‘I’ll be in touch,’ said Agnes. ‘I can’t say when. But I know where to find you.’
I watched her go back into the hospital. A one-armed sorrowful angel, who had just lost one of her wicked but remarkable children.
I got into the taxi and said where I wanted to go to. The driver eyed me suspiciously. I realised that I made a dodgy impression, to say the least. Dishevelled clothes, cut-down wellington boots, unshaven and hollow-eyed.
‘We usually ask for payment in advance for long journeys like this,’ the driver said. ‘We’ve had some bad experiences.’
I felt in my pockets and realised that I didn’t even have my wallet with me. I turned to the driver.
‘My daughter has just died. I want to go home. You’ll be paid. Please drive slowly and carefully.’
I started to weep. He said nothing more until we pulled up at the quayside. It was ten o’clock. There was a slight breeze that hardly disturbed the water in the harbour. I asked the taxi driver to stop outside the red wooden building that housed the coastguard. Hans Lundman had seen the taxi approaching and had come out of the door. He could see from my face that the outcome had not been good.
‘She died,’ I said. ‘Internal bleeding. It was unexpected. We thought she was going to make it. I need to borrow a thousand kronor from you to pay for the taxi.’
‘I’ll put it on my credit card,’ said Lundman, and headed for the taxi.
He’d finished his shift several hours previously. I realised that he had stayed on in the hope of being there when I got back to the quayside. Hans Lundman lived on one of the islands in the southern archipelago.
‘I’ll take you home,’ he said.
‘I don’t have any money at home,’ I said. ‘I’ll have to ask Jansson to take some out of the bank for me.’
‘Who cares about money at a time like this?’ he said.
I always feel at ease when I’m at sea. Hans Lundman’s boat was an old converted fishing vessel that progressed at a stately pace. His work occasionally forced him to hurry, but he never rushed otherwise.
We berthed at the jetty. It was sunny, and warm. Spring had sprung. But I felt devoid of any such feelings.
‘There’s a boat out there at the Sighs,’ I said. ‘Moored there. It’s stolen.’
He understood.
‘We’ll discover it tomorrow,’ he said. ‘It just so happens that I’ll be passing there on patrol tomorrow. Nobody knows who stole it.’
We shook hands.
‘She shouldn’t have died,’ I said.
‘No,’ said Lundman. ‘She really shouldn’t.’
I remained on the jetty and watched him reverse out of the inlet. He raised his hand in farewell, then was gone.
I sat down on the bench. It was much later when I returned to my house, where the front door was standing wide open.
CHAPTER 3
THE OAKS WERE unusually late this year.
I recorded in my logbook that the big oak tree between the boathouse and what used to be my grandparents’ henhouse didn’t start turning green until 25 May. The cluster of oaks around the inlet on the north side of the island – the inlet that for some incomprehensible reason had always been known as the Quarrel – started to come into leaf a few days earlier.
They say that the oaks on these islands were planted by the state at the beginning of the nineteenth century, so that there would be ample timber to make the warships being built in nearby Karlskrona. I remember lightning striking one of the trees when I was a child, and my grandfather sawing down what remained of the trunk. It had been planted in 1802. Grandfather told me that was in the days of Napoleon. I had no idea who Napoleon was at the time, but I realised that it was a very long time ago. Those annual rings had dogged me throughout my life. Beethoven was alive when that oak was still a sapling. The tree was in its prime when my father was born.
As so often out here in the archipelago, summer came gradually, but you could never be certain that it was here to stay. My feeling of loneliness usually decreased as it grew warmer. But that was not the case this year. I just sat there with my anthill, a sharp sword and Sima’s half-empty suitcase.
I often spoke to Agnes on the telephone during this period. She told me that the funeral had taken place in Mogata church. Apart from Agnes and the two girls who lived with her – the ones I had met: Miranda and Aida – the only other person to attend was a very old man who claimed to be a distant relative of Sima’s. He had arrived by taxi, and seemed so frail that Agnes was afraid he would drop dead at any moment. She had not managed to establish just how he was related to Sima. Perhaps he had mistaken her for somebody else? When she showed him a photograph of Sima, he hadn’t been at all sure that he recognised her.
