Depths

by Mankell Henning

  'I'm not alone,' she said. 'You are not the first person to come walking over the ice this winter. Somebody came from the other direction.'

  'From the sea?'

  'In a rowing boat, like the one you had.'

  'I didn't see a rowing boat in the inlet.'

  'He let it drift away when he came to the edge of the ice.'

  'He?'

  She sat down next to him on the floor. She smelled awful.

  He was usually disgusted by people who smelled bad, such as their maid Anna. While serving on board the gunship Edda as a cadet they were carrying out a rope-ladder manoeuvre and he had been assigned to help a simple rating with rotten teeth. The smell from the man's mouth was unimaginable. Even when he was two metres away from the rating the smell hit him in the face, it was the smell of death emerging from the sailor's mouth every time he breathed.

  Sara Fredrika did not smell of death. She just smelled of dirt, a friendly, sad little whiff of muck that he could put up with.

  Because I love her, he thought. That's the way it is. That's why I can put up with her.

  CHAPTER 96

  She sat down next to him and started speaking in a low voice.

  But the man hidden in the cupboard with all the nets could not understand, he could only guess at what the voices were now saying about him.

  He must be scared, Tobiasson-Svartman thought. A German sailor could not have any plausible reason for being on Swedish soil. On a rocky skerry like Halsskär, with the widow of a fisherman.

  He had let his rowing boat drift away. Whoever he was, he must have burned a bridge behind him, and that was dangerous.

  She said: 'I am not alone here. There's somebody in there among the nets.'

  He pretended to be surprised.

  'Who are you hiding? Who's hiding there?'

  'You spoke about the war last autumn when you were here. Sometimes I was woken up by dull thuds that made the house shake. I went to the highest point on the skerry, and there were times when I could see fires in the distance. Once when I was taking in nets at Jungfrugrunden, a hawser floated towards me. It was like a long snake in the water. The rope was as thick as my arm. It smelled of gunpowder, it smelled of death. I didn't touch it, it just wriggled past as if it were alive. It was clear that this bit of hawser had something to do with the war. A few days after Christmas two Finns turned up in a boat. One is called Juha, the other one is known as Arvo but is actually called something else that I can't say because round here it means something rude in Swedish. They hunt seals in these parts, but mostly they smuggle hard liquor. They've never done me any harm. They had an Ålander with them in their sloop. He was called Ville, his surname was something like Honka. He told me about the war, and he started crying and cursed us Swedes for not sending troops to Åland to defend the islands. I started to understand what the war was all about, those fires in the night and the shock waves and the thudding noises – it meant that people were dying in their thousands.'

  And then he came? The man who's been caught in your nets in there?'

  'I was scared when there was a knocking at the door. I didn't open up. I grabbed a knife. He was wearing a uniform and talking in a language I couldn't understand, it sounded like somebody who used to buy eels off us when I was a child. But when he collapsed on the doorstep, he wasn't threatening any more. I dragged him inside. His ribs felt like chicken bones under his jacket, I thought he might be ill, maybe he would die. I could have invited my own death, perhaps he had an infection. I slept in the boat two nights. He came round and was rambling, he had a fever, but he wasn't injured, just hungry and dehydrated. I eventually realised that he was German. He has tried to explain to me who he is, but I can't understand what he says. His words are like slippery stones. But I'm scared, I've noticed that he listens, he listens all the time, all the time, even when he's asleep his ears are cocked and his head and eyes are concentrating on something behind him.'

  'Am I a danger too?'

  'I don't know.'

  'I've slept here.'

  'You could be dangerous even so.'

  'You can believe what you like. I can't make up your mind for you.'

  She hesitated. Her face was twitching, she shook her head impatiently to get her hair out of her eyes. Then she stood up, as if she were going to do a standing jump, and opened the cupboard door.

  The sailor came out. He stood there, on his guard, ready to defend himself.

  Sara Fredrika said, although she knew he didn't understand: 'He's not dangerous, he's a sailor like you are, he's been here before.'

  Tobiasson-Svartman eyed the man. He was wearing the same uniform that Karl-Heinz Richter had on when they hauled him, sodden and semi-decayed, on board the Blenda. His face was pale, his hair thin, he must have been about twenty-five, maybe twenty-six.

  But there was something special about the sailor's eyes: he did not only try to see with them, but also to listen, to smell, to mind-read.

  Tobiasson-Svartman held out his hand and spoke slowly in German: 'My name is Lars Tobiasson-Svartman, my job is to sound depths, I was cut off from my friends by a crack in the ice.'

