She was getting washed. She was naked, standing in a baler and facing him. Her hair hung down over her breasts, which were dripping wet. She was rubbing herself vigorously with a flannel, bending down for more water, quickly, as it was cold. The fog was a curtain that had been pulled aside and this performance was just for him.
A memory came to mind. A few months previously he and Kristina Tacker had gone to the Svenska Teatern and seen the young and highly praised actress Tora Teje in a play whose name he had forgotten. During one of Teje's big monologues he had undressed her in his mind's eye and she had stood there on the stage, just for him, belting out a monologue of which he could not remember a single word.
Sara Fredrika stepped out of the baler and wrapped herself in a grey linen sheet. She spent for ever rubbing her hair, it was as if she were drying a newly scrubbed floor. She emptied the baler, dressed and went indoors.
Crouching down he ran back along the path, slipped and stumbled on one of the rocks, but he did not stop until he had reached the tender. He rowed into the fog, the rowlocks had started squeaking again, he was sweating, and all he wanted to do was to get away.
What was he afraid of? He had no answer to that.
He lost his way in the fog and could not at first find the ship. Everything was strangely silent, he was forced to shout and only when he heard a response was he able to get back on course.
Jakobsson was smoking his pipe next to the rope ladder, waiting for him.
'You keep making your early-morning trips,' he said. 'Everybody has a right to their secrets. Welander had his, until the bubble burst. When will yours burst?'
Tobiasson-Svartman wondered yet again if Jakobsson knew something.
'I just row around in the fog,' he said. 'It might seem pointless, but it wakes me up, body and soul. I row myself into a state where I'm ready to do my work. It chases away all my ugly dreams. Rowing can be like getting washed.'
Lieutenant Jakobsson held out his pipe.
'I smoke. Without tobacco I wouldn't even be up to being in charge of one of the navy's old tugboats. I mean that metaphorically, I would never dream of saying nasty things about a tugboat. They are like Ardennes horses. Even if a tug doesn't have a heart or lungs, they wear themselves out in the end and eventually they are no longer capable of towing. Horses are sent to the knacker's yard, boats to the breaker's yard.'
Tobiasson-Svartman was growing tired of Jakobsson. He was a bit of a fusspot, tended to be ingratiating. And he was a damned chatterbox with bad breath and a smelly pipe. It was the same as the sailor with the snotty nose. Tobiasson-Svartman had an urge to punch him.
He had breakfast, then he went back to work. The rating who had taken Welander's place performed excellently. They broke the record that day, making 144 soundings before they had to stop work because of failing light.
All the time he was thinking about what he had seen that morning. It seemed to him more and more like a mirage, something he had not in fact experienced.
CHAPTER 53
Late that evening, when he had already fallen asleep, Lieutenant Jakobsson knocked on his door. He dressed quickly and went on deck.
Way out to sea, on the eastern horizon, tongues of fire rose up through the darkness. A naval battle was taking place.
'We have had radio telegrams to the effect that something big and possibly crucial was in the offing,' said Jakobsson. "The Russian and German fleets have come up against each other. People will die tonight in a mixture of steam and fire, they'll be blown to pieces, drown.'
The flashes came and went, shooting up into the night sky. Distant rumbles and blasts could be heard.
Tobiasson-Svartman thought about the tragedy that was taking place. The heat of battle was hellish. An orchestra comprising the musicians of evil was playing out there in the darkness. Every flash in the night sky was a note that turned into a lethal projectile.
They stood on deck for a long time, watching the battle. Nobody said a word. Everybody was depressed, silent.
Shortly after three in the morning it was all over. The flames died away, the gunfire ceased. All that remained was the wind, which had veered to the east. The temperature had fallen again.
CHAPTER 54
Snow came, then drifted away. The wind remained light, alternating between east and north. They had just one day with a strong northerly gale. Tobiasson-Svartman forced the work rate up, the ratings were sometimes on their knees with exhaustion, but nobody complained.
