Depths (20 page)

At some point he was woken by a movement during the night.

The man lying by his side got quietly to his knees. The embers in the hearth had almost gone out, and the chill had already started to take over the room. He heard the man groping his way to the bunk, a few faint whispers, then silence, only their breathing.

He stayed awake until the man made his way quietly back to his place on the floor. His jealousy started rising from out of the depths and reached the point where he knew it was ready to burst to the surface.

There was a change in the weather. It was warmer during the day and the snow started to melt, but the nights were still cold. Every morning for a week he took Stefan Dorflinger with him on to the ice. It developed into a peculiar sort of game, with him drawing up an imaginary line a hundred metres from where he had prepared the trapdoor in the ice. He taught the deserter how to drill, explained the principles of depth sounding and let him drop the lead down to the seabed and do the calculations. Tobiasson-Svartman played the role of magician who would occasionally predict an accurate measurement even before the lead had reached the bottom.

Nothing is as magical as exact knowledge, he thought. The man who had run away from his German naval ship had found a strange magician in the Swedish winter landscape. A man who can see through the ice, who can measure depths, not by using a sounding lead but by using his magical powers.

The deserter became calmer as the days went by. Every morning he would gaze out to sea, but when there was no sign of a ship he seemed to forget all about being tracked down.

He would occasionally talk about his life. Tobiasson-Svartman asked his questions diplomatically, always politely, never intrusive. He soon formed his opinion of the deserter's character. Dorflinger was a limited young man, with no knowledge, no interests. His greatest resource was his fear, the fear that had driven him to try to row away to freedom.

They spent the mornings out on the ice. They drilled and measured. Now and then they could see Sara Fredrika on the rocks on Halsskär.

In the afternoons he left them on their own. Every evening he told Sara Fredrika about the sailor's progress, about his increasing trust.

'I'll take him with me when I leave,' he said. 'I have colleagues who hate the German military, they will help him. I'll take him with me, look after him. Then I'll come back here and fetch you.'

Her response was always the same.

'I don't believe it. Not until I see you on the ice.'

'I'll leave you my telescope,' he said. 'That will help you to see me sooner. It will make your wait shorter.'

He spent an hour every afternoon writing up his diary. He wrote about the deserter. On 17 February he wrote:

The day is approaching when I can do my duty and capture the German deserter who has fled to Sweden and is in hiding here. One can well ask oneself if he has made up the whole story. Perhaps he has been placed here as the furthest outpost in a network of spies preparing for a German attack on Sweden. Since I think he could well resist, I am planning for all possible circumstances.

He hid his diary, wrapped up in a waterproof pouch, in a clump of hawthorn bushes next to the path to the inlet.

It seemed to him that he was living in many different worlds at the same time. Each one of them was equally true.

The day was approaching. He was waiting for a change in the weather. He was waiting for a chilly morning with fog.

On 19 February, at about nine in the morning, he trained his telescope on the two hunters, father and son, who were returning to the inner archipelago over the ice. They passed to the south of Halsskär and had evidently had plenty of success. They were pulling a net behind them over the ice, full of dead birds.

Then he aimed his telescope out to sea. He sensed that a change of weather was on the way. The sun was hidden behind thick cloud and the temperature was falling. Everything suggested that they would have fog for the next few days. That day he had asked Dorflinger to drill some holes and take some measurements without supervision.

He scrutinised the man on the ice, hunched over the drill. Sara Fredrika came up to him. She had spent the morning catching cod with lines through several holes in the ice on the west side of the skerry. He suspected that she had been watching him before making her presence known.

'Why does one man watch another through a telescope?'

I once saw you naked, he thought. Without a telescope. I watched you getting washed, I saw your body. I have never forgotten that. I might forget
you
eventually, but I'll never forget your body.

'I'm just checking to make sure he's doing it right.' She grabbed hold of his arm. 'I can't stay here.' 'What would have happened if I hadn't come?' 'I'd have asked him to take me with him.' 'Would you have gone with a man who was doomed o die?'

'I didn't know that then.'

'No,' he said. 'You couldn't have known that.'

When she went back to the cottage he followed her at safe distance to make sure she went inside.

Dorflinger continued drilling the pointless holes in the ce.

Tobiasson-Svartman looked for a sufficiently big stone o act as a weight and kicked it on to the ice. It had a ounded bottom and slid along without him needing to ut much effort into it. Then he collected some sticks nd branches, broke them into pieces and left them next o the upturned boat.

