They eyed him curiously and made no attempt to conceal the fact that they were wondering what on earth a naval officer was doing out here on the skerry. He told them about his depth-sounding mission in the late autumn, and that he was now checking a number of measurements.
‘I remember people sounding the depths here when I was a young lad,’ said the father, whose name was Helge Wallén. ‘It must have been about 1869 or 1870. There were boats anchored at Barösund, measuring. My dad sold them groceries, eggs, milk, he even slaughtered a pig cos they paid him well. Us kids were half starved, but Dad knew what he was doing. He was able to buy our farm the year after, with all the dosh he raked in. They were here for ages, measuring. Can there really be so much going on down there that you have to go through it all again?’
‘It’s because of the boats,’ Tobiasson-Svartman said. ‘Bigger ships, bigger draughts, the need for wider navigable channels.’
They were standing outside the cottage. The son had stammered when he introduced himself as Olle.
‘So you’re still here, then?’ the father said to Sara Fredrika.
‘I’m still here.’
‘We saw that you weren’t on your own as we were passing Händelsöarna. I says to Olle, Sara Fredrika’s got herself a husband.’
‘I’m still here,’ Sara Fredrika said, ‘but my husband is still my husband, even if he’s lying at the bottom of the sea out here.’
They stood a while outside the cottage. The father was chewing over Sara Fredrika’s answer. Then he spat and lifted his bags.
‘We’d best be off,’ he said. ‘Have you seen any birds?’
‘At the edge of the ice. But further south, on the way to Häradskär. That’s the place to put your decoys.’
The men wandered off towards the inlet. Tobiasson-Svartman and Sara Fredrika clambered up a high rock and watched them leave, saw how they turned southwards when they reached the edge of the ice.
‘I’m related to them somehow or other,’ she said. ‘I can’t quite work out how. But the link is there somewhere in the past.’
‘I thought everybody in the skerries was related to everybody else?’
‘We get quite a few incomers,’ she said. ‘The types who like to hide away, the ones that aren’t tempted by the towns. I was in Norrköping once. I can’t have been more than sixteen. My uncle was going to sell a couple of cows and he wanted me with him. The town has some kind of smell that made it hard for me to breathe.’
‘But even so, you want me to take you away from here?’
‘I reckon you can learn. Like swimming. Or rowing. You can learn how to breathe even in a town.’
‘I’ll take you away from here,’ he said. ‘But not now. First I have to help this man.’
She looked at him doubtfully.
‘Do you really mean what you say?’
‘I always mean what I say.’
Sara Fredrika went back to the cottage. He watched her jumping from rock to rock, as if she knew them, every one.
He waited until she had gone inside. Then he fetched the deserter, who was shivering in his crevice.
Chapter 101
At some point he was woken by a movement during the night.
The man lying by his side got quietly to his knees. The embers in the hearth had almost gone out, and the chill had already started to take over the room. He heard the man groping his way to the bunk, a few faint whispers, then silence, only their breathing.
He stayed awake until the man made his way quietly back to his place on the floor. His jealousy started rising from out of the depths and reached the point where he knew it was ready to burst to the surface.
Chapter 102
There was a change in the weather. It was warmer during the day and the snow started to melt, but the nights were still cold. Every morning for a week he took Stefan Dorflinger with him on to the ice. It developed into a peculiar sort of game, with him drawing up an imaginary line a hundred metres from where he had prepared the trapdoor in the ice. He taught the deserter how to drill, explained the principles of depth sounding and let him drop the lead down to the seabed and do the calculations. Tobiasson-Svartman played the role of magician who would occasionally predict an accurate measurement even before the lead had reached the bottom.
Nothing is as magical as exact knowledge, he thought. The man who had run away from his German naval ship had found a strange magician in the Swedish winter landscape. A man who can see through the ice, who can measure depths, not by using a sounding lead but by using his magical powers.
The deserter became calmer as the days went by. Every morning he would gaze out to sea, but when there was no sign of a ship he seemed to forget all about being tracked down.
He would occasionally talk about his life. Tobiasson-Svartman asked his questions diplomatically, always politely, never intrusive. He soon formed his opinion of the deserter’s character. Dorflinger was a limited young man, with no knowledge, no interests. His greatest resource was his fear, the fear that had driven him to try to row away to freedom.
They spent the mornings out on the ice. They drilled and measured. Now and then they could see Sara Fredrika on the rocks on Halsskär.
In the afternoons he left them on their own. Every evening he told Sara Fredrika about the sailor’s progress, about his increasing trust.
‘I’ll take him with me when I leave,’ he said. ‘I have colleagues who hate the German military, they will help him. I’ll take him with me, look after him. Then I’ll come back here and fetch you.’
Her response was always the same.
‘I don’t believe it. Not until I see you on the ice.’
‘I’ll leave you my telescope,’ he said. ‘That will help you to see me sooner. It will make your wait shorter.’
He spent an hour every afternoon writing up his diary. He wrote about the deserter. On 17 February he wrote:
The day is approaching when I can do my duty and capture the German deserter who has fled to Sweden and is in hiding here. One can well ask oneself if he has made up the whole story. Perhaps he has been placed here as the furthest outpost in a network of spies preparing for a German attack on Sweden. Since I think he could well resist, I am planning for all possible circumstances.
He hid his diary, wrapped up in a waterproof pouch, in a clump of hawthorn bushes next to the path to the inlet.
It seemed to him that he was living in many different worlds at the same time. Each one of them was equally true.
The day was approaching. He was waiting for a change in the weather. He was waiting for a chilly morning with fog.
Chapter 103
On 19 February, at about nine in the morning, he trained his telescope on the two hunters, father and son, who were returning to the inner archipelago over the ice. They passed to the south of Halsskär and had evidently had plenty of success. They were pulling a net behind them over the ice, full of dead birds.
Then he aimed his telescope out to sea. He sensed that a change of weather was on the way. The sun was hidden behind thick cloud and the temperature was falling. Everything suggested that they would have fog for the next few days. That day he had asked Dorflinger to drill some holes and take some measurements without supervision.
He scrutinised the man on the ice, hunched over the drill. Sara Fredrika came up to him. She had spent the morning catching cod with lines through several holes in the ice on the west side of the skerry. He suspected that she had been watching him before making her presence known.