They sailed out to Halsskär one chilly Sunday in March. It had been a severe winter and the ice had not altogether loosened its grip. Her husband said that nothing could be worse than loud-mouthed gentleman farmers. Houses could be made windproof, nets and drift nets could be patched up and repaired, but nobody could shut the mouth of a gentleman farmer who bellowed and yelled.
They moved in as summer approached, made repairs on the house and started to prepare for whatever was in store: autumn, winter, ice, isolation.
Every now and then farmers from the inner archipelago would appear, sailing along the channel known as Märsfjärden that led to Halsskär and Krampbådorna. They were heading for the herring fishing grounds or shooting birds, and were astonished to see Sara Fredrika and her husband. Hadn’t Halsskär been abandoned a century ago? In 1807 an old spinster lived there, but she froze to death and was pecked to the bone by gulls and crows. Ever since then the skerry had been uninhabited. The outhouses had collapsed, the jetties in the inlet had rotted away and the houses that could be dismantled were moved, plank by plank, to the green islands closer to the mainland.
It was said that Nils Ferdinand Persson and his wife Sara Fredrika had their noses in the air, and people with noses in the air ire the first to fall.
They were also visited by people from Åland and Finland, who were hunting seals illegally. They would shake their heads and shout warnings to them in their incomprehensible language.
Autumn arrived in September. The first storm was quite unexpected, it blew in from the east in the middle of the night and it was sheer luck that they did not have any nets out. They soon learned their lesson, and every day as night closed in they would keep a close eye on the sea, and try to identify signs indicating that dangerous winds might be approaching.
In November one of the sheep — they had two, but no cow — slipped from a rock and broke its leg. Then the surviving one died, and they were even more isolated, if that were possible.
On the morning of Christmas Day, six months after they had settled on the skerry, catastrophe struck. They had laid out nets a few days earlier when the weather was cold and clear with virtually no wind, just a gentle breeze from the south. The nets were in two shallows and did not need too many heavy stones to anchor them. They had experienced good catches there ever since early December. As the shallows had no name, Nils Ferdinand christened one of them Sara Rocks and the other Fredrika Shallows.
The storm came late on Christmas Eve. It attacked from the south, charging towards them with a dense blizzard as the first line of assault. When dawn came it was obvious that if they were not to lose their nets they would have to go out and take them in. The winds were storm force, but that couldn’t be helped, they had no choice. They launched the boat and managed to haul in one of the nets. Then came a colossal wave that crashed into the starboard side of the boat and capsized it.
When she managed to get out of the floating coffin she saw her husband. He had become enmeshed in the net he had been trying to take in, and it was writhing around him like a sea monster. He fought and screamed, but was dragged down and she was unable to do anything except cling to an oar and the stern seat that had broken loose, struggle back to land and crawl to the cottage, half frozen.
That was her story. She had hewn it from deep inside her as if sculpting a block of stone with violent blows from a chisel. A block of stone, a headstone for her husband.
She said no more. It was getting dark when she finished. The shadows were lengthening.
He sat on his stool and watched while she made a soup. They ate in silence.
Tobiasson-Svartman thought: It must be like staring straight into Hell, watching somebody you love die screaming.
Chapter 60
That night he lay on the floor close to the fire.
His ‘bed’ comprised the pelt of the mad fox, some rag mats and sealskins. His ‘pillow’ was some logs of wood covered by his sweater. He spread the oilskin coat over him and worried that the draught would make him ill.
She had offered him the bunk. For one intoxicating moment he had thought she was inviting him to share it with her. Did she suspect what he was thinking? He could not be sure. She stroked her hair away from her face and asked him again. He shook his head, he could sleep on the floor.
She wrapped herself up in a thick quilt that he assumed was stuffed with feathers from the birds she had shot. She turned her back to him. Her breathing became deeper. She was asleep. When he adjusted the logs under his head he could hear that she had woken up, listened, then gone back to sleep.
I am not a danger as far as she is concerned, he thought. I’m not a temptation, I’m nothing.
The embers in the fire died down. He opened his pocket watch and managed with difficulty to make out the hands. It was half past nine. The cold from the floor had already started to penetrate through the skins.
The storm was still raging. The wind came and went in powerful gusts.
Chapter 61
His thoughts wandered to his wife moving around in their warm flat in Wallingatan. No doubt she was still awake. Last thing at night she would usually walk around from room to room, smoothing the heavy curtains in the windows, adjusting cloths and covers, straightening out a crease in a carpet.
He worked out distances, lived by checking where he was in relation to others. His wife looked for irregularities, in order to put them right. Before shutting the bedroom door behind her she would check that the flat’s front door was locked and that the maid had put the light out in her room behind the kitchen.
He realised that he was having difficulty in picturing her face here in the darkness. It was in the shadowy part of his memory, he could not get through to her. Nor could he conjure up her voice, that tense, slightly harsh tone with just a hint of a lisp, barely noticeable.
He sat up. The woman in the bunk gave a snore. He held his breath.
‘I love my wife,’ he whispered softly, ‘but also the woman in the bunk next to me. Or at least, I desire her and am jealous of the man who died screaming, tangled up in a herring net. I hate that accursed pipe she keeps hidden in her cupboard.’
Again he was tempted to creep into her bed. Perhaps that was what she expected, perhaps he had not grasped her intention when she spread the skins out on the floor. Perhaps something he could never have imagined was in store for him in this draughty little cottage.
He recalled with dismay his and Kristina Tacker’s wedding night. They had spent it in a hotel, one of the suites at the Grand Hotel, paid for by her rich father. They had groped after each other in the darkness, tried to ignore each other’s angst over what was about to happen. All he had hitherto experienced was some torn and well-thumbed photographs, which had been passed round furtively in various wardrooms, pictures taken in French photo studios. They showed fat women, their legs wide apart and their mouths open wide, with stuffed lion heads on the walls behind them. And he had undergone a degrading experience in a squalid room in Nyhavn. He was serving as a cadet on board the Loke, an old frigate that was due for the scrapyard but was making an official naval visit to Copenhagen. One evening he was off duty and got drunk in several harbourside cafés, together with the ship’s mate and a petty officer. Late on he had become separated from the others, and in his drunken state had ended up in a room with a toothless old whore who dragged off his trousers, and kicked him out with a mocking laugh when it was all over. He had vomited in the gutter, a group of Danish urchins had stolen his cap, and for that he had received an almighty dressing-down from the captain the following day.