Depths

by Mankell Henning

  '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 o
ccurred 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?'