'We can't stay in the water like this. It's too cold.'
She started to hit his face again.
'Can't you hear what I'm saying? My daughter is dead.'
'She was my daughter as well.'
'She wasn't your daughter. You were never there, you reacted to her by telling lies to get away from her and from me and from yourself and from everything I've ever believed in.'
She could not find any more words. She stood in the water screaming in despair.
He could picture the shelves with the china figurines slowly falling down one after another, each one smashing to smithereens.
CHAPTER 187
He led her carefully out of the water.
He was appalled by her bitterness, but shaken most of all by the boundless sorrow he had caused her. For the first time he felt utterly defenceless when facing her. This time he would not be able to wriggle off the hook. And Sara Fredrika would not be able to rescue him. Her presence would only compound the catastrophe.
'Do you remember our holiday in Oslo?' she asked. 'That day when we went to Bygdøy, the beach, the young boys bathing naked in the water, a bunch of balloons climbing up into the sky?'
He remembered, but decided to deny it.
'Of course you remember. Above all you must remember the cross we drew in the sand, and said that the most important thing in our lives would always be telling the truth. Good Lord, I believed it, I really did believe that I had met a man who was as good as his word.'
A quick gust of cold wind made them shiver.
'Who are you?' she said. 'I try to understand, but I can't. I simply can't pin you down, my image of you cracks and breaks up, you become an incomprehensible creature that seems to thrive on deceiving others.'
'I can explain,' he said.
Her response came with no hesitation at all.
'If there is one thing you can never do it is to explain. I have followed in your footsteps and it has been like climbing down into a well where the stench at the bottom gets more and more putrid. I have realised that I am married to a man who doesn't exist, a shadow with a circulatory system and a brain that is nothing more than an invention, a figment of the imagination. It is intolerable to think that my child had a figment of the imagination for a father. Can you make me understand? You are driving me mad.'
'I have to know how you found me.'
'I come here and tell you that Laura is dead. You don't react, you say you feel sorrow, but all you ask about is how I found you.'
'You can think whatever you like. But I mourn the death of my child.'
'You ought to mourn the fact that you are who you are. It was my father who helped me. When Laura died he contacted Naval Headquarters and told them what had happened. He forced his way through all the barriers, I can hear his voice inside my head: A baby has died, my granddaughter. Her father is on a secret mission, but of course he has to be told about the tragedy that has befallen him. There was silence. My father said that everybody seemed to be astonished. Jaws dropped on the faces of the entire Swedish high command. In the end a vice admiral informed my father that you no longer held a commission in the Swedish Navy. Then they became secretive, they couldn't go into details about why, they could only say that you were no longer enlisted. My father insisted that I personally should be given an explanation. The following day I went with him to Skeppsholmen. The vice admiral was there, and several other people, I can't remember who they were. They expressed their condolences. But when I asked them for an address so that I could send you a letter, they said that they didn't have one. My father was with me, he was standing behind my chair and put his hand on my shoulder when he heard that you were no longer in the navy. There was no mission, they knew as little about where you were as my father and I did. How do you think that felt? First I lost my baby, then I found out that I was married to a man who didn't exist. How do you think that felt?'
He said nothing. He was searching feverishly for a way of escape. It must have been Welander, he thought. There's no other possibility. Perhaps he suspected that I would head for here.
'I went home, and my father came with me. I was numb, but I was kept going by his fury. Especially after I gathered that he suspected it was you who had tried to kill him.'
'That's not true.'
'I would put nothing past you, Lars.'
She used his first name. It felt as if she were using it to hit him.
I can hit back, he thought. That is the ultimate escape route. I can kill her.
He asked a question to give himself a breathing space.
'Whose is the boat?'
'Does it matter? It belongs to one of my father's friends.'
'I didn't know you could sail.'
'I learned when I was a child. When I realised where you might be hiding I decided to get a boat and come here. My father protested, but I paid no attention to him.'
'Was it Welander who told you where you could find me?'
'He came a few days after I'd been to Skeppsholmen. I didn't want to let him in at first, but he said he'd heard rumours about your disappearance, and that you had lied to the admirals about him. He also said he knew where you might be, that you used to row to a skerry when you were working together.
