It’s an infinitely long time before they come back. And so that it won’t get too stuffy in the room, Bengt has opened the window. He is lying very close to the brown wooden ceiling and listening to their voices from the inlet. His underwear was wet with sweat and he couldn’t find his pajamas, so he’s naked underneath the blanket. Lying there, he suddenly gives a start. Something strange has happened to their voices. They have changed all of a sudden: one is much deeper than before; the other is much lighter. Then he notices that the voices are coming from behind the closed sliding door. Hearing it makes him so blistering hot that he flings the blanket off. After he has cooled off again, he hears a loud splash from the inlet and after a short moment of silence, he hears another splash. Then he climbs down from his bunk and leans out the window. Nothing is visible in the inlet. But there are two piles of clothes in the sand, one that is dazzlingly white and one so dark that he can hardly see it. Soon, he can see their two heads, like two dark balls bobbing up and down in the water. But before the swimmers wade back to shore, he slowly pulls the curtain from his fiancée’s bed. It occurs to him that he never said good night to her. When he came back from the beach, she had drawn the curtain that separated the hallway from their alcove as well as the curtain to her bed. Now he is leaning soundlessly over her. She’s breathing like she’s sleeping. But her eyes are open.
Are you cold? he asks. Is that why you have your coat over you? No, she whispers.
But she doesn’t touch him, even though she sees he is naked. Her hands are on her chest and clasped like a sick old woman.
Are you ill? he whispers.
She turns her head to the wall and closes her eyes. Playfully, he pulls some hairpins from her hair and covers her face with five locks of her own black hair.
No, she whispers. Just afraid.
Now he’s afraid, too.
Of what? he asks while listening for sounds outside.
So afraid of being alone, she whispers, wiping her hair away from her face. And afraid of your dad.
Now they are coming. He hears their soft pattering up the steps. He quickly hides himself behind the curtain of the fiancée’s bunk. Then, when the father and Gun are inside the other room, they close the sliding door again. He can’t hear them anymore.
Don’t be afraid, he whispers sharply, I will . . .
But she never gets to find out what he would do. He leaves her all alone, and he closes the window. Then he goes out to the hallway, where he burns his feet on their wet footprints. He slowly opens the sliding door again and peeks through the small opening. No one’s in the other room and the curtain to their alcove is drawn. Then he creeps back to his alcove and climbs into his bed. But he leaves the sliding door slightly ajar, so that the room won’t get too stuffy.
Beneath him, he hears his fiancée tossing and turning now and then, not for long stretches of time, but often. Then the walls of the wooden cottage start to creak. Otherwise, the cottage is completely silent. Beyond the silence, the sea murmurs impatiently, like the audience at a theater. But it isn’t the noise that keeps him from sleeping—it’s the silence. Or, more precisely, what he can’t hear. And for a long time he waits for sounds that never come. He waits, for instance, to hear the clinking of glasses. He does hear it in the end, but only because he wanted to so badly. At almost the same time, he hears the father snoring. Now he can roll over to the wall. Now he’s able to fall asleep, almost instantly.
In the morning, he is the first one to wake up. He forgot to close the shutter, so it’s very bright very early in the alcove. Behind the curtain, the fiancée is sleeping on her back. Her coat has slipped off, so he spreads it over her again. At his touch, she gives a start as though she were being punched and flings her hand over her face to protect herself. This upsets him, and he quickly leaves her. He opens the window and quietly climbs out. The rock is still cold underneath the coolness of the shade. He walks around the cottage just to see what it looks like in daylight. All but one of the green shutters are open. He stops in front of the closed shutter and lights a cigarette. He uses three matches for a single one. When he finishes it, no one has woken up yet. But he has a bad taste in his mouth.
Then he goes down to the shore, whistling quietly and carrying a flat stone in his right hand. Except for the inlet, the island is a single cliff, bordered by deadly, steep edges. He walks around the slippery edge and gazes absentmindedly into the naked sea. Faint smoke from invisible boats drifts against the horizon. Silent gulls are poised between the sun and the sea. Three sailboats have anchored by the low island. A quiet blue motorboat sweeps past the one on the right, its noise scarcely reaching him. A narrow, deep cleft runs through their own island, and the water can only surge through it when it’s really windy. It must not have been very windy for quite a while. The cleft is entirely arid and filled with dried-up seaweed and round little rocks. He tosses his flat stone away and meticulously selects a new one, one perfectly round and entirely shiny. For fun, it seems, someone has built a little smooth arch out of brown-painted wood over the cleft. And for fun, he walks over it. This side of the island is utterly barren; the rocks are as smooth as a person’s back. In the middle is a large, level depression where someone has laid soil and sowed grass and flowers. Now the flowers are wild and the grass is sparse. Despite this, he lies here on his back fiddling with the rock and looks up at the clear Sunday morning sky. After resting a while, he feels like a swim. Still lying there, he chucks the stone diagonally and hears it hit the bridge. He undresses and hides his clothes in the crevice, putting rocks over them. Since he still doesn’t remember where he left his swimming trunks, he doesn’t go back to the cottage to get them but instead goes out to the sea naked. He thought about diving from the cliff and straight into the green bottom, but since he is never brave when he’s on his own, he goes to the inlet in-stead—slowly. Partly because it’s cold and partly because he has the absurd feeling he has lost something.
Finally, he finds it. At the bottom where he is wading, he thinks he sees some dark shadows between his own steps. Suddenly, he realizes the shadows are footprints. This discovery makes him curiously anxious. He is no longer cold, and he follows the shadows farther and farther out, blocking the sun with his hands to see them better. There are two rows; first, far apart from each other, then, parallel and close, but where the bottom descended abruptly and steeply, they merge into a single large shadow. He treads into it with his foot, digging into it with his toes, deeper and deeper until it becomes a pit. He stands in it and cautiously looks around as if he were doing something dangerous. The water in the hole is warm. To avoid thinking about why he’s still there, he begins studying the coastline. It’s a few inches high and strikingly blue. He thinks he can see white spots amid all the blue—a bridge, a white house. He sees a black church tower, too. It protrudes from the edging like the point of a knife.
Then a shutter slams from the back of the cottage. His feet jerk from the pit. Fleeing almost in a panic, he thrusts himself into the deep part of the water. He swims with short, nervous strokes as he always does when no one is watching. When he hears someone coming down the stairs, he is already out in the inlet. Freezing, he creeps back to shore and hides behind some sparse bushes. Between the branches, he sees Gun standing on the steps. She is alone and wearing a red bathing suit. He hopes that she’ll wait until the commotion in the water has managed to subside. She walks slowly down to the shore and stands for a while with her hands on her hips, playing in the sand with her toes. Then she goes quietly, almost soundlessly, out into the water. He suddenly recalls his mother so vividly that he freezes up. Alma didn’t swim often; she was rather afraid of the water. Whenever she went in it, she had the habit of frightening the water, splashing it with her fat legs and screaming at it. She always embarrassed them at beaches, that is, when other people were there.