He sat on the stone and played with the thought of expeditions to distant countries.
He made a measurement he had never attempted before. How far from the truth could he transport a fantasy before it collapsed in ruins?
There was no answer to that, of course. He also imagined transforming his sounding lead into a diving bell and descending into the depths himself. How strong a pressure would he be able to tolerate? Would the shell hold or would it shatter so that he was sent shooting back up to the surface and the real world once more?
It was already late afternoon when he left his stone and continued walking towards the mouth of the river. He imagined himself trudging along a path somewhere inside a steaming rainforest in a tropical land without a name.
Chapter 162
The boat was the same type as Sara Fredrika’s, but the sail was patched and the farm labourers drunk. They were asleep, tangled together among the empty herring barrels and baskets in the bottom of the boat. It was six o’clock when he woke them up. One of them, the older one called Elis, asked Tobiasson-Svartman if he had brought the aquavit with him. He showed them the bottles but said he had no intention of handing them over until they were south of Finntarmen and preferably had reached their destination.
And what was the destination? It was the younger man, Gösta, who asked.
‘It’s secret. A military operation,’ he replied. ‘I am to be dropped on a skerry and I shall be collected from there by a naval vessel.’
‘Which island?’ Gösta wondered.
‘I’ll show you when we get close to it.’
The men were hung-over and starting to moan, and wanted to wait until the next day before leaving the mouth of the river. But he cajoled them into setting out to sea right now, there was no time to waste. There was a following wind that would take them out of Slätbaken before they lay up for the night. Gösta sat at the tiller and Elis kept an eye on the sail. He cursed every time he tightened the sheet or let it go.
Tobiasson-Svartman made himself comfortable in the bows. He had his rucksack with the sounding lead between his legs. There was an acrid smell coming from the sea. He recognised it from his time aboard the Blenda.
They anchored for the night in a creek on the edge of the approach to Slätbaken. He had spent a night with Sara Fredrika on the other side of the narrow channel.
He suddenly felt pangs of guilt. It was as if he were no longer being taken south, but was descending the sounding line inside himself. He found it difficult to breathe.
It was not until the fire had died out and the farm labourers had fallen asleep that he could feel his panic subsiding.
He looked at the sleeping labourers. I envy them, he thought. But between their lives and mine is a distance that can never be bridged.
Chapter 163
They were between Rökholmen and Lilla Getskär when Gösta asked once again where he wanted to be put ashore.
The wind had freshened during the night and they were making good progress after a night’s rest.
‘Halsskär,’ Tobiasson-Svartman told him.
The man looked at him in astonishment.
‘That bare bit of rock near the open sea? Near the lighthouses and the seal rocks?’
‘There is a Halsskär south of Västervik and another way up north off Härnosönd. But I’m hardly going to be going all that way.’
‘What the hell are you going to do on that godforsaken bloody place? A madwoman lives there. Is that who you’re going to see?’
‘I don’t know anything about the island being inhabited. I have my orders. That’s where I’m going to be collected from.’
The fisherman seemed amused.
‘They say that all the bloody Finnish hunters without a licence wandering around the outer archipelago stop off there to get a bit of leg-over on the way out and again on the way back,’ Elis said.
Tobiasson-Svartman was cold as ice. But even if he could have killed them, he wanted to know about the rumours.
‘You mean there’s a trollop living on the skerry? How on earth did she end up there?’
‘Her husband drowned,’ said Gösta. ‘How else could she make a living? I’ve seen her. A really filthy little scrubber. You’d have to be as randy as hell if you wanted to shag that.’
‘Does she have a name?’
‘Sara. Though some people say Fredrika.’
The men had nothing to add. The dinghy was making good headway. He was beginning to recognise the islands now, the channels were opening out, the ice that had covered the water was a distant memory.
He imagined the farm labourers dead, deep down at the bottom of the sea.
Late in the afternoon the sailing dinghy steered into the inlet where Sara Fredrika’s boat was moored. He handed over two litre bottles and jumped ashore.
‘If anybody asks, you had no passengers with you from Söderköping,’ he said.
‘Who would ask us?’ Gösta said. ‘Who cares if a couple of bloody farm yokels have anybody in the boat with them?’
‘There’s a war on, and what I’m doing is top secret. If you say a single word once you get back on shore you could end up in prison for life.’
He watched them go, heading south. They were talking eagerly, but he did not think they would say anything about him. He had frightened them.
He looked at the nets, corves, sinkers, all the other equipment. The boat was securely moored, it did not need to be beached when the water level was high. He looked towards the path and all the greenery clinging to the little crevices and along the sides of the rocks.
He tried to build a room around himself, but no walls wanted to rise up.
Chapter 164
The first thing he saw by the cottage was a cat, staring at him with watchful eyes. He had the impression it was the same cat as he had killed in his fury.
He despised the supernatural. Human beings worked constantly to make their gods unnecessary. He was an individual who made scientific measurements: one day time and perhaps also space would be measured and controlled by scales of measurements hitherto unknown. The supernatural was shadows dancing in the remains of a childhood fear of the dark. Normally he could always resist the supernatural. But the cat scared him.
It ran away as he approached the window.
Sara Fredrika was asleep on the bunk. He contemplated her enormous stomach.
She must have heard him, or sensed movement outside the window, turned her head to look, and squealed in delight. He opened the door and took her in his arms. She was warm and sweaty, steam was rising from her body. He immediately abandoned all thought of Kristina Tacker and Laura.
Now he was able to build the walls. There was nothing outside Halsskär, nothing that he could no longer control. He held all distances in his hands.
‘How did you get here?’ she asked. ‘I didn’t hear anything. I didn’t sense anything either.’
‘I sailed here with some farmhands from an island further south. From Lofthammar, they said.’
‘Sailing this way? Where from?’
‘Norrköping.’
‘How did you find them?’
‘In the harbour. They had bought a sailing dinghy, or got it in exchange, I couldn’t quite work out what they did. But I was lucky. I’d have had to go to Söderköping otherwise.’
Not even the farm labourers belong to my story, he thought. I’m walking on water, leaving no tracks behind me.
‘You’ve got a new cat,’ he said.
‘I got it from Helge. I hadn’t asked for a similar one, and Helge said he hadn’t seen the one I had before. It’s good company. But it misses its mice, there aren’t any on this skerry. And it’s frightened of the snakes.’