A Treacherous Paradise (8 page)

Captain Svartman was positively inclined towards their marriage. But as they left Algiers that same evening their wedding night was ruined by the fact that the prearranged timetable of duties came into operation, and Lundberg had to take his turn as lookout. There was no question of Captain Svartman giving him the evening off – his benevolence didn’t stretch that far. And it would never have occurred to Lundmark to ask for special treatment.

So Hanna had become a wife, Fru Lundmark. Both bride and bridegroom were shy and insecure. The solidly built third mate had been transformed into a little child, scared stiff of causing injury or offence. They embraced cautiously, as they barely knew each other yet. Their lovemaking was low-key, not yet uninhibited passion.

When they passed through the Suez Canal, they both happened to be off duty at the same time – an infrequent occurrence. They stood by the ship’s rail, contemplating the beaches, the tall palm trees, the camels slowly waddling along, the naked children diving into the waters of the canal.

What Hanna found hardest to get used to was sleeping with him lying by her side. Sleeping alongside a brother or sister or Berta had been one thing: but now she was sharing a bed with a big, heavy man who often tossed and turned and woke her up.

She felt both secure and restless in the situation she now found herself in, together with him; but at the same time she also felt an intense longing to be back in the life she had led in that remote river valley in the mountains.

At night, after making love, they would talk to each other in the dark, always in whispers as the bulkheads were thin and they were surrounded by other people.

In the darkness and the warmth, he now confided in her that he hoped one day to become the captain of his own ship.

‘I’ll achieve that if you help me,’ he said. ‘Now that I have you by my side, I think it’s possible.’

She took his hand. Thought about what he had said. And suddenly felt an overwhelming desire to be able to tell Elin about everything that was happening in her life.

When Elin had said that there was no other option, Hanna had to go to the coast, she had been right. But what would she think now about the voyage Hanna was now embarked upon?

I must write to her, Hanna thought. One day Elin will receive a letter. I’ll enclose a copy of our wedding photo. She must see the man I’ve married.

SHE WAS AROUSED
from her memories by the question that still remained unanswered, a bridge between the past and where she found herself now: did she know who she was? Two months after she had left Sundsvall, she became Lundmark’s wife, and was now waiting for him to be buried.

She had no answer. Everything was silent around her and inside her. She could not answer the question of who she was or who she had become.

The ship was motionless in the steaming heat. The pressure in the steam boilers was kept low while they waited for the burial at sea to take place. Once that was over, the engine-room telegraph would give the command ‘Full steam ahead!’, and the stokers would once again start shovelling coal into the firebox.

But just now the soot-covered men from the engine room had come up on deck and washed away the worst of the dirt. There was only one man left down below to make sure that nothing caught on fire, or that one of the boilers didn’t go out.

Captain Svartman went in person to collect Hanna. He knocked carefully on the door of the cabin she had shared with her dead husband. Now she will have to live there alone, Svartman thought. What shall I do if she is scared of the loneliness? What shall I do with a widow on board?

He opened the door. She was sitting on the edge of the bunk, staring at her hands. In her thoughts she had just been reminding herself of the long journey that had begun in a remote river valley. She had met a man, they had become a couple, but now he was gone.

They had been together for two months. Then the fever that had suddenly struck him down after he had gone ashore in Sudan had killed him. But she was still there. And now he was going to be buried.

When she got up from the bunk she had the feeling that she was on her way to her own funeral. Or perhaps to her execution? Yet again she found herself alone, but now in a much worse situation than ever before. Why should she travel to the other side of the world when the man who had belonged to her no longer existed? Who was she accompanying now? Apart from Captain Svartman, on the way to the starboard side of the ship, the one facing land, the African coast hidden away in the sunny haze and out of sight even with the aid of a telescope?