The sea held its breath: there were fewer and fewer flocks of birds, and those, barely visible over the crests of the waves, heading due south.
The days became shorter.
All the time he was thinking about the woman on Halsskär.
CHAPTER 55
A week passed without his going back there.
He became more and more restless, wanted to go, but did not dare. Was he too close, or was the distance too far?
The Svea turned up, without Captain Rake, who had gone to Stockholm to bury his mother. Lieutenant Sundfeldt received him in the saloon. He had two letters. One was from his banker, Herr Håkansson at the Handelsbanken head office, and the other from his wife.
They conversed briefly. The cryptographers collected his record book.
When he returned to his cabin he first read the letter from Håkansson. The stock exchange was still reacting bullishly to the war. There was no reason to worry. The war meant rising share prices and stability in key industrial stocks.
His banker advised him to consider buying into Russian Telecom and Bofors Gullspång, both of which had just posted good profits forecasts.
He spent some time just holding the letter from his wife. Eventually he decided not to open it. It was as if he already knew what was in it, and it upset him. He tucked it into some pages in an old atlas he had in his travel archive.
Then he sat down at his little table. How should he reply to a letter he had not read?
He scribbled a few lines: he had a bad cold, a sore throat. Every evening his temperature varied between 37.9 and 38.8. But he was managing to cope with his work, which was now entering a crucial phase. He thanked her for her letter, and told her he loved her. That was all.
In his heart, he knew that he would soon return to Halsskär.
CHAPTER 56
By 27 November they had reached the point in their soundings where the new section of the navigable channel would join the old one.
It was further and further to row there from the mother ship. Lieutenant Jakobsson had offered to move the Blenda, but Tobiasson-Svartman had insisted that she remain where she was.
'My calculations regarding the new channel are based on the point where the Blenda has been anchored all the time. It would make matters more awkward if the ship were to be moved now,' he said.
Jakobsson accepted that response. He could not know that Tobiasson-Svartman did not want the Blenda to come too close to Halsskär.
On that morning he noted that the ship's barometer was falling. The slowness of the change might suggest that there was no major storm on the way, but he suspected that the weather would soon deteriorate significantly. The first dramatic storm of winter was looming.
This was the sign he had been waiting for. Swiftly he packed some of the dried food he always took with him on his travels, in case something unexpected happened. Without anyone noticing, he also paid a visit to the ship's store and took a few red flares. He rolled an extra sweater and some warm socks in an oilskin coat and placed the parcel in one of the tenders.
As he rowed away from the Blenda, the wind was gathering strength. He was sure that a storm would be over them from the north in an hour or so.
This time he decided to row into the little inlet where the tender would be less exposed. The dinghy was there. He beached the tender on the shingle and tied the painter round the base of a robust juniper bush.
It was just turned eight. There was a moment of calm, then the north wind set in. He waited in the inlet
until he was certain the storm had come to stay. Then he clambered up to the highest point on the skerry and fired one of the flares. The crew of the Blenda would know that he was safe on the island and would stay there until the storm eased.
He hurried back to the tender, collected the parcel and followed the path to the cottage. The door was closed, smoke was rising from the chimney. He sat behind his rock, waiting for the rain. He stayed there until he was wet through. Then he emerged from behind the rock.
CHAPTER 57
She opened the door.
When she recognised his face she stepped to one side. No sooner had he entered the cottage than he wanted to turn and run out again. It was as if he had been enticed into a trap that he had set for himself. What was there for him to do here? This is madness, he thought, but a madness that I have been longing for.
She put a stool in front of the open fire.
'The storm blew up unexpectedly,' he said, holding his hands towards the fire.
'Storms always blow up unexpectedly,' she said.
She was keeping her face in the shadow, away from the fire.
'I was out rowing and didn't manage to get back to the ship. I took shelter here in the inlet.'
'They'll think you've been drowned.'