'I didn't want to know at first, I never wanted to see you again. The first night after I realised what kind of a man you were I gathered together all your clothes, your overcoats, uniforms, shoes, and piled them up on the floor. The next day Anna fetched a rag-and-bone man who took the lot. I didn't even accept any money. I wanted you to cease to exist.
'But my father talked me round. He said that you shouldn't be allowed to die in sin. He contacted Welander, who came round again a few days later. He had been talking to a police superintendent or maybe it was a parish constable from round here who said he thought you were on a skerry at the far edge of the archipelago.
'I sailed into the archipelago then turned south. Somewhere round about Landsort I was becalmed, I had plenty of time to think. And I still ask myself: Why did you marry me if your only intention was to hurt me, to lie to me? Why do you hate me?'
He gave a start. A shadow had moved on a high rocky ledge, but it wasn't Sara Fredrika. It was a bird, a crow that soared up and flew off northwards over the island. There wasn't much time. He needed to drive her along in front of himself instead of cowering in the face of her accusations.
'The fact that I was dismissed from the navy is due entirely to a misunderstanding, which was due in turn to the fact that I was disgracefully slandered by Welander. I tried to protect him when he hit the bottle. Everything else is a pack of lies. He is getting his revenge for having shown me his weakness, because I saw his humiliation. He was lying on deck in a pool of vomit and had to be carried away. I couldn't tell you that I had been dismissed, that was too shameful, too much of a disgrace. I came here to think out a way of telling you about it. Not everything I have told you has been entirely correct, but there has always been a kernel of truth.'
And what would that be?'
'My love for you. I came here in solitude to punish myself for not being able to tell you exactly how things were. I needed time, time to think, time to summon up courage.'
'But the letters? The inventions, the fantasies?'
"The same thing: shame, disgrace.'
'How can I possibly believe you?'
'Look me in the eye.'
She did as he asked. He could feel that he was starting to regain control, was able to regulate the distances.
'What do you see?'
'A person I don't know.'
'You know me. We have been married for nearly ten years. We have been intimate.'
'If I come too close to you I'm frightened of getting burned. You give off a corrosive acid, all those untrue –'
She broke off without completing the sentence.
'What I understand least of all is why you tried to kill my father.'
He felt an overwhelming urge to tell her the truth, that
it was all those accursed Christmas dinners, his father-in-law's contempt for the naval commander who had married his daughter. But there was no place for the truth yet.
'It wasn't me who attacked your father. I would never turn to violence.'
'You hit me, not long ago.'
'That was only because I had to stop you screaming.'
'Can't you tell the truth for once? Can't you try? Your lies are wrapping themselves round my legs like heavy weights.'
'I have told you the truth. I hid myself away here in order to think things over.'
Fear was being batted back and forth between them, like the ebb and flow of never-ending waves. Occasionally he would glance up at the path. He knew his time was limited, and that sooner or later Sara Fredrika would wonder where he had got to.
'I want you to go back home,' he said. 'I've been ordered to terminate my mission.'
'But you haven't got a mission. I heard the admiral say so himself: you are no longer a member of the Swedish Navy, you have no unfinished missions. I heard that with my own ears. Are you incapable of telling the truth?'
'You must understand that secrecy doesn't only apply to me. He wasn't able to say that I am still working on a task.'
'What are you doing on this skerry? I've been sailing all round these grey, barren islands, I've hardly set eyes on a single soul, here by the open sea everything is dead.'
'I'll tell you, even though I shouldn't. I have a wireless transmitter here, one of the inspired inventions of the engineer Marconi and Admiral Henry Jackson, for communications between ships and land, or from one ship's captain to another. We are conducting top-secret tests of a Swedish system, a variation of the ones the warring parties are using.'
'I don't know what you're talking about.'
'Invisible waves that travel through the air, that can be captured and interpreted. A secret language that will transform all aspects of war as it has been known until now. Every day at certain times I have to be stationed by the wireless in order to receive and transmit.'