There was a lookout on the bridge, an able seaman, one of the younger ones. But everyone else had assembled by the side of the soft coffin made out of sailcloth and standing on two trestles next to the rail. The grey cloth was wrapped up in a Swedish flag. It was stained and frayed. Hanna suspected it was the only flag on board. Captain Svartman was not the kind of person who made plans for what to do if one of his crew were to die. Only somebody who behaved rashly and broke his rules could get into trouble. Like the third mate now lying there on the trestles, and soon to be tipped overboard into the sea.

Hanna looked at the men who were standing in a semicircle. None of them could bring themselves to look her in the eye. Death was embarrassing, it made them self-conscious and insecure.

She looked up at the sky, and the sun that was broiling hot even though it was so early in the morning. In her thoughts she suddenly found herself back in the sleigh, behind Forsman’s broad back.

Then it was the cold, she thought. Now it’s the heat. But in a way they are the same.

And the movement. Then it was a sleigh, now it was a ship slowly, almost imperceptibly, swaying in the swell.

Captain Svartman was dressed in his uniform and with white gloves: in his hand was the book with instructions for how to conduct a burial at sea. He read in a monotonous but loud voice. He had no fears when it came to carrying out his duties as captain.

Hanna suspected that more than anything else Svartman was angry because somebody had ignored his exhortations and gone ashore, even though he must have been aware of the danger he was exposing himself to.

The man who was about to be buried had died completely unnecessarily. A man who had been stupid and not listened to what Captain Svartman had to say to him.

Hanna had the feeling that Svartman was not simply mourning the loss of his third mate. He also felt that he’d been let down.

THE CEREMONY WAS
short. Captain Svartman did not deviate from the set text, added nothing personal. He fell silent when he came to the end of the order of service and nodded to his second mate, who had a good singing voice and launched into a hymn. Oddly enough he had chosen a Christmas hymn.

Shine over sea and shore, star in the distance.

The rest of the crew joined in, mumbling, with here and there a jarring false note. Hanna glanced furtively at them. Some were not singing at all.

Which ones were thinking about the man who had died? Some were, no doubt. Others, perhaps most of them, were just grateful that they were still alive.

When the hymn was over Captain Svartman nodded at Hanna, inviting her to step forward. He had explained to her that there were not really any rules or traditions with regard to what a widow in the crew should do as a final farewell to her husband during a burial at sea.

‘Place your hand on the sailcloth,’ he had suggested. ‘As we don’t have any flowers on board, your hand can be the symbol of a final farewell.’

He could have sacrificed one of his potted plants, she thought. Broken off one of the flowers and given it to me. But he didn’t.

She did as he had suggested, and placed her right hand on the flag. Tried to conjure up Lundmark in her mind’s eye. But although he had only been dead for a few days, it seemed that she was already having difficulty in recreating his face.

Death is like a fog, she thought, which slowly envelops the person who is passing away.

She took a pace backwards, Captain Svartman nodded again, four able seamen stepped forward, lifted up the plank and tipped the dead body overboard. Captain Svartman had picked his strongest sailors because the sailcloth contained not only a dead body but also several sinkers weighing many kilos, in order to make sure that the cloth coffin really did sink to the bottom of the sea.

1,935 metres. Her husband was going to have a much deeper grave than the deepest grave on land. It would take almost thirty minutes for the dead body to reach the bottom. Halvorsen had told her that objects sink very slowly at great depths.

The sea burial was over, the crew returned to their work. Only a few minutes later there was a clattering noise in the engine room. The ship was moving again, the interval was over.

Hanna remained standing by the rail. There was no longer anything to be seen in the water. She turned away and went straight to the galley where the mess-room boy had begun preparing lunch. She put on her apron – and then discovered that a deckhand had been sent to help out in the kitchen.

‘Even though my husband is dead, I shall do my job,’ she said.

She didn’t wait for a reply but climbed down the ladder to the storeroom to fetch the potatoes that needed to be boiled for the meals that still remained to be served that day.