But so what? Agnes had said. The church ought to have been full of people bidding farewell to this young person who had never had an opportunity to discover herself, or explore the world.
The coffin had been adorned with a spray of red roses. A woman from the parish, accompanied by a restless young boy in the organ loft, sang a couple of hymns; Agnes said a few words, and she had asked the vicar not to go on unnecessarily about a conciliatory and omniscient God.
When I heard that the grave would only bear a number, I offered to pay for a headstone. Jansson later delivered a letter from Agnes with a sketch of the stone, how she thought it ought to look. Above Sima’s name and dates, she had drawn a rose.
I rang her the same evening and asked if it shouldn’t be a samurai sword instead. She understood my way of thinking, and said she had considered it herself.
‘But it would cause an uproar,’ she said.
‘What shall I do with her belongings? The sword and the suitcase?’
‘What’s in the suitcase?’
‘Underclothes. A pair of trousers and a jumper. A scruffy map of the Baltic and the Gulf of Finland.’
‘I’ll come and collect it. I’d like to see your house. And above all, I want to see the room where it happened.’
‘I’ve already said that I ought to have gone down to her. I shall always regret not having done so.’
‘I’m not accusing you of anything. I just want to see the place where she began to die.’
Initially she planned to visit me during the last week of May, but something cropped up. She cancelled her visit twice more. The first time Miranda had run away, and the second occasion she was ill. I had put the sword and the case with Sima’s clothes in the room with the anthill. One night I woke up out of a dream in which the ants had engulfed the case and the sword in their hill. I raced downstairs and wrenched open the door. But the ants were still continuing to climb and conquer the dining table and the white tablecloth.
I moved Sima’s belongings to the boathouse.
Jansson later told me that the coastguards had found a stolen motorboat moored in the Sighs. Hans Lundman was as good as his word.
‘One of these days they’ll be all over us,’ said Jansson menacingly.
‘Who will?’
‘These gangsters. They’re everywhere. What can you do to defend yourself? Jump into your boat and sail out to sea?’
‘What would they want to come here for? What is there around here worth stealing?’
‘The very thought makes me worry about my blood pressure.’
I fetched the monitor from the boathouse. Jansson lay down on the bench. I let him rest for five minutes then strapped up his arm.
‘It’s excellent. 140 over 80.’
‘I think you’re wrong.’
‘In that case I think you should find yourself another doctor.’
I returned to the boathouse and stayed there in the darkness until I heard him backing away from the jetty.
I spent the days before the oak trees started to turn green sorting out my boat at last. When I again managed to remove the heavy tarpaulin, which took considerable effort, I found a dead squirrel beneath the keelson. I was surprised, as I had never seen a squirrel out here on the island, and
never heard it claimed that there were any.
The boat was in much worse condition than I had feared. After two days assessing what needed to be done I was ready to give up even before I’d started. Nevertheless, the following day I began scraping off all the old, flaky paint on the rest of the hull. I phoned Hans Lundman and asked him for advice. He promised to call on me one of these days. It was slow going. I wasn’t used to this kind of exertion, my only regular activities being a morning bath and writing up my logbook.
The same day that I again started scraping off the paint, I dug out the logbook I’d kept during my very first year out here on the island. I looked up today’s date. To my astonishment I read: ‘Yesterday I drank myself silly.’ That was all. I now remembered it happening, but very vaguely and certainly not why. The previous day I had recorded that I’d repaired a downpipe. The following day I had laid out my nets and caught seven flounders and three perch.
I put the logbook away. It was evening now. The apple tree was in blossom. I could picture Grandma sitting on the bench beside it, a shimmering figure that melted into the background, the tree trunk, the rocks, the thorn thicket.
