that it wasn’t in fact the ice prods he could detect in her eyes and her voice, but her fear that he was telling lies, that there was something he had not told her.

‘I saw that you had them with you every time you went out on to the ice. Then one day, they weren’t there any more. And now I’ve found them soaked in blood.’

The lid over the abyss was parchment-thin. He tried to stop moving.

‘What happened?’ she asked. ‘That day he died. I’ve never understood it, never been able to believe that he simply sank down through thin ice and met his death. Neither that, nor that he killed the cat.’

‘Why do you think I would have said something that didn’t in fact happen?’

‘I’m saying that I don’t know.’

‘Are you suggesting that I killed him? Is that what you mean?’

She stood up, with considerable difficulty. ‘I’m not saying that you are concealing something or that you’re not telling me the truth. All I’m saying is that I found the ice prods and they were bloodstained.’

‘I was trying to spare you from some of the truth. He used the ice prods to kill the cat. I found them on the ice.’

Silence.

‘So you thought I told you something that wasn’t true?’ he said. ‘Do you believe I would ever dare to do such a thing? Don’t you understand that I’m scared to death of losing you?’

To his surprise he recognised that this was exactly what he was frightened of.

She eyed him up and down. Then she decided to believe him.

The lid over the abyss had very nearly given way.

Chapter 169

That evening and for the rest of the night, he was completely calm.

Distance had no meaning any more. He had control over himself and Sara Fredrika. The ice prods had been explained away. She was no longer worried.

As night approached they talked about the baby, and what would happen afterwards.

‘When the time comes,’ he asked, ‘who’s going to help you?’

‘There’s a midwife on Kråkmarö called Wester. She knows I’m pregnant. But you’ll have to sail to Kråkmarö and fetch her.’

What she wanted to talk about most was the future, what would happen after the skerry. She could only associate the baby with Halsskär as the place where it was born, the place they left soon afterwards.

In his imagination he had worked out a plan for how they would leave for America. He talked about the danger from the naval fleets stalking the European shipping lanes leading to the west. But thanks to the contacts he had they would be able to travel on a Swedish ship along a secret route north of Iceland. Everything was planned. The only thing he could not be sure of was the date for their departure. They would have to wait and be ready to leave at short notice.

‘You mean we’ll have to wait here? Who will come to fetch us?’

‘The same ship that I was on when I came here for the first time.’

His reply made her feel secure. I am creating time, he thought. I am increasing the distance to the point when I shall have to make a definite decision.

He put his hand on her stomach and felt the baby kicking. It was like cupping his hand over a flounder on the seabed. The baby was wriggling away under the palm of his hand, as if it were trying to escape.

Is that how it was with babies as well? That they wanted to escape the inevitable?

He cupped his hand. The flounder wriggled away under his palm.

Chapter 170

One night she woke him up.

‘I can hear somebody screaming,’ she said.

He listened. There was no wind.

‘I can’t hear anything.’

‘There’s somebody screaming, a person.’

He put his trousers on and went out. The ground felt chilly underfoot.

Then he heard it, a distant scream. It came from the sea.

She had got out of bed with considerable difficulty and was standing in the doorway. Her face was white in the night glow.

‘Can you hear it?’

‘Yes, I can.’

They listened. There it came again. He was still unsure if it was a person or a bird. Birds can also get into difficulties — he remembered the gull frozen into the ice last winter. Frozen wings, he thought. We always need to thaw out our wings in order to fly. But in the end that is no longer possible.

There was the scream again. He went to the highest point on the skerry and looked south-westwards, where the scream had come from. In the end he was convinced that it was a human scream. He set off for the inlet intending to take the boat out, but it stopped. He waited. The sea was silent.

He went back to the cottage. She was cold, pressed up against him, he put his arm round her shoulders. They lay awake as day broke, wondering who or what it had been, a person or a bird.

He got up early and scanned the sea with his telescope.

There was nothing to be seen. Breakers rolled slowly in towards the islands.

He had the feeling that the sea was like an old woman in a rocking chair.

Chapter 171

A north-easterly storm bringing low temperatures raged over the archipelago.

Then followed dead calm. Sara Fredrika was finding it increasingly difficult to move, and she was in continous pain from her back.

