That’s the way it is. She is alive, but Lundmark is dead.
4
Shortly afterwards Halvorsen returns and asks her to follow him: Captain Svartman is waiting.
‘We’re going to sound the depth,’ says Halvorsen. ‘If our ropes and lines aren’t long enough, the captain will select another place.’
She finishes frying the four eggs she has in the pan, then accompanies him as bidden. She suddenly feels dizzy, and stumbles: but she doesn’t fall, she manages to keep control of herself.
Captain Svartman comes from a long and unbroken line of seafarers, she is aware of that. He’s an old man, turned sixty. The tip of the little finger on his left hand is missing: nobody knows if that is congenital, or the result of an accident.
On two occasions he has been on a sailing ship that sank. On one of those occasions he and all the crew were rescued, on the other only he and the ship’s dog survived. And when the dog reached dry land it lay down in the sand and died.
Hanna’s dead husband once said that in fact the real Captain Svartman also died, together with the ship’s dog. After that catastrophe, the captain stayed on land for many years. Nobody knows what he did. Rumour has it that for part of that time he worked as a navvy and was a member of the vanguard sent out by state-owned Swedish Railways to build the controversial Inlandsbana — a railway line linking the south of Sweden with the north of the country following an inland route rather than the existing coastal railway: the Swedish Parliament was still arguing about it.
Then he suddenly went to sea again, now as the captain of a steamship. He was one of the select few who didn’t abandon the seafaring life once sailing ships began to die out, but chose to be part of modern developments.
He has never told anybody about those years he spent away from the sea — what he did, what he thought, not even where he lived.
He seldom says anything beyond the necessary minimum; he has as little faith in people’s ability to listen as he has in the reliability of the sea. He has lavender-coloured flowers in pots in his cabin, which only he is allowed to water.
So he has always been an uncommunicative sea captain. And now he has to establish the depth at which one of his dead mates will be buried.
Captain Svartman bows as Hanna approaches him. Despite the heat he is dressed in his full uniform. Buttons fastened, shirt pressed.
Standing next to him is the bosun, Peltonen, a Finn. He is holding a plumb bob, attached to a long, thin line.
Captain Svartman nods, Peltonen throws the bob over the rail and allows it to sink. The line slides between his fingers. Nobody speaks. At one point there is a black thread tied round the line.
‘A hundred metres,’ says Peltonen.
His voice is shrill. His words bounce away over the swell.
After seven black threads, 700 metres, the line comes to an end. The plumb bob is still hanging down there in the water, it hasn’t yet reached the bottom. Peltonen ties a knot and attaches the line to a new roll. There too is a black thread marking every hundred metres.
At 1,935 metres, the line goes slack. The bob has reached the sea bottom. Hanna now knows the depth of her husband’s grave.
Peltonen starts to haul up the line, winding it round a specially carved wooden board. Captain Svartman takes off his uniform cap and wipes the sweat from his brow. Then he checks his watch. A quarter to seven.
‘Nine o’clock,’ he says to Hanna. ‘Before the heat becomes too oppressive.’
She goes to the cabin she has shared with her husband. His was the upper bunk. They often shared the lower one. Without her knowing about it, somebody has taken away his blanket.
The mattress is lying there uncovered. She sits down on the edge of her own bunk and contemplates the bulkhead on the other side of the cramped cabin. She knows that she must now force herself to think.
How did she come to end up here? On a ship, swaying gently on a distant ocean. After all, she was born in a place about as far away from the sea as it’s possible to get. There was a rowing boat on the River Ljungan, but that was all. She sometimes accompanied her father in it when he went fishing. But when she said she wanted to learn to swim — she was about seven or eight at the time — he told her he couldn’t allow it. It would be a waste of time. If she wanted to bathe, she could do that by the bank of the river. If she wanted to get over to the other side, there was a boat and also a bridge.
She lies down on her bunk and closes her eyes. She travels back in her memory as far as she can, back into her childhood where the shadows grow longer and longer.
Maybe that is where she can hide away until the moment comes when her dead husband disappears into the sea for good.
Leaves her. For ever.
5
Her childhood, deep down there. As if at the bottom of an abyss.
That was Hanna’s first memory: the cold, writhing and twisting away inside the cavities in the wooden walls, close to her face as she slept. She would wake up over and over again, and feel how thin the gap was between the newspapers pasted on to the walls — there was no money for wallpaper in the squalid house in which she grew up — and the cold that was constantly trying to gnaw its way through the wood.
Every spring her father worked his way over the house, as if it were a ship on a slipway, patching and mending wherever possible, before the onset of the next winter.
The cold was a sea, the house a ship, and the winter an endless waiting. He would keep on filling the holes and gaps until the frosts arrived in full force. Then it was not possible to do any more, they would have to make the best of it. The house was launched into the winter yet again, and if there were still any leaks allowing the cold to seep through, that was too bad: there was nothing else he could do.
Her father was Arthur Olaus Angus Renström, a lumberjack who worked for Iggesund and shared a log hoist with the Salomonsson brothers who lived further down the river. He worked all out in the forest for next to nothing. He was one of the many men of the woods who never knew if the money they earned for their efforts would be sufficient to live on.
Hanna remembered her father as strong, and with a friendly smile. But also at times melancholy, lost in thoughts she knew nothing about. She sometimes had the impression that he had trolls in his head when he sat at the kitchen table, seemingly in a different world, with his hands like lead weights in his lap. He was sitting there in his own house, with the rest of his family, but nevertheless he wasn’t there at all. He was in a different world where stones had turned into trolls, reindeer moss had become hair, and the wind whispering through the pines was the chattering of voices of the dead.
He often used to speak about them. All those who had lived in the past. It frightened him to think about how few were living in the here and now, and how many more were already dead.
There was an illness, an epidemic that all women knew the name of: thumping sickness. It broke out when men had been hitting the bottle and thumped everybody within range — mostly their children and the women who tried to protect them. Her father certainly did drink to excess at times, albeit not very often. But he was never violent. And so his wife, Hanna’s mother, didn’t worry so much about the schnapps as about his melancholy. When he drank he became maudlin and wanted to sing hymns. Despite the fact that at other times he was keen to burn down churches and drive out the priests into the forests.
‘Without shoes,’ Hanna recalled him shouting. ‘Chase the priests out into the forests without shoes when the cold is at its worst. That’s where they should be banished to, into the forests, barefoot.’