‘He was lazy.’
Jakobsson nodded slowly, and eyed him quizzically.
‘I didn’t think a shipping lane could be such a personal matter,’ he said. ‘I can understand that a ship might be. I have seen old captains and bosuns weep when their ship has been towed away to the breaker’s yard. But a navigable channel?’
Tobiasson-Svartman thought he ought to respond to that. But he could not think of anything to say.
Chapter 42
He finished his meal and left the mess. When he came out on deck he stopped to gaze in the direction of Halsskär, which was invisible in the dark. He tried to imagine what Sara Fredrika’s husband looked like, and wondered if there were any children in the grey cottage.
A slight breeze had got up from the south. He could feel that the mercury had risen above freezing point.
It had stopped snowing.
He sat down at the table in his cabin and tried to deal with his disappointment. He had made a mistake, he had assumed that he would triumph. He had been convinced that he could change an arc into an almost straight line on the sea chart, give naval vessels more protection, and above all enable them to approach land or head out to sea at faster speeds. Although he knew from experience that a navigable channel was like an invisible obstacle course, he had allowed himself to approach the mission with too much confidence.
The sea had not tricked him. It was he who had failed to show sufficient respect. He had committed a grave sin: he had guessed.
The paraffin lamp started smoking. As he adjusted the flame a memory came to him. His father had once lapsed into one of his most furious rages when Lars arrived late at the dinner table because he had guessed the time and got it wrong. With a bellow his father had boxed his ears and sent him to bed without food.
To be late was to desecrate other people’s time. Guessing could be an amusing game, but was never permissible in connection with dinner or other serious matters.
Such as being responsible for checking the depth of secret naval channels.
He wrote up the notes he had made during the day and worked out a plan for how they would continue their work. They would be forced to retreat about 150 metres. When they came to the previous course of the navigable channel they would start sounding again.
He calculated how long it would take. Provided nothing unforeseen happened, they should be finished by 1 December even so.
He put the main record book away, turned down the flame and stretched out on his bunk. There was a faint creaking from the hull. He could hear the watchman walking over the deck. Somebody coughed. He thought how there always seemed to be a coughing epidemic on board a naval vessel. It rattled like an echo through the collective chest of ships. When on board a warship you could be certain that the wind and the sound of the engines would always be accompanied by somebody coughing.
He pictured the crew of a big battleship, perhaps two thousand men, standing on parade and coughing in unison while their superiors looked on.
He thought about the sailor he had struck. What did he know about him? He was nineteen, came from inland, Vimmerby, and was called Mats Lindegren. That was all. The lad spoke an almost incomprehensible dialect, often smelled of sweat and gave the appearance of being frightened. He was an insignificant person with a pale, pimply face, and unnaturally thin to boot. There was something vague and elusive about him. It was incomprehensible that he should have joined the navy, even if he was not among the worst when it came to being seasick. He knew as much from Lieutenant Jakobsson, who always had people keeping a check on which members of the crew — himself included — became incapable of working during a bad storm. Mats Lindegren was one of those not affected. He was not sick, nor did he become dizzy.
There in the darkness Tobiasson-Svartman suddenly realised why he had been unable to control himself. The yawning sailor with the snotty nose had reminded him of the dead man Richter, the one who had been pulled out of the sea a few weeks ago. The similarity of their appearance, that and the fact that, they had stumbled upon a big underwater ridge had shattered all his best-laid plans, had made him lose control.
He closed his eyes and thought about his wife. She was walking towards him through the darkness; he felt wholly calm deep down; the cabin was filled with a sweetish scent, and finally he managed to fall asleep.
Chapter 43
She followed him into his dreams.
It was 1905, they had just married and were on their honeymoon in Kristiania. The struggle over the ‘to be or not to be’ of the Swedish-Norwegian union was at its most troubled stage and he had made the naive mistake of going out for a walk with his wife along Karl Johan wearing his Swedish naval uniform. Just as they were passing the university somebody had shouted at him, and even in his dream he could hear that hot-tempered voice: ‘Swedish bastard, go home.’ He turned round, but there was no obvious culprit, just a crowd of people who looked the other way or smiled and looked down at the ground. They were staying at the Grand Hotel, and went back there immediately. Kristina Tacker had been fearful and wanted to leave right away, but he had refused. He changed into civilian clothes, they went out again and nobody had shouted at them. No one was hostile when they went to the Blom restaurant or the Grand Hotel’s veranda, nor when they visited the newly built National Theatre. They saw Johanne Dybwad as Mrs Alving in a production of Ibsen’s Ghosts, which his wife thought was disgusting. He agreed with her, to be polite, but in fact he had been disturbed and moved because the play reminded him of his own childhood and resurrected uncomfortable memories of pain and ignominy.
Thus far his dream was clear, a walk down memory lane. But then everything became chaotic. They become separated in a crowd at Bygdøy and soon afterwards he sees her with another man. He tries to pull the man away from her, but he is dead and his body is already decaying, the stink is something awful. Then suddenly everything is back at the beginning again. They walk along Karl Johan, stop at the entrance to the Blom restaurant and examine the menu, they talk about everyday things, she squeezes his arm and then the picture goes white, featureless, without content or meaning.
When he woke up he tried to interpret the dream. He had let it finish in nothing but whiteness. He had rubbed Kristina Tacker out.
His pocket watch showed three minutes to five. No thin light yet. He lay with his eyes open, and in the darkness — the opposite of the whiteness of the dream — he decided to row to Halsskär that morning.
He had to. That was all there was to it. He had no choice.
The watchman was pacing up and down the deck.
Tobiasson-Svartman stretched out a hand and touched his sound, which lay on the floor next to his bunk.
Chapter 44
The sea was wreathed in fog when he rowed over to Halsskär.
About halfway there the Blenda had faded away like a dark shadow amid all the white.
He wondered if the whiteness in his dream had presaged the fog. A fish broke the surface of the water alongside the boat with a plop. That’s what pike do, he thought, but would a pike really be as far out to sea as this?
He rested on his oars and listened. The fog magnified the noises from the invisible ship. Some of the ratings had been ordered to scrape away rust. The blows of hammers and chisels bounced through the fog and reached his ears. There was no risk of his getting lost, he could navigate on the basis of the noises. He counted his strokes and when he looked ahead he saw he was close to land. He beached the tender as before, having considered rowing a bit further and tying up in the little inlet where the sailing dinghy was moored. That would save him having to clamber over the slippery rocks, but the inlet was not his, and he did not want to intrude.