He went fishing and imagined himself to be the lord of Halsskär. He rarely gave a thought to Kristina Tacker and the baby. His memory was like a vast vacuum.

Sometimes he would give a sudden start. Kristina Tacker, Ludwig Tacker were just behind him.

One morning when he went down to the inlet he heard voices. He followed the sounds, leaned over the edge of the rocks and discovered a small brown mahogany yacht anchored off the narrow headland projecting furthest to the south-west. Two little rowing boats were heading for land. In the boats were women dressed in white and with large hats, and men in blue jackets who were doing the rowing. He could see the glint of bottles, the women were laughing. In the stern of one of the boats was a man wearing a cap back to front, holding some sort of instrument in front of his face — perhaps a camera.

He hurried back to the cottage and told Sara Fredrika.

‘They look like summer holidaymakers,’ he said. ‘But are there any this far out? I thought they were only to be seen around Stockholm and on the bathing beaches along the west coast. And it’s getting late in the year, it will soon be autumn.’

‘I once heard about a man who used to come with a piano on the steamboat Tjust from Söderköping,’ she said. ‘It was always the beginning of May. He’d bring the piano with him from Stockholm, and it would be lashed down in the bows. The crew had trouble in getting it on to a cattle ferry. But once he’d settled he would sit on an island playing the piano and getting drunk every day until September, and then he would go back home again.’

‘This party doesn’t have a piano with them.’

‘What are they doing here? On my island?’

‘It’s not your island. And I expect they’d take no notice if anybody tried to stop them landing.’

She started to protest, but he cut her short.

‘They’ll wonder who I am,’ he said. ‘I mustn’t be seen, my orders are not to allow myself to be identified.’

‘How would they know you were anybody other than a man who lives here on this island with me? People judge people on their appearance. Take some of my husband’s clothes.’

That thought had already occurred to him. He took some clothes out of a chest. They smelled mouldy, of old sea.

‘You look as if you’re wearing hand-me-downs,’ she said. ‘You’re taller than he was, but not as bulky.’

‘I’m only borrowing them,’ he said. ‘When we leave Halsskär I shall burn them.’

‘I want to see these people,’ she said.

‘You can’t go scrambling over the rocks.’

‘If they are where you say, on that headland in the west, there are some flat ledges I can walk along. I want to see those hats.’

When they came to the headland they found that the party had already landed. They were squatting behind a big rock. It took him a while to realise that they were making a film, one of these newfangled inventions with people flitting about jerkily in moving pictures, projected on to a white screen. He tried to explain to Sara Fredrika in a low whisper, but she was not listening.

The man had placed his cine camera on a stand. The ladies in white were running around on the rocks when suddenly a man with an amazingly long moustache and a white-painted face jumped out from behind a slab of rock and rushed towards the women.

Sara Fredrika dug her nails into Tobiasson-Svartman’s arm.

‘He’s got a tail,’ she hissed. ‘There’s a tail sticking out of his trousers.’

She was right. The man with black rings round his eyes had an artificial tail. The women looked as if they were praying and begging for mercy, their faces twitching. The man behind the camera was winding away at full speed, the women were screaming, but without making a sound. Sara Fredrika stood up. Her scream was like a foghorn. She bellowed and started throwing stones at the man with the tail. Tobiasson-Svartman tried to hold her back.

‘It’s not real,’ he said. ‘It’s not real life, it’s not actually happening.’

He snatched a stone from out of her hand and gave her a shake.

‘They’re only acting,’ he said. ‘Nobody’s going to get hurt.’

Sara Fredrika calmed down. The man behind the camera had stopped winding and turned his cap the right way round. The ladies were staring in astonishment at the pair who had materialised from the rocks. The man had removed the tail and was holding it in his hand like a piece of rope. There was a flash of light from the yacht which was bobbing up and down in the swell. Somebody was watching them through a telescope.

Tobiasson-Svartman told Sara Fredrika to wait, and went over to the film-makers. The women were young and strikingly pretty. The man with the tail had a face he thought he recognised. When he held his hand out in greeting, he remembered having seen the man in a play at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm. His name was Valfrid Mertsgren, the play was called The Wedding at Ulfåsa.

