Lieutenant Jakobsson was standing, pipe in hand, as they winched the two launches on board. He was still uncommunicative. Tobiasson-Svartman was pleased that they would soon take leave of each other and never meet again.
He reported that the mission was complete. Jakobsson nodded, without speaking. Then he lit his pipe, inhaled deeply, coughed, and fell down on to the deck as if he had been struck a violent blow by an unseen fist.
He fell without a sound. Everything came to a standstill, the ratings stopped operating the winch’s ropes and tackle, Tobiasson-Svartman was holding his notebook and lead in his hands.
The first to react was Lindegren. He knelt down and placed his fingers on the officer’s neck. Then he stood up and saluted. His dialect was so hard to understand that he had to repeat what he said before Tobiasson-Svartman could understand.
‘I believe Lieutenant Jakobsson is dead.’
Tobiasson-Svartman stared at the man lying on his back. He was holding his pipe in his right hand, staring fixedly at a point over Tobiasson-Svartman’s head.
Lieutenant Jakobsson was carried to his cabin. Fredén, who had had some medical training, took Jakobsson’s pulse in several places before corifirming that he was dead. The time of death was entered into the logbook. Fredén took over command of the ship. His first duty was to write a report of what had happened for Naval Headquarters in Stockholm.
The radio telegraphist went to his cabin to send the message.
For a moment Fredén was alone with Tobiasson-Svartman. Both were shaking.
‘What did he die of?’
Fredén pulled a face.
‘Difficult to say. It happened so quickly. Jakobsson was still comparatively young. He drank no more than anybody else, didn’t get blind drunk in any case. Didn’t exactly overeat either. He occasionally used to complain about pains in his left arm. Nowadays some doctors regard that as an indication that the heart is not as healthy as it might be. The way he simply fell over could suggest a massive heart attack. Either it was his heart or a blood vessel burst in his brain.’
‘He always seemed to be healthy.’
‘Hymn 452,’ Fredén said. ‘“My life’s a journey unto death.” We sing that whenever we have a burial on board. We sung it for the German sailor we picked up. Strangely, not many people seem to realise that Wallin, the man who wrote it, knew what he was talking about. He reminds us all of what is in store for us, if only we listen.’
He excused himself and went on deck to assemble the crew and tell them what they already knew, namely that Lieutenant Jakobsson was dead.
Tobiasson-Svartman looked at the dead man again. This was the third dead person he had seen in his life, the third dead man. First his father, then the German sailor and now Lieutenant Jakobsson.
Death is silence, he thought. That’s all. Trees fallen, their roots exposed.
Above all silence. Death announces its approach by silencing men’s tongues.
For a second he felt as if he himself were falling. He was forced to grab hold of the chest of drawers and close his eyes. When he opened them again, it looked as though Lieutenant Jakobsson had changed his position.
He hurried from the cabin.
Chapter 67
An invisible veil of mourning was being pulled over the ship.
It was dusk when Fredén assembled the ship’s crew on the foredeck, and some of the searchlights were already lit. The arc lamps crackled away as night-flying insects flew into the filaments and were roasted.
Tobiasson-Svartman thought it was like watching something on a stage. A play was about to begin. Or, perhaps better, the last act and epilogue. The end of Lieutenant Jakobsson’s story.
Lieutenant Fredén spoke very briefly. He urged the crew to master their emotions and maintain discipline. Then he dismissed them.
Tobiasson-Svartman could not sleep that night, even though he was hugging his lead. He got up at midnight, dressed and went out on deck. His mission was over, he was surrounded by death, there was a woman on a skerry when he desired and he both longed for and dreaded the imminent meeting with his wife. He had measured the depth of the sea around the Sandsänkan lighthouse, but he had not succeeded in coordinating his discoveries with the navigable channels inside himself.
The ship was rocking gently in the swell. He had the feeling of being a large animal padding round a cage. The cold night made him shiver. He set off round the ship. The sailors on watch saluted him, and he nodded in reply. Suddenly he found himself outside the door of Jakobsson’s cabin. Now that the ship’s master was dead he no longer felt he needed to use his title when he thought about him.
He wondered where Fredén was sleeping. Until now he had been sharing a cabin with Jakobsson.
The dead man was still there. There was a lantern on the table, he could see the light under the door. He opened it and went in. Somebody had placed a white handkerchief over Jakobsson’s face. The pipe had been taken from his grasp before his hands had been crossed over his chest. Tobiasson-Svartman contemplated Jakobsson’s chest, as if there might be a trace of a forgotten breath.
He opened the drawer in the bureau attached to the wall. It contained a few notebooks and a framed photograph. It was of a woman. He looked furtively at the photograph. She was very beautiful. He stared at the picture as if bewitched. She was one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen. On the back was the name Emma Lidén.
He sat down and started thumbing through the notebooks. To his surprise he saw that Jakobsson had been keeping a private diary in parallel with the official logbook.
Tobiasson-Svartman glanced at the man lying with a handkerchief over his face. It felt both dangerous and amusing to penetrate his private world. He leafed through to the date when he had joined the ship.
It took him an hour to read to the end. Jakobsson had made the last entry only a couple of hours before he died. He had noted ‘a pain in my left arm, some slight pressure over my chest’ and reflected on why his bowel movements had been so sluggish these last few days.
Tobiasson-Svartman was shaken. The man who ended his life with a worried comment about a stomach upset had been in possession of colossal strength, of both love and hatred.
Emma Lidén was his secret fiancée, but she was already attached to another man and had several children. The diaries were full of notes about letters exchanged and then burned, of a love that exceeds all bounds, that is a blessing without equal, but can never be anything but a dream. The phrase ‘woke up in tears again this morning’ was repeated at regular intervals.
Tobiasson-Svartman tried to picture it. The man with the pipe and the shrivelled hand, weeping in his cabin. But the image was no more than a blur.
He could never have imagined that Jakobsson had hated him so intensely, but the lieutenant had taken a dislike to him the moment he stepped on board. ‘I will never be able to trust that man. Both his reserved manner and his smile seem to be false. I have an illusion on board.’
Tobiasson-Svartman tried to recall the moment when he had met the Blenda’s master for the first time. His own impression had been quite different. Jakobsson must have been a man turned inside out. He had not been who he was.
Tobiasson-Svartman read every diary entry for the period that he had been on board. Jakobsson never referred to him by his name, only as ‘the sea-measurer’, a term exuding deeply felt contempt. It sounds like a grub, he thought. A beetle that hides in the cracks of his ship.
The hatred that emerged from the diary was shapeless, like a lump of mud that spread out over the pages. Jakobsson never vouchsafed the reason for his antagonism and hatred. Tobiasson-Svartman was no more than ‘a mud-dipper, repulsive, stuck-up and stupid. He also smells like sludge. He has mud in his mouth, he is a man rotting away.’