And then he came? The man who’s been caught in your nets in there?’
‘I was scared when there was a knocking at the door. I didn’t open up. I grabbed a knife. He was wearing a uniform and talking in a language I couldn’t understand, it sounded like somebody who used to buy eels off us when I was a child. But when he collapsed on the doorstep, he wasn’t threatening any more. I dragged him inside. His ribs felt like chicken bones under his jacket, I thought he might be ill, maybe he would die. I could have invited my own death, perhaps he had an infection. I slept in the boat two nights. He came round and was rambling, he had a fever, but he wasn’t injured, just hungry and dehydrated. I eventually realised that he was German. He has tried to explain to me who he is, but I can’t understand what he says. His words are like slippery stones. But I’m scared, I’ve noticed that he listens, he listens all the time, all the time, even when he’s asleep his ears are cocked and his head and eyes are concentrating on something behind him.’
‘Am I a danger too?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I’ve slept here.’
‘You could be dangerous even so.’
‘You can believe what you like. I can’t make up your mind for you.’
She hesitated. Her face was twitching, she shook her head impatiently to get her hair out of her eyes. Then she stood up, as if she were going to do a standing jump, and opened the cupboard door.
The sailor came out. He stood there, on his guard, ready to defend himself.
Sara Fredrika said, although she knew he didn’t understand: ‘He’s not dangerous, he’s a sailor like you are, he’s been here before.’
Tobiasson-Svartman eyed the man. He was wearing the same uniform that Karl-Heinz Richter had on when they hauled him, sodden and semi-decayed, on board the Blenda. His face was pale, his hair thin, he must have been about twenty-five, maybe twenty-six.
But there was something special about the sailor’s eyes: he did not only try to see with them, but also to listen, to smell, to mind-read.
Tobiasson-Svartman held out his hand and spoke slowly in German: ‘My name is Lars Tobiasson-Svartman, my job is to sound depths, I was cut off from my friends by a crack in the ice.’
He didn’t know the German expression for ‘an open channel’, but ‘crack in the ice’ would do. The German seemed to understand. Cautiously, he held out his hand. His grip was limp, a bit like Kristina Tacker’s.
‘Dorflinger.’
‘You’ve come here over the ice?’
The German hesitated before replying.
‘I have run away.’
A German deserter, a young man who had jumped ship in a desperate attempt to get away. Tobiasson-Svartman was filled with disgust. Deserters were cowards. Deserters deserved to be executed. There was no other way to treat people who failed in their duty. People who maintained that they were being true to themselves, when they were in fact letting everybody else down. What right had this deserter to appear here and get in his way, when he was risking his marriage and his career because of an inner urge that he had to fulfil? What was the deserter risking? A man who was defending no more than his own cowardice?
They stood in the room like the tips of a triangle. He tried to decide if Sara Fredrika was closer to him than to the deserter, but there was no distance in the room, the house itself seemed to be moving, or perhaps it was Halsskär that was shifting, driven by the ice that was beating against the rocks.
The ice, he thought, the ice and the dead cat. Everything is linked. And now there is a man in my way.
He smiled.
‘Perhaps we should sit down,’ he said to Sara Fredrika. ‘I think Herr Dorflinger the sailor is tired.’
‘What does he say? I don’t even know his name.’
‘Dorflinger.’
‘Is that his first name?’
‘No.’
He asked Dorflinger what his first name was.
‘Stefan. My name is Stefan Dorflinger.’
‘Where do you come from?’
‘A little town between Cologne and Bonn, in the heart of Germany. You can’t get further away from the sea.’
‘Why were you drafted into the navy?’
‘I asked to be put in the navy. To see the sea. We sailed from Kiel, in one of Admiral Wettenberg’s naval units.’
Dorflinger slumped down on the bed. Sara Fredrika was hovering in the shadows. Tobiasson-Svartman sat on the stool by the fire, tried to do so without making a sound, he did not know why. All too often he did certain things without knowing why, and without holding back.
‘You are safe here,’ he said. ‘Even if you are what I think you are.’
‘What’s that?’
‘A deserter.’
‘I could not endure any more.’ It came out like a scream.
When he spoke again he was calm: ‘I could not suffer all that killing. I can describe what is really impossible to describe, things that even words try to escape from. Some things happen that words are even frightened of, that words do not want to be used for describing. I have dreamt about words running for their lives, like I did.’
He paused and drew a deep breath. Tobiasson-Svartman thought for a moment that someone else was going to drop dead at his feet. But Dorflinger continued, as if he had fought his way up to the surface and was able to breathe normally again.
‘I was on the cruiser Weinshorn. On Christmas Eve in the morning, north-east of Rügen, we spotted two Russian troop carriers. The sea was calm, but it was very cold, steam was coming from the water, making it look as if cold can also reach boiling point.
‘I was on a team looking after one of the heavy guns amidships. It was a 254-millimetre gun and could fire salvos at targets more than ten kilometres away pretty accurately. We were given the command “Battle stations!” and we raced to our positions. I was on the lower section of the magazine, and my job was to load powder cartridges into the hoist that took them to the loading ramp on the deck above.
‘We shot nineteen shells from my gun, it was an inferno, I couldn’t see if we hit the target, couldn’t see what we were aiming at, every shot sent us sprawling against the walls. Some people had blood coming from their eyes and noses, and the first shot burst my eardrum.
‘I didn’t realise when we’d stopped firing, the lad in charge of the other hoist had to come and shake me and point. The guns were silent, we had to go back on deck. I couldn’t hear a thing, it was like being behind thick panes of glass. You discover a different kind of reality when you only have your eyes to help you. When there are no sounds or voices, reality is different.
‘The Weinshorn closed in on the troopships. They were sinking now. The water was covered in burning oil. Hundreds of men were struggling to escape drowning, the fire, the oil. But the Weinshorn did nothing. Not one lifeboat was launched, not a single lifebuoy was thrown into the sea, not a single rope, nothing.
‘I looked at the rest of the crew. Just like me they were staring in horror at all those dying men, and nobody could understand why we did nothing to save them. We were at war with Russia, OK, but these people were already beaten. We watched them dying, I can remember how our knuckles turned white as we grasped the rail. We looked at the officers up on deck, watched them laughing and pointing.
‘I couldn’t hear the screams, nor the laughter. I could only watch the horrific deaths in the freezing water and the burning oil. In the end there was nobody left, they were all dead, most of them had sunk, one or two bodies were still floating, some of them so badly burned that you could see only their craniums sticking out of their tattered uniform.