Their conversations were spasmodic.
He was close to her all the time in the cramped room, but it felt to him as if the distance between them grew.
Late in the afternoon she stood up and left the cottage. He made no move, but glanced surreptitiously at the window. He expected her to be standing there, watching him.
The window was empty.
He did not understand it. She was not behaving as she ought to have done. All the time when he was growing up he had kept his parents under constant observation. He would peer furtively through half-closed doors or use mirrors to see unnoticed into rooms where his parents were, together or alone or with others. In his imagination he bored invisible holes in the upstairs floor of the house they lived in at Skeppsbron, so that he could see down into his father's office.
He had learned not to reveal his presence when he listened to their angry exchanges, watched them drinking themselves silly or, as was often the case with his mother, sitting alone, sobbing.
His mother always wept silently. Her tears seemed to tiptoe out of her eyes.
These memories shot through his mind, one after the other. He walked to the window, which was coated in a thin layer of salt spray.
He caught a glimpse of her walking along the path to the inlet. He assumed that she wanted to make sure her boat was securely moored.
He looked around the room. She had just put more wood on the fire. It smelled of juniper. The light from the flames danced round the walls. In one of them was a low door, closed. He tried the handle. It was not locked and led into a windowless closet. In one corner were a few wooden barrels; sheep shears and broken carding combs were scattered on the floor as well as some folded sacks for flour. On one of the walls hung a herring net, half finished. He made a mental inventory of the room and its contents, as if it were important to remember every detail.
Sara Fredrika still had not returned. In the big room was a corner cupboard, rickety, with rusty hinges. Did he dare to open it? Would the door fall off if he did? He pressed his hand against the cupboard frame and turned the key.
On the only shelf were two objects: a hymn book and a pipe. The pipe was similar to the one Lieutenant Jakobsson usually had in his mouth. He picked it up and sniffed at it. It seemed not to have been used for a long time. The remains of the burned tobacco were rock hard. It still smelled of old tar. He put the pipe down, eyed the hymn book without touching it, then closed the door.
He squatted down and felt under the bed. There was something there. He could feel that it was an old-fashioned shotgun, but he did not take it out. He pressed his face against the pillow, trying to find traces of her smell. All he could feel was that the pillow was damp.
Damp loneliness, he thought. That's her fragrance. The thought excited him.
There had been a man in the house, a man who had left behind a well-used pipe and an old shotgun. Perhaps he was not gone altogether. Perhaps he was away selling fish in Slätbaken on the way to Söderköping. Autumn was ending, and there were markets all over Sweden.
The storm was still battering the walls. He tried to imagine the man, but was unable to give him a face.
The door flew open. Sara Fredrika was back. The cold wind rushed into the room.
'I went to check the boats,' she said. 'I've never seen one like yours before.'
'It's a tender. We have four of them, in case we need to abandon ship. And we also have two quite big launches. If the ship starts to sink, nobody need be left behind. You may find it hard to believe, but the tender is classified as a warship.'
She poked at the fire. Her movements were precise and purposeful, he noticed, but she was trying to conceal a degree of worry or impatience. She sat down on the bunk. The fire was blazing away again, and he could see her clearly. Something was welling up inside him that he could not put his finger on. Somehow or other he felt tricked, deceived. The pipe in the corner cupboard belonged to somebody who had been in this cottage, who might even have built it, who had shared her bed and who might come back.
He eyed her as he had looked at the sailor with the snotty nose. He wanted to hit her. Quickly he moved his stool back to avoid that happening. In order to have something to say he said: 'Do you not have any animals? I thought I saw a cat with bluish-grey fur. If there is such a thing as a cat with a touch of blue in its fur.'
'There are no animals here.'
'Not even a cat?'
'I wouldn't mind having a dog that could swim out and fetch the birds I shoot.'
'But I thought I saw a cat?'
'There is no cat. I know what there is on this skerry. There are two adders, one male and one female. I kill the young ones every spring. Maybe I ought to let one or two live so that the skerry doesn't become snakeless if the parents upped and died or are caught by an eagle. There was a fox here once.'
