Depths (29 page)

Angel was her name, the midwife.

She was not baptised Angel, of course: in the registers and on her midwifery certificate she was called Angela Wester. But everybody said Angel. That's what her mother had wanted to call her, she had had a dream about it the night before she gave birth. But the vicar refused. He pointed to the parish register and maintained that nobody was allowed to be called Angel, it would be little short of blasphemy. Her father, the ship's master Fredrik Wester, did not believe in gods but in compasses, and suggested with a growl that they should call the girl Angel even so. The vicar could not dictate what happened out in the archipelago. And so she became Angel. She never had any brothers or sisters, nor did she find a husband as she was cross-eyed and could hardly be called pretty. When her parents died she sold the house in the village and the little cargo boat that was half submerged in the creek, and moved into a crofter's cottage. She had trained as a midwife in Norrköping, and devoted her life to other people's children. She smiled a lot, had a beautiful voice, and was not afraid of mending the roof of her cottage herself if necessary. She could be ill-humoured and would sometimes set out on her own in her sailing dinghy, and everybody in the village would worry in case she never came back again. But she always did come back, and would sail her boat into the creek under cover of darkness when her depression had blown away.

Most of all, Angel was a good midwife. She was good at extracting babies that had got stuck. She had magic hands. There were a lot of midwives and old ladies who knew how to do the job of a midwife. They were all good, of course, but Angel was
deft.
Like a seamstress or a hunter or a gardener who could make things grow in hollows in the rock with hardly any soil. She had been so successful in many cases considered to be hopeless, that a doctor from Stockholm had once visited Kråkmarö in order to interview her, and although she was getting on for seventy and there were younger midwives to turn to, most people asked for her.

He moored the boat in the creek and walked up the hill to the village. The villagers were out in the fields and pointed the way. He knocked on Angel's door and she answered immediately. He had never set eyes on her before, but even so, it was as if he knew her. He went into her low-ceilinged kitchen and said where he had come from. She smiled.

'Sara Fredrika's baby,' she said. 'I assume it's yours as well?'

He could not bring himself to reply, and she did not worry about it.

'Children would no doubt like to choose their parents,' she said. 'Maybe they do, did we but know it. But there's some time to go yet for Sara Fredrika. What's the matter with her?'

He tried to explain, saying what Sara Fredrika had told him to say. Spasmodic tension, difficulties in moving, pains in her pelvis.

Angel asked a few questions.

'Has she had a fall?'

'No.'

'And you haven't hit her?'

'Why on earth would I want to do that?'

'Because men hit their women when things go wrong. Does she have a fever? Has she been carrying heavy things?'

'She spends most of her time resting.'

'And when you left things had got a bit better?'

'Yes.'

"Then you must go back to her. Sara Fredrika hasn't had much happiness in this life. I'm not sure that you have brought her any either. But you must look after her well. Then you might be able to become the man she needs.'

'She wants me to take her away from there.'

'Why should she stay there on that barren rock, after all the terrible things she's had to go through? It's eating her up, that inhospitable skerry is scraping her to the bone.'

She went with him down the hill to the sailing dinghy.

'You haven't even said what you're called. Don't you have a name?'

'I'm Lars.'

'I don't care where you come from. Rumour says that you're in the navy. But there's something else that's more important than that. You are wearing Nils Persson's clothes. You are reconciled to the fact that there was somebody else before you.'

'What shall I tell her?'

"That it's not time yet. And that I shall come, as long as you fetch me.'

He got into the boat and she untied the painter. There was no wind in the creek, so he prepared the oars.

'Stay until the baby's been born. Then you should take her away. The youngster won't survive out there. So many young children have died on that barren skerry over the years, too many to keep count of.'

He started rowing.

'Tell her I'll come,' she shouted. 'We'll get the baby born and it will survive all right, as long as you all get away from there.'

He kept on rowing until he found some wind. Then he raised the sail and headed for the open sea.