The following day Jansson delivered letters from both Harriet and Louise. I had eventually brought myself to tell them about the girl who had come to my island, and her death. I read Harriet’s first; as always, it was very short. She wrote that she was too tired to write a proper letter. I read it, and frowned. It was difficult to read her handwriting, much more so than before. The words seemed to be writhing in pain on the page. And to make matters worse, the content was bewildering. She wrote that she was better, but felt worse. She made no mention of Sima’s death.
I put the letter to one side. The cat jumped up on to the table. I sometimes envy animals that don’t have the worry of disturbing mail. Was Harriet befuddled by painkillers when she wrote the letter? I was worried, picked up the telephone and rang her. If she was drifting into the very last phase of her life, I wanted to know about it. I let it ring for ages, but there was no answer. I tried her mobile number. Nothing. I left a message and asked her to return the call.
Then I opened the letter from Louise. It was about the remarkable cave system in Lascaux in the west of France, where in 1940 some boys stumbled upon cave paintings 17,000 years old. Some of the animals depicted on the rock walls were four metres high. Now, she wrote, ‘These ancient works of art are under threat of being ruined because some madmen have installed air conditioning in the passages because the American tourists cannot handle the temperature! But freezing temperatures are essential if these cave paintings are to survive. The rock walls have been attacked by a strain of mould that is difficult to deal with. If nothing is done, if the whole world fails to unite in defence of this, the most ancient art museum we possess will disappear.’
She intended to act. I assumed that she would write to every politician in Europe, and I felt proud. I had a daughter who was prepared to man the barricades.
The letter had been written in short bursts on several occasions. Both the handwriting and pen used varied. In between serious and agitated paragraphs, she had interposed notes about mundane happenings. She had sprained her foot while fetching water. Giaconelli had been ill. They had suspected pneumonia, but now he was on the mend. She sympathised with the sorrow I felt at the death of Sima.
‘I’ll be coming to visit you shortly,’ she concluded. ‘I want to see this island where you’ve been hiding yourself away all these years. I sometimes used to dream that I had a father who was just as frighteningly handsome as Caravaggio. That is not something anybody could accuse you of being. But still, you can no longer hide from me. I want to get to know you, I want my inheritance, I want you to explain to me all the things that I still don’t understand.’
Not a word about Harriet. Didn’t she care about her mother, who was busy dying?
I tried Harriet’s numbers again, but still no answer. I called Louise’s mobile, but no answer there either. I climbed the hill behind the house. It was a beautiful early-summer day. Not really warm yet, but the islands had begun to turn green. In the distance I could see one of the year’s first sailing boats on its way to somewhere unknown from a home harbour that was also unknown. I suddenly felt an urge to drag myself away from this island. I had spent so much of my life wandering back and forth between the jetty and the house.
I just wanted to get away. When Harriet appeared out there on the ice with her walker, she shattered the curse that I’d allowed to imprison me here, as if in a cage. I realised that the twelve years I had lived on the island had been wasted, like a liquid that had drained out of a cracked container. There was no going back, no starting again.
I walked round the island. There was a pungent smell of sea and soil. Lively oystercatchers were scurrying about at the water’s edge, pecking away with their red beaks. I felt as if I were walking round a prison yard a few days before I was due to emerge through the front gates and become a free man again. But would I do that? Where could I go to? What kind of a life would be in store for me?
I sat down under one of the oaks in the Quarrel. It dawned on me that I was in a hurry. There was no time to waste.
That evening I rowed out to Starrudden. The sea bottom was smooth there. I laid out a flounder net, but didn’t have much hope of catching anything – maybe the odd flounder or a perch that would be appreciated by the cat. The net would be clogged up by the sticky algae that now proliferates in the Baltic.
Perhaps this sea stretching out before me on these beautiful evenings is in fact slowly deteriorating into a marsh?
