Depths

by Mankell Henning

  He felt as if the sea were keeping watch on him, like a sharp-eyed animal.

  CHAPTER 41

  Shortly after ten o'clock Welander shouted that he had come across a significant underwater peak. Over twenty metres the depth of water had decreased from sixty-three metres to nineteen. It was like coming upon a cliff wall that had risen unnoticed beneath the surface of the sea. Tobiasson-Svartman sank his own lead. The last sounding, a mere ten metres astern, had been fifty-two metres. He held his breath, hoping for the same measurement again. But his lead came to a stop after only seventeen metres. What he had feared had come to pass. They had hit upon an underwater ridge that had not previously been marked on charts.

  The sea had raised its voice and refused to cooperate.

  Instead of continuing along the transit line, he requested readings at right angles to the course the launches had been following so far. They must find out if the ridge was a long one or just an isolated stack. They took soundings every three metres and shouted the results to each other. Welander found depths of 19, 16, 16, 15 and then suddenly 7 metres, thereafter 7 again, then 4, followed by another jump to 2 metres. For a further stretch of a hundred metres the distance to the seabed was between 2 and 3 metres.

  Tobiasson-Svartman had the same result. This was no minor irregularity: they had come across a stretch of shallow water that for some reason had hitherto been missed. Off the top of his head he could not remember it being mentioned as a good place for herring fishing in old documents describing the best fishing grounds around the Sandsänkan lighthouse.

  The snow was falling even more heavily. He felt disappointed. The sea had tricked him.

  He shouted to Welander, instructing him to stop work for the day. The thoroughly soaked ratings came to life. One of them yawned noisily as he took hold of his oar. A lump of yellowish-green snot was trickling down his upper lip. Tobiasson-Svartman stood up abruptly and hit the sailor in the face with the chart pouch. It was a hard blow, and blood appeared immediately on the rating's lip.

  It all happened so quickly that nobody had time to react.

  Weakness, Tobiasson-Svartman thought. Now I have made myself vulnerable. I lost control.

  The ratings carried on rowing. He sat with his eyes fixed on Halsskär. Nobody spoke.

  Over dinner, which consisted of roast beef, potatoes and pickled gherkin, he told Lieutenant Jakobsson about the invisible cliff wall.

  'What are the implications?' Jakobsson asked.

  'I shall be able to relocate the navigable channel closer to the mainland, but it will not be as wide as I had hoped.'

  'So it hasn't been a complete failure?'

  'No.'

  He went on to speak of the other incident.

  'I gave a rating a good dressing-down today. It was necessary. He wasn't rowing as he should have been. I hit him with the chart pouch.'

  Needless to say, Jakobsson knew about it already. He smiled.

  'Naturally, the crew has to be punished if they don't obey orders or fail to carry out their work properly. I must ask you, though, from curiosity purely, what are you doing when you are not "rowing as you should be"?'

  'He was lazy.'

  Jakobsson nodded slowly, and eyed him quizzically.

  'I didn't think a shipping lane could be such a personal matter,' he said. 'I can understand that a ship might be. I have seen old captains and bosuns weep when their ship has been towed away to the breaker's yard. But a navigable channel?'

  Tobiasson-Svartman thought he ought to respond to that. But he could not think of anything to say.

  CHAPTER 42

  He finished his meal and left the mess. When he came out on deck he stopped to gaze in the direction of Halsskär, which was invisible in the dark. He tried to imagine what Sara Fredrika's husband looked like, and wondered if there were any children in the grey cottage.

  A slight breeze had got up from the south. He could feel that the mercury had risen above freezing point.

  It had stopped snowing.

  He sat down at the table in his cabin and tried to deal with his disappointment. He had made a mistake, he had assumed that he would triumph. He had been convinced that he could change an arc into an almost straight line on the sea chart, give naval vessels more protection, and above all enable them to approach land or head out to sea at faster speeds. Although he knew from experience that a navigable channel was like an invisible obstacle course, he had allowed himself to approach the mission with too much confidence.

  The sea had not tricked him. It was he who had failed to show sufficient respect. He had committed a grave sin: he had guessed.

  * * *

  The paraffin lamp started smoking. As he adjusted the flame a memory came to him. His father had once lapsed into one of his most furious rages when Lars arrived late at the dinner table because he had guessed the time and got it wrong. With a bellow his father had boxed his ears and sent him to bed without food.

  To be late was to desecrate other people's time. Guessing could be an amusing game, but was never permissible in connection with dinner or other serious matters.

  Such as being responsible for checking the depth of secret naval channels.