She considered what he had said.
'Perhaps that is true,' she said. 'Show me round this island that you have made your home, show me these invisible waves that are dancing around in the air here. Show me something that is true. Show me where you live, in a cave or a hut.'
'You are right,' he said. 'One hut to live in, and another for my measuring equipment. I'll show you.'
He racked his brains for a way out of this desperate situation. It was becoming clearer to him where he really belonged. It was on Halsskär with Sara Fredrika and Laura, that was where he was at home. For the first time in his life there was something he did not want to lose. He was a stranger to Kristina Tacker and her china figurines, in the cold and warm rooms in Stockholm. All the years he had lived with her had ceased to exist. That was the biggest lie, he thought, I could never understand or control that. We had nothing in common, we just came together in a fantasy of love.
But not even that is true, he thought. I can only speak for myself. She must have felt something different. She has come here, not merely to expose a lie, but also to understand how she could have given me so much love.
She aimed her light at a cold cliff face. It never became warm. I tried to tame her all the years we lived together.
I failed. She stayed wild. The china figurines deceived me. She had more sides to her than I had ever suspected. Hidden behind her calm, almost apathetic exterior was something else.
He recalled the Christmas market when she had intervened to stop a man hitting his child. He had not drawn the right conclusions from that. He ought to have realised even then that she was in fact a stronger individual than he was.
CHAPTER 188
It was starting to get dark. They were freezing cold. He heard footsteps on the path. Sara Fredrika emerged from the hawthorn bushes.
He wondered if she'd been waiting there, just as he used to hover out of sight.
Sara Fredrika gave a start and stopped dead.
'Who's she?'
He did not answer. His first reaction was to head for the water. He could hijack the sailing boat and then vanish, straight out to sea, or to the south, to one of the German ports around Kiel, where he could seek asylum.
Sara Fredrika was approaching now, and asked again who the woman at his side was.
'I don't know,' he said.
'Don't know?' Kristina Tacker said. 'Don't you even know who I am any more? Who's she? What do you get up to here? Do you ever say anything that's true?'
Sara Fredrika took hold of him.
'Who is she?'
He could not answer. He was trapped. He did not have his sounding lead with him.
Both women showered him with questions, who was this woman who had come from the sea, who was this woman clinging on to his arm? He said nothing, the trap had been sprung, it would soon be over and he had no idea how it would end.
Sara Fredrika and Kristina Tacker did all the talking. But he was the one they were staring at, as Kristina Tacker grew more and more outraged and Sara Fredrika more and more desperate. The cat appeared from out of nowhere, it seemed to sense that a trial of strength was taking place and was waiting to witness the outcome. He tried once again to find a way out, to identify a weakness in what he was faced with. But all he could feel was weariness and an urge to give up.
Somewhere in the rocks round about him was his father's face, his eyes would soon be liberated.
The stone hands were hovering over his head.
In the end, he told the truth: that was the only possibility left.
'Her name's Kristina. She's my wife. I'm married to her.'
'But you said your wife was dead? And your child?'
Kristina Tacker took a pace forward.
'He said that I was dead?'
'Who are you?'
'I am his wife.'
'But that's impossible. His wife fell over a cliff. And the child was dragged down as well.'
'Well, he lied to you, whoever you are! I'm alive and I am married to him.'
Kristina Tacker screamed and set off running along the path. She disappeared from view, but her screams bounced back and forth off the rocks.
'Who is she?' asked Sara Fredrika again.
'She's telling the truth. I am married to her, I have not yet concluded the divorce proceedings.'
'But you said she'd fallen over a cliff, and your daughter as well?'
'That was my first wife. I haven't told you everything about my life. I work on top-secret missions, and it's infectious, I end up by being top secret even to myself.'
She backed away from him, he could see that she was frightened.
'What's she doing here?'
'I don't know. She came here in the sailing dinghy.'
Kristina Tacker came back. He tried to embrace her and calm her down, but she avoided his grasp.
'I don't want you to touch me, never again.'
She turned her back on him and started talking to Sara Fredrika. 'Who are you?'
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