Later that evening I did something I shall never be able to understand. I fetched a spade, and opened up my dog’s grave. I dug up the whole cadaver. Maggots had already eaten away the mucous membranes around its mouth, eyes and ears, and opened up its stomach. There was a white clump of them clustered around its anus. I put down the spade, and fetched the cat that was fast asleep on the kitchen sofa. I carried her to the grave and set her down next to the dead dog. She jumped high into the air, as if she’d been bitten by an adder, and ran away as far as the corner of the house, where she paused, wondering whether to continue her flight. I gathered a handful of the fat maggots and wondered whether I ought to eat them – or would the nausea be too much for me? Then I threw them back on to the dog’s body, and filled in the grave as fast as I could.
It made no sense. Was I preparing the way for opening up a similar grave inside myself? In order to summon up enough courage to face in cold blood all the things I’d been burdened with for so long?
I spent ages scrubbing my hands under the kitchen taps. I felt sick at what I’d done.
At about eleven I phoned Harriet and Louise again. Still no answer.
Early the next morning I took in the net. There were two thin flounders and a dead perch. As I had feared, the net was clogged up with mud and algae. It took me over an hour to get it somewhere near clean and hang it up on the boathouse wall. I was glad that my grandfather hadn’t lived to see the sea he loved being choked to death. Then I went back to scraping the boat. I was working half naked and tried to make peace with my cat, who was wary after the previous night’s meeting with the dead dog. She wasn’t interested in the flounders, but took the perch to a hollow in the rocks and chewed away.
At ten o’clock I went in and phoned again. Still no answer. There wouldn’t be any postal delivery today either. There was nothing I could do.
I boiled a couple of eggs for lunch and leafed through an old brochure advertising paints suitable for a wooden boat. The brochure was eight years old.
After the meal I lay down on the kitchen sofa for a rest. I was worn out and soon fell asleep.
It was almost one o’clock when I was woken up with a start. Through the open kitchen window I could hear the sound of an old compression-ignition engine. It sounded like Jansson’s boat, but he wasn’t due today. I got up, stuck my feet into my cut-down wellington boots and went outside. The noise was getting loud
er. I had no doubt now that it was Jansson’s boat. It makes an uneven noise because the exhaust pipe sometimes dips down under the surface of the water. I went down to the jetty to wait. The prow eventually appeared from behind the rocks furthest away. I was surprised to note that he was only travelling at half-throttle, and the boat was moving very slowly.
Then I understood why. Jansson was towing another craft, an old cow ferry tied to the stern of his boat. When I was a child I had watched ferries like this one taking cows to islands with summer pasture. I hadn’t seen a single ferry like this during all the twelve years I’d lived on the island.
On the deck of the cow ferry was Louise’s caravan. She was standing in the open door, exactly as I remembered seeing her the first time I met her. Then I noticed another person standing by the rail. It was Harriet, with her walker.
If it had been possible, I’d have jumped into the water and swum away. But there was no escape. Jansson slowed down and untied the tow rope, giving the ferry a push to ensure that it glided in towards the shallowest part of the inlet. I stood there as if paralysed, watching it beach itself. Jansson moored his boat at the jetty.
‘I never thought I’d have a use for this old ferry again. The last time I had it out was to take a couple of horses to Rökskär. But that must have been twenty-five years ago, if not more,’ he said.
‘You could have phoned,’ I said. ‘You could have warned me.’
Jansson looked surprised.
‘I thought you knew they were coming. Louise said you were expecting them. We’ll be able to tow the caravan up with your tractor. It’s a good job it’s high tide, otherwise we’d have had to pull it through the water.’
This explained why nobody had answered my telephone calls. Louise helped Harriet ashore with her walker. I noticed that Harriet was even thinner and much weaker now than when I’d left them so abruptly in the caravan.
I clambered down on to the shore. Louise was holding Harriet by the arm.
‘It’s pretty here,’ said Louise. ‘I prefer the forest. But it’s pretty.’