But there was no mystical connection. They separated, and no longer had anything to do with one another. If their affinity had been real, it would not have been so easy to break. They would have soldiered on and understood each other completely, all the way through the hell in which they found themselves.
Anders raised his bottle and made a circular movement with his hand, encompassing the room and the house, and said out loud, ‘But I do understand you.’
Or did he?
He thought about all the times he had stood looking at Maja when she was a baby, sleeping in her cot. How amazed he had been at the rapid movements of her eyes beneath her eyelids when she was dreaming. How he had wished he could get inside her head, see what she could see, try to understand what it was that her young mind could possibly have to work through. What the world looked like to her, really.
No. We don’t understand.
After Maja’s disappearance he had carried her with him all the time. He had talked to her in his head, or out loud. As time passed, he had formed a clear picture of her. Since she was no longer alive, she couldn’t change, and he had carried her like a doll, a frozen image to turn to.
‘It’s not like that any more,’ he said out into the room. ‘Now I’m wondering what you’re doing. What it looks like where you are, what’s happening to you. I’m pretty scared, and I wish I could see you again. That’s what I wish most of all.’ Tears welled up in his eyes, spilled over and ran down on to Maja’s pillow. ‘Just to see you again. Hold you in my arms. That’s what I wish. That’s what I wish.’
Anders snuffled the snot back up his nose, wiped his eyes, dried his tears. He sat up on the edge of the bed and drew his shoulders together, cowering like an anxious child afraid of a telling-off. He spotted the heap of Bamse the Bear comics under the bed, and picked up the top one. Issue number 2, 1993. He had bought a whole pile at a flea market so that Maja would have something to read, or rather look at, when they were on Domarö.
The cover showed Bamse and his friends Little Leap the rabbit and Shellman the tortoise on a boat, on their way to an island shrouded in mist. As usual Little Leap looked terribly worried. Anders lay down on his back on Maja’s bed and started to read.
The story was about Captain Buster and some buried treasure, which turned out to be a trick. Anders carried on reading, smiling at the familiar dialogue he had read aloud to Maja so many times, in different interpretations:
‘Wait, Bamse! I’ve got some thunder honey.’
‘Puff…thank you, Little Leap…puff!’
‘Oh no! He’s dropped the pipe. Now they’re in trouble.’
Anders moved on to the next story, which was about the vanity of Jansson the cat. From time to time he had a drink from his bottle of wine. When he finished the comic and was looking at the back cover, a picture of two children wearing Bamse hats that you could buy for only fifty-eight kronor, he caught sight of himself.
He was lying in Maja’s bed with a Bamse comic in one hand and his bottle in the other. He laughed. Maja had stopped having milk and baby rice a long time ago, but at the age of six she still wanted her juice in a baby’s bottle so that she could lie there sucking at it while she was looking at her Bamse comics or listening to tapes.
He realised what he was doing. As long as Maja’s bed stood empty and her comics lay unread, there was an empty space where she had been. If he didn’t want to erase her and throw away her things, then something had to fill that empty space, and he was using himself. Living her memories and doing what she had done meant that she hadn’t disappeared. The things she had loved were still there.
‘And in any case, you still exist. Somewhere.’
His legs were heavy as he climbed off the bed. In the hallway he pulled on the fluffy Helly Hansen top that Maja had called his bearskin, and went out to the woodpile.
If he was going to spend the winter living in the Shack, he was going to need wood, lots of wood. The small inheritance he had received after his father’s death was almost gone, and he couldn’t afford to run the oil-fired central heating any more than was absolutely necessary.
A pile of logs Holger had delivered that last winter still lay there, waiting to be dealt with. Anders went and fetched the chainsaw from the toolshed, topped it up with petrol and oil for the chain, said a little prayer and yanked at the starter cord. The saw didn’t start, of course, nor had he expected it to.
When he had pulled the cord maybe thirty times, his right arm was beginning to feel numb and he was dripping with sweat. No sign of life from the saw. He got out his Phillips screwdriver and box spanner, unscrewed the spark plug and cleaned it. It could be something as simple as a rusty spark plug.
When he’d replaced the spark plug he lit a cigarette, took a swig of his wine and stared at the saw for a while; he patted it and tried to coax it along, persuade it that there was nothing wrong with the carburettor or some other part he couldn’t fix. That the problem had been with the spark plug, and that was all sorted now.
‘And I have to have wood, you see. If I’m going to stay here. If I haven’t got any wood I’ll have to move, and you’ll end up out there in the shed rusting away for another winter.’
He took another swig of wine, thought things over and realised that there was a hole in his argument. The saw would be out in the shed even if he did get some wood.
‘OK, how about this. If you start up now, you can spend the winter indoors in the warmth, just as you should have done in the past. My mistake. OK?’
With his heel he ground the cigarette stub into the carpet of old sawdust that covered the area.
I’m talking a lot. I’m talking to everything.
He picked up the saw, pulled out the choke, took a deep breath and yanked the cord. The motor coughed, one cylinder fired and Anders quickly pushed the choke back in, but the motor died. When he yanked again, it worked. The saw was obviously open to persuasion.
