Depths (6 page)

Shortly after eleven in the morning they found a depth that did not correspond to the depth recorded on the chart. The disparity was considerable, all of three metres. The correct depth was fourteen metres, not seventeen. They checked the surrounding depths, but found no deviations from the figures on the chart. They had stumbled upon an unexpected projection deep below the surface. Some sort of narrow and pointed rock formation in the middle of an area where the rest of the bottom was flat.

Tobiasson-Svartman had found the first of the points he was looking for. A wrong measurement that he could correct. A depth had become less deep.

But in his heart of hearts he was looking for something quite different. A place where the sounding lead never reached the bottom: a point where the sounding line ceased to be a technical instrument and was transformed into a poetic tool.

The stretch where they were measuring at present curved round a series of small rocks and shallows to the south of the skerry known as Halsskär at the edge of the open sea. The west side had never been charted. There was a possibility that they might find a channel sufficiently deep and wide to take a vessel with a draught as big as the destroyer
Svea.

In his travelling archive he found a note to the effect that until the eighteenth century the skerry had been called Vratholmen. He tried to discover why this barren little island no more than one thousand metres in diameter would have had its name changed. A person can change his name for any number of reasons. He had done so himself. But why a skerry at the edge of the open sea?

Could the original name have something to do with wrath, with anger? Records showed that it had been called Vratholmen for at least 250 years. Then, at some time between 1712 and 1740, its name had changed. From then on, there was no Vratholmen, only Halsskär.

He thought about the riddle for some time, but he could find no plausible answer.

In the evening, after copying his own and Sub-Lieutenant Welander's notes into the main expedition record book, he went on deck The sea was still calm. Some ratings were busy repairing the gangway. He paused and gazed out at Halsskär.

Suddenly, there was a flash of light. He screwed up his eyes. It did not happen again. He went to his cabin and fetched his telescope. There was nothing to be seen on the smooth rocks apart from darkness.

Later that night he wrote a letter to his wife. It was a scrappy description of days that could hardly be distinguished from one another.

He did not write anything about Rudin. Nor did he mention the drift net he had seen that morning.

The following day, as dawn broke, he clambered into one of the tenders tied to the
Blenda's
stern. He unfastened the painter and rowed towards Halsskär. It was dead calm, and the sea smelled of salt and mud. He rowed through the gentle swell with powerful strokes and found a tiny cove on the west side of the skerry where he could land without getting his feet wet. He beached the tender, tied the painter round a large stone then leaned back against the sloping cliff.

The
Blenda
was anchored off the east side of Halsskär. He was alone. No sound reached him from the ship.

The skerry was resting in the sea. It was like being in a cradle, or on a deathbed, he thought. All the voices hidden in the cliff were whispering. Even rocks have memories, as do waves and breakers. And down below, in the darkness where fish swam along invisible and silent channels, there were also memories.

The barren skerry was a poor and destitute being, devoid of desires. The only vegetation on the rocky islet was patches of lichens, clumps of heather, occasional tufts of grass, short, windswept juniper bushes and some strips of seaweed at the edge of the water.

The skerry was a mendicant friar who had renounced all earthly possessions and wandered alone through the world.

He was all of a sudden overcome by a powerful longing for his wife. The next time he saw Captain Rake he would ask him to post the letter he had written to her.

Only then could he count on receiving a letter from her. He was married to a woman who answered letters, but was never the first to write.

He climbed to the top of the cliff. The rocks were slippery and he kept stumbling. From the summit he could see the
Blenda,
riding at anchor in the distance. He had his telescope with him and aimed it at the ship. Watching people and things through a telescope always gave him a feeling of power.

Lieutenant Jakobsson was standing by the rail, peeing out over the water. He was holding his penis in his deformed hand.

Tobiasson-Svartman put the telescope down. What he had seen disgusted him. He took a deep breath.

From now on he would feel repugnance towards Jakobsson. Every time they sat down at table together he would have to fight back the image of the man peeing through the rail, using his deformed hand.