Mertsgren ignored his outstretched hand and eyed him up and down in annoyance.

‘Who are you?’ he asked. ‘We were told this skerry was uninhabited. They said there was a ruin of an old cottage that we could use.’

‘I live here with my wife.’

‘For hell’s sake, you can’t live here. What do you live on?’

‘Fishing.’

‘Plundering wrecks?’

‘If somebody gets into difficulties we help them. We don’t plunder.’

‘Everybody does,’ said Mertsgren. ‘People are greedy. They’d steal their neighbour’s heart if they had the chance.’

The cameraman and the two women in white had gathered round him.

‘Can you really live here?’ asked one of the women. ‘What do you do in the winter?’

‘Where there’s the sea, there’s food.’

‘Can’t we include him and the fat woman in the film?’ said the other woman, with a shrill laugh.

‘She’s not fat,’ Tobiasson-Svartman said.

The woman who had made the suggestion stared at him. He hated her intensely.

‘She’s not fat,’ he said again. ‘She’s pregnant.’

‘In any case, you can’t be in the film,’ Mertsgren said. ‘We can’t have a woman with a bun in the oven. This is a romantic adventure, pretty tableaux alternating with scary ones. We don’t want any cows with one up the spout.’

Tobiasson-Svartman was on the point of punching him. But he controlled himself, spoke slowly in an attempt to disguise his feelings.

‘Why make a film on Halsskär?’ he asked in a friendly tone. ‘Why here of all places?’

‘That’s a good question,’ Mertsgren said. ‘I really don’t know why we’re filming here.’

He turned his back on the others.

‘There’s a bloodhound by the name of Hultman on the boat,’ he snarled. ‘He’s a wholesale dealer, and he’s put some money into this incredible mish-mash of a manuscript we’re supposed to be filming. Maybe he’s got nothing better to waste his money on. He’s earning vast amounts from the war, churning out nails and explosives. Can you see what the boat’s called?’

To his surprise Tobiasson-Svartman discovered that the yacht had the name Goeben on its bows. The same name as the German battleship he had a picture of on his desk, the ship he had never actually seen but had admired even so.

A yacht and a battleship with the same name! Women in white with large hats and dying sailors trapped inside their burning ships, a war and a man earning big money.

‘I understand,’ he said.

‘Understand what?’ Mertsgren asked.

‘That Mr Hultman likes the war and death.’

‘I don’t know if he likes death. He likes watching women bathing through his telescope. He keeps far enough away not to be seen, nobody realises he’s there, but then he aims his telescope at the woman or the part of her body he fancies.’

‘But likes the war and death for the sake of his nails.’

‘He certainly likes the Germans, at least. They’re like his nails, he says. Straight, austere, all the same. He likes the German orderliness, hopes the Kaiser will win the war, curses Sweden for keeping its mouth shut and hiding behind switched-off lighthouses. While he sits in his yacht watching ladies through his telescope.’

Mertsgren leaned forward and whispered in Tobiasson-Svartman’s ear.

‘He’s also enthusiastic about anything to do with erotic jokes. You’re a fisherman, so he would have told you that he only sticks his rod into Thigh Bay.’

He contemplated the tail he had in his hand.

‘In all the appalling and degrading roles I’ve had to play in my life, I’ve never had to wear a tail before. Not until now. Hamlet doesn’t have a tail, nor does Lear, nor the malade imaginaire. But a man will do anything for a thousand kronor. That’s what he’s paying. For a week’s work, plus fancy dinners and barrels of booze.’

He waved to Sara Fredrika.

‘I understand why she got upset,’ he said. ‘Give her my compliments and tell her I apologise. We’ll leave you in peace. I’ll tell Hultman that the skerry was already booked.’

Mertsgren took the two ladies by the arm and returned to the rowing boats. The man with the camera was busy winding leather straps round his stand. Tobiasson-Svartman looked hard at the camera. The man nodded.

‘A miracle,’ he said. ‘Something for the priests to envy us for.’ He rested the stand on his shoulder. ‘Are you wondering what on earth I’m on about?’

‘Yes.’

