Once again he found that the work gave him the peace of oblivion which he now realised was something worth striving for. After a good hour he had reorganised the wood store and was able to put the new wood inside. Twilight had begun to dim the brightness of the sky by the time he tipped the wheelbarrow up against the wall of the shed. He took off his gloves and rubbed his hands together as he contemplated the wood store, which was now looking much healthier.
A day's work. A good day's work.
He was famished after all his efforts, and cooked a meal consisting of a huge portion of macaroni with half a kilo of Falun sausage. When he had finished eating and smoked a cigarette, he sat for a long time looking out of the window. His whole body was aching, and he almost felt like a real person.
He considered taking a stroll over to Elin's to see if she fancied sharing a little undiluted wine, or rather a lot of wine, but he decided against it, partly because she had been away for two days and probably wasn't home, and partly because he didn't think he would need any wine in order to get to sleep tonight. For the first time in ages.
Meeting
Simon had had enough.
The discovery of Sigrid's body and what had followed had been the final straw. He could no longer close his eyes to what had been moving closer for fifty years. Enough was enough.
The story of his escape by the steamboat jetty had been polished over the years, bounced between him and Anna-Greta and worn smooth until it was now the jewel of a story they had told Anders only four days ago; he was merely the latest in a long line of listeners. A story of heroic deeds and awakening love.
Of course it was that kind of story as well, but something essential was missing. He had taken up that something with Anna-Greta, but she had refused to have anything to do with it, and it had been expunged from the official story. This bothered him.
But Simon remembered it very well. What had really happened.
It had been an unusually simple escape, to start with. Only chains had been used, and chains rarely posed a problem. While he was still standing in the sack he had got out of most of them, and had also picked the lock on the handcuffs.
When the push that sent him down into the water came at last, he had calculated that he would need a maximum of thirty seconds to free himself from the last of the chains and get out of the sack. Then all he had to do was swim over to the jetties and wait a minute or two, just for effect.
The sack hit the water and he sank. He had learned to close the airways in his nose so that he could even out the pressure without using his fingers. On his way down to the bottom he pressed twice, which made the eardrum push outwards in the right way and reduced the noise and the pain in his head. He closed his eyes to enable him to concentrate better as the cold water penetrated through the sack and began to make his limbs stiffen.
The greatest danger in spending a long time underwater was not the lack of oxygen. He had trained himself to be able to hold his breath for more than three minutes. No, the real danger was the cold. After only a minute the fingers would start to become incapable of precise movements. That was why he always tried to make sure the handcuffs were dealt with as quickly as possible.
This time that problem had already been resolved. When his body hit the bottom he had only a few simple twists left before he could rip open the sack with the sharpened picklock and swim towards his triumph.
It was then, just as he was easing the penultimate chain over his shoulder, that the water above him suddenly became heavier. Something laid itself on top of him. His first thought was that someone up on the jetty had thrown something into the water. Something large and heavy. He was being pushed down to the bottom, and had to make quite an effort to stop the air being forced out of his lungs.
He opened his eyes and saw only darkness. The cold that was working on his skin from the outside now had help from the cold fear on the inside. His heart began to beat faster, consuming the valuable oxygen he had left. He tried to understand what could possibly be lying on top of him, so that he would have a better chance of escaping from its grip. He couldn't come up with anything. It had no shape, no seams. The first feeling he had had was the closest he got: the water had become heavy.
Panic threatened. His eyes had now grown accustomed to the faint light that penetrated through the sacking and six metres of water. When a few bubbles of air escaped from his lips, he could see them as blurred reflections.
I don't want to die. Not like this.
With an enormous effort he managed to twist his body in the grip of the water so that the last chains fell off. He still had time. When he was training himself to hold his breath he had sometimes had Marita there to help, which had given him the courage to hang on as long as possible. He could tell when he was about to lose consciousness. He wasn't there yet.
But he couldn't escape from the weight. It was lying on top of him like a giant pestle, and the sack was a peppercorn in the bottom of the mortar.
He managed to rip open the sack with the picklock, and was rewarded with a glimmer of real daylight. He was lying on his back, pressed against the seabed, and way up above he could see the contours of the people on the jetty, the blue sky above them. Nobody had thrown anything, there was nothing on top of him. Except water. Six metres of impenetrable water.
The cold had now got a serious grip on him, and a feeling of calm was beginning to spread through his body. A calm that resembled warmth. He relaxed and stopped fighting. He had at least a minute left before it was over. Why should he spend that minute struggling and fighting? He had freed himself from the chains, the handcuffs and the rope, but he knew he wouldn't be able to free himself from the water. He had been defeated in the end.
Everything was beautiful.
Quiet and helpless, Simon lay there on the seabed. He lay there like the dead, and through the tear in the sacking he could see the sky and vague figures waiting for him. It was the angels calling him to them, and in a while he would be there. He was in darkness, but soon he would come into the light, and it was good.
He didn't know how long he lay like that. It might have been one minute or two, perhaps ten seconds, when the water suddenly released its pressure. As lightly as a veil the weight was withdrawn, and he was free.
With a calm which he would later find difficult to comprehend, he merely thought something along the lines of: I see, we're doing it this way, then. He got out of the sack and swam with even strokes over to the far jetty. Nothing grabbed at him, nothing wanted to get at him. There was no weight, only lightness. When he broke the surface of the water, hidden from view by the boats, he took a deep breath, and only then did everything go black. He grabbed at the rail of the nearest skiff and managed to stop himself from sinking. He breathed evenly and calmly, and the world began to come together once again.
From the steamboat jetty he could hear someone shouting, 'Three minutes!' and he couldn't believe they were referring to him. He had been gone much longer than that.
Simon hung on to the rail and tried to regain his grasp of reality. When the voice on the jetty yelled, 'Four minutes!' he had come to his senses. He recognised the faint smell of tar from the skiff, the taste of salt and old fear in his mouth, the piercing cold in his muscles.
I'm alive.
He swam towards the shore and after a couple of metres he was able to walk in the shallows, crouching down behind the boats. He carried on up on to the rocks, and the rest of the story matched the official version.