He wondered what would happen if he wrote in the letter to his wife: 'This morning I surprised the ship's master with his trousers down.'

He sat down in a rocky hollow where the ground was dry and closed his eyes. After a few seconds he had conjured up the smell of his wife. It was so strong that when he opened his eyes he half expected to see her there on the skerry, standing close to him.

Shortly afterwards he climbed down to the tender and rowed back to the gunboat.

That same afternoon they progressed as far as Halsskär and began a methodical search for a sufficiently deep channel along the west side of the skerry.

It took them seven days of hard, relentless work to confirm that it was possible to route the navigable channel on the west side of Halsskär. All the ships in the Swedish Navy, apart from the largest of the battleships, would be able to pass with a satisfactory safety margin.

At dinner, consisting of poached cod with potatoes and egg sauce, he told Lieutenant Jakobsson what they had established. He was not absolutely certain that he was allowed to pass on such details, but on the other hand it seemed odd not to be able to speak openly with a man who could observe what was going on with his own eyes.

'I'm impressed,' said Jakobsson. 'But I have a question: Did you know in advance?'

'Know what?'

'That it was deep just there? That it was deep enough for the big naval vessels?'

'Hydrographic surveyors who guess their way forward are seldom successful. The only thing I know for sure is that it's impossible to predict what is hidden under the surface of the sea. We can pull up mud and fish and rotten seaweed from the sea, but we can also bring up some significant surprises.'

'It must be a remarkable feeling, to look at a sea chart and tell yourself that you were responsible for its accuracy.'

The conversation was interrupted by Jakobsson's second in command, Fredén, appearing to announce that the
Svea
had been sighted, heading northwards.

Tobiasson-Svartman quickly finished his meal and hurried to write up the latest of his data. He checked through the notes briefly, then signed the record book.

Before leaving his cabin he wrote another short letter to his wife.

The destroyer towered over the
Blenda.
As it was almost perfectly calm, a gangplank was laid out to act as a bridge between the two vessels.

Captain Rake had a bad cold. He asked no questions, merely accepted the record book and passed it on to one of the cryptographers. Then he offered Tobiasson-Svartman a brandy.

'Bosun Rudin?' Tobiasson-Svartman asked. 'How is he?'

'I'm afraid he died during the operation,' Rake said. 'It's very sad. He was a good bosun. Besides, with his death my personal statistics look less good.'

Tobiasson-Svartman suddenly felt sick. He hadn't expected Rudin to be dead, and for a moment he lost his self-possession.

Rake was watching him intently. He had noticed the reaction.

'Are you not well?'

'I'm fine, thank you. It's just that my stomach has been a bit upset these last few days.'

Neither of them spoke. The shadow of Bosun Rudin passed through the cabin.

They took another glass of brandy before Tobiasson-Svartman left.

On 31 October, early in the afternoon, the central east coast of Sweden was struck by a storm that forced the hydrographers to stop work. It was not without a degree of satisfaction that Tobiasson-Svartman ordered the launches back to the mother ship. Early that morning, when he had checked the weather, all the indications were that a storm was approaching. At breakfast he had asked Jakobsson what he thought about the weather prospects.

'The barometer is falling,' Jakobsson said. 'We might get a strong southerly wind approaching gale force, but probably not until after nightfall.'

More probably by this afternoon, Tobiasson-Svartman had thought. And the wind is going to be more of an easterly. And it will be storm force. But he said nothing. Neither at breakfast, nor when the storm hit them.

The
Blenda
tossed and turned in the rough seas. The engines were at full throttle, to keep the ship heading into the wind. He was alone at the meal table for two days. Lieutenant Jakobsson suffered badly from seasickness and did not appear. Tobiasson-Svartman had never had that problem, not even during his early days as a cadet For some reason, that gave him a bad conscience.

The storm blew itself out during the night of 2 November.

When Tobiasson-Svartman came out on deck at dawn ragged clouds were scudding across the sky. The temperature was climbing. They could restart their depth sounding. His overall plan had incorporated time to make up for delays and he was confident that they would still finish on time. He had allowed for three severe storms.

