It turns out that there’s a good deal he desires but cannot find the nerve to do this summer. The little notebook he always carries in his pocket is littered with scribblings of those desires: he feels like a string that has yet to be played, a taut string fearful of being plucked lest it should break, or like a dynamo spinning and spinning without any outcome.
Now he lies here on the rock shelf in the broiling sun, drawing a small sailboat as it tacks in the sound. His boat isn’t bad, but he can’t say as much for his attempts to catch the water’s reflections shimmering in the midday heat or the flock of gulls that dive continuously into a yellow slick of something a couple sailors have poured out over a gunwale. On another island, just across the sound, two girls in red bathing suits are moving along the shore with small, timid steps, as music plays above them from a gramophone atop a rock cliff. Maybe they are afraid of snakes, which is enough to make anyone’s bare feet dart anxiously from toe to toe as they eye the grass before them. In boots you’re apt to take fearful lumbering steps as you whistle up into the empty air with a bit too much gusto. The strides of fear come in all walks, sure enough.
Maybe he does know a good bit about life after all. He knows almost everything worth knowing about the art of scrounging soda from the hostess of the small steamer’s restaurant. And he knows what sherry tastes like, ever since he and a young college student shared half a bottle in the dining lounge one evening during a blind run. He has smoked eight different brands of cigarettes and discovered just how strong beer can get if you let it stew on the ship’s boiler. If asked, he can reveal the good and the bad about all of Sweden’s weekly magazines. And he can do the same when it comes to that great man of the people and defender of the arts who bought a notorious pornographic magazine off him — for research purposes, of course — and then bawled him out because the back cover had apparently gotten soiled in his tote bag. He also knows that if you want to be treated like a grown-up you should snap your head around and stare at the legs of any girl over a certain age who walks by you on the upper deck. For a week now he’s also known what it feels like to kiss.
He learns this one evening from Barbro after taking a dip alone in the small cove where the water is always warm from the canal. The boat is dark and quiet when he returns from his swim. A hanging kerosene lamp has been lit in the waiting hut by the ferry dock across the sound, where a couple dances silently to a distantly wailing gramophone. As he boards the boat he encounters Barbro in the twilight of the upper deck.
She says, “Would you like me to kiss you, Sune?”
He has yearned so long and so intensely to know what it’s like to kiss that he isn’t sure his lips will be able to endure it. He’s afraid they may suddenly burst and spatter blood on her teeth, her lips and chin. So he says no and tries to step aside to rid her of the temptation. But she pulls him toward her with such force that his soap and towel fall to the floor, and then she kisses him squarely on the mouth. And then? Well, nothing. Nothing bad, anyway. They sit down on a bench nearby and continue, and he learns a great deal that evening. For instance, he learns that his lips can glide apart during a very long kiss so that his teeth actually scrape against hers. Like a boat’s hull when it runs aground, he thinks. He’s done an awful lot of reading this summer. Or he can stretch out his tongue and feel with delight how hers wriggles back. Or he can bite tenderly into her lip. Oh, yes.
But a couple evenings later, when they’re alone again, she asks him if he’d like to take a walk with her on the island. Since he is still the unplayed string afraid of breaking, he says no to her. And then nothing more comes of it. She’s not about to force him. She doesn’t drag him into the woods by the canal, nor out upon the wet meadows, nor onto the naked rocks above the sighing sea. She leaves him alone with his poor body, which should bleed from all the torture he allows it to endure in its loneliness, from all the loathing he heaps on it during those long nights of white sin in the aft saloon. She leaves him there alone in the twilight on the rocky promontory above their little bathing spot, with its partial view of the sound, the sunken barge, the dark blue currents flowing slowly southward between the islands’ docks. Across the cove his eyes trail along two hundred yards of green, rocky shoreline to their own white vessel with its lifeboats fastened securely on the roof, its long line of gleaming portholes and windows, its foredeck crowded with yellow barrels of Baltic herring.
From this height it’s even possible to see the black hatch leading into the fo’c’sle where Paul sleeps. He is the only one of the regular crew who doesn’t go home at night because he’s quarrelling with his wife. One evening after his swim, while Sune sits alone shivering on the promontory, he sees Barbro climb down through the hatch. He sits there for a long time after she closes the hatch behind her. Eventually his shivers subside, but she has not come back up. He takes up his notebook and sketches the boat and the dock. He draws the same picture four times, and yet she still has not come back up. A large well-lit motorboat passes by out on the sound, disappearing at last around the point with its muted drone. Not even when its wake finishes slapping against the rocky shore nearby has she come up again. He is anxious. Somewhere inside him something hurts. He undresses and swims out. The bottom disappears beneath him in the shimmering, dusky reflection as warm, sticky water laps into his mouth. But none of it makes any difference: she still has not come out from the fo’c’sle and he lacks the will to drown himself as he had vaguely hoped. After the swim he walks into the empty waiting hut on the dock, leaving the door wide open as he carves his name and the date of this night into a beam. Not even before he has finished doing this does she appear again from the hatch. At some point later he finds himself on the foredeck drawing the distant rock shelf and the old barge half-sunken into the mud, the spiny outline of the woods, and the moon rolling above it all. Essentially this same moon shines over victory and defeat. Later that night as he lies pitifully naked beneath a blanket in the aft saloon, he hears her in the middle of his dream sneaking back across the deck and whimpers like a dog until her steps disappear.
It’s Sunday now and he has just been caught by the cook’s husband make-believe fencing with some bushes up above the dock. So he’s moved off across the cove to lie by himself atop the high exposed shelf of rock. Lying there on his side he sketches and thinks, and for a while at least he believes that he may have things figured out. The boat slumbers, casting its wide black shadow into the depths of the sunlit cove. Only the cook’s spindly husband stirs on the dock in his white shirt, his hands resting together against his lower back as he kicks a stone or two into the water before swinging round.
Then the little dishwasher Greta appears with Alfhild, the pale Sunday waitress. Out for a Sunday stroll, the pair head up the path with their elbows linked. At the shelf of high exposed rock, they stop beside him and look down. He can feel himself starting to sweat intensely under his official newsstand jacket, although nothing in particular is going on.