  He wrote up the notes he had made during the day and worked out a plan for how they would continue their work. They would be forced to retreat about 150 metres. When they came to the previous course of the navigable channel they would start sounding again.

  He calculated how long it would take. Provided nothing unforeseen happened, they should be finished by 1 December even so.

  He put the main record book away, turned down the flame and stretched out on his bunk. There was a faint creaking from the hull. He could hear the watchman walking over the deck. Somebody coughed. He thought how there always seemed to be a coughing epidemic on board a naval vessel. It rattled like an echo through the collective chest of ships. When on board a warship you could be certain that the wind and the sound of the engines would always be accompanied by somebody coughing.

  He pictured the crew of a big battleship, perhaps two thousand men, standing on parade and coughing in unison while their superiors looked on.

  He thought about the sailor he had struck. What did he know about him? He was nineteen, came from inland, Vimmerby, and was called Mats Lindegren. That was all. The lad spoke an almost incomprehensible dialect, often smelled of sweat and gave the appearance of being frightened. He was an insignificant person with a pale, pimply face, and unnaturally thin to boot. There was something vague and elusive about him. It was incomprehensible that he should have joined the navy, even if he was not among the worst when it came to being seasick. He knew as much from Lieutenant Jakobsson, who always had people keeping a check on which members of the crew – himself included – became incapable of working during a bad storm. Mats Lindegren was one of those not affected. He was not sick, nor did he become dizzy.

  There in the darkness Tobiasson-Svartman suddenly realised why he had been unable to control himself. The yawning sailor with the snotty nose had reminded him of the dead man Richter, the one who had been pulled out of the sea a few weeks ago. The similarity of their appearance, that and the fact that, they had stumbled upon a big underwater ridge had shattered all his best-laid plans, had made him lose control.

  * * *

  He closed his eyes and thought about his wife. She was walking towards him through the darkness; he felt wholly calm deep down; the cabin was filled with a sweetish scent, and finally he managed to fall asleep.

  CHAPTER 43

  She followed him into his dreams.

  It was 1905, they had just married and were on their honeymoon in Kristiania. The struggle over the 'to be or not to be' of the Swedish-Norwegian union was at its most troubled stage and he had made the naive mistake of going out for a walk with his wife along Karl Johan wearing his Swedish naval uniform. Just as they were passing the university somebody had shouted at him, and even in his dream he could hear that hot-tempered voice: 'Swedish basta
rd, go home.' He turned round, but there was no obvious culprit, just a crowd of people who looked the other way or smiled and looked down at the ground. They were staying at the Grand Hotel, and went back there immediately. Kristina Tacker had been fearful and wanted to leave right away, but he had refused. He changed into civilian clothes, they went out again and nobody had shouted at them. No one was hostile when they went to the Blom restaurant or the Grand Hotel's veranda, nor when they visited the newly built National Theatre. They saw Johanne Dybwad as Mrs Alving in a production of Ibsen's Ghosts, which his wife thought was disgusting. He agreed with her, to be polite, but in fact he had been disturbed and moved because the play reminded him of his own childhood and resurrected uncomfortable memories of pain and ignominy.

  Thus far his dream was clear, a walk down memory lane. But then everything became chaotic. They become separated in a crowd at Bygdøy and soon afterwards he sees her with another man. He tries to pull the man away from her, but he is dead and his body is already decaying, the stink is something awful. Then suddenly everything is back at the beginning again. They walk along Karl Johan, stop at the entrance to the Blom restaurant and examine the menu, they talk about everyday things, she squeezes his arm and then the picture goes white, featureless, without content or meaning.

  When he woke up he tried to interpret the dream. He had let it finish in nothing but whiteness. He had rubbed Kristina Tacker out.

  His pocket watch showed three minutes to five. No thin light yet. He lay with his eyes open, and in the darkness – the opposite of the whiteness of the dream – he decided to row to Halsskär that morning.

  He had to. That was all there was to it. He had no choice.

  The watchman was pacing up and down the deck.

  Tobiasson-Svartman stretched out a hand and touched his sound, which lay on the floor next to his bunk.

  CHAPTER 44

  The sea was wreathed in fog when he rowed over to Halsskär.

  About halfway there the Blenda had faded away like a dark shadow amid all the white.

  He wondered if the whiteness in his dream had presaged the fog. A fish broke the surface of the water alongside the boat with a plop. That's what pike do, he thought, but would a pike really be as far out to sea as this?

  He rested on his oars and listened. The fog magnified the noises from the invisible ship. Some of the ratings had been ordered to scrape away rust. The blows of hammers and chisels bounced through the fog and reached his ears. There was no risk of his getting lost, he could navigate on the basis of the noises. He counted his strokes and when he looked ahead he saw he was close to land. He beached the tender as before, having considered rowing a bit further and tying up in the little inlet where the sailing dinghy was moored. That would save him having to clamber over the slippery rocks, but the inlet was not his, and he did not want to intrude.