‘I have the mystery of life in my hand. I turn the handle and decide the speed of people’s movements. With the camera we can expose secrets that even the eye cannot see. A galloping horse has all four hooves in the air at the same time, that’s something the camera has been able to establish. We can see more than the eye does. But we also control what we allow others to see.’

He picked up the camera and looked from Sara Fredrika to Tobiasson-Svartman. He smiled.

‘I don’t really know how I got mixed up in all this,’ he said. ‘I was a photographer to start with, with my own little studio. Then Hultman happened to hear about me, and now I’m standing here on a rock with a cine camera and some crazy idea about a tableau the Nail Master has decided should be called The Devil on Holiday by the Sea. But it has sharpened my eyes, I have to admit that.’

‘How do you mean?’

The man put his head on one side, a shadow fell over his smile.

‘Well, for example, I can see that you are not a fisherman. I don’t know who you are nor what you do. But a fisherman? Never.’

He set off tentatively towards the water, carrying his equipment. Tobiasson-Svartman had the impression that the stand was part of a cross the cameraman was having to bear.

The man stopped and turned round.

‘Maybe you would be a good story for a film? An escaped criminal, somebody running away from his debts. How should I know?’

He did not wait for an answer. The first rowing boat was already on its way back to the yacht. The women in white were laughing, there was a clinking of bottles.

Tobiasson-Svartman went back to Sara Fredrika.

‘What kind of people were they? Those women hiding their eyes under their hats? I didn’t like them. And tails are for animals, not for people.’

‘It was just make-believe. A devil jumping around, that’s all.’

‘What were they doing here?’

They had started to walk back to the cottage. He was holding on to her, making sure she did not slip.

‘Just think of them as driftwood. Something that happened to have been washed ashore here. Then the wind turned and they drifted away again. Driftwood that wasn’t even fit for firewood.’

‘Tails are for animals,’ she said again. ‘Tails are not for people.’

Chapter 172

In the afternoon he went to the highest point of the skerry, telescope in hand. The Goeben had left. He scanned the horizon but could find no sign of it.

The cameraman had seen right through him. He tried to work out if that implied danger.

He could not see any.

Chapter 173

One night she woke him up out of a dream.

Kristina Tacker had been standing in front of him, she had been saying something, but he had not been able to work out what it was.

He gave a start and sat up.

‘I think the baby is on its way. It’s moving, it’s tensing its body.’

‘But there’s a long time to go yet.’

‘I have no control over that.’

‘What do you want me to do?’

‘Stay awake. I’ve been on my own for long enough in my life.’

‘I’m here, even if I’m asleep.’

‘What do I know about your dreams?’

It’s just like the man with the camera, he thought. She sees straight through me. But she does not know.

‘I rarely dream,’ he said. ‘My sleep is empty, it’s black, it doesn’t even have any colours. I sometimes think I’ve been dreaming about flowers, but they are always grey. I’ve only ever dreamed about dead flowers, never about living ones.’

They stayed awake until dawn. The oyster-catchers were calling to one another, the gulls, the terns.

At about six they decided that he would sail to Kråkmarö and fetch the midwife. Even if the baby was not ready to pop out, they ought to make sure that everything was prepared.

He set sail in the easterly wind, three or four metres per second.

A thought struck him. Perhaps he should seize the moment and make a run for it, head north or south, or even east towards Gotland, and the Gulf of Riga beyond.

But he set sail in a westerly direction, to the midwife. The dinghy sped through the water, Halsskär faded into the horizon behind him.

The August day was like a buoy, he thought. Clean and white in the sunlight.

The sea was carrying him to his destiny.

Chapter 174

Angel was her name, the midwife.

She was not baptised Angel, of course: in the registers and on her midwifery certificate she was called Angela Wester. But everybody said Angel. That’s what her mother had wanted to call her, she had had a dream about it the night before she gave birth. But the vicar refused. He pointed to the parish register and maintained that nobody was allowed to be called Angel, it would be little short of blasphemy. Her father, the ship’s master Fredrik Wester, did not believe in gods but in compasses, and suggested with a growl that they should call the girl Angel even so. The vicar could not dictate what happened out in the archipelago. And so she became Angel. She never had any brothers or sisters, nor did she find a husband as she was cross-eyed and could hardly be called pretty. When her parents died she sold the house in the village and the little cargo boat that was half submerged in the creek, and moved into a crofter’s cottage. She had trained as a midwife in Norrköping, and devoted her life to other people’s children. She smiled a lot, had a beautiful voice, and was not afraid of mending the roof of her cottage herself if necessary. She could be ill-humoured and would sometimes set out on her own in her sailing dinghy, and everybody in the village would worry in case she never came back again. But she always did come back, and would sail her boat into the creek under cover of darkness when her depression had blown away.