He checked his watch and saw that it was time for breakfast.

Then he heard a shout. It sounded like a lamentation. When he turned round he saw a rating leaning over the rail, gesticulating wildly with his hand. Something in the water had attracted the sailor's attention.

Lieutenant Jakobsson and Tobiasson-Svartman hurried to where the sailor was standing. Half of Jakobsson's face was covered in shaving foam.

There was a dead body bobbing up and down in the water by the side of the ship. It was a man lying face downwards. His uniform was not Swedish. But was it German or was it Russian?

Ropes and grappling irons were used to hoist the body on board. The ratings turned him on his back. The face was that of a young man. He had blond hair. But he had no eyes. They had been eaten by fish, eels or perhaps birds. Lieutenant Jakobsson groaned out loud.

Tobiasson-Svartman tried to grab hold of the rail, but fainted before he could reach it When he came round, Jakobsson was bent over him. Some drops of the white lather dripped on to Tobiasson-Svartman's forehead. He sat up slowly, waving away the crew members who were trying to help him.

Feelings of humiliation were swelling up inside him. Not only had he lost control of himself, he had shown weakness in full view of the crew.

First Rudin had died, and now this body had been pulled up from the sea. That was too much, more than he could bear.

Before today Tobiasson-Svartman had only ever seen one dead body in all his life. That was his father, who had suffered a massive heart attack one evening when he was getting changed. He had died on the floor beside his bed, just as Tobiasson-Svartman had put his head round the door to tell him that dinner was ready.

At the moment of death Hugo Svartman had pissed himself. He lay there with his stomach uncovered and his eyes wide open. He was holding a shoe in one hand, as if to defend himself.

Tobiasson-Svartman had never managed to forget the sight of that fat, half-naked body. He often thought that his father had decided to punish him one last time by dying before his very eyes.

The dead man was very young. Lieutenant Jakobsson bent down and placed a handkerchief over the empty eye sockets.

'The uniform is German,' he said. 'He belonged to the German Navy.'

Jakobsson unbuttoned the dead man's tunic. He produced some soaking wet documents and photographs from the inside pockets.

'I don't have much experience of dead sailors,' he said. 'That doesn't mean of course that I've never fished dead men out of the sea. I don't think this man has been in the water all that long. He doesn't appear to have any wounds to suggest that he died in battle. Presumably he fell overboard by accident.'

Jakobsson stood up and ordered the body to be covered. Tobiasson-Svartman accompanied him into the mess. When they had sat down, and the papers and photographs were laid out on the table, Jakobsson realised that half of his face still had shaving foam on it. He shouted for the steward to bring him a towel and wiped his face clean. When Tobiasson-Svartman saw the half-shaved face, he could not help but burst into insuppressible laughter. Lieutenant Jakobsson raised an eyebrow in surprise. It occurred to Tobiasson-Svartman that this was the first time he had laughed out loud since coming on board the
Blenda.

The idea of Lieutenant Jakobsson as a comic figure in a cinematographic farce came to him for the second time.

Lieutenant Jakobsson started going through the dead sailor's papers. Carefully he separated the pages of a military pay book.

'Karl-Heinz Richter, born Kiel 1895,' he read. 'A very young man, not twenty. Short life, violent death.'

He was, with difficulty, deciphering the water-damaged writing.

'He was a crew member of the battleship
Niederburg,'
he said. 'I think the Naval Headquarters in Stockholm will be surprised to hear that the
Niederburgis
operating in the Baltic.'

Tobiasson-Svartman thought to himself: One of the smaller battleships in the German Navy, but even so it has a crew of more than eight hundred men. One of the heavy German naval vessels that could travel at impressively high speeds.

Jakobsson was poring over the photographs. One was a miniature in a glazed frame.

'Frau Richter presumably,' he said. 'A woman with a friendly smile sitting in a photographer's studio, never dreaming that her son will drown and have this photograph with him. A pretty face, but a bit on the plump side.'

