“We brought it in,” he said.
“Is it moored now?”
“No,” he said very calmly, “we broke it up and got rid of the timber. I did it myself the same day.”
“Oh,” I said. “Did you take all the nails out?”
“I did,” he said.
“That’s good,” I said. “Otherwise the chaps at the sawmill would have caught the nails on the saw and it would have ruined their piecework rate.”
“Yes, I know,” he said.
“What was the name of the man rowing the boat Håkan went in?”
But Grandfather didn’t reply; he just sat there, looking pensive.
“He wasn’t from round here,” I said. “He looked like Eriksson who works the barking drum at the sawmill, but it wasn’t him.”
“No,” Grandfather said softly. “Now you have to get some more sleep.”
He was standing at the door, looking at me, and when I started to tell him what had happened that night, he looked slightly irritated, or something else—he looked odd—and he just turned and left, quite abruptly. The next day, the first day I was allowed to get up, he came back and asked me to tell him. And I told him everything.
He just sat there, looking pensive, as he often used to do in the chapel; whenever things became slow and boring and serious, he would sit and think about fishing. He looked pensive then. He was looking exactly the same now, so I assumed he was thinking about fishing again.
I said, “It’s a good job you pulled all the nails out. It would have ruined their piecework rate.”
Then he said, straight into the air, “Well now, about Håkan. He didn’t come back.”
That summer I read a great deal. The book I liked best was the story of the Flying Dutchman. He had once committed a dreadful crime: he had not reached out his hand to some drowning sailors—he had thought only of himself—and he had let them drown. So he was damned: whenever he and his ship came to a port, a headwind blew up and he was unable to enter the harbour. He had to continue to the next one, and the next, and the next.
And there he sailed, year in, year out. Sailors would see him coming in his ship, in the middle of the night, in a fierce storm, and in the moonlight they saw him standing on the deck, lashed to the wheel, doomed to sail for evermore. An unknown man.
I told Grandfather about it.
“Do you understand?” I said. “That’s the only time you see him, in the middle of the night. He comes sailing along in the moonlight. Isn’t it strange? An unknown man, who never speaks to anyone, but just arrives, at night, in the moonlight. Do you understand, Grandfather?”
“No. What about?” Grandfather asked.
“Well,” I said, “an unknown man, a stormy night, and you see him in the moonlight. He just comes gliding along in the moonlight! Do you see? There must be a connection, mustn’t there?”
“I don’t understand,” Grandfather cut me short.
“He came rowing from the east that night,” I said. “You know as well as I do that there’s no one living in the east. Not here by the lake. Not even a tourist. But he came from the east.”
In July I began a systematic exploration of the lake’s eastern shores. I didn’t tell the others what I was doing. The grown-ups had already taken me aside for long talks, long, serious talks, about what, I don’t recall, don’t want to recall. They would never understand, they would only ask me to do something else, to help out in the cowshed, to think about something else, something else, something else.
I decided to explore the lake’s eastern shores.
It was in July 1943, a very warm summer. Håkan always used to call the eastern part of the lake “the cesspool”—it wasn’t very pleasant, there were lots of tree stumps and rubbish in the water, the bottom was mucky and slimy, the shore was scrubby and in some places cleared of trees in that barren kind of way that made you thirsty just by looking at it. I took some water in a bottle and I began to search. I started furthest away down by the shore and then walked up a hundred metres. Then diagonally down to the beach again, then up. In this way I would be able to comb the entire area.
I walked for several hours, got very thirsty, drank some water. When my water ran out, I went home.
In July I searched the eastern part of the lake, and I found nothing. The only thing I came upon was the remains of a half-rotted boat, a dinghy. It had been pulled a long way up on land, with its hull in the air. It must have been there for years.
I sat down on the boat. The sun was shining and it was very warm. I cupped my hands around my mouth and shouted, loudly, out across the water, “Håkan! Håkan! Håkan!”
But no answer came. No echo. Nothing at all. And then I knew, finally, that there was no trace of Håkan in the eastern part of the lake, and no trace of the man in the boat.
In September that year I searched for the last time.
September was the month I liked best. In Västerbotten’s coastal regions the cold arrived quite early, the autumnal colours started appearing in the middle of the month, and in the last two weeks you could break a thin layer of ice on the puddles every morning. The entire lake seemed embedded in a band of dark green and golden red. All the forests looked like that. Green from the conifers, golden red from the birch trees. Mist lay over the lake, and it was cold.
On one of the last days of that month, I took Grandfather’s boat and rowed out. I didn’t have permission, but I did it. It was the day of my ninth birthday.
I rowed around the whole lake. There was a thin mist everywhere, a mist that was almost transparent and only a few metres high, but which nevertheless made me feel as though I were rowing in an empty, forsaken world. As if I was completely alone. And it felt good.
I rowed around the whole lake. And then I rowed out into the middle. I pulled up the oars, settled down and waited.
It was lonely in the mist, in a very strange way; it felt safe. I thought about everything that had happened and, oddly, I no longer felt despair when I thought about Håkan’s disappearance. I just didn’t understand how it had happened, who the man in the boat was. Why had he left me behind? Where was Håkan now? Why didn’t he come back?
I must have sat there for an hour. Then I saw a boat coming towards me, out of the mist.
It was a dinghy with a man rowing. Someone was sitting in the stern with his face turned towards me.
There could be no mistake. It was Håkan. The dinghy glided slowly towards me, without a sound, straight through the mist, and I wasn’t in the least bit afraid. Håkan was sitting in the stern, looking right at me, and he looked exactly the same as before. And he smiled at me.
It was utterly silent. I sat still and watched the other dinghy glide slowly towards me, next to me, past me. The whole time Håkan was looking at me, a peculiar expression on his face. With a slight smile, he was looking right at me. As if he wanted to say: Here I am. You don’t need to search any more. You’ve found me. And now you’ve found me, you have to stop searching for me. I’m fine. You must understand that. You have to stop searching for me, because you’ve found me. And now you need to be yourself. You need to be grown up.
We didn’t say a word, but we looked at one another. And we both smiled. And then the dinghy slid away, and they were gone. And since that time I haven’t seen my only friend Håkan again.
I sat still for a long time, thinking, before I took up the oars to start rowing; but at that moment I saw something floating in the water. It was a long pole. It was the pole we used to push ourselves along on the raft. I thought: Håkan wanted to give it back. That’s good. I’ll pick it up.