‘The mines, all those terrible explosions. Ships sinking in only a few seconds.’
‘I shall be a long way away from the war. My job is to make sure that as few ships as possible are affected by the catastrophe.’
‘What exactly are you doing?’
‘I’m preserving a secret. And creating new secrets. I’m guarding the door.’
‘What door?’
‘The invisible door between what a few people know and what others ought not to know.’
She was about to ask another question, but he raised his hand. ‘I’ve already said too much. Now I’d like you to go to bed. By tomorrow you’ll have forgotten everything I’ve said.’
‘Is that an order?’ she asked with a smile.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s an order.’
It is even an order that is secret.
Chapter 122
March turned into one long wait. On several occasions he went to Naval Headquarters without being able to get an explanation for why it was taking so long for written confirmation of the length of his leave to come through.
Lieutenant Berg was never in his office. Adjutant Jakobsson had also disappeared. Nobody could tell him anything. But everybody insisted that nothing had happened to change the situation. It was simply a matter of excess bureaucracy as a result of the war.
One cold, clear evening at the end of March he left his flat in Wallingatan, after saying goodbye to his wife, who was not feeling well. He walked to the top of Observatoriekullen and studied the night sky.
Once a year, usually on a clear winter’s night, he would make a pilgrimage to the stars. When he was a young cadet he had studied the star charts and read several astronomical textbooks.
He stood next to the dark observatory building and gazed up at the stars.
It seemed to him that the clear night sky and the sea were similar, like diffuse and not altogether reliable reflections of each other. The Milky Way was an archipelago, like a string of islands off the coast up there in space. The stars gleamed like lanterns, and he thought he could discern both green and red lights and all the time he was searching for navigable channels, routes between the stars where the biggest of naval vessels would be able to proceed without the risk of running aground. It was a game involving charts that did not exist. There were no ships sailing through space, no shallows between the stars.
But in space there were bottomless depths. Perhaps what he was really looking for in the sea was an entrance into another world, a space hidden far down below the surface where undiscovered fishes swam along their secret routes.
He stayed there for an hour and was freezing by the time he got home. His wife was asleep. Silently he opened the door to the maid’s room. She was snoring, her mouth wide open. The covers were pulled up to her chin.
He sat in the warmest room in the flat, poked away at the embers in the tiled stove, drank a glass of brandy and wondered where Captain Rake was.
It had been a hard winter, few harbours had been ice-free. The navy had concentrated its resources on the south and west coasts. Somewhere out there was Captain Rake. No doubt he was asleep. He was an early bird.
Tobiasson-Svartman was impatient. Having to wait was getting him down. It was 29 March already, he wanted to set off south as soon as possible. Would Sara Fredrika still be there, waiting for him? Or had she already left the island? He poked the embers again. The image of Sara Fredrika came and went.
Chapter 123
Late at night. He was sitting at his desk, the lamp with the green porcelain shade was on. He was making notes. What was he really measuring? Distances, depths, speeds. But also light, darkness, cold, heat. And weights. All the things external to himself, that made up the space he occupied, ships’ decks, his night on Observatoriekullen. He was measuring something else inside himself. Perseverance, resistance. Truth and falsehood. Worry, happiness, introversion. What was meaningful, and what was meaningless.
He stopped. He had made similar lists many times before. They were never complete. What did he always forget? What didn’t he see? There was something he measured without being aware of it.
He stayed at his desk for quite a while. Eventually he locked the sheet of paper away in a drawer, with all the other lists.
He went to the bedroom. Kristina Tacker was still asleep. He gently touched her stomach.
Sara Fredrika, he thought. Are you still there?
Chapter 124
One day Kristina Tacker found the large sum of money he had collected from Handelsbanken. He had left the notes under a diary on his desk.
‘I don’t let the maid touch your desk. I tidy it up myself. A note was sticking out. I saw all that money.’
‘That’s right. There is a large sum of money on the desk.’
‘But why?’
‘If we get involved in the war the banks might close. I took precautions against that.’
She asked no more questions.
‘I’ve always expected my wife not to snoop around among my private papers.’
She was shaking with emotion when she replied. ‘I do not root around among your private papers. The only things I touch are your clothes when I pack your bags for you.’
‘I’ve noticed before now that you’ve been going through my papers. It’s just that I’ve chosen not to say anything until now.’
‘I have never touched your papers. Why are you falsely accusing me?’
‘Then we’ll say no more about it.’
She stood up and ran out of the room. He heard the bedroom door close with a bang. Of course his accusations were groundless. But he felt no regret at all.
Soon the waiting will be over, he thought. One day, in the far distant future, I might be able to explain to her that she was married to a man who was never fully visible, not even to himself.
Chapter 125
Not a word was spoken for two days. The maid crept round the flat, hugging the walls. Then everything returned to normal on the third day. Kristina Tacker smiled. Lars Tobiasson-Svartman smiled back.
The snow had started to melt outside.
Chapter 126
On 3 April he was notified that his leave without pay would last until 15 June 1915. It would only be cancelled if Sweden were drawn into the war. His suitcases were already packed.
On 5 April he said goodbye to his wife. She went with him to the station. In his hand he had a ticket to Skövde and Karlsborg. She waved. He thought about how often her hand was cold.
In Katrineholm he got off the train and bought a new ticket to Norrköping. He emptied his cases and transferred the contents to his two rucksacks. After removing the luggage labels he stood the cases at the side of a luggage van.
Chapter 127
The ice was softer now. But it was still there, all the way to the outer skerries. The sky was obscured by a thin mist. He walked fast.
In one of the bays near Hässelskären he came upon a shoe frozen fast in the ice. The sole was facing upwards, as if the wearer had fallen through the ice while standing on his head. It was a man’s lace-up boot, big, patched, a boot for a large foot. He paused and examined the ice all around it. Nothing but the boot. No footsteps, nothing.
He continued his trek, walking so fast that he became short of breath. He would occasionally stop and scan the ice he had already traversed through his telescope. There was, of course, nobody following him.