Harbor

by John Ajvide Lindqvist

  ‘So I was thinking that maybe if you could go, that would reduce the risk significantly. And they don’t know this boat.’

  Anna-Greta weighed up the pros and cons. It wasn’t the risk of getting caught that bothered her as much as the purely moral step involved in moving over to criminal activity. On the other hand, there were already people who looked at her sideways because of her father. She might as well fulfil their expectations.

  ‘How much would I get?’ she asked.

  Her father glanced at her protruding stomach and made an expansive gesture.

  ‘Let’s say half of the profit. Seeing as it’s you.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Two thousand, more or less.’

  ‘Done.’

  The whole thing went without a hitch. Although the glory days of smuggling liquor were long gone, there was still the matter of rationing and housekeeping, and a thousand litres of Russian vodka could always find throats to slip down.

  The transportation was taken care of in the old way. The cases were loaded into a torpedo that was towed behind the boat. If customs turned up, you simply cut the rope and the cargo sank, taking with it a little floating buoy and a bag of salt heavy enough to keep the buoy submerged. After a few days the salt would dissolve and the buoy rose to the surface. Then all you had to do was salvage the cargo.

  Anna-Greta sat in the stern with the rudder in her hand, waving goodbye to the Russian captain. She turned her gaze to the prow, where her father was crouching, then lifted her eyes to the horizon. The child kicked in her stomach and a feeling of dizziness came over her. It felt a bit like fear, but when she thought about it she realised what it was: freedom.

  She gazed out at the archipelago far away in the distance, where the soldiers were keeping watch in their defence posts and people were getting on with this and that in their cottages. All those people, sitting still and keeping watch over what was theirs. She tightened her grip on the rudder and lifted her face to the wind.

  I am free. I can do anything.

  The child was born in the middle of April, a healthy boy she named Johan. In the summer, Anna-Greta invested a thousand kronor of the money she had earned in a fishing boat of her own.

  Ulla Billqvist was on the radio singing about the boys in blue, but the truth was the boys in blue were bored to death on their islands. The Russians hadn’t so much as dipped a finger in Swedish territorial waters, and Sweden’s defenders were sitting in their barracks playing cards, glowering at the gulls and being as bored as it is humanly possible to be.

  Anna-Greta had spoken to quite a lot of people, and had identified a need. During the winter it had been warmth that was lacking, during the summer it was some kind of diversion. Anna-Greta set to work.

  By various methods, some of them entirely legal, some slightly more shady, she bought herself a stock of things that can ease loneliness and dispel melancholy. Sweets, snuff, tobacco, magazines and easily digestible thrillers, along with a range of games and puzzles. She didn’t dare take any alcohol, but she let the soldiers know that if they needed anything along those lines when they were on leave, it could be arranged.

  Then she travelled around between the islands on regular days, selling her wares. Business was good. Anna-Greta was not vain, but she was aware of the effect she had on the men. Some of them probably bought from her just so that they could spend a short while in her company, having a bit of a joke and perhaps brushing against her hand by mistake.

  She knew that, and to a certain extent she exploited it. But she declined all advances before they had even been formulated properly. She had her man, and his name was Johan. When she was out on her business trips he was with his grandparents, an arrangement that suited them all very well.

  During the winter she went back to her knitting, and the following summer she was back out in her boat once again.

  Anyway. What about those bottles of schnapps?

  That didn’t happen until after the war, and it was connected to Folke. He wouldn’t give up. She sometimes bumped into him on her trips around the islands; he had been promoted to the rank of captain, and she always took the time to chat for a while, but never did anything to raise his hopes.

  After the war, Folke left the army and went to work for the customs service. Within a couple of years he was the captain of one of the customs cruisers.

  Presumably with the aim of impressing Anna-Greta, he moored the cruiser at her jetty one day and strode up to her house in full uniform: epaulettes, peaked cap, the lot. He asked if she would like to accompany him on a little trip, he had to carry out an official check.

  Anna-Greta’s father was visiting on that particular day, and there was an exchange of casual remarks with a caustic undertone between him and Folke. However, by that stage her father had given up his activities, and there was no real antagonism. Her father said he would be happy to look after Johan if Anna-Greta wanted to go out on a pleasure cruise with the enemy.

  The cruiser raced out to the three-mile limit. Like most men, Folke was under the mistaken impression that travelling at a high speed can make a woman’s heart melt, and he pushed the cruiser to the limit, standing there on the bridge and pretending to be unmoved. Anna-Greta thought it was quite entertaining to travel so fast, but nothing more.

  The cargo boat just outside the limit was boarded with the usual polite exchanges. Anna-Greta thought it all looked somehow familiar. Everything became clear when the captain appeared. It was the same Russian captain who had sold vodka to her and her father several years earlier. He recognised her, too, but gave nothing away.

  Anna-Greta had a little money with her, and when Folke and his men went below to check the interior of the boat, she whispered to the captain, ‘Four cases.’

  The captain looked at her with a mixture of terror and delight. ‘But where?’

  Anna-Greta pointed. Right at the back of the customs cruiser hung a covered lifeboat. ‘There. Underneath the tarp.’