  He didn't know the German expression for 'an open channel', but 'crack in the ice' would do. The German seemed to understand. Cautiously, he held out his hand. His grip was limp, a bit like Kristina Tacker's.

  'Dorflinger.'

  'You've come here over the ice?'

  The German hesitated before replying.

  'I have run away.'

  A German deserter, a young man who had jumped ship in a desperate attempt to get away. Tobiasson-Svartman was filled with disgust. Deserters were cowards. Deserters deserved to be executed. There was no other way to treat people who failed in their duty. People who maintained that they were being true to themselves, when they were in fact letting everybody else down. What right had this deserter to appear here and get in his way, when he was risking his marriage and his career because of an inner urge that he had to fulfil? What was the deserter risking? A man who was defending no more than his own cowardice?

  They stood in the room like the tips of a triangle. He tried to decide if Sara Fredrika was closer to him than to the deserter, but there was no distance in the room, the house itself seemed to be moving, or perhaps it was Halsskär that was shifting, driven by the ice that was beating against the rocks.

  The ice, he thought, the ice and the dead cat. Everything is linked. And now there is a man in my way.

  He smiled.

  'Perhaps we should sit down,' he said to Sara Fredrika. 'I think Herr Dorflinger the sailor is tired.'

  'What does he say? I don't even know his name.'

  'Dorflinger.'

  'Is that his first name?'

  'No.'

  He asked Dorflinger what his first name was.

  'Stefan. My name is Stefan Dorflinger.'

  'Where do you come from?'

  'A little town between Cologne and Bonn, in the heart of Germany. You can't get further away from the sea.'

  'Why were you drafted into the navy?'

  'I asked to be put in the navy. To see the sea. We sailed from Kiel, in one of Admiral Wettenberg's naval units.'

  Dorflinger slumped down on the bed. Sara Fredrika was hovering in the shadows. Tobiasson-Svartman sat on the stool by the fire, tried to do so without making a sound, he did not know why. All too often he did certain things without knowing why, and without holding back.

  'You are safe here,' he said. 'Even if you are what I think you are.'

  'What's that?'

  'A deserter.'

  'I could not endure any more.' It came out like a scream.

  When he spoke again he was calm: 'I could not suffer all that killing. I can describe what is really impossible to describe, things that even words try to escape from. Some things happen that words are even frightened of, that words do not want to be used for describing. I have dreamt about words running for their lives, like I did.'

  He paused and drew a dee
p breath. Tobiasson-Svartman thought for a moment that someone else was going to drop dead at his feet. But Dorflinger continued, as if he had fought his way up to the surface and was able to breathe normally again.

  'I was on the cruiser Weinshorn. On Christmas Eve in the morning, north-east of Rügen, we spotted two Russian troop carriers. The sea was calm, but it was very cold, steam was coming from the water, making it look as if cold can also reach boiling point.

  'I was on a team looking after one of the heavy guns amidships. It was a 254-millimetre gun and could fire salvos at targets more than ten kilometres away pretty accurately. We were given the command "Battle stations!" and we raced to our positions. I was on the lower section of the magazine, and my job was to load powder cartridges into the hoist that took them to the loading ramp on the deck above.

  'We shot nineteen shells from my gun, it was an inferno, I couldn't see if we hit the target, couldn't see what we were aiming at, every shot sent us sprawling against the walls. Some people had blood coming from their eyes and noses, and the first shot burst my eardrum.

  'I didn't realise when we'd stopped firing, the lad in charge of the other hoist had to come and shake me and point. The guns were silent, we had to go back on deck. I couldn't hear a thing, it was like being behind thick panes of glass. You discover a different kind of reality when you only have your eyes to help you. When there are no sounds or voices, reality is different.

  'The Weinshorn closed in on the troopships. They were sinking now. The water was covered in burning oil. Hundreds of men were struggling to escape drowning, the fire, the oil. But the Weinshorn did nothing. Not one lifeboat was launched, not a single lifebuoy was thrown into the sea, not a single rope, nothing.

  'I looked at the rest of the crew. Just like me they were staring in horror at all those dying men, and nobody could understand why we did nothing to save them. We were at war with Russia, OK, but these people were already beaten. We watched them dying, I can remember how our knuckles turned white as we grasped the rail. We looked at the officers up on deck, watched them laughing and pointing.