She pointed to a fox fur lying on a bench.
'Had it swum here?'
'Sometimes the winters are so cold and long that ice forms on the sea even as far out as this, and occasionally further – as far as the outermost herring grounds. That's when the fox came. It stayed when the ice melted. I shot it through the door when it was scavenging for food. It had seaweed and bits of stone in its stomach. I think it had gone mad and started chewing stones in desperation. I suppose it's worse for a fox than for a person to be all alone. But it may be easier for animals to do away with themselves.'
'Why?' he said, surprised.
'They have no god to be afraid of. Unlike me.'
He hoped she would start talking about herself. He did not care about the snakes and the fox. But she kept on about the animals.
'Seals sometimes bask on the reefs north-west of Sandsänkan if it gets too crowded on their usual rocks. Occasionally a seal comes ashore here. But there are no animals apart from those. I think this is the only skerry out here where there aren't any ants. I don't know why.'
'I see no sign of a rifle,' he said. 'But you say you shot a fox?'
She pointed under the bed she was sitting on.
'I have a shotgun. And crampons for my boots. And also a seal club. My father made it. He was born in 1851 and died when I was a little girl. No picture of him exists, nothing. A photographer from Norrköping visited the islands in the 1890s, but my father didn't want to have his picture taken. He ran away and hid in a rock crevice somewhere. Some of the old men out here used to believe they would lose the ability to aim straight at seabirds if they had their photo taken. There was a lot of superstition in the archipelago when I was a girl. That seal club is the only thing I have that belonged to my father. A club covered in dried seal blood instead of a face.'
He tried cautiously to wheedle out an answer to what really interested him.
'Are there any other people on this skerry?'
'Not any more. There used to be.'
'That's hard to understand.'
'Understand what? That anybody would stay here? I've stayed here. But there'll be no one when I've gone. When I leave, the island will revert to what it used to be. The snakes will be able to live in peace. They might multiply. There might be so many of them that no humans will dare to land here any more. Once, a long time ago, people rowed out to here. They used their ribs as oars. Now they've all gone. Even the stones that were carried up here from the shore to make the foundations for the houses have started to go away. I go out and look at them. It's like trying to watch the elevation of the land. You would have to stand in the same place for very many years to check if the land really was rising. It's the same with the stones they lugged up here, the first of the people who came to the skerry hundreds of years ago. Now the stones are slowly sliding back again, to the places they were taken from.'
He listened in astonishment. Ribs used as oars? Stones that move? What was she talking about?
'I'm not used to people,' she said. 'Not since I became alone.'
'Why do you live here on your own?'
'Is there more than one answer?'
'Either you have chosen to do so, or you haven't.'
'Who would choose loneliness?'
'Some people would. You can shut yourself away in a house, but you can also do it on an island where the sea is a sort of terrifying moat.'
'I don't understand that. I'm twenty-seven years old, nothing can scare me any more.'
'I just wonder what happened.'
A massive gust of wind shook the cottage to its foundations.
'One of these days it can simply collapse,' she shouted, in a sudden burst of emotion. 'I'll let it fall to bits all round me.'
She went on talking, in long sentences. She expressed herself clearly, as only people who talk a lot to themselves can. Afterwards, when she had fallen silent, abruptly, as if she regretted having spoken, he realised that he could no longer hear the wind. Had the storm blown over so soon?
He listened. She had shrunk back into the shadows again.
Then the wind started once more.
She had spoken without hesitation, known in detail exactly what she wanted to say. It was as if she had told the story many times, but only to herself, the story of why she was alone on Halsskär. Or perhaps, in the evenings, in the darkness, she had practised so that she could tell the story to somebody she hoped might one day come to the skerry.
He had the feeling that he had come to Halsskär for one specific reason. He had come so that she would have somebody to listen to her.
The man whose pipe was here was called Nils Ferdinand Persson.
He had been Sara Fredrika's husband.