The temperature went on falling. He could see the unters again. He watched them on their way back to and until they were no longer visible.

The next day the island was covered in fog.

Tobiasson-Svartman waited until the others were awake.

'I'm going out now,' he said. 'You can follow me in an hour. Wait to see if the fog lifts.'

'I won't get lost,' Dorflinger said.

'I'll leave a trail from the inlet. It's easy to get overconfident when it's foggy. Shout as you are walking over the ice, and I can put you right if you are off-course.'

He did not wait for a response. He strapped on his rucksack with the ice drill sticking out and set off. When he stepped on to the ice he left a trail of sticks marking the way to the holes that had been drilled. The fog was very thick. He kicked the stone a few metres ahead and took a step back, then another. The stone was lost in the fog. Visibility was four metres at most.

He thought he could hear a foghorn in the distance. He listened, but there was no second foghorn. He left his trail of sticks until he came to the place where he had bored the first holes at the corners of a square. He tried the ice with his foot. It creaked. He had kept the holes open by clearing away any ice and snow in them every other day or so. Now he bored ten more holes. He was dripping with sweat by the time he had finished. When he put his foot on the ice and pressed lightly, it cracked along all four sides. He got down on his knees and spread loose snow over the cracks, making them invisible.

It suddenly struck him that Sara Fredrika might accompany the deserter, being afraid that he could get lost. That would mean he would be forced to postpone what he planned to do. He hoped she would not appear. Changing plans would be a defeat.

He opened his rucksack and took out a piece of rope he had found in Sara Fredrika's dinghy. He tied it round the stone, which he then kicked into the fog.

He took a few deep breaths and measured his pulse. It was a little higher than normal, eighty-two beats per minute. He took off his gloves and held his hands out in front of him. His fingers were not shaking. He was a stranger, somebody who was himself, but at the same time somebody else.

Then he heard the crunch of footsteps on the ice. Dorflinger appeared out of the fog. He was alone. Tobiasson-Svartman smiled.

It was their last conversation and it was very short.

Tobiasson-Svartman had positioned himself so that the hole in the ice was between him and Dorflinger.

'You know the fate lying in wait for a deserter,' he said. 'They'll hang you from a tree or a lamp-post. Or they'll shoot you or even behead you. They'll hang a plaque round your neck.
Deserter.
And there will be no shortage of volunteers willing to pull the rope tight or to press the trigger. A deserter is a man who stole other people's lives.'

He took a step back. Dorflinger took a pace forward. He stepped on to the square, the ice gave way and he fell into the water. Tobiasson-Svartman raised his sounding lead and hit him hard on the back of his head. To his surprise, it made a bloodstained dent in the brass. Then he saw that Dorflinger was still alive. His hands were grasping at the edge of the ice in an attempt to stay above water. He stared at Tobiasson-Svartman with gaping eyes.

Tobiasson-Svartman took one of the ice prods hanging round his neck and stabbed at Dorflinger's eyes. They must stop seeing, he must destroy what they have seen.

Dorflinger screamed just once, a sound like one coming from a little child. Then he was silent.

Tobiasson-Svartman kicked the stone to the edge of the hole and fastened the rope round the waist of the man in the hole. The water was cold, the broken ice covered in sticky blood. He tried not to look at the man's face, the mutilated eyes. When he pushed the stone into the water the body sank immediately and vanished.

He thought of the burial of Karl-Heinz Richter.

Now Herr Richter and Herr Dorflinger would meet in the cemetery 160 metres under water. Two men with no eyes, two men who spent five or six minutes sinking to the bottom of the sea.

He listened. Not a sound. He wiped his sounding lead clean and scraped away the blood that had spurted on to the ice.

When everything was clean around the hole, it dawned on him what he had done. For the whole of his life he had been afraid of death, of dead people. Now he had killed a man, not in a war, not obeying an order, not in self-defence. He had acted in cold blood, with malice aforethought, without hesitation or regret.

He looked at the hole in the ice, the grave opening. Down there in the depths, he thought, two people are sinking to the bottom of the sea. One is a German deserter. I killed him because he got in my way. But there is another person sinking with an invisible weight tied round his neck.

Me. The person I was. Or possibly the person I have at last discovered that I am. He felt dizzy. So as not to fall over, he sat down on the ice. His heart was pounding, he had difficulty in breathing. He stared at the hole and had a powerful feeling that Stefan Dorflinger was about to climb out of the ice-cold water.

