Depths (22 page)

Three days later he collected a letter from Skeppsholmen.

The board stated their view in great detail that Commander Lars Svartman had always carried out his duties with the utmost care and competence. The board therefore considered it appropriate that Svartman should be granted the leave he had requested. The precise date of his return to duty would be established in due course.

After his visit to Skeppsholmen he went for a long walk in Djurgården. He wiped the snow off one of the benches as far out on the promontory as you could get at Blockhusudden. A tug was labouring to keep the channel free of ice.

He thought about Kristina Tacker and the child that was on its way, but most of all he thought about the woman he had decided never to see again.

He remained sitting on the bench until he started to feel cold. The tug was still carving its passage to the sea. The ice was dirty, grey. He worked out the distance to the stern of the tug. When it reached the hundred-metre mark, he stood up and started to walk back towards the city centre.

He stopped at the entrance to Handelsbanken in Kungsträdgården. He was surprised not to feel uneasy about his plan to make inroads into his capital. Hitherto he had always regarded himself as being thrifty, on the borderline of being miserly. Now he felt the need to start squandering money.

He entered the bank. The man who looked after his financial affairs, Håkansson, was engaged. He was received by a clerk and invited to wait.

He observed the people moving around inside the bank. They seemed to be deep down under the surface of the sea, with none of the noise they made rising to the surface. He held his breath for twenty seconds and allowed himself to sink down to the bottom of the bank. I'm playing, he thought. I'm playing with other people's depths.

Håkansson had flickering eyes and sweaty hands. Tobiasson-Svartman followed him up some stairs to a room whose door closed silently behind them.

'The war is worrying, of course,' said Håkansson. 'But thus far the stock exchange has reacted favourably to all the gunfire. Nothing seems to inspire the market more than the outbreak of war. The snag, of course, is that the market can be capricious. However, your shares are stable at the present time.'

'I need to turn some of those shares into cash.'

'I see. And what figure do you have in mind, Commander Svartman?'

I do not have a double-barrelled name here either, he thought. As far as the bank is concerned I am simply Lars Svartman, without the protection that my mother's surname gives me.

Annoyed, he said: 'Might I point out that my surname is Tobiasson-Svartman? It is several years now since I changed my name.'

Håkansson looked at him in surprise. Then he started leafing through his papers.

'I apologise for the fact that both the bank and I had overlooked your change of name. I shall put that right immediately.'

'Cash,' Tobiasson-Svartman said. 'Ten thousand kronor.'

Håkansson was surprised again. 'That's a lot of money. It means that quite a lot of shares will have to be sold.'

'I realise that.'

Håkansson thought for a moment. 'I would suggest in that case that we offload some forestry shares. When do you need access to the money?'

'Within a week.'

'And how would you like the money?'

'Hundreds, fifties, tens and fives. An equal amount of each denomination.'

Håkansson made a note. 'Shall we say Wednesday next week?'

'That will suit me fine.'

Tobiasson-Svartman left the bank. It is like getting drunk, he thought. Deciding to squander money. To be not like my father, all that damned saving all the time.

He went to Kungsträdgården and watched the skaters on the outdoor rink. An elderly man in shabby clothes came up to him, begging. Tobiasson-Svartman dismissed him curtly. Then changed his mind and hurried after him. The man reacted as if he were about to be attacked. Tobiasson-Svartman gave him a one-krona coin and did not wait to be thanked.

That evening they talked about the mission to come. The silence in the room rose and fell. He closed the brass doors in the tiled stove with the poker. The room grew darker.

'I'm always afraid when you go away,' she said.

A mission can always be dangerous, he thought. Especially this time, when there is no mission.

'There's no reason for you to be afraid,' he said. 'There might have been if we were involved in the war. But we're not.'

'The mines, all those terrible explosions. Ships sinking in only a few seconds.'

'I shall be a long way away from the war. My job is to make sure that as few ships as possible are affected by the catastrophe.'

'What exactly are you doing?'

'I'm preserving a secret. And creating new secrets. I'm guarding the door.'

'What door?'