'I had a smoke grenade with me that I fired. So they'll know I'm here, on Halsskär.' He wondered if she knew what a smoke grenade was, but she did not ask him to explain.
She was wearing the grey skirt. Her hair was loosely tied at the back of her head, thick locks tumbled over her cheeks. When she handed him a cup, he wanted to take hold of her.
The coffee was bitter, full of grounds. She was still keeping in the shadows.
'You can stay here, of course,' she said from the darkness. 'I wouldn't turn anybody away in weather like this. But don't expect anything.'
She sat on the bunk along the wall. It seemed to him that she was concealing herself in the darkness, like an animal.
'I read in an old tax register that people used to live on this island,' he said. 'One, possibly two families settled here. But in the end it became too hard for them, and the skerry was uninhabited from then on.'
She did not reply. The wind was crashing into the walls. The cottage was draughty, although he could see that she had tried to fill the gaps in the walls.
'I can remember word for word what it said in that tax register,' he said. 'Maybe it wasn't a tax register, but rather an official letter from an enforcement officer. I think his name might have been Fahlstedt.' He recited from memory: "'They live on a barren skerry at the mercy of the sea, they are blessed with neither fields, meadows nor forest, but compelled to derive from the open sea, many a time in peril for their lives, all things they eat and require for apparel, or otherwise are in need of."'
'It sounds like a prayer,' she said. 'Like a priest.'
She was still in the dark, but her voice had come closer. Her voice had that special timbre that comes from being at sea and shouting from boat to boat, shouting in gales and headwinds. Her dialect was less pronounced than he had heard in others from these parts. There were sailors on board the Blenda who came from this section of the archipelago, one from Gräsmarö, and another was the son of a pilot from Häradskär. There was also a stoker from Kättilö and he spoke exactly as she did, like the voice from the dark.
Suddenly she emerged from the darkness. She was still sitting on the bunk, but she leaned forward and looked him in the eye. He was not used to that, his wife never did that. He looked away.
'Lars Tobiasson-Svartman,' she said. 'You are a naval officer and wear a uniform. You row around in stormy weather. You have a ring. You are married.'
'My wife is dead.'
It sounded perfectly natural, not the least bit strained. He had not planned to say that, but on the other hand, he was not surprised at it. An imagined sorrowful event became reality. Kristina Tacker had no place in this cottage. She belonged to another life that he was keeping at a distance, as if looking at it through the wrong end of a telescope.
'My wife Kristina is dead,' he said again, and thought that it still sounded as if he were telling the truth. 'She died two years ago. It was an accident. She fell.'
How had she fallen? And where? How could he bring about the most meaningless of deaths? He decided to throw her over a cliff. The woman sitting here in the darkness would understand that. But he couldn't let her die alone. Inspiration was flooding into him with irrestible force.
She would have a child with her, a daughter. What should he call her? She must have a name that was worthy of her. He would call her Laura. That was the name of Kristina Tacker's sister, who had died young, coughing her lungs away with tuberculosis, Laura Amalia Tacker. The dead gave the living their names.
'We were travelling in Skåne. At Hovs Hallar, with our daughter Laura. She was six years old, an angel of a girl. My wife stumbled on the edge of the cliff, and happened to bump into our daughter, and they went hurtling down. I couldn't reach them in time. I shall never forget their screams. My wife broke her neck in the fall, and a sharp piece of rock dug deep into my daughter's head. She was still alive when they raised her up the cliff. She looked at me, as if accusing me, then died.'
'How can you bear such sorrow?'
'You bear it because you have to.'
She put some cut branches into the fire. The flames seemed to gather strength from the green wood.
He noticed that he was enticing her closer. It was as if he were directing all her movements. He could see her face now. Her eyes were less watchful.
It had been very easy to kill his wife and his daughter.
The storm was roaring into the cottage walls. There was a long way to go before it reached its culmination.
PART IV
Autumn, Winter, Loneliness
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.
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