The chain was as good as new, and it was easy to slice the logs into manageable blocks. By the time the tank was empty, he had sawn up a good third of the logs.
His head was buzzing when he took off his ear protectors. During the half hour when he had stood bent over the logs with the saw, slicing and rolling, slicing and rolling, he had not thought about anything. No bad thoughts, no good thoughts, nothing. Just the roar of the saw and the tickling sensation of the sawdust spraying against his shins.
I could live like this.
He was sweaty and his mouth was dry, but instead of quenching his thirst with wine he went into the house and had a long drink of water. He felt better than he had for ages, he even felt as if he’d done something just a little bit worthwhile. It had been a long time since he felt like that.
Back outside he finished off the wine to celebrate, smoked a cigarette and fetched the axe. More than half the wood was fir, and it had been lying there drying for two years. He started on that. It was hard work, most of the blocks took several minutes to chop. In between he relaxed with a piece of birch or elm.
He had been working with the axe for about an hour, his arms were aching and he was just about ready to call it a day, when he felt it again. Someone was standing behind him, watching him. This time he wasn’t afraid. With the head of the axe he pushed away the piece of birch that was lying on the chopping block, tightened his grip on the handle of the axe and spun around.
‘Who are you?’ he yelled. ‘Come out! I know you’re there!’
The yellow foliage of the poplars rustled and he squinted up at the quivering leaves as if they were metal slats on an advertising hoarding. At any moment a message would appear, or a face become visible. But nothing came. Only the continued perception of a dark threat. Someone weighing him up and sharpening a knife.
Suddenly he heard a flapping sound and a dark ball flew past his head. Instinctively he raised the axe to protect himself, but the ball carried on past his head, and soon afterwards he heard a thud from inside the toolshed.
A bird. It was a b
ird.
He lowered the axe. The bird was banging about inside the shed, a panic-stricken rustle of feathers, the scrabbling of claws. It was a small bird, he could tell that from the sound. Anders waited. The feeling of being watched had gone.
The bird?
No, it wasn’t the bird that had been watching him. It was something bigger and darker. The bird had just happened to come along. Anders took a couple of steps towards the shed and peered in through the door. Even if it was a small creature, there is something about birds in enclosed spaces that encourages caution. The sudden, rapid movements, the beak and claws. They might be small, but they’re also sharp.
It wasn’t until he had summoned the courage to go right up to the open door that he spotted the bird. He was useless at identifying different species, it might have been a bullfinch. Or a great tit. It was sitting right at the back of the shed, on top of a plastic bottle on a shelf. It was clambering around like a circus artist, balancing on the bottle’s narrow stopper.
Anders took a step into the shed. The bird shifted uneasily, its claws rasping on the plastic. The black eyes were shining, and Anders couldn’t tell what it was looking at. He leaned closer and whispered, ‘Maja? Is that you, Maja?’
The bird didn’t react. Anders reached out his hand towards it. Slowly, a few centimetres at a time. When he was on the point of just brushing against the feathers, the bird jumped and flew out of the shed. Anders stood there with his hand outstretched, like someone who had tried to capture a mirage. He closed his fingers around the neck of the bottle instead.
He looked out of the door, but the bird had disappeared. For the lack of anything else to do, he examined the bottle in his hand. It was filled with a cloudy liquid that looked like neither fuel nor oil. He undid the stopper and a bitter odour came surging out. He had no idea what it could be. As he screwed the stopper back in he turned the bottle slightly and noticed a hand-written label.
He recognised the writing. The curly, unsteady letters belonged to his father. On a scrap of torn-off sticky tape he had written, ‘WORMWOOD’. The bottle contained some kind of wormwood concentrate, perhaps to get rid of insects. Or roe deer.
Anders shook his head. Wormwood was poisonous, and this bottle must have been standing here when Maja was running around the place playing.
Typical lousy parent.
As a belated penance Anders screwed the stopper in firmly and placed the bottle on the shelf above the workbench, where Maja wouldn’t be able to reach it. Then he went out and fetched the wheelbarrow. Before he could put the newly cut wood into the store, he would have to move the old, dry wood to the front.
Once again he found that the work gave him the peace of oblivion which he now realised was something worth striving for. After a good hour he had reorganised the wood store and was able to put the new wood inside. Twilight had begun to dim the brightness of the sky by the time he tipped the wheelbarrow up against the wall of the shed. He took off his gloves and rubbed his hands together as he contemplated the wood store, which was now looking much healthier.
A day’s work. A good day’s work.
He was famished after all his efforts, and cooked a meal consisting of a huge portion of macaroni with half a kilo of Falun sausage. When he had finished eating and smoked a cigarette, he sat for a long time looking out of the window. His whole body was aching, and he almost felt like a real person.
He considered taking a stroll over to Elin’s to see if she fancied sharing a little undiluted wine, or rather a lot of wine, but he decided against it, partly because she had been away for two days and probably wasn’t home, and partly because he didn’t think he would need any wine in order to get to sleep tonight. For the first time in ages.
