Depths

by Henning Mankell

  "Very few get leave granted nowadays. The navy requires all its resources. Your request is hardly going to be favourably received.'

  'But I shall be applying even so.'

  Lieutenant Berg shrugged.

  'Let me have a written application by no later than tomorrow afternoon. I'll make sure it gets looked at this week.'

  Tobiasson-Svartman clicked his heels and saluted.

  He left Naval Headquarters. The sun had broken through the clouds, and it did not seem quite as cold any more.

  He went straight home, feeling relieved about the decision he had made.

  There was obviously a risk that his application would not be granted. Even so, he was not especially unhappy, indeed his relief was greater. He increased his stride. He was in a hurry to be home.

  Kristina Tacker was sitting at a table, reading a book. Women's poetry, he thought dismissively. I'm sure Sara Fredrika doesn't read poetry. She probably barely knows what it is.

  Kristina Tacker put her book down.

  He gave her a worried smile.

  'I've been given another mission,' he said. 'It means that I'll have to be away again for considerable periods. But I won't have to rough it this time. No treks over the ice, no long weeks on ships out at sea.'

  'What will you be doing?'

  'As usual the mission is classified. You know that I can't tell you even if I wanted to. Everything to do with the navy is secret. War is just round the corner all the time.'

  'All I have is a postal address,' she said. 'The Military Postal Service in Malmö. But I never know where you are.'

  They were sitting in the warm room. The maid was not on duty, the building was silent. They had drawn their chairs up to the tiled stove. Its brass doors were half open. He raked the embers. He was calm, even though everything he said was meaningless. His professional secrecy merged with the mission that did not exist but that he would carry out even so. His expedition was moving in a vacuum.

  Not even the sea was right.

  'What I can tell you is that I shall be on the other side of Sweden. Part of the time I shall be at the Karlsborg fortress, by Lake Vättern. Then I shall be moved to Marstrand in total secrecy. You mustn't mention any of this to anybody.'

  'I never say anything.'

  'You mustn't even hint at the fact that I'm on a mission.'

  'If you're not here, surely I have to say something?'

  'You can say that I'm on leave, indisposed, that I'm in a convalescent home.'

  She squeezed his hand. 'I want you here.'

  I don't want to be here, he thought, and had to force himself not to push her hand away. I don't want to be here, I'm afraid of the baby, of these rooms, of all the china figurines and their dead eyes.

  I love you, but I don't want to be here. I love your fragrance, but I dread the day when it's no longer there. I'm scared of waking up out of a dream without knowing what it meant.

  He stroked her hand gently.

  'I'll soon be back, and above all our child will have a father who used the nine months of waiting to gain promotion.'

  'That is a worthy cause.'

  He could sense her expectation.

  'That's also a secret.'

  'Surely you can tell me.'

  He leaned over, put his face next to hers and whispered: 'I'm to be made a captain.'

  He enjoyed the taste of the words, and smiled.

  'I'm so pleased to hear that. It will make my father happy.'

  'It's essential that this remains between you and me. You mustn't say a word to him.'

  He carried on telling her patiently how he would soon be back. There was no danger, he would simply be doing his duty.

  'Nothing is more important than the baby,' he said. 'I must do my duty, but the baby is the most important thing.'

  'I want our son to be called Ludwig, after my father. If it's a daughter, I'd like her to be called Laura. After my sister. I always wanted to be called Laura when I was a child.'

  He kept on smiling.

  'Ludwig is an attractive name and has a touch of strength about it. Of course our son should be called Ludwig.'

  'Maybe he should be called Hans Ludwig?'

  'On no account should he have my father's name.'

  'When will you be leaving?'

  I have already left, he thought. I am not here, it's only an aura that I have left behind. A spoor that will be washed away.

  'Soon,' he said. 'I don't know exactly when, but soon. I must be with you when the time comes, of course.'

  He was sitting by her side, holding her hand.

  It felt warmer now, not so cold as it had been.

  CHAPTER 119

  Three days later he collected a letter from Skeppsholmen.

  The board stated their view in great detail that Commander Lars Svartman had always carried out his duties with the utmost care and competence. The board therefore considered it appropriate that Svartman should be granted the leave he had requested. The precise date of his return to duty would be established in due course.