He felt ashamed when he thought about how close he had come to running away. He would have stolen her boat like a pirate, and abandoned her. Now he was sailing as fast as possible so that she would not start to think that he had headed out to sea after all.

He was in a hurry. And the sea was still carrying him to his destiny.

August was drawing to a close, it was unusually windy, persistent westerly winds. An autumnal thunderstorm passed over them, and a stroke of lightning felled a tree on Armnö.

He speculated that memory and forgetting shared the same key. Perhaps anger shared the same door? Kristina Tacker and the baby drifted away. But where was he himself?

The longest distance I have had to relate to is the distance to myself. No matter where I stand, the compass inside me pulls me in different directions. All my life I have crept around trying to avoid bumping into myself. I have no idea who I am, and I do not want to know either.

Sara Fredrika could feel that her body was calm. She talked all the time about the journey they would make once the baby was delivered.

Sometimes the conversations became unbearable. The skerry began to be a heavy weight, a ballast in his pockets that made it more and more difficult for him to move. He thought about what Angel had said, about the inhospitable skerry scraping her to the bone.

Every three or four days he would sit down to write a letter to Kristina Tacker. He had found a rock formation on the south side of the skerry that gave him both a bench to sit on and a rough desk to write on.

He described a voyage in a convoy of ships heading for Bornholm and the Polish coast. It had been a dangerous but necessary expedition. Now he was back in Swedish waters again, and by coincidence he had ended up in Östergötland, among the islands where he had already spent such a long time. He would soon be returning to Stockholm. His mission had been long and drawn out, but there was an end in sight, he wrote, an end, and then he would return home. He asked about Laura, how Kristina Tacker herself was, and not least her father. Had he recovered? Had they arrested whoever had carried out the attack?

But he also wrote about himself, tried to capture something of his own desperation without revealing the true facts.
When I'm alone I sometimes get so close to myself that I understand who I am. But then you are not there, nobody else can see what I see, only me, and that is not enough.

He hesitated for a long time, wondering whether to leave out the last few lines. But in the end he left them in, felt that he dared do so.

He buried the letters under a piece of turf, wrapped inside a waterproof pouch. Towards the end of August he decided he would have to send at least one of the many letters. He had intended to give the letters to some fisherman or hunter who passed by the skerry, but none of them landed. He could see sailing dinghies in among the skerries sometimes, but none of them came close. One day he decided that it could not wait any longer. He told Sara Fredrika that he was going to go to church in Gryt on the last Sunday in August.

'I'm not much of a believer,' he said, 'but after a while I feel very empty inside.'

'If you're lucky you'll be able to sail there. If there's no wind you'll have a long way to row.'

They got up at dawn and she went with him to the inlet. He had his uniform wrapped inside his oilskin.

'You'll have a good wind,' she said. 'Easterly veering towards north, a church wind in both directions. Sing a hymn for me, listen to the gossip outside the church. I've no idea who's dead and who's still alive. Bring me some news, even if it's old news.'

He stopped once on the way, landing on one of the islands in Bussund. He changed into his uniform and scrubbed away a stain on one of the shoulders. As he sailed into Gryt accompanied by other boats with passengers on their way to church, he was wearing his naval cap. He could see that his companions were bemused, but some of them must know about him, he could not be completely unknown.

There was a man on Sara Fredrika's island, the father of the baby that was about to be born.

Remarkably enough, he felt something approaching pride when everybody looked at him.

There had been a time when you could sail right up to the church from both the north and the south.

But the sound had silted up, and now you had to walk. There were a lot of people gathered outside the church. People seldom came from the outlying islands in winter.

Suddenly he came face to face with the farm labourers from Kättilö. They were not entirely sober.

'We haven't said a word,' Gösta said. 'Nothing has slipped out.'

'Let's keep it that way,' Tobiasson-Svartman said. 'And we mustn't make it too obvious that we know each other.'

He turned on his heel and walked away. The sexton told him that the man who looked after the post in Gryt was smoking his pipe by the church wall.

Tobiasson-Svartman gave him two letters. He asked for one to be posted right away, the other ten days later.