Meeting
Simon had had enough.
The discovery of Sigrid’s body and what had followed had been the final straw. He could no longer close his eyes to what had been moving closer for fifty years. Enough was enough.
The story of his escape by the steamboat jetty had been polished over the years, bounced between him and Anna-Greta and worn smooth until it was now the jewel of a story they had told Anders only four days ago; he was merely the latest in a long line of listeners. A story of heroic deeds and awakening love.
Of course it was that kind of story as well, but something essential was missing. He had taken up that something with Anna-Greta, but she had refused to have anything to do with it, and it had been expunged from the official story. This bothered him.
But Simon remembered it very well. What had really happened.
It had been an unusually simple escape, to start with. Only chains had been used, and chains rarely posed a problem. While he was still standing in the sack he had got out of most of them, and had also picked the lock on the handcuffs.
When the push that sent him down into the water came at last, he had calculated that he would need a maximum of thirty seconds to free himself from the last of the chains and get out of the sack. Then all he had to do was swim over to the jetties and wait a minute or two, just for effect.
The sack hit the water and he sank. He had learned to close the airways in his nose so that he could even out the pressure without using his fingers. On his way down to the bottom he pressed twice, which made the eardrum push outwards in the right way and reduced the noise and the pain in his head. He closed his eyes to enable him to concentrate better as the cold water penetrated through the sack and began to make his limbs stiffen.
The greatest danger in spending a long time underwater was not the lack of oxygen. He had trained himself to be able to hold his breath for more than three minutes. No, the real danger was the cold. After only a minute the fingers would start to become incapable of precise movements. That was why he always tried to make sure the handcuffs were dealt with as quickly as possible.
This time that problem had already been resolved. When his body hit the bottom he had only a few simple twists left before he could rip open the sack with the sharpened picklock and swim towards his triumph.
It was then, just as he was easing the penultimate chain over his shoulder, that the water above him suddenly became heavier. Something laid itself on top of him. His first thought was that someone up on the jetty had thrown something into the water. Something large and heavy. He was being pushed down to the bottom, and had to make quite an effort to stop the air being forced out of his lungs.
He opened his eyes and saw only darkness. The cold that was working on his skin from the outside now had help from the cold fear on the inside. His heart began to beat faster, consuming the valuable oxygen he had left. He tried to understand what could possibly be lying on top of him, so that he would have a better chance of escaping from its grip. He couldn’t come up with anything. It had no shape, no seams. The first feeling he had had was the closest he got: the water had become heavy.
Panic threatened. His eyes had now grown accustomed to the faint light that penetrated through the sacking and six metres of water. When a few bubbles of air escaped from his lips, he could see them as blurred reflections.
I don’t want to die. Not like this.
With an enormous effort he managed to twist his body in the grip of the water so that the last chains fell off. He still had time. When he was training himself to hold his breath he had sometimes had Marita there to help, which had given him the courage to hang on as long as possible. He could tell when he was about to lose consciousness. He wasn’t there yet.
But he couldn’t escape from the weight. It was lying on top of him like a giant pestle, and the sack was a peppercorn in the bottom of the mortar.
He managed to rip open the sack with the picklock, and was rewarded with a glimmer of real daylight. He was lying on his back, pressed against the seabed, and way up above he could see the contours of the people on the jetty, the blue sky above them. Nobody had thrown anything, there was nothing on top of him. Except water. Six metres of impenetrable water.
The cold had now got a serious gr
ip on him, and a feeling of calm was beginning to spread through his body. A calm that resembled warmth. He relaxed and stopped fighting. He had at least a minute left before it was over. Why should he spend that minute struggling and fighting? He had freed himself from the chains, the handcuffs and the rope, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to free himself from the water. He had been defeated in the end.
Everything was beautiful.
Quiet and helpless, Simon lay there on the seabed. He lay there like the dead, and through the tear in the sacking he could see the sky and vague figures waiting for him. It was the angels calling him to them, and in a while he would be there. He was in darkness, but soon he would come into the light, and it was good.
He didn’t know how long he lay like that. It might have been one minute or two, perhaps ten seconds, when the water suddenly released its pressure. As lightly as a veil the weight was withdrawn, and he was free.
With a calm which he would later find difficult to comprehend, he merely thought something along the lines of: I see, we’re doing it this way, then. He got out of the sack and swam with even strokes over to the far jetty. Nothing grabbed at him, nothing wanted to get at him. There was no weight, only lightness. When he broke the surface of the water, hidden from view by the boats, he took a deep breath, and only then did everything go black. He grabbed at the rail of the nearest skiff and managed to stop himself from sinking. He breathed evenly and calmly, and the world began to come together once again.
From the steamboat jetty he could hear someone shouting, ‘Three minutes!’ and he couldn’t believe they were referring to him. He had been gone much longer than that.
Simon hung on to the rail and tried to regain his grasp of reality. When the voice on the jetty yelled, ‘Four minutes!’ he had come to his senses. He recognised the faint smell of tar from the skiff, the taste of salt and old fear in his mouth, the piercing cold in his muscles.
Harbor Page 19