  After his visit to Skeppsholmen he went for a long walk in Djurgården. He wiped the snow off one of the benches as far out on the promontory as you could get at Blockhusudden. A tug was labouring to keep the channel free of ice.

  He thought about Kristina Tacker and the child that was on its way, but most of all he thought about the woman he had decided never to see again.

  He remained sitting on the bench until he started to feel cold. The tug was still carving its passage to the sea. The ice was dirty, grey. He worked out the distance to the stern of the tug. When it reached the hundred-metre mark, he stood up and started to walk back towards the city centre.

  CHAPTER 120

  He stopped at the entrance to Handelsbanken in Kungsträdgården. He was surprised not to feel uneasy about his plan to make inroads into his capital. Hitherto he had always regarded himself as being thrifty, on the borderline of being miserly. Now he felt the need to start squandering money.

  He entered the bank. The man who looked after his financial affairs, Håkansson, was engaged. He was received by a clerk and invited to wait.

  He observed the people moving around inside the bank. They seemed to be deep down under the surface of the sea, with none of the noise they made rising to the surface. He held his breath for twenty seconds and allowed himself to sink down to the bottom of the bank. I'm playing, he thought. I'm playing with other people's depths.

  Håkansson had flickering eyes and sweaty hands. Tobiasson-Svartman followed him up some stairs to a room whose door closed silently behind them.

  'The war is worrying, of course,' said Håkansson. 'But thus far the stock exchange has reacted favourably to all the gunfire. Nothing seems to inspire the market more than the outbreak of war. The snag, of course, is that the market can be capricious. However, your shares are stable at the present time.'

  'I need to turn some of those shares into cash.'

  'I see. And what figure do you have in mind, Commander Svartman?'

  I do not have a double-barrelled name here either, he thought. As far as the bank is concerned I am simply Lars Svartman, without the protection that my mother's surname gives me.

  Annoyed, he said: 'Might I point out that my surname is Tobiasson-Svartman? It is several years now since I changed my name.'

  Håkansson looked at him in surprise. Then he started leafing through his papers.

  'I apologise for the fact that both the bank and I had overlooked your change of name. I shall put that right immediately.'

  'Cash,' Tobiasson-Svartman said. 'Ten thousand kronor.'

  Håkansson was surprised again. 'That's a lot of money. It means that quite a lot of shares will have to be sold.'

  'I realise that.'

  Håkansson thought for a moment. 'I would suggest in that case that we offload some forestry shares. When do you need access to the money?'

  'Within a week.'

  'And how would you like the money?'
<
br />   'Hundreds, fifties, tens and fives. An equal amount of each denomination.'

  Håkansson made a note. 'Shall we say Wednesday next week?'

  'That will suit me fine.'

  Tobiasson-Svartman left the bank. It is like getting drunk, he thought. Deciding to squander money. To be not like my father, all that damned saving all the time.

  He went to Kungsträdgården and watched the skaters on the outdoor rink. An elderly man in shabby clothes came up to him, begging. Tobiasson-Svartman dismissed him curtly. Then changed his mind and hurried after him. The man reacted as if he were about to be attacked. Tobiasson-Svartman gave him a one-krona coin and did not wait to be thanked.

  CHAPTER 121

  That evening they talked about the mission to come. The silence in the room rose and fell. He closed the brass doors in the tiled stove with the poker. The room grew darker.

  'I'm always afraid when you go away,' she said.

  A mission can always be dangerous, he thought. Especially this time, when there is no mission.

  'There's no reason for you to be afraid,' he said. 'There might have been if we were involved in the war. But we're not.'

  'The mines, all those terrible explosions. Ships sinking in only a few seconds.'

  'I shall be a long way away from the war. My job is to make sure that as few ships as possible are affected by the catastrophe.'

  'What exactly are you doing?'

  'I'm preserving a secret. And creating new secrets. I'm guarding the door.'

  'What door?'

  'The invisible door between what a few people know and what others ought not to know.'

  She was about to ask another question, but he raised his hand. 'I've already said too much. Now I'd like you to go to bed. By tomorrow you'll have forgotten everything I've said.'