The story began several years ago when they were newly married and worked as domestic servants for a relative of hers, Axel Theodor Homeros Lundberg. He was well-to-do, owned farms in both Gusum and in the archipelago near Finnö and as far north as Risö. They did not enjoy working for Lundberg. He was miserly and vindictive, and the only things he seemed to like were his riding boots, which he was forever treating with seal fat. No one was allowed to touch them, not even his wife, who was scared stiff of getting a beating. They stuck it for a year, but left in acrimonious circumstances and went to live on one of the islands near Turmulefjärden. It was a very poor smallholding, but at least there was nobody there polishing boots and shouting at them. They stayed there for a year, then heard that there was an abandoned cottage on Halsskär. They were able to secure the lease cheaply, for practically nothing – a barrel of herring every spring and autumn, that was all.
They sailed out to Halsskär one chilly Sunday in March. It had been a severe winter and the ice had not altogether loosened its grip. Her husband said that nothing could be worse than loud-mouthed gentleman farmers. Houses could be made windproof, nets and drift nets could be patched up and repaired, but nobody could shut the mouth of a gentleman farmer who bellowed and yelled.
They moved in as summer approached, made repairs on the house and started to prepare for whatever was in store: autumn, winter, ice, isolation.
Every now and then farmers from the inner archipelago would appear, sailing along the channel known as Märsfjärden that led to Halsskär and Krampbådorna. They were heading for the herring fishing grounds or shooting birds, and were astonished to see Sara Fredrika and her husband. Hadn't Halsskär been abandoned a century ago? In 1807 an old spinster lived there, but she froze to death and was pecked to the bone by gulls and crows. Ever since then the skerry had been uninhabited. The outhouses had collapsed, the jetties in the inlet had rotted away and the houses that could be dismantled were moved, plank by plank, to the green islands closer to the mainland.
It was said that Nils Ferdinand Persson and his wife Sara Fredrika had their noses in the air, and people with noses in the air ire the first to fall.
They were also visited by people from Åland and Finland, who were hunting seals illegally. They would shake their heads and shout warnings to them in their incomprehensible language.
Autumn arrived in September. The first storm was quite unexpected, it blew in from the east in the middle of the night and it was sheer luck that they did not have any nets out. They soon learned their lesson, and every day as night closed in they would keep a close eye on the sea, and try to identify signs indicating that dangerous winds might be approaching.
In November one of the sheep – they had two, but no cow – slipped from a rock and broke its leg. Then the surviving one died, and they were even more isolated, if that were possible.
On the morning of Christmas Day, six months after they had settled on the skerry, catastrophe struck. They had laid out nets a few days earlier when the weather was cold and clear with virtually no wind, just a gentle breeze from the south. The nets were in two shallows and did not need too many heavy stones to anchor them. They had experienced good catches there ever since early December. As the shallows had no name, Nils Ferdinand christened one of them Sara Rocks and the other Fredrika Shallows.
The storm came late on Christmas Eve. It attacked from the south, charging towards them with a dense blizzard as the first line of assault. When dawn came it was obvious that if they were not to lose their nets they would have to go out and take them in. The winds were storm force, but that couldn't be helped, they had no choice. They launched the boat and managed to haul in one of the nets. Then came a colossal wave that crashed into the starboard side of the boat and capsized it.
When she managed to get out of the floating coffin she saw her husband. He had become enmeshed in the net he had been trying to take in, and it was writhing around him like a sea monster. He fought and screamed, but was dragged down and she was unable to do anything except cling to an oar and the stern seat that had broken loose, struggle back to land and crawl to the cottage, half frozen.
That was her story. She had hewn it from deep inside her as if sculpting a block of stone with violent blows from a chisel. A block of stone, a headstone for her husband.
She said no more. It was getting dark when she finished. The shadows were lengthening.
He sat on his stool and watched while she made a soup. They ate in silence.
Tobiasson-Svartman thought: It must be like staring straight into Hell, watching somebody you love die screaming.