THE MAN IN THE BOAT
PER OLOV ENQUIST
THE STORY, as I recounted it to Mats…
This all took place the summer I was nine. We lived by a lake called Bursjön, a fine lake, large, with small islands. I was nine and Håkan was ten. A river passed through the lake, entering at the northern end and flowing out at the southern. It came from far up in Lappmarken, and in spring timber was floated downstream. In May I could see it all from our window: the lake filling with logs, lumps of ice and ice floes, the timber slowly drifting southwards, and then, one day that same month, finally disappearing.
But not all the timber went. Some of it strayed off to the side, got stuck on the shore, stranded. They were top-quality logs, thick and impressive; they were buoyant, riding high in the water. We knew what would happen to them. After a week the log drivers would come, nudge the logs out from the shore, manoeuvre them together and shove them off in the wake of the others. The log drivers walked along the shore, or some of them rowed in boats; they could clean up the lake in a day, removing everything. They were called the “rear crew”. When the rear crew left, the lake was empty once more.
That was the reason Håkan and I hid the three logs. There was a ditch running into the lake, at the very spot where we lived. We hauled the logs into the ditch and up twenty metres, and then we laid them all in a long row, stashed away in the grass at the side, which covered them up, camouflaging them. It took a whole day. We knew very well it was forbidden, but Håkan said that it didn’t matter, because it was only the company who would lose out, and they had enough money anyway. They could wait a year or two for their timber.
Håkan knew all about it. The day the rear crew left, we lay low at the edge of the forest, watching the log drivers. They were walking along the shore, while a rowing boat was out on the water. Now and then one of them found a log and dragged it into the water, and then the men in the boat took over. We could hear their voices. It was still spring; we heard them talking, but we couldn’t hear what they said. And I remember how Håkan and I lay there in the undergrowth at the edge of the forest, out of view and motionless, watching the log drivers draw nearer as they talked to one another. When they reached the ditch where we had hidden our three logs, they stopped for a while and had a smoke, and I can still remember how clearly I could hear Håkan’s breathing and my own heartbeat—as distinctly as if they were echoing in the cool spring air.
But they walked on. And they didn’t see the logs. The next day the lake was empty of timber and log drivers, and the rear crew had gone for another year. But we still had the logs. And the lake was ours. We alone had command of it now, for the whole summer.
We waited two days, just in case. But I remember being woken early on the morning of the third day by someone knocking on my window. It was Håkan, who had climbed up the fire escape to the first floor and was hanging there, making faces and sticking out his tongue and tapping on the pane of glass. I got up and walked across the floor, which was comfortably cool under my feet, and I could see that Håkan was holding something in his hand: a hammer. We were going to do it today. Right now.
I threw on some clothes. I must have eaten breakfast as well, but it couldn’t have taken long. I ran out. Håkan was sitting behind the house, by the wall, wearing his red shirt and blue plimsolls, holding the hammer and a packet of three-inch nails, and smiling at me as I approached.
“Now, damn it,” he said, “we’re going to start building!”
That morning we began constructing the raft. We dragged the logs out into the water again, placed the longest in the middle and the other two on either side, and whacked some struts on top. One cross plank at the front, which we nailed onto the logs; three planks in the middle and two at the rear. We used three-inch nails, except at the back, where we used six-inch ones that Håkan had got hold of somewhere.
“When we don’t need it any more,” he said in a thick voice, his mouth full of nails, “we’ll chuck the planks away and pull the nails out. If we leave the nails in, it’s really bad for the saw blade. And it ruins the old boys’ piecework rate.”
He worked in silence for a moment, and then he said, “You mustn’t forget the piecework rate.”
Håkan was only a year older than me, but he knew a huge amount and he taught me lots of things. I remember that summer very welclass="underline" we built a raft of three logs; it had a sail on it; Håkan was there. It was the summer I was nine and he was ten. It was 1943.
It only took a day to finish it.
Håkan weighed thirty-eight kilos and I weighed thirty-five. The logs lay deep in the water. Generally, only a tenth of the log sticks up. It depends partly on how green it is. Some are pretty much sunken timber, while others float high in the water. Together, we weighed seventy-three kilos. When the wind blew, the waves nearly always splashed over the deck and came up in the gap between the logs. The water was quite cold to begin with, no more than 14 to 15 degrees; we were wearing wellingtons. Apart from that, the raft was well kitted out. For the most part, we pushed ourselves along. The pole was exactly three metres long and reached quite a distance out. Two pieces of plank were supposed to be paddles (but it was almost impossible to paddle; very slow at any rate). We had provisions in a small food container right at the back (secured with a one-inch nail to the rear platform). They consisted of: 1 bottle of water, 1 piece of sausage (10 cm long), 1 half-loaf, 8 biscuits, 1 knife, 100 grams margarine, 20 sugar cubes, 1 small tin of treacle (a kind of dark syrup that the cows were given, but Håkan maintained it was better than ordinary syrup; I didn’t like treacle myself, but he wanted to take a tin with us and I didn’t argue). Those were our provisions. Our armoury on the raft was a wooden crossbow with six arrows, a willow slingshot for pine cones plus ammunition (thirty-five cones) and Håkan’s old catapult with spare elastic and ten smallish stones.
There was no doubt, we ruled the lake.
However, the day I have to tell you about, when everything ended and everything began, we went out quite late. It was after seven in the evening; we had said we were going fishing, for which we were given permission. It was August. For the last two days, we had been experimenting with a sail on the raft, stretching a sheet between two long sticks. Sometimes we held onto the sticks ourselves, at other times we tried to lash them down. Neither way really worked, but this evening there was a good wind, coming straight off the land. After we had secured the provisions and ammunition, we set out. The sun was just setting on the other side, the wind was strong and we could see we were skimming along nicely, being blown out into the middle of the lake. It was all rather lovely; I didn’t want to mention it to Håkan, but as the sun went down, it was beautiful. Whenever I confided to him my thoughts about that kind of thing, Håkan would laugh.