The potatoes were duly peeled. She emptied the buckets of peel overboard and went back into the galley. Halvorsen was busy repairing a cupboard with racks for saucepans and frying pans. Her husband’s best friend on board. He has also lost a companion, she thought. He’s also wondering why the third mate took it into his head to go ashore on that unhappy occasion.

She continued her work with the mess-room boy and the deckhand. But when Halvorsen had finished what he was doing he tapped her on the shoulder and beckoned her to follow him out. She asked the mess-room boy to keep an eye on her saucepans, and followed after him.

He was looking down at the deck when he spoke to her, never looked her in the eye.

‘What are you going to do now?’ he asked.

That was a question she’d had neither the strength nor the courage to ask herself. What
could
she do? What choice did she have?

She was honest with him, and said she didn’t know.

‘I’ll help you,’ he said. ‘Just so that you know. If I can.’

Halvorsen didn’t wait for a response, but turned on his heel and headed towards the bows. She thought about what he had said. And gathered that her husband had asked him to help her in his desperation when he realized how ill he was.

It was Lundmark speaking with Halvorsen’s voice. A voice from the deep. A voice that was very good at imitating others.

THEY BERTHED IN
an African town by the name of Lourenço Marques. The town was small and sparsely populated, reminiscent of Algiers perhaps, with white-fronted houses climbing up a slope. At the top of the hill was a white hotel. The name of the town was impossible to pronounce, so the crew called it Loco – a word she recognized from her Portuguese dictionary, meaning ‘mad’.

Halvorsen had been there before. He urged Hanna not to sleep with the porthole open as there were mosquitoes that carried the dreaded malaria. And she should never wear anything with short sleeves, even though the evenings were warm.

He offered to go ashore with her. They could go for a walk through the town, perhaps stop at one of the countless small restaurants and eat the grilled fish, the prawns deep-fried in oil, or the lobster that was the best in the world.

But she declined. She wasn’t yet ready to go anywhere with another man, even if Halvorsen had the best of intentions. She remained on board and thought about the fact that in two days’ time they would set sail due east over the big ocean that separated the African continent from Australia.

One night as they were lying in their cramped bunk, whispering, Lundmark had told her that sometimes ships heading for Australia came across icebergs. Although they were sailing on warm seas, some of these icebergs – as big as palaces built of marble – could drift a long way north before they were completely melted by the heat. Captain Svartman had told him that, and everything Captain Svartman said was true.

She stood by the ship’s rail, watching African porters dressed in rags carrying provisions on board supervised by Captain Svartman. A white man, bearded and tanned, wearing a khaki suit, was in charge of the porters. It seemed to Hanna that the movements of his hands gave the impression that he was lashing their shoulders with an invisible whip. The porters were thin, frightened. Now and again she would meet their scared, shifty eyes.

Sometimes she thought she could also see something different: fury, perhaps hatred. But she couldn’t be sure.

The white man’s voice was shrill, as if he hated what he was doing, or just wanted it to come to an end as quickly as possible.

Sometimes when the gangplank was not being used she thought that despite everything she might cross over it, and set foot on the African continent one more time.

But she never did. The rail continued to be her unsurmountable border.

The first night she lay awake in the heat. Halvorsen had said that she could leave the porthole open as long as she covered it carefully with a thin cotton cloth. He had given her a piece of suitable material that he had bought for her while he was ashore.

Now she lay there in the dark, listening to the cicadas, and beyond them occasional drumbeats and something that might have been a song, or perhaps the cry of a nocturnal bird.

The static heat was so stifling that she got dressed and went out on deck. A sailor was guarding the gangplank, which was blocked at night by a thick rope. She went forward to the bows of the ship and sat down on a capstan.

All around her the ship was in darkness, apart from the hurricane lamp by the gangplank. A fire was burning down below on the quay. Men were sitting around it, their faces lit up by the flames. She shuddered. She didn’t know why. Perhaps she was afraid, perhaps it was all the unaddressed sorrow that had been accumulating inside her.