  He made his way to the protected natural harbour and paused to observe the dinghy. It was in the same place as last time, but the sail was not furled round the mast, it was flapping gently in the slight breeze. The nets were hanging as before, but as he approached he could smell fish. There were the remains of cod and a few flounders in the water next to the boat He was surprised that the gulls had not already been there and eaten the lot. He walked on over the slippery rocks, slipped and cut his hand on a sharp stone. He had a handkerchief in one of his pockets, Kristina Tacker had embroidered his initials into one corner. He pressed it against his hand until the bleeding had stopped.

  The door of the grey cottage was shut. Smoke was coming out of the chimney. He sat behind some large rocks and let his telescope glide over the building, the door, the walls, the window. The only moving thing was the smoke. He waited. Suddenly a black cat with a white nose appeared round one corner of the cottage. It paused and looked towards where he was sitting, one front paw poised. He held his breath. The cat moved on again and vanished into some bushes. The door opened. Sara Fredrika came out. She lifted up her skirt and squatted down. He had a glimpse of her white legs. He hesitated for a moment, then grasped the telescope and aimed it at her. Just as she stood up she looked straight at him. He jerked the telescope away and closed his eyes. She walked along the path towards the inlet where the sailing dinghy was moored, and disappeared behind an outcrop of rocks.

  He stood up and half ran to the highest point of the skerry, where he could see down into the inlet. There was the creaking sound of an oar, some squeaking from a rowlock, and then he saw the boat moving away from land. She rowed with good, strong strokes, and the sail was hanging loose, flapping as if enjoying its freedom. He could see through the telescope that she had tucked her skirt above her knees, and that there were nets lying on the stern thwart. She emerged from the inlet but did not follow the line of the coast. Instead she headed for the inner archipelago where the nearest landmark was a group of bare rocks sticking up out of the water.

  She tossed a cork float over the side and as the dinghy glided downwind at a fair pace she let the net go. The breeze was easterly, barely enough to cause ripples. He estimated the net to be forty-two metres long, and she quickly adjusted the flow whenever it threatened to become tangled. She knew what she was doing and wasted no time. Her blonde hair kept falling over her face, she kept blowing it away, shaking her head, and eventually hung on to a long strand with her teeth to keep it out of her way.

  He lowered the telescope. Odd that she was out in the boat on her own. Was her husband ill? Was he in bed at the cottage, behind the closed door?

  He made up his mind on the spot. It would be some time before she finished laying out the nets and came back to the skerry.

  He walked down to the cottage. The door was still closed and there was no sign of the cat. He approached cautiously and peered in through the window. It was quite dark inside and difficult to see anything. A fire glowed in the hearth. Suddenly it flared up. There was only one room, a bed, a table and a chair inside the rough walls. He could not see anybody in there. He tried the door, knocked gently, then opened it. The room was empty. No sign of her husband. No boots, no overcoat, no pipe on the table, no shotgun on the wall. She lived there alone.

  There was no husband. Sara Fredrika lived all alone on Halsskär.

  He thought he heard the dinghy scraping against some stones in the inlet and hurried back to his hiding place behind the rocks. She soon appeared, walking towards the cottage. She glanced up at the sky then went inside.

  The fog was lifting when he returned to the ship. He rowed so fast that his clothes were sticking to his body. Why was he in such a hurry?

  Was he running away from something, or towards something?

  CHAPTER 45

  Lieutenant Jakobsson was standing by the rail, cleaning his pipe.

  He smiled.

  'You get up early.'

  'I hope I didn't wake you?'

  'If I manage to sleep, I dream I'm awake. Sometimes I don't know if I'm awake or asleep. But when I come out on deck it's the real world, and I saw that one of the tenders was missing and they said you had rowed off into the fog.'

  'I need some exercise. The work in the boats isn't enough.'

  He climbed up on deck and headed for the mess and breakfast. He had spent too much time on Halsskär. Work would be late in starting today.

  Jakobsson followed him.

  'Maybe I should accompany you,' he said, after lighting his pipe. 'Maybe you've discovered something?'

  For a moment Tobiasson-Svartman thought that Jakobsson knew. Then he understood that it was an innocent question.

  'There's nothing there. You can't even get ashore. But I enjoy rowing.'

  'It's not something I try to do, not with my hand.'

  Tobiasson-Svartman drained his cup of coffee then stood up, went back on deck and climbed down into his launch.