Most of all, Angel was a good midwife. She was good at extracting babies that had got stuck. She had magic hands. There were a lot of midwives and old ladies who knew how to do the job of a midwife. They were all good, of course, but Angel was deft. Like a seamstress or a hunter or a gardener who could make things grow in hollows in the rock with hardly any soil. She had been so successful in many cases considered to be hopeless, that a doctor from Stockholm had once visited Kråkmarö in order to interview her, and although she was getting on for seventy and there were younger midwives to turn to, most people asked for her.

He moored the boat in the creek and walked up the hill to the village. The villagers were out in the fields and pointed the way. He knocked on Angel’s door and she answered immediately. He had never set eyes on her before, but even so, it was as if he knew her. He went into her low-ceilinged kitchen and said where he had come from. She smiled.

‘Sara Fredrika’s baby,’ she said. ‘I assume it’s yours as well?’

He could not bring himself to reply, and she did not worry about it.

‘Children would no doubt like to choose their parents,’ she said. ‘Maybe they do, did we but know it. But there’s some time to go yet for Sara Fredrika. What’s the matter with her?’

He tried to explain, saying what Sara Fredrika had told him to say. Spasmodic tension, difficulties in moving, pains in her pelvis.

Angel asked a few questions.

‘Has she had a fall?’

‘No.’

‘And you haven’t hit her?’

‘Why on earth would I want to do that?’

‘Because men hit their women when things go wrong. Does she have a fever? Has she been carrying heavy things?’

‘She spends most of her time resting.’

‘And when you left things had got a bit better?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then you must go back to her. Sara Fredrika hasn’t had much happiness in this life. I’m not sure that you have brought her any either. But you must look after her well. Then you might be able to become the man she needs.’

‘She wants me to take her away from there.’

‘Why should she stay there on that barren rock, after all the terrible things she’s had to go through? It’s eating her up, that inhospitable skerry is scraping her to the bone.’

She went with him down the hill to the sailing dinghy.

‘You haven’t even said what you’re called. Don’t you have a name?’

‘I’m Lars.’

‘I don’t care where you come from. Rumour says that you’re in the navy. But there’s something else that’s more important than that. You are wearing Nils Persson’s clothes. You are reconciled to the fact that there was somebody else before you.’

‘What shall I tell her?’

‘That it’s not time yet. And that I shall come, as long as you fetch me.’

He got into the boat and she untied the painter. There was no wind in the creek, so he prepared the oars.

‘Stay until the baby’s been born. Then you should take her away. The youngster won’t survive out there. So many young children have died on that barren skerry over the years, too many to keep count of.’

He started rowing.

‘Tell her I’ll come,’ she shouted. ‘We’ll get the baby born and it will survive all right, as long as you all get away from there.’

He kept on rowing until he found some wind. Then he raised the sail and headed for the open sea.

He felt ashamed when he thought about how close he had come to running away. He would have stolen her boat like a pirate, and abandoned her. Now he was sailing as fast as possible so that she would not start to think that he had headed out to sea after all.

He was in a hurry. And the sea was still carrying him to his destiny.

Chapter 175

August was drawing to a close, it was unusually windy, persistent westerly winds. An autumnal thunderstorm passed over them, and a stroke of lightning felled a tree on Armnö.

He speculated that memory and forgetting shared the same key. Perhaps anger shared the same door? Kristina Tacker and the baby drifted away. But where was he himself?

The longest distance I have had to relate to is the distance to myself. No matter where I stand, the compass inside me pulls me in different directions. All my life I have crept around trying to avoid bumping into myself. I have no idea who I am, and I do not want to know either.

