‘Stay until the baby’s been born. Then you should take her away. The youngster won’t survive out there. So many young children have died on that barren skerry over the years, too many to keep count of.’
He started rowing.
‘Tell her I’ll come,’ she shouted. ‘We’ll get the baby born and it will survive all right, as long as you all get away from there.’
He kept on rowing until he found some wind. Then he raised the sail and headed for the open sea.
He felt ashamed when he thought about how close he had come to running away. He would have stolen her boat like a pirate, and abandoned her. Now he was sailing as fast as possible so that she would not start to think that he had headed out to sea after all.
He was in a hurry. And the sea was still carrying him to his destiny.
Chapter 175
August was drawing to a close, it was unusually windy, persistent westerly winds. An autumnal thunderstorm passed over them, and a stroke of lightning felled a tree on Armnö.
He speculated that memory and forgetting shared the same key. Perhaps anger shared the same door? Kristina Tacker and the baby drifted away. But where was he himself?
The longest distance I have had to relate to is the distance to myself. No matter where I stand, the compass inside me pulls me in different directions. All my life I have crept around trying to avoid bumping into myself. I have no idea who I am, and I do not want to know either.
Chapter 176
Sara Fredrika could feel that her body was calm. She talked all the time about the journey they would make once the baby was delivered.
Sometimes the conversations became unbearable. The skerry began to be a heavy weight, a ballast in his pockets that made it more and more difficult for him to move. He thought about what Angel had said, about the inhospitable skerry scraping her to the bone.
Chapter 177
Every three or four days he would sit down to write a letter to Kristina Tacker. He had found a rock formation on the south side of the skerry that gave him both a bench to sit on and a rough desk to write on.
He described a voyage in a convoy of ships heading for Bornholm and the Polish coast. It had been a dangerous but necessary expedition. Now he was back in Swedish waters again, and by coincidence he had ended up in Östergötland, among the islands where he had already spent such a long time. He would soon be returning to Stockholm. His mission had been long and drawn out, but there was an end in sight, he wrote, an end, and then he would return home. He asked about Laura, how Kristina Tacker herself was, and not least her father. Had he recovered? Had they arrested whoever had carried out the attack?
But he also wrote about himself, tried to capture something of his own desperation without revealing the true facts. When I’m alone I sometimes get so close to myself that I understand who I am. But then you are not there, nobody else can see what I see, only me, and that is not enough.
He hesitated for a long time, wondering whether to leave out the last few lines. But in the end he left them in, felt that he dared do so.
He buried the letters under a piece of turf, wrapped inside a waterproof pouch. Towards the end of August he decided he would have to send at least one of the many letters. He had intended to give the letters to some fisherman or hunter who passed by the skerry, but none of them landed. He could see sailing dinghies in among the skerries sometimes, but none of them came close. One day he decided that it could not wait any longer. He told Sara Fredrika that he was going to go to church in Gryt on the last Sunday in August.
‘I’m not much of a believer,’ he said, ‘but after a while I feel very empty inside.’
‘If you’re lucky you’ll be able to sail there. If there’s no wind you’ll have a long way to row.’
They got up at dawn and she went with him to the inlet. He had his uniform wrapped inside his oilskin.
‘You’ll have a good wind,’ she said. ‘Easterly veering towards north, a church wind in both directions. Sing a hymn for me, listen to the gossip outside the church. I’ve no idea who’s dead and who’s still alive. Bring me some news, even if it’s old news.’
He stopped once on the way, landing on one of the islands in Bussund. He changed into his uniform and scrubbed away a stain on one of the shoulders. As he sailed into Gryt accompanied by other boats with passengers on their way to church, he was wearing his naval cap. He could see that his companions were bemused, but some of them must know about him, he could not be completely unknown.
There was a man on Sara Fredrika’s island, the father of the baby that was about to be born.
Remarkably enough, he felt something approaching pride when everybody looked at him.
Chapter 178
There had been a time when you could sail right up to the church from both the north and the south.
But the sound had silted up, and now you had to walk. There were a lot of people gathered outside the church. People seldom came from the outlying islands in winter.
Suddenly he came face to face with the farm labourers from Kättilö. They were not entirely sober.
‘We haven’t said a word,’ Gösta said. ‘Nothing has slipped out.’
‘Let’s keep it that way,’ Tobiasson-Svartman said. ‘And we mustn’t make it too obvious that we know each other.’
He turned on his heel and walked away. The sexton told him that the man who looked after the post in Gryt was smoking his pipe by the church wall.
Tobiasson-Svartman gave him two letters. He asked for one to be posted right away, the other ten days later.
During the service he half listened to the Reverend Gustafsson’s sermon about the devil who takes possession of our flesh, and the mercy of the Son of God.
Afterwards he wandered around, listening to the conversations. He had always been an eavesdropper, skilled at sucking in what other people were talking about. Most of the congregation were talking about who was ill and how bad the fishing had been.
When he started walking towards his boat a man in uniform came alongside him. He shook hands and introduced himself as the parish constable, Karl Albert Lund.
‘There aren’t many people round here wearing uniform,’ said the constable. ‘That’s why I thought I’d say hello.’
‘Hans Jakobsson, Commander. I just happen to be passing by,’ Tobiasson-Svartman said.
‘Might I ask what it is that brings you here?’
‘I can’t tell you that. It has to do with the war.’
‘I understand. I won’t press you.’
Tobiasson-Svartman clicked his heels and saluted. He went back to the boat and sailed home. Why had he chosen the name Hans Jakobsson? he wondered.
Was it a greeting to the man who had died on the deck of the Blenda? Why had he not said what he had really wanted to say, that he was Sara Fredrika’s new husband?
He changed out of his uniform. The wind was enabling him to maintain steady progress. On the way he invented news and rumours about unknown people that he passed on to Sara Fredrika that evening when he got back home.
Chapter 179
Sara Fredrika gave birth on Halsskär on 9 September 1915.
He’d had time to fetch Angel from Kråkmarö. The wind had been capricious on the way back, the sail had not been much use, and he had rowed so hard that the palms of his hands were covered in burst blisters. There were three of them in the boat, Angel had taken with her another woman to help, a maid to one of the cargo boat skippers. Once they arrived on the island Angel told Tobiasson-Svartman to keep out of the way, and to find somewhere among the rocks where there was a wind to carry the screams in a different direction if Sara Fredrika got into difficulties.