  'I couldn't hear the screams, nor the laughter. I could only watch the horrific deaths in the freezing water and the burning oil. In the end there was nobody left, they were all dead, most of them had sunk, one or two bodies were still floating, some of them so badly burned that you could see only their craniums sticking out of their tattered uniform.

  'Then the Weinshorn moved away. That was probably the most awful part. We didn't even stay. We sailed southwest, and in the afternoon Christmas trees were raised on the afterdeck, and carols were sung. I still couldn't hear anything, I could only see my comrades jumping and dancing round the tree and I felt I had to join them.

  'Two days after New Year's Eve, late at night, I cleared off. The rating on guard duty realised what I was doing. He wanted to come with me, but didn't dare. He was frightened of being shot as a deserter and upsetting his parents. I rowed away and a week later I ended up here. I clambered on to this island and let the boat drift away. I can't stay here, of course, but I don't know where to go. I have tried to explain that to the woman, but we can't understand each other.'

  Tobiasson-Svartman translated for her. Not everything, only what he thought was appropriate. The storyteller owns the story. He adapted it, made no mention of the Russian ships that had been sunk, but instead made Dorflinger desert after killing one of the officers in cold blood.

  'You have to understand his dilemma,' he said in conclusion. 'Military law is hard, there is no mercy, no sympathy, just a rope or an execution squad. In circumstances like that you run away. I would have done the same thing.'

  'Why did he kill a man? Who was it?'

  'I'll ask him.'

  Dorflinger was watching him uneasily.

  He still has all those images in his mind's eye, Tobiasson-Svartman thought. Those silent images, the jerky movements of war, with no sound.

  'What was the name of the rating standing guard? The one who didn't dare go with you?'

  'Lothar Buchheim. He was the same age as me.'

  Sara Fredrika was waiting impatiently.

  'What did he say?'

  'The man he killed was a bosun called Lothar Buchheim. He was a bully. In the end he went too far.'

  'You don't kill people. Should I kill every Finnish bastard who comes here and tries to rape me? Or the men from the islands in the inner archipelago who think that a widow is a bloody whore who ought to be taken in hand and made to work?'

  He was surprised by her language. It reminded him of that night in Copenhagen.

  'I can't have a murderer in the house,' she said. 'Even if he can't cope with the war.'

  'We have to protect him.'

  'If he's a murderer, shouldn't he be sentenced?'

  'He's already doomed. They'll hang him. We must help him.'

  'How?'

  'I'll take him with me when I've finished my work.'

  Sara Fredrika looked at Dorflinger. Tobiasson-Svartman realised that he had misunderstood the situation.

  The pair had become close. Dorflinger had been on Halsskär for a month. Sara Fredrika did not want him sentenced. She wanted to keep him. Her anger was not genuine.

  He moved his stool closer to Dorflinger.

  'I've told her what you said. I've also told her that I intend to help you. You're a marked man as a deserter from the German Navy, but I'll help you.'

  'Why? You are also in the navy.'

  'Sweden and Germany are not at war with each other. You are not my enemy.'

  He could see that Dorflinger was doubtful. He smiled.

  'I'm not sitting here telling you lies. I'll help you. You can't stay here. When I've finished my work you can come with me. Do you understand what I'm saying?'

  Dorflinger said nothing.

  Tobiasson-Svartman knew that he had understood. But he did not yet dare believe that it was true.

  CHAPTER 97

  During the night he slept next to the fire.

  The deserter had hidden himself inside his overcoat, halfway under the bunk where Sara Fredrika was curled up with furs pulled over her head.

  Tobiasson-Svartman slept deeply, then woke up with a start. He thought he could hear breathing that he recognised, his father's.

  The dead, he thought. They're getting closer and closer. My father is also here, somewhere in this cottage. He is watching me without my being able to see him.

  His watch told him that it would soon be dawn. He got up gingerly and went outside.

  It was cold. He followed the path down to the inlet.

  When dawn broke he discovered a seabird frozen into the ice. Its wings were spread, as if it had frozen to death just as it was about to take off.

  He observed it for some considerable time, then walked on to the ice and broke its outstretched wings, bending them back against its body. Now the bird was resting, its attempt to escape was over.

  He continued, following the route he used to row and approached the spot where the Blenda had been anchored. Thick cloud drifted in from the east. He had measured the precise distance to the ship and stood on the ice in the exact same place where the rope ladder had hung down. The clouds were dark, and it started snowing. He contemplated Halsskär. The grey rocks, interspersed by patches of white, looked like a shabby overcoat spread out in a field.