Chapter 176

Sara Fredrika could feel that her body was calm. She talked all the time about the journey they would make once the baby was delivered.

Sometimes the conversations became unbearable. The skerry began to be a heavy weight, a ballast in his pockets that made it more and more difficult for him to move. He thought about what Angel had said, about the inhospitable skerry scraping her to the bone.

Chapter 177

Every three or four days he would sit down to write a letter to Kristina Tacker. He had found a rock formation on the south side of the skerry that gave him both a bench to sit on and a rough desk to write on.

He described a voyage in a convoy of ships heading for Bornholm and the Polish coast. It had been a dangerous but necessary expedition. Now he was back in Swedish waters again, and by coincidence he had ended up in Östergötland, among the islands where he had already spent such a long time. He would soon be returning to Stockholm. His mission had been long and drawn out, but there was an end in sight, he wrote, an end, and then he would return home. He asked about Laura, how Kristina Tacker herself was, and not least her father. Had he recovered? Had they arrested whoever had carried out the attack?

But he also wrote about himself, tried to capture something of his own desperation without revealing the true facts. When I’m alone I sometimes get so close to myself that I understand who I am. But then you are not there, nobody else can see what I see, only me, and that is not enough.

He hesitated for a long time, wondering whether to leave out the last few lines. But in the end he left them in, felt that he dared do so.

He buried the letters under a piece of turf, wrapped inside a waterproof pouch. Towards the end of August he decided he would have to send at least one of the many letters. He had intended to give the letters to some fisherman or hunter who passed by the skerry, but none of them landed. He could see sailing dinghies in among the skerries sometimes, but none of them came close. One day he decided that it could not wait any longer. He told Sara Fredrika that he was going to go to church in Gryt on the last Sunday in August.

‘I’m not much of a believer,’ he said, ‘but after a while I feel very empty inside.’

‘If you’re lucky you’ll be able to sail there. If there’s no wind you’ll have a long way to row.’

They got up at dawn and she went with him to the inlet. He had his uniform wrapped inside his oilskin.

‘You’ll have a good wind,’ she said. ‘Easterly veering towards north, a church wind in both directions. Sing a hymn for me, listen to the gossip outside the church. I’ve no idea who’s dead and who’s still alive. Bring me some news, even if it’s old news.’

He stopped once on the way, landing on one of the islands in Bussund. He changed into his uniform and scrubbed away a stain on one of the shoulders. As he sailed into Gryt accompanied by other boats with passengers on their way to church, he was wearing his naval cap. He could see that his companions were bemused, but some of them must know about him, he could not be completely unknown.

There was a man on Sara Fredrika’s island, the father of the baby that was about to be born.

Remarkably enough, he felt something approaching pride when everybody looked at him.

Chapter 178

There had been a time when you could sail right up to the church from both the north and the south.

But the sound had silted up, and now you had to walk. There were a lot of people gathered outside the church. People seldom came from the outlying islands in winter.

Suddenly he came face to face with the farm labourers from Kättilö. They were not entirely sober.

‘We haven’t said a word,’ Gösta said. ‘Nothing has slipped out.’

‘Let’s keep it that way,’ Tobiasson-Svartman said. ‘And we mustn’t make it too obvious that we know each other.’

He turned on his heel and walked away. The sexton told him that the man who looked after the post in Gryt was smoking his pipe by the church wall.

Tobiasson-Svartman gave him two letters. He asked for one to be posted right away, the other ten days later.

During the service he half listened to the Reverend Gustafsson’s sermon about the devil who takes possession of our flesh, and the mercy of the Son of God.

Afterwards he wandered around, listening to the conversations. He had always been an eavesdropper, skilled at sucking in what other people were talking about. Most of the congregation were talking about who was ill and how bad the fishing had been.

When he started walking towards his boat a man in uniform came alongside him. He shook hands and introduced himself as the parish constable, Karl Albert Lund.

‘There aren’t many people round here wearing uniform,’ said the constable. ‘That’s why I thought I’d say hello.’

‘Hans Jakobsson, Commander. I just happen to be passing by,’ Tobiasson-Svartman said.

‘Might I ask what it is that brings you here?’

‘I can’t tell you that. It has to do with the war.’

