‘Why does one man watch another through a telescope?’
I once saw you naked, he thought. Without a telescope. I watched you getting washed, I saw your body. I have never forgotten that. I might forget you eventually, but I’ll never forget your body.
‘I’m just checking to make sure he’s doing it right.’
She grabbed hold of his arm. ‘I can’t stay here.’
‘What would have happened if I hadn’t come?’
‘I’d have asked him to take me with him.’
‘Would you have gone with a man who was doomed o die?’
‘I didn’t know that then.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘You couldn’t have known that.’
When she went back to the cottage he followed her at safe distance to make sure she went inside.
Dorflinger continued drilling the pointless holes in the ice.
Tobiasson-Svartman looked for a sufficiently big stone o act as a weight and kicked it on to the ice. It had a rounded bottom and slid along without him needing to put much effort into it. Then he collected some sticks and branches, broke them into pieces and left them next o the upturned boat.
The temperature went on falling. He could see the hunters again. He watched them on their way back to and until they were no longer visible.
Chapter 104
The next day the island was covered in fog.
Tobiasson-Svartman waited until the others were awake.
‘I’m going out now,’ he said. ‘You can follow me in an hour. Wait to see if the fog lifts.’
‘I won’t get lost,’ Dorflinger said.
‘I’ll leave a trail from the inlet. It’s easy to get overconfident when it’s foggy. Shout as you are walking over the ice, and I can put you right if you are off-course.’
He did not wait for a response. He strapped on his rucksack with the ice drill sticking out and set off. When he stepped on to the ice he left a trail of sticks marking the way to the holes that had been drilled. The fog was very thick. He kicked the stone a few metres ahead and took a step back, then another. The stone was lost in the fog. Visibility was four metres at most.
He thought he could hear a foghorn in the distance. He listened, but there was no second foghorn. He left his trail of sticks until he came to the place where he had bored the first holes at the corners of a square. He tried the ice with his foot. It creaked. He had kept the holes open by clearing away any ice and snow in them every other day or so. Now he bored ten more holes. He was dripping with sweat by the time he had finished. When he put his foot on the ice and pressed lightly, it cracked along all four sides. He got down on his knees and spread loose snow over the cracks, making them invisible.
It suddenly struck him that Sara Fredrika might accompany the deserter, being afraid that he could get lost. That would mean he would be forced to postpone what he planned to do. He hoped she would not appear. Changing plans would be a defeat.
He opened his rucksack and took out a piece of rope he had found in Sara Fredrika’s dinghy. He tied it round the stone, which he then kicked into the fog.
He took a few deep breaths and measured his pulse. It was a little higher than normal, eighty-two beats per minute. He took off his gloves and held his hands out in front of him. His fingers were not shaking. He was a stranger, somebody who was himself, but at the same time somebody else.
Then he heard the crunch of footsteps on the ice. Dorflinger appeared out of the fog. He was alone. Tobiasson-Svartman smiled.
Chapter 105
It was their last conversation and it was very short.
Tobiasson-Svartman had positioned himself so that the hole in the ice was between him and Dorflinger.
‘You know the fate lying in wait for a deserter,’ he said. ‘They’ll hang you from a tree or a lamp-post. Or they’ll shoot you or even behead you. They’ll hang a plaque round your neck. Deserter. And there will be no shortage of volunteers willing to pull the rope tight or to press the trigger. A deserter is a man who stole other people’s lives.’
He took a step back. Dorflinger took a pace forward. He stepped on to the square, the ice gave way and he fell into the water. Tobiasson-Svartman raised his sounding lead and hit him hard on the back of his head. To his surprise, it made a bloodstained dent in the brass. Then he saw that Dorflinger was still alive. His hands were grasping at the edge of the ice in an attempt to stay above water. He stared at Tobiasson-Svartman with gaping eyes.
Tobiasson-Svartman took one of the ice prods hanging round his neck and stabbed at Dorflinger’s eyes. They must stop seeing, he must destroy what they have seen.
Dorflinger screamed just once, a sound like one coming from a little child. Then he was silent.
Tobiasson-Svartman kicked the stone to the edge of the hole and fastened the rope round the waist of the man in the hole. The water was cold, the broken ice covered in sticky blood. He tried not to look at the man’s face, the mutilated eyes. When he pushed the stone into the water the body sank immediately and vanished.
Chapter 106
He thought of the burial of Karl-Heinz Richter.
Now Herr Richter and Herr Dorflinger would meet in the cemetery 160 metres under water. Two men with no eyes, two men who spent five or six minutes sinking to the bottom of the sea.
He listened. Not a sound. He wiped his sounding lead clean and scraped away the blood that had spurted on to the ice.
When everything was clean around the hole, it dawned on him what he had done. For the whole of his life he had been afraid of death, of dead people. Now he had killed a man, not in a war, not obeying an order, not in self-defence. He had acted in cold blood, with malice aforethought, without hesitation or regret.
He looked at the hole in the ice, the grave opening. Down there in the depths, he thought, two people are sinking to the bottom of the sea. One is a German deserter. I killed him because he got in my way. But there is another person sinking with an invisible weight tied round his neck.
Me. The person I was. Or possibly the person I have at last discovered that I am. He felt dizzy. So as not to fall over, he sat down on the ice. His heart was pounding, he had difficulty in breathing. He stared at the hole and had a powerful feeling that Stefan Dorflinger was about to climb out of the ice-cold water.
What have I done? he thought, horrified. What is happening to me? There was no answer. The panic taking possession of him was incapable of words.
He stood up and prepared to throw himself into the water. But Kristina Tacker appeared by his side and said: ‘It’s not you who’s going to die. It’s your enemies who die. Lieutenant Jakobsson, who despised you, he dropped dead. You are alive and the others die. Never forget that I love you.’
Then she was gone.
Love is unfathomable, he thought. Unfathomable, but perhaps invincible.
He stayed for half an hour by the hole in the ice, then walked slowly back to the skerry that was still shrouded in fog. Every time he saw a piece of wood marking out the path, he bent down and threw it as far as he could, one to the left, the next to the right.
The hole would soon freeze over again. There was no longer a path behind him.
There was nothing behind him.
Chapter 107
It would not be difficult to explain to Sara Fredrika what had happened. The deserter quite simply could no longer cope. There were people who tried to get the better of death by taking their own lives. That was nothing special, it often happened, particularly in wartime. When living in the proximity of death, it was usual for people not only to hang on to life but also to take out an advance on death.