It was two minutes to eleven when the church door opened and a tall, broad-shouldered woman strode in. She was wearing a black coat and a black veil that concealed her eyes, but her lips were painted with bright red lipstick. Her heels echoed on the stone floor, and many heads turned in the church. The woman marched up and sat down in the pew
at the front on the right, next to Katrine’s four half sisters and brothers.
She was their mother and Katrine’s mother: Mirja Rambe, Joakim’s mother-in-law, the artist and singer. He hadn’t seen Mirja since their wedding seven years earlier. In contrast to that particular day, she appeared to be sober now. Just as Mirja sat down, the bells began to toll up in the church tower.
Less than forty-five minutes later it was all over, and Joakim could hardly remember anything about what Pastor Högström had said, or what hymns they had sung in the church. His head had been filled with images and sounds of crashing waves and running water.
Afterward, when they had crossed the bitterly cold churchyard and gathered in the community hall, lots of people came over to talk to him.
“I’m so sorry, Joakim,” said a bearded man, patting him on the shoulder. “We were very fond of her.”
Joakim focused his gaze and suddenly recognized the man-it was his uncle from Stockholm.
“Thank you… thank you very much.”
There wasn’t much else to say.
Several other people wanted to stroke his back or give him a stiff embrace. He let them carry on; he was everybody’s pet.
“It’s so awful… I was only talking to her a few days ago,” said a weeping girl aged about twenty-five.
He recognized her behind the handkerchief she was using to wipe her eyes; it was Katrine’s younger sister. Her name was Solros-Sunrose, he recalled. Mirja had given all five of her children unusual second names; Katrine’s was Månstråle, Moonbeam, but she’d hated it.
“And she’d been so much happier lately,” Solros went on.
“I know… she was glad we’d moved down here.”
“Yes, and she was pleased she’d found out about her father as well.”
Joakim looked at her.
“Her father?” he said. “Katrine never had any contact with her father.”
“I know,” said Solros. “But Mom’s written a book and revealed who he was.”
The tears came again; she hugged him and went off to join her brothers and sisters.
Joakim stayed where he was and saw Albin and Viktoria Malm, friends from the center of Stockholm, sitting at a table with the Hesslin family, their neighbors from Bromma.
He also saw his mother, sitting alone at another table with a cup of coffee, but didn’t go over to her.
When he turned around, Pastor Högström was talking to a small gray-haired woman on the other side of the room. He went to join them.
Högström turned his kindly gaze in his direction. “Joakim,” he said. “How are you feeling?”
Joakim just nodded, several times. It was an appropriate response, it could mean anything. The little elderly lady smiled up at him expectantly and nodded as well, but didn’t seem to know what to say either. Then she took two tentative steps backward and disappeared.
That’s the thing about the bereaved, thought Joakim, they smell of death and are best avoided.
“I’ve been thinking something over,” he said seriously to Högström.
“Oh yes?”
“If you hear someone calling for help here on the island, when you yourself are on the mainland, miles and miles away, what does that mean?”
The priest looked at him blankly. “Miles and miles away… how could you possibly hear that?”
Joakim shook his head. “But that’s what happened,” he said. “I heard my wife… Katrine, when she died. I was in
Stockholm at the time, but I heard her when she drowned. She called out to me.”
The priest looked down into his coffee cup. “Perhaps you heard someone else?” He had lowered his voice, as if they were talking about forbidden matters.
“No,” said Joakim. “It was Katrine’s voice.”
“I understand.”
“I know I heard her,” said Joakim. “So what does it mean?”
“Who knows, who knows,” was all Högström said, patting him gently on the shoulder. “Get some rest now, Joakim. We can talk again in a few days.”
Then he left.
Joakim stood there staring at a poster on the wall advertising a charity collection for those affected by radiation in Chernobyl. Ten years had passed since the catastrophe.
OUR DAILY BREAD FOR THE VICTIMS OF THE RADIATION, said the heading on the poster.
Our daily Chernobyl, thought Joakim.
Finally it was evening again and he was back at Eel Point. This long day was coming to an end.
Inside the house Livia and Gabriel were being put to bed by their grandmother. Lisa and Michael Hesslin were standing by their car out at the front. It was late and they had a long journey back to Stockholm, but they had still come back to the house with him.
“Thanks for coming,” said Joakim.
“No problem,” said Michael, placing his black suit in its plastic covering on the back seat.
There was a tense silence.
“Come up to Stockholm soon,” said Lisa. “Or come over to Gotland with the children, to our cottage.”
“Maybe.”
“We’ll be in touch, Joakim,” said Michael.
Joakim nodded. Gotland sounded better than Stockholm. He never wanted to go there again.
Lisa and Michael got into the car, and Joakim took a step back as they drove off.
When the car had pulled out onto the road and the glow of its lights had disappeared, he turned and looked down toward the lighthouses.
Out on its little island the southern tower flashed its red light across the water. But the northern tower, Katrine’s tower, was just a black pillar in the darkness. He had only seen a light in it once.
After a few attempts he found the path down to the shore and followed the same route he had taken with Katrine and the children several times during the fall.
He could hear the sea in the darkness, feel the bitterly cold wind. Carefully he made his way down to the water, across the tufts of grass on the shore and the strip of sand, out onto the big blocks of stone that protected the lighthouses from the waves.
The waves were like slow breaths in the darkness tonight, thought Joakim. Like Katrine when they were making love-she would pull him down toward her in bed, holding him tight and breathing in his ear.
She had been stronger than him. It was Katrine who had decided they were moving here.
Joakim remembered how beautiful it had been on the coast when they came here for the first time. It had been a clear, sunny spring day at the beginning of May, and the manor house had looked like a wooden palace up above the glittering water.
When they had finished looking at the house, they had walked down to the shore, hand in hand along a narrow path through a field of wood anemones in full bloom.
Beneath the open sky on the coast the flat islands in the north seemed to magically float out at sea, covered in fresh
grass. There were birds everywhere: flocks of flycatchers, oystercatchers, and larks, soaring and diving. Small groups of black-and-white tufted ducks were bobbing along beyond the lighthouses, and closer to the shore swam mallards and grebes.
Joakim remembered Katrine’s face in the bright sunshine.
I really want to stay here, she had said.
He shivered. Then he clambered cautiously out onto the furthest block in the jetty and looked down into the black water.
This is where she’d stood.
The footprints in the sand had shown that Katrine had gone out onto the jetty alone. Then she had fallen or thrown herself in the water, and quickly sunk beneath the surface.
Why?
He had no answers. He only knew that at the moment when Katrine drowned, he had been standing in a cellar in Stockholm and heard her come in through the door.