‘I understand. I won’t press you.’

Tobiasson-Svartman clicked his heels and saluted. He went back to the boat and sailed home. Why had he chosen the name Hans Jakobsson? he wondered.

Was it a greeting to the man who had died on the deck of the Blenda? Why had he not said what he had really wanted to say, that he was Sara Fredrika’s new husband?

He changed out of his uniform. The wind was enabling him to maintain steady progress. On the way he invented news and rumours about unknown people that he passed on to Sara Fredrika that evening when he got back home.

Chapter 179

Sara Fredrika gave birth on Halsskär on 9 September 1915.

He’d had time to fetch Angel from Kråkmarö. The wind had been capricious on the way back, the sail had not been much use, and he had rowed so hard that the palms of his hands were covered in burst blisters. There were three of them in the boat, Angel had taken with her another woman to help, a maid to one of the cargo boat skippers. Once they arrived on the island Angel told Tobiasson-Svartman to keep out of the way, and to find somewhere among the rocks where there was a wind to carry the screams in a different direction if Sara Fredrika got into difficulties.

It was a chilly day. He found a crevice on the south side where he could half lie, well protected. He tried to imagine Sara Fredrika, her struggle to force the baby out. But he saw nothing, only the sea.

My innermost longing is a dream about horizons, he thought, horizons and depths. That’s what I am searching for.

It was as if he had some kind of invisible seal that made him inaccessible to everybody apart from himself. The surface was calm, like a sea when there is no wind blowing, but underneath it lurked all the duplicitous forces he was forced to fight against. Ambition, insecurity, the memory of his furious father and the silent weeping of his mother. He lived through a constant battle between control, calculation and outrageous risk-taking. He did not do what other people do and adapt to different situations, but he changed his personality, became somebody else, often without being aware of the fact.

Without warning, he started crying, forlornly, uncontrollably. Then he stopped, just as suddenly as he had started.

Late in the afternoon he heard them shouting for him. He went back to the cottage, convinced that he had a son. But Angel Wester held out a daughter to him. This time he did not think the baby looked like a shrivelled mushroom, more like heather in the spring before it acquires its full colour.

‘She’s healthy and strong. She will survive if God wishes her to and you look after her properly. I reckon she weighs three kilos, and a bit more.’

‘How is Sara Fredrika?’

‘Like all women are after they’ve given birth. Relief, happiness at the fact that all has gone well, a great desire to sleep. But first she should greet her husband.’

He went inside. Angel and the maid left them alone. Her face was pale and sweaty.

‘What shall we call her?’

Without hesitation, he replied, ‘Laura. That’s a pretty name. Laura.’

‘She’s born now. And now we can leave this hellish island and never return.’

‘We shall leave as soon as I’ve finished my last reports.’

‘Are you happy about your child?’

‘I’m indescribably happy about my child,’ he said.

‘You got a new daughter to replace the one that fell over the cliff.’

He did not say anything, just nodded. Then he went outside and invited Angel and the maid to a celebratory drink. As it was already late, they stayed overnight.

He spent the night in a hollow covered by his oilskin coat.

He thought about his two daughters, both called Laura.

Laura Tobiasson-Svartman.

The younger sister of Laura Tobiasson-Svartman.

They’ll live their lives in ignorance of each other. Just as their mothers will never meet.

Chapter 180

A few days after Sara Fredrika had given birth, Tobiasson-Svartman found something extraordinary next to the rocks on a headland at the extreme eastern edge of Halsskär.

He could see something bobbing up and down close to the edge of the rocks. When he clambered down to the water he saw that it was a collection of military-issue boots, tied together to form a chain. He tried to find some marking or other that would reveal if they were German or Russian boots, but there was nothing.

There were nine boots in all, four left ones and five right. They had been in the water for a long time. Somebody had tied them together and sent them drifting over the sea.

He threw them up on to the rocks.

He had the feeling that once again he had been surprised and challenged by the dead.

Chapter 181

Their daughter cried a lot and kept them awake at night.

For Tobiasson-Svartman it was like being exposed to an agonising pain. He cut pieces of cork and stuck them in his ears when Laura was crying at her loudest, but nothing seemed to help. Sara Fredrika was immune to all noise, and he observed her love with envy. As for him, he had difficulty in feeling any connection with the child.

