They went indoors. Everything was as he remembered it. Nobody else seemed to have been in the cottage since he left. Nevertheless, he had a strange feeling of uneasiness, a suspicion that, even so, everything had changed since he was last here.
It was a while before he saw it.
Her eyes had changed. She looked at him in a different way.
Something had in fact happened.
Chapter 165
He asked her that evening.
A storm had blown in from the west, the thunderclaps were so strong that the cottage walls shook. She had a pain in her back and lay down on the bed.
‘Nothing has happened,’ she said. ‘They threw the cat ashore from the boat. I’ve been waiting for you, nothing else.’
He listened carefully and could detect a change in her voice. Something had happened, but what? He ought not to ask any more, not just now.
During the night he had the feeling that she was keeping her distance. It was barely noticeable, but it was a fact. She was suspicious, maybe unsure. But what could have happened?
He was afraid. Somehow she knew now that he was married, that no woman and no daughter had fallen over a cliff.
He slid out of bed cautiously, but she woke up.
‘Where are you going?’
‘I just need to go out for a moment.’
‘My back’s hurting.’
‘Go back to sleep. It’s only just getting light.’
‘How shall I be able to give birth here?’
‘I’ll sail for help when the time comes.’
The storm had subsided. The sparse grass was wet, water was running down the rocks. The cat emerged from a crack in the rock underneath the cottage and followed him down to the inlet, where he plucked a little flounder from the corf. He threw it to the cat.
Could she have found out something about him despite everything? He tried to go back over all the many things that had happened since they first met, but he could not hit upon anything.
It occurred to him that the deserter might have floated up to the surface or been caught in one of her nets. But that could not have been the case. The body could not have reappeared, the sinker was securely fastened. Besides, she did not have any nets that would go as deep as that.
He walked round the island with the cat the single member of his retinue. He climbed to the highest point, and was reminded of Lieutenant Jakobsson, peeing over the rail. Distant memories, he thought. Like dreams.
He wondered if it would be possible to sink his sounding lead through the darkness that exists below the surface of all dreams.
On the far horizon he caught a glimpse of a ship heading north. He did not have his telescope with him and could not make out if it was a warship.
The cat suddenly vanished.
Still he could not understand what had happened.
Chapter 166
The heatwave continued.
Sara Fredrika had difficulty in moving, her back ached and she complained that she could not keep cool. He went fishing and did whatever had to be done. When he was busy with the nets, cleaning fish or carrying water he was able to feel totally relaxed, the walls around him were constantly there. Occasionally he would see Kristina Tacker and the newly born baby in his mind’s eye. Did she know what he had done, that he had denied her existence to another woman? Yet how could she know?
Early one morning in the middle of August when he was on the way to Jungfrugrunden to take up some nets, he stopped rowing. There was no wind, just a gentle swell.
He realised that he was near the spot where the two German sailors were lying at the bottom of the sea. He could row there, tie the rope in the stern of the boat round the sinker beside it, throw it and himself overboard, and it would all be over at last.
Perhaps that was the only bottomless depth he could hope to find? Sinking towards death, unaware of what happened to him after his lungs had filled with seawater?
He took tight hold of the oars and started rowing again.
The net he pulled aboard contained a lot of fish. Any thoughts about death vanished immediately.
Sara Fredrika came down to the shore to help him gut the catch. She moved with difficulty, and the pain in her back made her pull faces.
They did not say much to each other.
Chapter 167
The next day he cleaned his sounding lead and started measuring the depths around Halsskär. He would record the reading in a notebook then lower his lead once again.
It was as if he were listening to two voices, a never-ending conversation between sea and land. Every wave or swell brought with it a fragment of a story, every slab of rock made its contribution.
He put the sounding lead on the floor of the boat. Before, he had always thought there was a never-ending struggle between the sea and the rocks. Now he realised that was incorrect. It was an embrace that never lost its element of lust. A slowly increasing intimacy, he thought. The elevation of the land progresses invisibly, the rocks and the sea rely on each other.
He turned his back on Halsskär and gazed out to sea. The horizon was empty. He had the vague impression that there was something missing, something that ought to be there had vanished.
Chapter 168
When he reached home she was sitting outside the cottage, waiting.
Her eyes were blazing.
He stopped, not wanting to get too close to her.
She threw two wooden sticks that dropped at his feet. He did not see what they were at first. Then he saw the dried-out bit of rope fastening the two pins together. His ice prods. The ones he had stuck into the deserter’s eyes.
He turned icy cold. He was sure he had pushed them inside the dead man’s clothes before kicking the sinker into the ice hole and watching the corpse vanish into the depths.
He looked at her. Was there anything else? Was this only the beginning?
‘What’s that on them?’ she asked.
‘I don’t understand what you mean.’
‘They are yours, aren’t they?’
‘Of course they are mine. But they vanished into thin air. I don’t know what happened to them.’
‘Pick them up!’
He bent down. There was a dark colour dried into the light brown wood. It looked like dark brown rust. Blood, no doubt. The deserter’s blood.
‘I still don’t know what you mean.’
‘There’s blood on them.’
‘It could be anything. Why should it be blood?’
‘Because I recognise it. My husband once cut himself with a knife. It was a deep wound, I thought it would never stop bleeding. I’ll never forget that colour. Dried blood on light-coloured wood. The colour I saw when I thought my husband was going to die.’
She almost burst into tears, but managed to control herself.
‘I found them on the shore. The last time I walked round the skerry before I became so fat that I dared not trust myself on the rocks any more. I shouldn’t have risked it that time either.’
‘I must have mislaid them.’
She was looking hard at him. He realised that it wasn’t in fact the ice prods he could detect in her eyes and her voice, but her fear that he was telling lies, that there was something he had not told her.
‘I saw that you had them with you every time you went out on to the ice. Then one day, they weren’t there any more. And now I’ve found them soaked in blood.’
The lid over the abyss was parchment-thin. He tried to stop moving.
‘What happened?’ she asked. ‘That day he died. I’ve never understood it, never been able to believe that he simply sank down through thin ice and met his death. Neither that, nor that he killed the cat.’