  The captain took the money and gave the order to his crew. Then he went below to make sure Folke and the others stayed there until the goods had been stowed.

  They found what they expected to find in the hold, but there wasn’t much they could do about it as the boat was in international waters. They just wanted to check the amounts, and to see if there was any need for special vigilance.

  Anna-Greta had never seen the Russian captain smile, but he was certainly smiling as he waved goodbye to Anna-Greta and the customs boat. In fact, he was grinning from ear to ear.

  ‘He seems like quite a good bloke, in spite of everything,’ said Folke.

  ‘He does,’ replied Anna-Greta.

  When the cruiser hove to at Anna-Greta’s jetty, she asked if she could perhaps invite the crew to her house for coffee and cake just to say thank you for the trip. They accepted with pleasure, and the men trooped up to the Shack.

  While they were playing with Johan, Anna-Greta took her father to one side and said there were a couple of things that needed to be collected from the lifeboat. Perhaps he could put them in the boathouse for the time being. Her father’s jaw dropped and a fire ignited in his eyes. He said nothing, he merely nodded and went out.

  And then, of course, Anna-Greta was having some problems with the leaky woodshed at the front of the house. As her father disappeared around the corner, she took Folke and the others to the woodshed and listened to their advice on how she could reinforce the construction or how she might go about building a new one.

  After ten minutes her father was back, at which point she thanked the men for all their help and invited them to enjoy the promised coffee.

  When the cruiser was on its way and their visitors had been properly waved off, her father turned to Anna-Greta as she stood there holding Johan by the hand, and said, ‘This is the best bloody thing ever.’

  ‘Not one word.’

  ‘No, no.’

  Within a month the whole archipelago knew the story of how Anna-Greta had smuggled s
chnapps on the customs boat. Her father had probably tried to keep his mouth shut, but it just couldn’t be done; he was far too proud of his daughter and of the great story in which he had played his small part.

  Eventually the story must have reached Folke’s ears as well, since he never came to call on Anna-Greta again. She told her father off for blabbing and thus destroying Folke’s reputation, but what was done was done. Anna-Greta had never been one for regrets.

  Anyway, the schnapps was decanted into bottles and one of them eventually ended up in Evert Karlsson’s cupboard, where it stands to this day.

  The magician

  Life could have been perfect for Simon at the beginning of the 1950s. He was in his early thirties, the time when we reap, if we are lucky, what we have sown during our youth. And he was reaping a rich harvest. Success after success.

  For a few years he and his wife Marita—under the name El Simon & Simonita—had been among the most popular artists playing the summer shows in the big parks. For the last couple of summers they had even had to turn down some engagements to avoid double-bookings.

  This spring, Simon had found out that they could look forward to the most desirable booking of all for the autumn: the variety show at Stockholm’s Chinese Theatre, for two weeks in October. This would in turn give them the opportunity to ask for higher fees in the parks. Having performed at the Chinese Theatre was a mark of honour in the profession.

  Their program wasn’t actually anything special: a little mind-reading, some sleight of hand involving cards, a few tricks with cloths. An unusually quick substitution trunk, plus a version of sawing the lady in half, with the twist that Marita was divided into three sections rather than just two. An escapology feature. Nothing special.

  But they did have a particular style on stage. Simon’s measured, concentrated movements and patter set against Marita’s light, whirling steps created a kind of dance that it was difficult to take your eyes off. In addition, Simon was elegant and Marita—well, Marita had glamour.

  A weekly magazine had done an at-home-with feature on the couple, and the photographer had found it very difficult to stop taking pictures of Marita—posed beside the armchair, next to the gramophone; holding a lid and gazing ecstatically down into the saucepan.

  And so everything should have been wonderful, but it wasn’t. Simon was frankly unhappy and, as so often happens the same thing lay at the root of both his success and his unhappiness: Marita.

  Simon had a tendency to brood. This could be very useful when it came to getting to the bottom of something, for example dissecting a conjuring trick so that he could work out how to improve it. Among other things, he was the first to saw the lady in half using a chainsaw. Most illusionists made a big thing of spinning the separated sections around on the stage. Simon had thought it through, and come to the conclusion that it wasn’t the separate parts that were interesting, but the separation itself.

  The huge handsaw that was normally used looked like a stage prop. But the raw physicality of a chainsaw, set against his own elegant appearance and Marita’s feather-light frailty—that might possibly achieve the desired effect.

  And indeed it was. At one performance a couple of people fainted when Simon started up the big chainsaw. Fortunately there was a reporter in the audience, and it proved to be excellent publicity. This was the result of Simon’s brooding on the question of sawing the lady in half.

  Marita was cut from a different cloth. When Simon met her in the mid-1940s, she had been a bright, energetic woman with ambitions to be a dancer, and she moved through the nightclubs of Stockholm like a wisp of smoke.

  It was not until a year or so after they joined forces that Simon discovered her secret box. A shoebox containing some twenty Benzedrine inhalers. Simon assumed she was using it as an aid to slimming, and didn’t mention the matter.

