Depths (17 page)

He went down to the dining room and had dinner.

A string quartet played something he took to be highlights from Verdi operas. The dining room was almost empty, waitresses standing around with nothing to do. Outside, where it was very cold and the snow crunched underfoot, was somewhere the shadow of a war that nobody really understood, nor very much cared about, in fact.

He imagined himself with a gun, firing gas shells. A red-faced man sitting next to one of the pillars in the dining room was hunched over a newspaper. He estimated the distance as thirteen metres, then fired the gun. The man was blown to smithereens and swallowed up by flames. He killed the diners one by one, then the waitresses and the cashier, and finally the musicians in the string quartet.

He fled the dining room at midnight. He lay in bed with the cold sounding lead clutched to his body. The freezing temperatures made the hotel walls creak. The violin in the nearby room could no longer be heard.

Before he slept he tried to take his bearings. Where was he, where was he actually going to? Every movement made him feel dizzy, perhaps he was heading for his own demise. The last thing he thought about was the ice. Would it hold his weight? Had the sea frozen over as far out as Halsskär? Or would he be forced to pull a boat over the ice and row the last part of the way? Would he ever get there?

Ice floes drifted through his sleep.

He left the hotel after a quick breakfast.

The receptionist, who spoke with a Danish accent, ordered him a cab. This was not straightforward since he wanted to be taken as far as the jetty at Gryt, where he would set out on his trek. The road was icy, and the cold could cause engine problems. After being offered ten kronor extra, a taxi driver with a Ford agreed to take him.

They left shortly after half past seven. Tobiasson-Svartman was wrapped in a thick blanket in the back seat. The driver had a scarf round his winter hat. It reminded Tobiasson-Svartman of Lieutenant Jakobsson. He shuddered at the memory of the man who had dropped dead in front of him on the deck.

The countryside was embedded in the cold.

Just before driving through Söderköping they passed the Göta Canal. Barges were frozen in beside the canal banks. They were chained by their hawsers, like animals in their stalls. He turned to look at the barges through the back window for as long as they were visible. I shall remember those barges, he thought. One of them will take me over the final border when my time comes.

At Gusum the engine began coughing and it was not possible to go any further when they reached Valdemarsvik.

He decided to stay there overnight, paid the driver and booked into a guest house on a hill beyond the big tannery on the shore of the bay. The wind was from the east and blew the smell away. The landlord, who spoke a dialect very difficult to understand, promised to arrange transport the next day.

Having installed his luggage in his room he walked down to the harbour and examined the ice. It was thick and did not give when he stood on it. He approached a man who was busy chiselling ice off a fishing boat and asked what conditions were like out in the archipelago, but he did not know.

'If it's as cold out there among the skerries, the sea will no doubt be frozen there as well. But I don't know, and I don't want to know.'

He had dinner at the guest house, avoided answering anything more than yes or no to the questions asked by the inquisitive landlord and his wife, and went early to bed.

He snuggled down deep into his pillow and tried to imagine that he did not exist.

The Gryt jetty was deserted, a few boats frozen into the ice, a locked boathouse, a battered slipway. The driver lifted out the two rucksacks and took his payment. There was a thin layer of snow on the ice, but the only footprints were those of an occasional crow or magpie.

'Nobody's gone from here,' said the driver. 'And nobody's come neither. No boats'll be coming here until the ice melts in March or April. Are you really sure this is where you wanted to come to?'

'Yes,' Tobiasson-Svartman said. 'This is where I wanted to come to.'

The driver nodded slowly and asked no more questions. The black car disappeared up the hill from the jetty. Tobiasson-Svartman stood motionless until the sound of the engine had died away. Then he took out his sea chart. Panic was ticking deep inside him. I cannot go back, he thought. There is nothing behind me, perhaps nothing in front of me either, but I must do what I have set myself to do.

There was an easterly breeze blowing. It would take him three days to get to Halsskär, assuming the weather did not take a turn for the worse, and that there really was ice in the outer archipelago. He decided to walk as far as Armnö in the central part of the archipelago this first day. There ought to be a boathouse there where he could spend the night and be comparatively warm.

He strapped on his two rucksacks after fixing crampons to his leather boots and hanging his ice prods round his neck. It was ten minutes past ten when he took his first step out on to the ice. His route would take him round the south end of Fågelö and then he would head towards Höga Svedsholmen. He estimated the distance to Armnö to be eight kilometres, which meant that he ought to be there before dusk.