  'Is that an order?' she asked with a smile.

  'Yes,' he said. 'That's an order.'

  It is even an order that is secret.

  CHAPTER 122

  March turned into one long wait. On several occasions he went to Naval Headquarters without being able to get an explanation for why it was taking so long for written confirmation of the length of his leave to come through. Lieutenant Berg was never in his office. Adjutant Jakobsson had also disappeared. Nobody could tell him anything. But everybody insisted that nothing had happened to change the situation. It was simply a matter of excess bureaucracy as a result of the war.

  One cold, clear evening at the end of March he left his flat in Wallingatan, after saying goodbye to his wife, who was not feeling well. He walked to the top of Observatoriekullen and studied the night sky.

  Once a year, usually on a clear winter's night, he would make a pilgrimage to the stars. When he was a young cadet he had studied the star charts and read several astronomical textbooks.

  He stood next to the dark observatory building and gazed up at the stars.

  It seemed to him that the clear night sky and the sea were similar, like diffuse and not altogether reliable reflections of each other. The Milky Way was an archipelago, like a string of islands off the coast up there in space. The stars gleamed like lanterns, and he thought he could discern both green and red lights and all the time he was searching for navigable channels, routes between the stars where the biggest of naval vessels would be able to proceed without the risk of running aground. It was a game involving charts that did not exist. There were no ships sailing through space, no shallows between the stars.

  But in space there were bottomless depths. Perhaps what he was really looking for in the sea was an entrance into another world, a space hidden far down below the surface where undiscovered fishes swam along their secret routes.

  He stayed there for an hour and was freezing by the time he got home. His wife was asleep. Silently he opened the door to the maid's room. She was snoring, her mouth wide open. The covers were pulled up to her chin.

  He sat in the warmest room in the flat, poked away at the embers in the tiled stove, drank a glass of brandy and wondered where Captain Rake was.

  It had been a hard winter, few harbours had been ice-free. The navy had concentrated its resources on the south and west coasts. Somewhere out there was Captain Rake. No doubt he was asleep. He was an early bird.

  Tobiasson-Svartman was impatient. Having to wait was getting him down. It was 29 March already, he wanted to set off south as soon as possible. Would Sara Fredrika still be there, waiting for him? Or had she already left the island? He poked the embers again. The image of Sara Fredrika came and went.

  CHAPTER 123

  Late at night. He was sitting at his desk, the lamp with the green porcelain shade was on. He was making notes. What was he really measuring? Distances, depths, speeds. But also light, darkness, cold, heat. And weights. All the things external to himself, that made up the space he occupied, ships' decks, his night on Observatoriekullen. He was measuring something else inside himself. Perseverance, resistance. Truth and falsehood. Worry, happiness, introversion. What was meaningful, and what was meaningless.

  He stopped. He had made similar lists many times before. They were never complete. What did he always forget? What didn't he see? There was something he measured without being aware of it.

  He stayed at his desk for quite a while. Eventually he locked the sheet of paper away in a drawer, with all the other lists.

  He went to the bedroom. Kristina Tacker was still asleep. He gently touched her stomach.

  Sara Fredrika, he thought. Are you still there?

  CHAPTER 124

  One day Kristina Tacker found the large sum of money he had collected from Handelsbanken. He had left the notes under a diary on his desk.

  'I don't let the maid touch your desk. I tidy it up myself. A note was sticking out. I saw all that money.'

  'That's right. There is a large sum of money on the desk.'

  'But why?'

  'If we get involved in the war the banks might close. I took precautions against that.'

  She asked no more questions.

  'I've always expected my wife not to snoop around among my private papers.'

  She was shaking with emotion when she replied. 'I do not root around among your private papers. The only things I touch are your clothes when I pack your bags for you.'

  'I've noticed before now that you've been going through my papers. It's just that I've chosen not to say anything until now.'

  'I have never touched your papers. Why are you falsely accusing me?'

  'Then we'll say no more about it.'

  She stood up and ran out of the room. He heard the bedroom door close with a bang. Of course his accusations were groundless. But he felt no regret at all.

  Soon the waiting will be over, he thought. One day, in the far distant future, I might be able to explain to her that she was married to a man who was never fully visible, not even to himself.