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In fact it wasn’t the cat, he thought. What I attacked was something else. My father, perhaps? Or why not Lieutenant Jakobsson with his deformed hand and swollen face?

Two shadows appeared over the ice. Two eagles were hovering overhead. They had discovered the dead cat. He could see through his telescope that they were young sea eagles. They continued circling for a while before landing on the ice. They approached the cat cautiously, as if suspecting a trap. Then they started eating.

Life and death, he thought. My life, my death, my tins of American meat. The life and death of the cat, eagles on an endless expanse of ice.

He added more wood to the fire, stuck his feet into the rucksack and tried once again to think calmly. When he got up it had turned noon. He kicked snow over the fire, divided the contents of the rucksacks so that he could leave one and take the other with him.

The eagles were gone. All that remained of the cat was a dark patch of frozen blood.

Chapter 95

He approached the cottage from the inlet where the boat was, paused uneasily behind a rock and observed the scene. The cottage door was closed, thin smoke drifted up from the chimney.

He would wait for one minute. He would give himself a minute in which to have second thoughts. Even if he had run out of food he would still have enough energy to walk as far as Harstena where the biggest fishing village in the archipelago was. He could still turn back.

I’ll leave, he thought. I’ll walk back over the ice. Sara Fredrika has nothing to do with my life. I am risking something I do not want to lose.

He set off towards the inlet, then turned on his heel, marched up to the cottage and hammered on the door. She did not open it. But he was only going to knock that one time. He stepped back a pace, so that she would be able to see him from the window.

When she opened the door wide, not just a few centimetres, he knew she had seen him.

‘You,’ she said. ‘Are you here?’

She did not wait for a response but let him in. The room was empty, he could sense that he had the upper hand. She had hidden the stranger in the cupboard with the nets and barrels and decoys. He could smell something unusual, old engine oil perhaps, or rifle grease. He squatted by the fire and warmed his hands.

He had prepared his story carefully. It is easier in a desolate winter landscape than in cities, he had thought. It is more difficult to check the truth in the outer archipelago.

Everything depended on the open channel.

He had once met a petty officer in Karlskrona who had been bosun on the Svensksund. In the summer of 1896 the Swedish hot-air balloon expedition to the North Pole led by the engineer Salomon Andrée had set off for Spetsbergen on board that ship. It had been fitted with reinforced bows so as to be able to sail through iced-over water and even force its way through pack ice. That was almost twenty years ago, nobody had ever heard a thing from the three ballooners who vanished in the fog over the Arctic Ocean.

They talked about the expedition and about the ice and its mysterious qualities. The bosun had described how ice could suddenly crack, forming enormous open channels for no apparent reason. The crack appears out of the blue. The ice seemed to carry a secret inside itself. The bosun claimed that the Eskimos call it ‘the frozen soul’. As recently as 1893 seven Swedish seal-hunters had been marooned on an ice floe by a gigantic crack that had made it impossible for them to get back to land. The only one to survive, a farmer from the island of Öland, had told the bosun that the ice was thick and there was no wind when the seven of them had set off. Suddenly the hunters heard a roaring sound, the ice cracked and the sea rose up like the back of a gigantic whale and they were unable to turn back. They were doomed, the open channel grew longer and wider, and he was the only one to survive, albeit having lost both feet to frostbite; the only one who could tell the tale of that sudden crack.

The ice was alive, it was not to be trusted.

Tobiasson-Svartman now told Sara Fredrika that he had been one of a party of eight that had set out from the mainland to make holes through the ice and check some of the soundings made last autumn. Just on the other side of Kråkmarö but before coming to the outer skerries, maybe Lökskär or Tyskärsarkipelagen, he had left the others to reconnoitre. The ice had cracked and he had been cut off from his colleagues by an open channel. He had very little food, and his only chance was to walk towards the open sea, towards Halsskär where he knew she lived.

‘You might not have been here, of course,’ he said. ‘The cottage might have been empty. But at least I would have had a roof over my head, I could have drilled holes through the ice, fished and survived.’

‘I am still here,’ she said.

‘No doubt the open channel will freeze over again, but you never know how long it will take.’

‘I’m not alone,’ she said. ‘You are not the first person to come walking over the ice this winter. Somebody came from the other direction.’

‘From the sea?’

‘In a rowing boat, like the one you had.’

‘I didn’t see a rowing boat in the inlet.’

‘He let it drift away when he came to the edge of the ice.’

‘He?’

She sat down next to him on the floor. She smelled awful.

He was usually disgusted by people who smelled bad, such as their maid Anna. While serving on board the gunship Edda as a cadet they were carrying out a rope-ladder manoeuvre and he had been assigned to help a simple rating with rotten teeth. The smell from the man’s mouth was unimaginable. Even when he was two metres away from the rating the smell hit him in the face, it was the smell of death emerging from the sailor’s mouth every time he breathed.

Sara Fredrika did not smell of death. She just smelled of dirt, a friendly, sad little whiff of muck that he could put up with.

Because I love her, he thought. That’s the way it is. That’s why I can put up with her.

Chapter 96

She sat down next to him and started speaking in a low voice.

But the man hidden in the cupboard with all the nets could not understand, he could only guess at what the voices were now saying about him.

He must be scared, Tobiasson-Svartman thought. A German sailor could not have any plausible reason for being on Swedish soil. On a rocky skerry like Halsskär, with the widow of a fisherman.

He had let his rowing boat drift away. Whoever he was, he must have burned a bridge behind him, and that was dangerous.

She said: ‘I am not alone here. There’s somebody in there among the nets.’

He pretended to be surprised.

‘Who are you hiding? Who’s hiding there?’

‘You spoke about the war last autumn when you were here. Sometimes I was woken up by dull thuds that made the house shake. I went to the highest point on the skerry, and there were times when I could see fires in the distance. Once when I was taking in nets at Jungfrugrunden, a hawser floated towards me. It was like a long snake in the water. The rope was as thick as my arm. It smelled of gunpowder, it smelled of death. I didn’t touch it, it just wriggled past as if it were alive. It was clear that this bit of hawser had something to do with the war. A few days after Christmas two Finns turned up in a boat. One is called Juha, the other one is known as Arvo but is actually called something else that I can’t say because round here it means something rude in Swedish. They hunt seals in these parts, but mostly they smuggle hard liquor. They’ve never done me any harm. They had an Ålander with them in their sloop. He was called Ville, his surname was something like Honka. He told me about the war, and he started crying and cursed us Swedes for not sending troops to Åland to defend the islands. I started to understand what the war was all about, those fires in the night and the shock waves and the thudding noises — it meant that people were dying in their thousands.’