Depths

by Mankell Henning

  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.

  CHAPTER 90

  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.

  CHAPTER 91

  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.

  CHAPTER 92

  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.

  PART VI

  The Adder Game

  CHAPTER 93

  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.

  CHAPTER 94

  His fury subsided. The cat's death a memory already.

  As a child he had sometimes trapped birds, then killed them by cutting off their heads with a pair of scissors from his father's study. Afterwards he had always felt distaste and regret. When he was a naval cadet he had joined some colleagues in tying bags of gunpowder to stray dogs, which were then released with burning fuses attached to the bags. They used to make bets on which of the dogs would run furthest before being blown to pieces.

  But apart from that? He had never killed, he was afraid of death. The cat had come too close. It had trespassed on forbidden territory. The cat had crossed the barrier he surrounded himself with.

  He gazed up at the sky. Ten o'clock. The shape of the white sun could be seen through the thin clouds. He looked down at the cat lying on the ice. A pool of blood had formed round the body.

  In fact it wasn't the cat, he thought. What I attacked was something else. My father, perhaps? Or why not Lieutenant Jakobsson with his deformed hand and swollen face?

  Two shadows appeared over the ice. Two eagles were hovering overhead. They had discovered the dead cat. He could see through his telescope that they were young sea eagles. They continued circling for a while before landing on the ice. They approached the cat cautiously, as if suspecting a trap. Then they started eating.

  Life and death, he thought. My life, my death, my tins of American meat. The life and death of the cat, eagles on an endless expanse of ice.

  He added more wood to the fire, stuck his feet into the rucksack and tried once again to think calmly. When he got up it had turned noon. He kicked snow over the fire, divided the contents of the rucksacks so that he could leave one and take the other with him.

  The eagles were gone. All that remained of the cat was a dark patch of frozen blood.

  CHAPTER 95

  He approached the cottage from the inlet where the boat was, paused uneasily behind a rock and observed the scene. The cottage door was closed, thin smoke drifted up from the chimney.

  He would wait for one minute. He would give himself a minute in which to have second thoughts. Even if he had run out of food he would still have enough energy to walk as far as Harstena where the biggest fishing village in the archipelago was. He could still turn back.

  I'll leave, he thought. I'll walk back over the ice. Sara Fredrika has nothing to do with my life. I am risking something I do not want to lose.

  He set off towards the inlet, then turned on his heel, marched up to the cottage and hammered on the door. She did not open it. But he was only going to knock that one time. He stepped back a pace, so that she would be able to see him from the window.

  When she opened the door wide, not just a few centimetres, he knew she had seen him.

  'You,' she said. 'Are you here?'

  She did not wait for a response but let him in. The room was empty, he could sense that he had the upper hand. She had hidden the stranger in the cupboard with the nets and barrels and decoys. He could smell something unusual, old engine oil perhaps, or rifle grease. He squatted by the fire and warmed his hands.

  He had prepared his story carefully. It is easier in a desolate winter landscape than in cities, he had thought. It is more difficult to check the truth in the outer archipelago.

  Everything depended on the open channel.

  He had once met a petty officer in Karlskrona who had been bosun on the Svensksund. In the summer of 1896 the Swedish hot-air balloon expedition to the North Pole led by the engineer Salomon Andrée had set off for Spetsbergen on board that ship. It had been fitted with reinforced bows so as to be able to sail through iced-over water and even force its way through pack ice. That was almost twenty years ago, nobody had ever heard a thing from the three ballooners who vanished in the fog over the Arctic Ocean.

  They talked about the expedition and about the ice and its mysterious qualities. The bosun had described how ice could suddenly crack, forming enormous open channels for no apparent reason. The crack appears out of the blue. The ice seemed to carry a secret inside itself. The bosun claimed that the Eskimos call it 'the frozen soul'. As recently as 1893 seven Swedish seal-hunters had been marooned on an ice floe by a gigantic crack that had made it impossible for them to get back to land. The only one to survive, a farmer from the island of Öland, had told the bosun that the ice was thick and there was no wind when the seven of them had set off. Suddenly the hunters heard a roaring sound, the ice cracked and the sea rose up like the back of a gigantic whale and they were unable to turn back. They were doomed, the open channel grew longer and wider, and he was the only one to survive, albeit having lost both feet to frostbite; the only one who could tell the tale of that sudden crack.

  The ice was alive, it was not to be trusted.

  Tobiasson-Svartman now told Sara Fredrika that he had been one of a party of eight that had set out from the mainland to make holes through the ice and check some of the soundings made last autumn. Just on the other side of Kråkmarö but before coming to the outer skerries, maybe Lökskär or Tyskärsarkipelagen, he had left the others to reconnoitre. The ice had cracked and he had been cut off from his colleagues by an open channel. He had very little food, and his only chance was to walk towards the open sea, towards Halsskär where he knew she lived.

  'You might not have been here, of course,' he said. 'The cottage might have been empty. But at least I would have had a roof over my head, I could have drilled holes through the ice, fished and survived.'

  'I am still here,' she said.

  'No doubt the open channel will freeze over again, but you never know how long it will take.'