'The invisible door between what a few people know and what others ought not to know.'

She was about to ask another question, but he raised his hand. 'I've already said too much. Now I'd like you to go to bed. By tomorrow you'll have forgotten everything I've said.'

'Is that an order?' she asked with a smile.

'Yes,' he said. 'That's an order.'

It is even an order that is secret.

March turned into one long wait. On several occasions he went to Naval Headquarters without being able to get an explanation for why it was taking so long for written confirmation of the length of his leave to come through. Lieutenant Berg was never in his office. Adjutant Jakobsson had also disappeared. Nobody could tell him anything. But everybody insisted that nothing had happened to change the situation. It was simply a matter of excess bureaucracy as a result of the war.

One cold, clear evening at the end of March he left his flat in Wallingatan, after saying goodbye to his wife, who was not feeling well. He walked to the top of Observatoriekullen and studied the night sky.

Once a year, usually on a clear winter's night, he would make a pilgrimage to the stars. When he was a young cadet he had studied the star charts and read several astronomical textbooks.

He stood next to the dark observatory building and gazed up at the stars.

It seemed to him that the clear night sky and the sea were similar, like diffuse and not altogether reliable reflections of each other. The Milky Way was an archipelago, like a string of islands off the coast up there in space. The stars gleamed like lanterns, and he thought he could discern both green and red lights and all the time he was searching for navigable channels, routes between the stars where the biggest of naval vessels would be able to proceed without the risk of running aground. It was a game involving charts that did not exist. There were no ships sailing through space, no shallows between the stars.

But in space there were bottomless depths. Perhaps what he was really looking for in the sea was an entrance into another world, a space hidden far down below the surface where undiscovered fishes swam along their secret routes.

He stayed there for an hour and was freezing by the time he got home. His wife was asleep. Silently he opened the door to the maid's room. She was snoring, her mouth wide open. The covers were pulled up to her chin.

He sat in the warmest room in the flat, poked away at the embers in the tiled stove, drank a glass of brandy and wondered where Captain Rake was.

It had been a hard winter, few harbours had been ice-free. The navy had concentrated its resources on the south and west coasts. Somewhere out there was Captain Rake. No doubt he was asleep. He was an early bird.

Tobiasson-Svartman was impatient. Having to wait was getting him down. It was 29 March already, he wanted to set off south as soon as possible. Would Sara Fredrika still be there, waiting for him? Or had she already left the island? He poked the embers again. The image of Sara Fredrika came and went.

Late at night. He was sitting at his desk, the lamp with the green porcelain shade was on. He was making notes. What was he really measuring? Distances, depths, speeds. But also light, darkness, cold, heat. And weights. All the things external to himself, that made up the space he occupied, ships' decks, his night on Observatoriekullen. He was measuring something else inside himself. Perseverance, resistance. Truth and falsehood. Worry, happiness, introversion. What was meaningful, and what was meaningless.

He stopped. He had made similar lists many times before. They were never complete. What did he always forget? What didn't he see? There was something he measured without being aware of it.

He stayed at his desk for quite a while. Eventually he locked the sheet of paper away in a drawer, with all the other lists.

He went to the bedroom. Kristina Tacker was still asleep. He gently touched her stomach.

Sara Fredrika, he thought. Are you still there?

One day Kristina Tacker found the large sum of money he had collected from Handelsbanken. He had left the notes under a diary on his desk.

'I don't let the maid touch your desk. I tidy it up myself. A note was sticking out. I saw all that money.'

'That's right. There is a large sum of money on the desk.'

'But why?'

'If we get involved in the war the banks might close. I took precautions against that.'

She asked no more questions.

'I've always expected my wife not to snoop around among my private papers.'

She was shaking with emotion when she replied. 'I do not root around among your private papers. The only things I touch are your clothes when I pack your bags for you.'

'I've noticed before now that you've been going through my papers. It's just that I've chosen not to say anything until now.'

'I have never touched your papers. Why are you falsely accusing me?'

'Then we'll say no more about it.'