During the service he half listened to the Reverend Gustafsson's sermon about the devil who takes possession of our flesh, and the mercy of the Son of God.

Afterwards he wandered around, listening to the conversations. He had always been an eavesdropper, skilled at sucking in what other people were talking about. Most of the congregation were talking about who was ill and how bad the fishing had been.

When he started walking towards his boat a man in uniform came alongside him. He shook hands and introduced himself as the parish constable, Karl Albert Lund.

'There aren't many people round here wearing uniform,' said the constable. "That's why I thought I'd say hello.'

'Hans Jakobsson, Commander. I just happen to be passing by,' Tobiasson-Svartman said.

'Might I ask what it is that brings you here?'

'I can't tell you that. It has to do with the war.'

'I understand. I won't press you.'

Tobiasson-Svartman clicked his heels and saluted. He went back to the boat and sailed home. Why had he chosen the name Hans Jakobsson? he wondered.

Was it a greeting to the man who had died on the deck of the
Blenda?
Why had he not said what he had really wanted to say, that he was Sara Fredrika's new husband?

He changed out of his uniform. The wind was enabling him to maintain steady progress. On the way he invented news and rumours about unknown people that he passed on to Sara Fredrika that evening when he got back home.

Sara Fredrika gave birth on Halsskär on 9 September 1915.

He'd had time to fetch Angel from Kråkmarö. The wind had been capricious on the way back, the sail had not been much use, and he had rowed so hard that the palms of his hands were covered in burst blisters. There were three of them in the boat, Angel had taken with her another woman to help, a maid to one of the cargo boat skippers. Once they arrived on the island Angel told Tobiasson-Svartman to keep out of the way, and to find somewhere among the rocks where there was a wind to carry the screams in a different direction if Sara Fredrika got into difficulties.

It was a chilly day. He found a crevice on the south side where he could half lie, well protected. He tried to imagine Sara Fredrika, her struggle to force the baby out. But he saw nothing, only the sea.

My innermost longing is a dream about horizons, he thought, horizons and depths. That's what I am searching for.

It was as if he had some kind of invisible seal that made him inaccessible to everybody apart from himself.

The surface was calm, like a sea when there is no wind blowing, but underneath it lurked all the duplicitous forces he was forced to fight against. Ambition, insecurity, the memory of his furious father and the silent weeping of his mother. He lived through a constant battle between control, calculation and outrageous risk-taking. He did not do what other people do and adapt to different situations, but he changed his personality, became somebody else, often without being aware of the fact.

Without warning, he started crying, forlornly, uncontrollably. Then he stopped, just as suddenly as he had started.

Late in the afternoon he heard them shouting for him. He went back to the cottage, convinced that he had a son. But Angel Wester held out a daughter to him. This time he did not think the baby looked like a shrivelled mushroom, more like heather in the spring before it acquires its full colour.

'She's healthy and strong. She will survive if God wishes her to and you look after her properly. I reckon she weighs three kilos, and a bit more.'

'How is Sara Fredrika?'

'Like all women are after they've given birth. Relief, happiness at the fact that all has gone well, a great desire to sleep. But first she should greet her husband.'

He went inside. Angel and the maid left them alone. Her face was pale and sweaty.

'What shall we call her?'

Without hesitation, he replied 'Laura. That's a pretty name. Laura.'

'She's born now. And now we can leave this hellish island and never return.'

'We shall leave as soon as I've finished my last reports.'

'Are you happy about your child?'

'I'm indescribably happy about my child,' he said.

'You got a new daughter to replace the one that fell over the cliff.'

He did not say anything, just nodded. Then he went outside and invited Angel and the maid to a celebratory drink. As it was already late, they stayed overnight.

He spent the night in a hollow covered by his oilskin coat.

He thought about his two daughters, both called Laura.

Laura Tobiasson-Svartman.

The younger sister of Laura Tobiasson-Svartman.

They'll live their lives in ignorance of each other. Just as their mothers will never meet.