The Hand that Trembles

THIRTY-NINE

Yet another clear night with a moon climbing over the horizon. He was standing out in the garden and followed with his gaze an aeroplane on its way east. Its lights twinkled like stars. He tried to visualise the passengers in their seats and the flight attendants hurrying in the aisles, but only managed brief disconnected images.

He took a couple of steps, the small stones crunching under his feet. The sound echoed in the night and he veered from the path up onto the lawn, past the flagpole and the thicket of shrubby cinquefoil.

It was completely calm. The cold had come creeping slowly. The temperature had been sinking one degree per hour and it was set to be the coldest night of the season so far.

Darkness enveloped him more deeply the farther he went from the house. He looked back but kept walking. He knew the way and did not have to think about where to put his feet. After a while his eyes grew accustomed to the details, the old, half-fallen stone wall, the many stems of the rowanberry tree with its ghostlike blackened fruits, the tarp draped like a shroud over the lumber he had ordered to build a garage. Everything loomed out of the darkness. He walked without thinking of anything except the connections that each object that appeared before him told. Everything was connected, had a story, talked to him about a time gone by. It was like a museum of memories.

This is your place on the earth, he thought suddenly. These four thousand square metres of land is the area that decides your life. Limits. He looked back up at the sky. The plane was gone and was by now a good portion of the way out over the Sea of Åland.

He walked aimlessly but nonetheless reached the sea, where the breakers were slowly rolling in. He felt kinship with the water, how it stiffened in the creeping cold. Winter was inexorably here. There was something – he had always thought this – something sorrowful about the sea as it was engulfed by frigidity and darkness. A faint, repeated splash revealed a stone caressed by a glacial hand. The sea was death. Or was it perhaps the opposite, that the sea was life? He was confused by his ambivalent thoughts. He came from a line of fishermen and perhaps his confusion was an inheritance from those that had gone before? He did not know much about his ancestors more than that they had won their livelihood from the sea but also that several of them had died in boats that had foundered or under ice that had given way.

The endless sea and the limited plot of land, a cottage, between them a swathe of forest, a wetland with alder and the heavy scent of scrubby plants with pale flowers and leathery leaves. Once he had seen his life so clearly, it was from above, in a sport plane. Several years ago an old classmate had taken him on a flight over the coast and they had surveyed the archipelago outside Östhammar at a couple of hundred metres’ height. From that perspective the house and surroundings on Bultudden had appeared unnaturally beautiful, like a dreamscape. He had had trouble getting his head around the fact that he actually lived down there.

The dark form of the fishing cottage could be glimpsed some hundred metres away. He set his sights on the gleam of the moonlight in its windows and followed the twisty path along the edge of the water. Suddenly one of the windows lit up, a warm yellow tongue that licked the rock out toward the sea. He stopped short and curled up instinctively, crouching behind a thicket of sea buckthorn, before he was drawn to the light like a moth lurching about in the dark.

He wanted to warm himself. Nothing more. He wanted to be toasty and snug like before. The Magpie would warm him, he was sure of it. She was as fragile as he was, a female outsider who lived by the sea, who had freely found her way to the point in her hunt for images, and he had started to understand her longing.

Slowly he neared the cottage until he stood next to the wall. Her figure formed a fluttering silhouette on the rock. If he was given the opportunity to explain that he was a good man, they would become friends. Her rejecting stance would be replaced by warmth.

He did not wish her ill. She would understand.