She stood up and ran out of the room. He heard the bedroom door close with a bang. Of course his accusations were groundless. But he felt no regret at all.

Soon the waiting will be over, he thought. One day, in the far distant future, I might be able to explain to her that she was married to a man who was never fully visible, not even to himself.

Not a word was spoken for two days. The maid crept round the flat, hugging the walls. Then everything returned to normal on the third day. Kristina Tacker smiled. Lars Tobiasson-Svartman smiled back. The snow had started to melt outside.

On 3 April he was notified that his leave without pay would last until 15 June 1915. It would only be cancelled if Sweden were drawn into the war. His suitcases were already packed.

On 5 April he said goodbye to his wife. She went with him to the station. In his hand he had a ticket to Skövde and Karlsborg. She waved. He thought about how often her hand was cold.

In Katrineholm he got off the train and bought a new ticket to Norrköping. He emptied his cases and transferred the contents to his two rucksacks. After removing the luggage labels he stood the cases at the side of a luggage van.

The ice was softer now. But it was still there, all the way to the outer skerries. The sky was obscured by a thin mist. He walked fast.

In one of the bays near Hässelskären he came upon a shoe frozen fast in the ice. The sole was facing upwards, as if the wearer had fallen through the ice while standing on his head. It was a man's lace-up boot, big, patched, a boot for a large foot. He paused and examined the ice all around it. Nothing but the boot. No footsteps, nothing.

He continued his trek, walking so fast that he became short of breath. He would occasionally stop and scan the ice he had already traversed through his telescope. There was, of course, nobody following him.

He stopped again at Armnö: it would be the third time he had spent the night there. Somebody had been in the boathouse in the meantime. The herring drift nets had gone, and a newly tied pike net was in one corner. He ate his tinned meat and made a fire. He was impatient. The frozen-in boot puzzled him.

The next day he rose early and continued his trek over the ice. A wind was getting up, gusting from the north-east.

When he came to Uddskärsfiärden, the other side of Höga Lundsholmen, he met two people coming the other way. They suddenly appeared from behind the skerry, as if out of nowhere. He slipped out of the harness he was using to pull his rucksacks over the ice. It was like laying down his guns.

It was a man about the same age as himself and a boy, twelve or thirteen years old. The boy was deformed, with a misshapen head. His skull was far too big, and his skin was stretched tightly over his projecting cheekbones. He was also one-eyed, his left eye being no more than a shrivelled bag of skin. Their clothes were shabby, the man's face gaunt, his eyes flickering. They eyed him anxiously. The boy took hold of the man's hand.

'It's not very often you come across anybody else walking over the ice,' Tobiasson-Svartman said.

"We're on our way to Kalmar,' the man said. 'We come from t' north. It's quicker to walk over f ice, when it's strong enough.'

The man spoke a dialect he could not place.

'From the north?' he said. 'How far north? Further than Söderköping?'

'I nivver 'eard of Söderköping. We come from Roslagen, near Öregrund.'

'Then you have come a long way.'

The boy said nothing. He made a snorting sound when he breathed. He suddenly burst out laughing and tossed his head about. His father took hold of him, gripping him tight like an animal you've just caught. The boy calmed down and sank back into silence.

'His mother's dead,' the man said. 'There was nowt for us up there. He's got an aunt in Kalmar. Mebbe it's better there. She's religious, so I reckon she ought to be willing to take in young ones and ailin' folk.'

'What do you do to earn a living?'

'We wanders frae farm to farm. Folks are poor, but they share with us. Specially when they clap eyes on my lad. I reckon it's mainly so as to get shot of us quicker.'

The father raised his shabby hat, took hold of his son's hand and started walking. Tobiasson-Svartman shouted to them to stop. He took some banknotes out of his inside pocket, at first low-value ones, but then he added a hundred-kronor note. He handed them to the father who stared at the money in amazement.

'I can afford it,' Tobiasson-Svartman said. 'It's not only poor people who go trekking over the ice.'

He set off again. He did not turn round until he was several hundred metres distant.

The father and son were as if rooted to the ice, gaping after him.