He set off. The thin layer of snow had been blown away in some places, exposing the dark ice beneath. It felt like balancing on the edge of a precipice that could give way at any moment. The archipelago was empty. He would occasionally pause and listen. Sometimes an invisible bird would call, but apart from that it was totally silent. When he had passed Fågelö he stopped, unstrapped his rucksacks and made a hole through the ice with his knife. It was fourteen centimetres thick. It would not crack under his weight.

He walked at twenty-five metres per minute. He did not want to run the risk of sweating and then freezing. He paused at Höga Svedsholmen and broke off a branch to use as a walking stick. He drank some water and ate some of the sandwiches provided by the guest house. Then he rested for twenty minutes.

When he left Höga Svedsholmen he tried pulling his rucksacks behind him, as if they were on runners. He fastened a rope around his waist and started pulling. The rucksacks slid easily on the ice and thin snow. But before he was even halfway to Gråholmarna the small of his back started to ache. He stopped and tried to think of another way of doing it. He made a harness out of the rope, so that the weight was shared by his back and shoulders. When he began walking again he could feel that there was less of a strain.

At Gråholmarna he made a fire between some stones. Nowhere could he see any smoke rising above the tree-tops, nowhere was there any sign of human life. A whole world had disappeared from view.

While he was waiting for the coffee water to boil he stood on a rock and shouted over the ice-covered bay. The sound was tossed about, returned as a distant echo, then all was silent again. From there he could see Kråkmarö and Armnö through his telescope.

He found an unlocked boathouse by the Armnö Sound. There was a fireplace inside, and no sign of any footprints around the building. There were nets, decoys and a strong smell of tar in the boathouse. He opened a tin of American meat and snuggled down in his sleeping bag. He fell asleep with a feeling of being inaccessible.

The next day he walked ten kilometres.

That took him over Bockskärsdjupet and as far as Hökbådan, where he set up camp.

He had intended to head straight for Halsskär, but a channel had opened up near Harstena and so he was forced to make a detour to the north. Hökbådan proved to be no more than a collection of bare rocks with no boathouses. Before darkness fell he managed to make a shelter of branches and moss over a crack in the rocks where he intended to spend the night. He made a fire and opened another tin of American meat. The wind was still no more than a gentle breeze when he eased himself into his sleeping bag. It had grown noticeably less cold during the day. He estimated the temperature at minus three degrees. When darkness fell and his fire died he lay listening to the sea. Was that open water he could hear lapping against the ice? Or would the thick ice stretch as far as Halsskär? He could not make up his mind what he could hear, whether it was the sea or the silence inside his head.

Several times he thought he could hear gunfire, first a distant thud and then a shock wave passing through the darkness.

Nobody knows where I am, he thought. In the middle of winter, in the cold world of the ice, I have found a hiding place that nobody could possibly imagine.

He lit a fire as day broke. The wind was still no more than a breeze, the temperature minus one. He ate his remaining sandwiches, drank coffee, then prepared to walk the ten kilometres to Halsskär. The clouds were motionless above his head, the ice with its thin covering of snow was no longer broken by rocks and skerries. Now he was heading towards the open sea. He could see Halsskär and the Sandsänkan lighthouse through his telescope. He could still not see whether the ice stretched all the way, though.

He pulled his rucksacks behind him, the harness had chafed his left shoulder, but it was not painful enough to stop him walking for one more day.

He saw no animal tracks. He was walking eastwards and gave himself no time to rest. Every half-hour he scanned the horizon with his telescope.

He had passed Krokbåden to his right before he could be confident that there was ice all the way. There was no open water forming a barrier between him and the island. The ice extended as far as Halsskär and perhaps even to the Sandsänkan lighthouse.

He scanned Halsskär with his telescope. Eventually he was able to make out a narrow wisp of smoke rising from the skerry.

She was still there. But she was not expecting him.

It was starting to get dark as he approached Halsskär.

His first impulse was to hurry over the ice and go straight to Sara Fredrika's cottage. But something stopped him, he hesitated. What would he say? How would he explain his return? What would happen if he changed his mind the moment she opened the door?

He squeezed the questions into a little clump: why was he out on the ice, why had he lied to set up this journey, what was he really looking for?

He reached the skerry as dusk fell without having found an answer. Sara Fredrika's boat was on land, upside down and resting on large pieces of driftwood. The nets had been taken in, an abandoned herring barrel was brimful of snow.

He made a shelter in a crevice between the inlet and the rocks where he could not be seen from the cottage. He knew the way from there, he would be able to walk it in the dark. That was the only thing he had managed to decide, he would wait for it to get properly dark and then creep up on her. He wanted to look through the window and see what she was doing, only then would he know how to take the final steps.