What have I done? he thought, horrified. What is happening to me? There was no answer. The panic taking possession of him was incapable of words.

He stood up and prepared to throw himself into the water. But Kristina Tacker appeared by his side and said: 'It's not you who's going to die. It's your enemies who die. Lieutenant Jakobsson, who despised you, he dropped dead. You are alive and the others die. Never forget that I love you.'

Then she was gone.

Love is unfathomable, he thought. Unfathomable, but perhaps invincible.

He stayed for half an hour by the hole in the ice, then walked slowly back to the skerry that was still shrouded in fog. Every time he saw a piece of wood marking out the path, he bent down and threw it as far as he could, one to the left, the next to the right.

The hole would soon freeze over again. There was no longer a path behind him.

There was nothing behind him.

It would not be difficult to explain to Sara Fredrika what had happened. The deserter quite simply could no longer cope. There were people who tried to get the better of death by taking their own lives. That was nothing special, it often happened, particularly in wartime. When living in the proximity of death, it was usual for people not only to hang on to life but also to take out an advance on death.

As he came to the skerry he threw the last bit of wood out into the fog.

She was gutting cod, and now and then a bass, up by the cottage. She knew right away that something had happened. She dropped her knife and sat down, not on the stool behind her but on the ground.

'Tell me,' she said. 'Don't beat about the bush, tell me now.'

'There's been an accident.'

'Is he dead?'

'Yes, he's dead.'

'Did the ice give way?'

'He must have drilled holes so as to create a potential trapdoor when he was alone on the ice. He stepped on the weakened patch and just disappeared.'

She shook her head.

'He took his own life,' Tobiasson-Svartman said. 'I was taken completely by surprise. He didn't say a word. He just appeared out of the fog, walked up to where he must have drilled the holes and stepped straight on to it. He didn't hesitate. He can only have wanted to die.'

'No. He didn't want to die. He wanted to live.'

She was adamant. She bit hard on her hair. He had the impression that she was in a hole in the ice, hanging on by her own hair.

'He was scared. He was surrounded by fog, but even so he was alert to pursuers. When he was asleep, he tossed and turned and looked to see if there was somebody behind him. There's a limit to what can be endured by a person who is being hunted down even in his dreams.'

'He didn't want to die.'

She put out a hand to the cottage wall and stood up. When he tried to help her she pushed him away. She flopped down on to the stool. The fog had started to lift. The sun glinted on the layer of ice covering the roof ridge.

'I don't understand this,' she said. 'He wanted to live. Didn't you see his eyes? I've never seen anything like them.'

'They were full of fear.'

'They were
self-contained.
He had eyes that made sense, that could see there was something you could reach if only you could get away from what was causing you pain.'

'You must have been mistaken. He was so scared that, in the end, he couldn't deal with it. He had evidently thought it all out, drilled the holes in the right places, filled his pockets with stones. He stepped into the water just as you would step on to the dance floor, or into a warm room out of a cold one. He did what he wanted to do. When he stepped into the water, he wasn't frightened any more.'

'I thought I heard a scream.'

'It must have been a bird crying through the fog.'

The ice on the roof had started dripping. He stood up, stretched his legs and thought that Dorflinger had never really existed: he was just a figment of the imagination.

'Why didn't he kill himself when he first drilled the holes to create the trapdoor in the ice? Why did he wait?'

'If you've decided you're going to die, there's no hurry. Perhaps he wanted to be properly prepared.'

'When he touched me he wasn't scared. There was no hint of suicide in his hands.'

He winced when she mentioned the sailor's hand. He tried not to think about it. I should tell her the truth, he thought. That I killed him, and that now she has to make up her mind: stay here or go away with me.

'He had accepted the fact that he could not go on,' he said. 'He had seen the war, he had run away from it and he was being eaten up inside by his pursuers. I might well have done the same in his situation.'

She ran away down the path to the inlet. He followed slowly after.

She was sitting on the upturned boat, crying.

He felt sorry for her, but mostly he felt sorry for himself. Did she not understand? She was the one who had forced him to kill the deserter because she had put her cottage and her bed at his disposal.

The clouds had dispersed, and the fog. He returned to the cottage and sat down to wait.

She took her time. But when she did come, it was to him, and to nobody else.