Depths a novel, p.18
Depths: A Novel, page 18
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.
CHAPTER 105
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.
CHAPTER 106
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.
CHAPTER 107
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.
CHAPTER 108
They shared her bed that night. For the second time.
For one brief, giddy moment he thought he could smell the fragrance of Kristina Tacker’s body, hear her panting breath.
Then he was back to reality. Sara Fredrika’s long hair imprisoned him, as if he had been woven into a net and was being pulled towards a point where he felt like bursting. Afterwards they were calm, still. He could not tell if she was awake or asleep. But she was there. He was there. It was not like sharing a bed with Kristina Tacker, with each of them heading off in different directions all the time.
He was woken up at dawn by her looking at him. Her face was very close.
‘I shall soon have to leave you,’ he said. ‘But I’ll come back. I’ll come and take you away from here.’
‘I hope so,’ she said. ‘I have to have something to believe in. Otherwise I couldn’t go on.’
Otherwise I couldn’t go on. What would happen then?
CHAPTER 109
He left her early in the morning of 27 February.
He had made preparations for starting to walk back to the mainland. She went with him to the edge of the ice.
‘The cat,’ he said when they were saying goodbye. ‘I saw a cat once, here on the island. But you said there wasn’t one?’
‘I don’t know why I lied. Of course there is a cat. But I don’t know where it’s got to.’
‘I thought you would want to know. Dorflinger killed it with a stone and threw it on to the ice. He killed the cat in a spasm of violent rage. I don’t know why. But I thought you would like to know.’
She did not reply.
Their leave-taking was awkward, a handshake, no more.
He counted to two hundred paces. Then he turned round. She had gone. She was left behind.
PART VII
Capture
CHAPTER 110
The train came to a halt betwen stations. They had just passed through Åby. The station had been in darkness, but a fire was burning next to the line. It was evening, with a wind blowing from Bråviken. Tobiasson-Svartman was in the carriage next to the engine. He was sharing a compartment with a man fast asleep in a corner, his head buried in a moth-eaten fur coat. He listened to the sighing noise coming from the steam engine, and was overcome by a feeling of unreality: he would be stuck here, the train would never start moving again. There were no rails ahead of him, only an endless vacuum and sighs from the engine.
It was the second day after he had left Halsskär and started his trek to the mainland. He had spent the night in the boathouse on Armnö, but he had been unable to sleep and as soon as dawn broke he went on walking over the ice towards Gryt.
Round about Kättilö he had heard rifle shots, first one, then another. Apart from that all was silent: the ice, the islands, solitary birds.
When he came to Gryt, walking up the hill towards the church, he had a stroke of luck. A car approached and they gave him a lift as far as Valdemarsvik. The driver said not a word all the twenty-kilometre journey. There were big rust holes in the car, and Tobiasson-Svartman could see the road beneath his feet.
On the back seat was the body of a child, a little girl, wrapped in a blanket. Only when they reached Valdemarsvik did he ask what had happened.
The man replied wearily: ‘She scalded herself. Knocked over a bowl of boiling water. She was soaked in it from her stomach downwards. She screamed something awful before she died. But her face wasn’t burned.’
The girl was lying with her face turned towards him.
As he sat on the train he did not think about Sara Fredrika or Kristina Tacker. He thought about the girl who had scalded herself. Who had died from the stomach downwards.
CHAPTER 111
A conductor came past. Tobiasson-Svartman was standing in the corridor between the first and second coaches, and he asked the man why the train had stopped. He noticed that he had a Bible in one of his uniform pockets.
‘It’s the cold. A set of points has frozen. A couple of linemen are thawing it out. We’re twenty-five minutes late.’
‘Twenty-nine,’ Tobiasson-Svartman said.
They started off again shortly after midnight. The man in the corner woke up, gave Tobiasson-Svartman a bleary look and went back to sleep.
Tobiasson-Svartman had killed a man. Was he now less scared of death than before? Or more scared? There was no answer. His instrument was dead. His sounding lead was silent in his rucksack.
They arrived in Stockholm as dawn was breaking on 2 March. Outside the Central Station he passed the conductor from his train, but the man did not recognise him.
CHAPTER 112
Stockholm greeted him with snow flurries and freezing temperatures. He stood with his luggage and a porter, wondering where he should go. At first he gave his home address, then changed his mind and named a little hotel at Norra Bantorget. The porter disappeared into the snow and Tobiasson-Svartman went back into the station. He ordered breakfast in the first-class dining room, but the food stuck in his throat and he was forced to run to the toilets and throw up. The waitress looked at him in astonishment when he returned with tears in his eyes.
She can see, he thought. She can see that I have killed a man.
He paid his bill and left. The city and the falling snow made him dizzy. He came to the hotel where the porter was waiting for him. When the receptionist told him that the hotel was full, he was furious. The receptionist turned pale and gave him a room that was in fact already booked. The porter carried up his luggage.
‘That’s the way to treat them buggers,’ he said with a smile as he pocketed his payment.
Tobiasson-Svartman closed the door, locked it and lay down on the bed. It was like being back in the boathouse on Armnö. He closed his eyes and clutched his sounding lead to his chest. Nobody knew where he was, nobody knew where he was heading for, least of all himself.
There was a draught from the window. He wrapped a scarf round his head, moved as close as possible to the wall and waited for the strength to make a decision.
CHAPTER 113
The snow eased off at about eleven. He stood in the window and looked down at Vasagatan. He was looking for somebody among the pedestrians who might be himself.
He made his decision. He would stay in the hotel today and tonight. Then he would go home to Kristina Tacker.
The events on Halsskär began to fade. He examined his hands. No trace there of what had happened. His fingers were smooth and unmarked, his hands were unaltered.
He went out in the evening. It had stopped snowing, but it was bitterly cold and the city was deserted. Only those who had to ventured out of doors. He took a cab outside the Central Station and asked to be taken to the Grand Hotel.
As he was entering the dining room a man turned towards him. It was his father-in-law, Ludwig Tacker.
Tobiasson-Svartman could see no escape. Tacker introduced him to the man he was with, Tobiasson-Svartman understood his name to be something like Andrén. Tacker asked his companion to wait in the foyer.
‘I spoke to my daughter yesterday,’ Tacker said. ‘She was very worried to have heard nothing from you.’
‘My mission was classified as secret.’
‘So damned secret that you couldn’t even send a greeting to your wife? When did you get home?’
‘I came to Stockholm about an hour ago,’ he said. ‘I haven’t been home yet. I have to meet some of my superiors first and submit a report.’
Ludwig Tacker’s eyes were narrow and cold.
‘At the Grand Hotel? In the dining room of the Grand Hotel? Secret goings-on?’
‘We shall be meeting in a special room. I just wanted to see if I was the first to arrive.’
Tacker eyed him up and down.
‘And when are you intending to go back to your home and your wife?’
‘I don’t want to disturb her too late. I shall spend tonight in a hotel. I can’t go back home like a thief in the night.’
Tacker leaned towards him.