He crept down into his sleeping bag. Night fell, and still he waited. The clouds dispersed, the sky was full of stars, the narrow sliver of a new moon. When he eventually got up it was nine o'clock. He made his way to the edge of the rock and looked out to sea. There was no sign of the Sandsänkan lighthouse. He screwed up his eyes, momentarily confused and wondering if he was completely disorientated. Then he realised that the light had been switched off as part of the increased security operation along the Swedish coast. The war had brought its darkness here as well.

He waited for another hour. The wind had dropped altogether, the ice continued so far out that he could not even hear the sea. He groped his way along the path. There was a faint light coming from the window. He made a start when something rubbed against his leg. It was the cat. He bent down and stroked it. The cat that did not exist.

He was careful where to tread as he approached the window. Despite the hoar frost on the pane he could see into the room, a fractured image.

He moved away from the window. The cat went with him, rubbing against his leg. He looked again through the window. Sara Fredrika was squatting in front of the fire. She was wearing a woolly cap and was wrapped in blankets.

But she was not alone. Sitting on the floor next to the hearth was a man in uniform.

He had seen a similar uniform some months earlier. Then it had been on a dead German soldier floating in the sea next to the gunboat
Blenda.

The picture sent a shudder of pain through him. There was a German sailor sitting in Sara Fredrika's cottage. A German sailor barring his way.

The cat was beside him, rubbing against his leg.

Someone had taken his place, his fox pelt.

He could hear the sailor's voice through the wall. It was hard to make out all his words, he was speaking in a low voice as if he suspected or feared that there was somebody close at hand, listening.

The German Tobiasson-Svartman had learned during his hated school years was not good enough for him to understand fully what was being said. In addition, the sailor was speaking dialect, he seemed to slur words, some consonants were almost inaudible, as if he had swallowed them.

Tobiasson-Svartman pressed his cheek against the cold wall. What he really wanted to do was to smash the windowpane with his fist, kick the door open and throw the man squatting in front of the fire out into the night. But he did and said nothing, and stayed in the darkness by the cottage until the fire had almost gone out. She was lying in the bunk, and the sailor on rags and old pelts on the floor, just as he had done.

He returned to his crevice. He was very tired, his joints were aching from the cold. A wind was getting up. At dawn he obliterated all traces he had left in and around the crevice, and moved to the north-eastern cliffs which dropped steeply to the sea. There were cavelike recesses there. He found one sheltered from the wind, scrambled down to the water's edge, collected some driftwood and started a fire. With his naked eye he could see that the covering of ice extended almost as far as the Sandsänkan lighthouse. The open sea looked like a black belt, a line from the north-east to the southwest. At the very edge of the ice he could make out some black spots that moved, a little group of seals, perhaps.

He took out his telescope and scanned the horizon. Nothing but sea, no ships.

The sea was emptiness, a reminder of infinity, an absence of limits.

He warmed himself in front of the fire, and eventually dozed off. The surrounding cliffs protected him from the wind. The smoke blew out to sea, almost invisible.

He woke up when the fire started to go out. For more than an hour he crawled among the icy rocks, collecting branches, broken fish boxes, parts of a ship's rail that had been washed up in a storm. He built himself a hut, just large enough for him to huddle up inside. He made some coffee and opened the last of his tins of meat. All he had left now were a few rusks and a frozen lump of butter. He drank the coffee in a series of sips, put more wood on the fire then huddled up with his feet inside one of the rucksacks.

He assessed the situation. That evening at the latest he would have to make his presence known. He could not keep watch on the cottage for another night. There was a risk that he would freeze to death. He had all day to make up his mind, to invent a story. A man who has walked all the way here over the ice must have a convincing explanation when he reveals his presence.

He tried to think calmly. The sailor and Sara Fredrika had not been sleeping together. They hadn't touched each other, not even laughed. The man had seemed despondent. Fear, he thought. Perhaps what I could see in the sailor wearing a German uniform was simply fear?

Something moved next to him. He gave a start. It was the cat. It was hungry, sniffing after bits of food in the empty tin and on the knife he had used to open the lid.

The cat studied him with vacant eyes. It was like one of the china figurines on Kristina Tacker's shelf. One that had fallen on the floor without breaking.

He exploded in fury. He grabbed the knife, stabbed the cat in the throat and slit open its stomach. Its intestines started to ooze out, the cat only had time to hiss before it was dead. Its mouth jerked a few times, its eyes wide open. He flung the body over the cliff and down to the ice. Then he wiped the blood from his hand and the knife.

There was no cat, he thought, wild with rage. That's what she said when I asked her. There was no cat. There is no cat. There is nothing.