But with Sara Fredrika, it was as if he had finally understood what love was. For the first time in his life he felt terrified of being abandoned. He was scared by the thought of what would happen if one of these days it dawned on Sara Fredrika that there was no plan to leave the skerry. That the only things in existence were the barren island and all the new reports that had to be written for a secret committee.

Chapter 182

Sara Fredrika took every opportunity to talk about leaving.

Her questions now made him feel profoundly desperate. He wanted to be left in peace, he did not want to talk about the future.

‘I’m scared,’ she said. ‘I dream about water, about the depths that you measure. But I don’t want to see that. I want to see Laura growing up, I want to get away from this hellish skerry.’

‘We shall. Soon. Not just yet.’

It was early one morning. Their daughter was asleep. It was raining. She looked long and hard at him.

‘I never see you touching your child,’ she said. ‘Not even with your fingertips.’

‘I daren’t,’ he said simply. ‘I’m afraid that my fingers will leave a mark.’

She said no more. He continued to balance on the invisible borderline between her worry and her trust.

Chapter 183

At the beginning of October Tobiasson-Svartman could see that Sara Fredrika’s patience was close to breaking point. She did not believe him when he said that soon, not just yet, but soon he would have finished writing his reports.

One night she started hitting him while he was asleep. He defended himself, but she kept on hitting.

‘Why can’t we go away? Why do you never finish?’

‘I’m nearly finished. There’s not much left. Then we can go.’

He got out of bed and went outside.

Chapter 184

A few days later. Drizzle, no wind.

He walked round the skerry. He suddenly had a flash of insight. All these rocks formed a sort of archive. Like books in a library with infinite holdings. Or faces that will eventually be picked out and examined by future generations.

An archive or a museum, he could not be quite specific about his insight. But autumn was creeping in. Soon this archive or museum would close down for the winter.

Chapter 185

Nights now brought frost with them. As day broke on 9 October, the baby started to cry.

That same day Angel Wester sailed out to the skerry to check up on Sara Fredrika and the baby. She was satisfied, the baby was growing and developing as it should.

He accompanied her down to the inlet when her visit was over.

‘Sara Fredrika is a good mother,’ she said. ‘She is strong, and she has plenty of milk. And she seems to be happy as well. I can see that you are looking after her properly. I think she has forgotten her husband, the one that drowned.’

‘She will never forget him.’

‘There comes a day when the dead turn their backs on us,’ she said. ‘It happens when a new being enters our lives. Make the most of the opportunity. Don’t let there be a distance between you and the baby.’

He pushed the boat out as she raised the sail.

‘Will you be staying here over the winter?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Maybe not.’

‘What kind of an answer is that? Yes and no, and maybe something in between?’

‘We haven’t decided yet.’

‘Autumn has hit us early this year, as the old men say when they see the clouds and feel the winds. Early autumn, long winter, rainy spring. Don’t wait too long before leaving.’

He watched the dinghy disappearing round the headland. He could hear his daughter crying in the distance.

Angel’s words had hit him with full force. All his life he had been keeping things at a distance. But distance did not matter, it was closeness that was significant.

He realised that he would have to tell Sara Fredrika the truth, that he had belonged to somebody else, that he had been kicked out of the Swedish Navy and one of these days would be penniless. Only then could they start again from the beginning, only then could they really make plans to leave.

With great effort he had built walls around Halsskär. Now he would have to demolish them, in order to get out.

He was overcome by a strong sensation. Surprised and confused, he said to himself: I think my sounding lead has reached the bottom.

He was in the habit of rounding off the day by taking his telescope and climbing up to the highest point on the skerry. There was a north-easterly wind, fresh and squally. He pulled his jacket more tightly round him and gazed out towards the mainland.

A sailing dinghy was approaching. The sail was straining hard, but the boat was sitting well in the water. He did not recognise it, he did not need the telescope to tell him that. It was longer than the boats used by the fishermen in the archipelago.

He aimed his telescope and focused it.

There was a woman at the helm and she was steering straight for Halsskär.

The woman was Kristina Tacker, his wife.