He scrutinised the miniature more closely.

'There's a little blue butterfly behind the photograph,' he said. 'Why, we shall never know.'

The other photograph was blurred. He studied it for a long time before putting it down.

'It could just possibly be a dog. A Swedish foxhound, perhaps. But I'm not sure.'

He handed over the photographs and the documents. Tobiasson-Svartman also thought it could be a dog, but he too was unsure about the breed. The woman, who was most probably Karl-Heinz Richter's mother, looked cowed and scared. She seemed almost to be crouching before the photographer. And she was really fat.

'There are two possibilities,' Jakobsson said. 'Either it was a banal accident A sailor falls overboard in the dark. Nobody notices. It doesn't even have to be dark for such an accident to occur. It could have happened in broad daylight. It only takes two or three seconds to fall into the water from the deck of a ship. Nobody sees you, nobody hears when you fall in with a splash and struggle with the sea that relentlessly sucks all the heat out of you and then pulls you under. You die from hypothermia, in a state of extreme panic. Anybody who's been close to drowning talks about a very special kind of fear that can't be compared to anything else, not even the terror you feel when making a bayonet charge on enemy forces shooting at you for all they are worth.'

He broke off, as if he had lost the thread. Tobiasson-Svartman could feel his stomach churning.

'But there could also be another explanation,' Jakobsson said. 'He might have committed suicide. His angst had got the better of him. Young people most especially can take their own lives for the strangest reasons. A broken heart, for instance. Or that vague phenomenon the Germans cal "
Weltschmerz?.
But even homesickness is not unknown as a reason for servicemen taking their own lives. Mother's apron strings are more important than life. If you lose your grip on the apron strings, the only alternative is death.'

He reached for the miniature.

'It's not impossible that this woman has been over-protective as far as her son is concerned, and made his life without her impossible.'

He studied the image for a while before putting it down again.

'One could speculate about other reasons, of course. He might have been badly treated by his officers or fellow crewmen. I thought the lad looked little and scared even in death – he looked quite like a girl, in fact. All that was missing were the pigtails. Perhaps he couldn't put up with being at the bottom of the pecking order. Even so, it needs a special sort of courage to throw yourself into the water. Courage or stupidity. Often enough it boils down to the same thing. Especially among soldiers and sailors.'

Lieutenant Jakobsson stood up.

'I don't want the man on board any longer than necessary. Death weighs heavily on a ship. A crew gets nervy when they have a dead body as cargo. We'll bury him as soon as possible.'

'Doesn't there have to be a post-mortem?'

Jakobsson thought for a moment before replying.

'I'm in command of this ship and so I make the decisions. We can't be certain that the man hasn't been ill. People can carry an infection even when they are no longer breathing. I'm going to bury him as soon as possible.'

He paused in the doorway.

'I need some advice,' he said. 'You are presumably the best qualified person to give it in the whole of the Swedish Navy.'

'What?'

'I need a spot that's suitably deep. Ideally somewhere close where we can sink the body. Maybe you could check your charts and find somewhere?'

'That won't be necessary. I know a suitable place already.'

They went on deck and walked to the rail. It was strangely silent on board. Tobiasson-Svartman pointed to the northeast.

'There is a crack in the sea floor 250 metres from here. It never gets wider than thirty metres and it runs as far as Landsortsdjupet. As you know, that's the deepest part of the whole Baltic Sea, in excess of 450 metres. The location I'm talking about is 160 metres deep. If you want anything deeper than that you'll have to sail several nautical miles north.'

'That will be fine. On land they bury coffins only two metres deep. At sea, 160 metres should be more than enough.'

The body was sewn into a tarpaulin. Various pieces of scrap metal from the engine room were lashed around the corpse. While the sea-coffin was being prepared, Lieutenant Jakobsson finished shaving.

The ship moved in accordance with the instructions given to the helmsman by Tobiasson-Svartman. It struck him that this was the first time he'd been in de facto command of a Swedish naval vessel. Even if it was only for 250 metres.