  But he became vigilant, and soon he could see what she was doing. They might be having a drink, spirits or wine, and he would notice her fiddling with something in her handbag. Eventually one night he grabbed her hand, pulled it out of her bag and found…a strip of paper. He didn’t understand.

  By this stage Marita was quite drunk. She began to sneer at him in front of their companions at the table. How blind and stupid he was, and above all how boring. As Marita staggered off in the direction of the ladies’ toilets, someone explained it to Simon: his wife was a drug user.

  The strip of paper was what you found if you broke open an inhaler. It was impregnated with Benzedrine, a kind of amphetamine. All you had to do was roll up the strip of paper and swallow it: suddenly you had a spring in your step.

  Simon left before Marita came back from the toilet. He went straight home and threw her destructive metal tubes down the rubbish chute. Marita went crazy when she found out what he’d done, but soon calmed down. Far too soon. Simon suspected she was confident she could replace the stash he had thrown away.

  It took a few weeks for him to track down her supplier, a former boyfriend who had been a quartermaster in the army. He had stolen from the stores a huge quantity of inhalers meant to keep fatigue at bay during long watches. He had initiated Marita in the use of the drug and its effect on the central nervous system, and had carried on supplying her after their love affair ended.

  Simon issued what threats he could muster. The police, a beating, public humiliation. He didn’t know if it would have any effect, but he did his best.

  The effect was that Marita’s underhand ways took more dramatic forms. She could disappear for days on end, and refuse to say where she had been. She made it clear to Simon that he could sit and rot in their apartment if he wanted to, but she had a life to live.

  She never missed a performance, though. Her disappearances always coincided with a gap between engagements. When it was time for her entrance she was there, sparkling as she always had, tripping lightly on to the stage. It was partly for this reason that Simon tried to keep their calendar as full as possible.

  But he wasn’t happy.

  He needed Marita. She was his partner and the other half of his act—without her he would probably be no more than a competent conjuror. And she was his wife. He still loved her, in some ways. But he wasn’t happy.

  And so in the spring of 1953 Simon was at the peak of his career, leafing through their booking schedule with a feeling of unease in the pit of his stomach. The engagement at the Chinese Theatre lay ahead, and the summer was looking good. But the way things had turned out, there were three completely blank weeks in July. June and August were more or less full, but those weeks in July were bothering him. He could see himself sitting there in the summer heat in Stockholm with a great lump of fear in his chest, while Marita was out enjoying herself God knows where or how. He didn’t want that. He definitely didn’t want that.

  However, there was one possibility. Perhaps it was finally time to take action? He picked up the daily newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, and turned to the ads for accommodation. Under the heading ‘Summer Cottages’ he read:

  ‘Well-maintained house on the island of Domarö in southern Roslagen. Sea frontage with own jetty. Hire boat available. 80 square metres. Large garden. Rented on an annual basis. Contact: Anna-Greta Ivarsson.’

  Domarö.

  Hopefully it really was an island, without a direct link to the mainland. If he could get Marita away from the destructive influence of Stockholm, then perhaps things would work out. And it wouldn’t do any harm to have a place to get away to when life was moving too fast.

  He made the call.

  The woman who answered explained politely that no one else had expressed an interest, so all he had to do was come out and take a look. The rent was one thousand kronor per year, and that was nonnegotiable. Would he like her to tell him how to get there?

  ‘Yes please,’ said Simon. ‘But there was one other thing I was wondering about. Is it an island?’

  ‘You’re asking me if it’s an island?’

  ‘Yes, is there…is there water all aro
und it?’

  There was silence on the other end of the line for a few seconds. Then the woman cleared her throat and said, ‘Yes, it is an island. With water all around it. Rather a lot of water, in fact.’

  Simon closed his eyes as if he were in pain. ‘I was just wondering.’

  ‘Oh, we’ve just got a telephone link to the mainland, if that’s what you were thinking?’

  ‘No, it was just…so how do people get there?’

  ‘There’s a tender. From Nåten, which is on a bus route. Would you like more details?’

  ‘Yes…please.’

  Simon made a note of the numbers of buses to and from Norrtälje, and said that he would ring in advance and come over one day. When he hung up he was sweating profusely. He had made himself sound ridiculous and felt very uncomfortable. Her voice alone had been enough to make him realise he didn’t want to look ridiculous in front of this woman. Anna-Greta.

  Marita made no comment on his plans for the summer, but he had to go out and take a look at the place by himself. One day at the end of April, Simon followed Anna-Greta’s instructions, and after two and a half hours travelling by bus and by boat, he was standing by the waiting room on the steamboat jetty on Domarö.

  The woman who came to meet him was wearing a knitted hat, with two long, dark brown plaits emerging from underneath it. Her hand was small, her handshake firm.

  ‘Welcome,’ she said.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Good journey?’

  ‘Fine, thank you.’

  Anna-Greta waved in the direction of the sea.

  ‘There’s…rather a lot of water here, as you can see.’

  As Simon followed Anna-Greta up from the harbour, he tried to imagine it: that this would be the place. That this was the first of countless times he would walk up this path, see the things he could see now: the jetties, the boathouses, the gravel track, the diesel tank, the alarm bell. The smell of the sea and the particular quality of light in the sky.