Chapter 92
It was starting to get dark as he approached Halsskär.
His first impulse was to hurry over the ice and go straight to Sara Fredrika’s cottage. But something stopped him, he hesitated. What would he say? How would he explain his return? What would happen if he changed his mind the moment she opened the door?
He squeezed the questions into a little clump: why was he out on the ice, why had he lied to set up this journey, what was he really looking for?
He reached the skerry as dusk fell without having found an answer. Sara Fredrika’s boat was on land, upside down and resting on large pieces of driftwood. The nets had been taken in, an abandoned herring barrel was brimful of snow.
He made a shelter in a crevice between the inlet and the rocks where he could not be seen from the cottage. He knew the way from there, he would be able to walk it in the dark. That was the only thing he had managed to decide, he would wait for it to get properly dark and then creep up on her. He wanted to look through the window and see what she was doing, only then would he know how to take the final steps.
He crept down into his sleeping bag. Night fell, and still he waited. The clouds dispersed, the sky was full of stars, the narrow sliver of a new moon. When he eventually got up it was nine o’clock. He made his way to the edge of the rock and looked out to sea. There was no sign of the Sandsänkan lighthouse. He screwed up his eyes, momentarily confused and wondering if he was completely disorientated. Then he realised that the light had been switched off as part of the increased security operation along the Swedish coast. The war had brought its darkness here as well.
He waited for another hour. The wind had dropped altogether, the ice continued so far out that he could not even hear the sea. He groped his way along the path. There was a faint light coming from the window. He made a start when something rubbed against his leg. It was the cat. He bent down and stroked it. The cat that did not exist.
He was careful where to tread as he approached the window. Despite the hoar frost on the pane he could see into the room, a fractured image.
He moved away from the window. The cat went with him, rubbing against his leg. He looked again through the window. Sara Fredrika was squatting in front of the fire. She was wearing a woolly cap and was wrapped in blankets.
But she was not alone. Sitting on the floor next to the hearth was a man in uniform.
He had seen a similar uniform some months earlier. Then it had been on a dead German soldier floating in the sea next to the gunboat Blenda.
The picture sent a shudder of pain through him. There was a German sailor sitting in Sara Fredrika’s cottage. A German sailor barring his way.
The cat was beside him, rubbing against his leg.
Part VI
The Adder Game
Chapter 93
Someone had taken his place, his fox pelt.
He could hear the sailor’s voice through the wall. It was hard to make out all his words, he was speaking in a low voice as if he suspected or feared that there was somebody close at hand, listening.
The German Tobiasson-Svartman had learned during his hated school years was not good enough for him to understand fully what was being said. In addition, the sailor was speaking dialect, he seemed to slur words, some consonants were almost inaudible, as if he had swallowed them.
Tobiasson-Svartman pressed his cheek against the cold wall. What he really wanted to do was to smash the windowpane with his fist, kick the door open and throw the man squatting in front of the fire out into the night. But he did and said nothing, and stayed in the darkness by the cottage until the fire had almost gone out. She was lying in the bunk, and the sailor on rags and old pelts on the floor, just as he had done.
He returned to his crevice. He was very tired, his joints were aching from the cold. A wind was getting up. At dawn he obliterated all traces he had left in and around the crevice, and moved to the north-eastern cliffs which dropped steeply to the sea. There were cavelike recesses there. He found one sheltered from the wind, scrambled down to the water’s edge, collected some driftwood and started a fire. With his naked eye he could see that the covering of ice extended almost as far as the Sandsänkan lighthouse. The open sea looked like a black belt, a line from the north-east to the southwest. At the very edge of the ice he could make out some black spots that moved, a little group of seals, perhaps.
He took out his telescope and scanned the horizon. Nothing but sea, no ships.
The sea was emptiness, a reminder of infinity, an absence of limits.
He warmed himself in front of the fire, and eventually dozed off. The surrounding cliffs protected him from the wind. The smoke blew out to sea, almost invisible.
He woke up when the fire started to go out. For more than an hour he crawled among the icy rocks, collecting branches, broken fish boxes, parts of a ship’s rail that had been washed up in a storm. He built himself a hut, just large enough for him to huddle up inside. He made some coffee and opened the last of his tins of meat. All he had left now were a few rusks and a frozen lump of butter. He drank the coffee in a series of sips, put more wood on the fire then huddled up with his feet inside one of the rucksacks.
He assessed the situation. That evening at the latest he would have to make his presence known. He could not keep watch on the cottage for another night. There was a risk that he would freeze to death. He had all day to make up his mind, to invent a story. A man who has walked all the way here over the ice must have a convincing explanation when he reveals his presence.
He tried to think calmly. The sailor and Sara Fredrika had not been sleeping together. They hadn’t touched each other, not even laughed. The man had seemed despondent. Fear, he thought. Perhaps what I could see in the sailor wearing a German uniform was simply fear?
Something moved next to him. He gave a start. It was the cat. It was hungry, sniffing after bits of food in the empty tin and on the knife he had used to open the lid.
The cat studied him with vacant eyes. It was like one of the china figurines on Kristina Tacker’s shelf. One that had fallen on the floor without breaking.
He exploded in fury. He grabbed the knife, stabbed the cat in the throat and slit open its stomach. Its intestines started to ooze out, the cat only had time to hiss before it was dead. Its mouth jerked a few times, its eyes wide open. He flung the body over the cliff and down to the ice. Then he wiped the blood from his hand and the knife.
There was no cat, he thought, wild with rage. That’s what she said when I asked her. There was no cat. There is no cat. There is nothing.
Chapter 94
His fury subsided. The cat’s death a memory already.
As a child he had sometimes trapped birds, then killed them by cutting off their heads with a pair of scissors from his father’s study. Afterwards he had always felt distaste and regret. When he was a naval cadet he had joined some colleagues in tying bags of gunpowder to stray dogs, which were then released with burning fuses attached to the bags. They used to make bets on which of the dogs would run furthest before being blown to pieces.
But apart from that? He had never killed, he was afraid of death. The cat had come too close. It had trespassed on forbidden territory. The cat had crossed the barrier he surrounded himself with.
He gazed up at the sky. Ten o’clock. The shape of the white sun could be seen through the thin clouds. He looked down at the cat lying on the ice. A pool of blood had formed round the body.