One night she woke him up.
'I can hear somebody screaming,' she said.
He listened. There was no wind.
'I can't hear anything.'
"There's somebody screaming, a person.'
He put his trousers on and went out. The ground felt chilly underfoot.
Then he heard it, a distant scream. It came from the sea.
She had got out of bed with considerable difficulty and was standing in the doorway. Her face was white in the night glow.
'Can you hear it?'
'Yes, I can.'
They listened. There it came again. He was still unsure if it was a person or a bird. Birds can also get into difficulties – he remembered the gull frozen into the ice last winter. Frozen wings, he thought. We always need to thaw out our wings in order to fly. But in the end that is no longer possible.
There was the scream again. He went to the highest point on the skerry and looked south-westwards, where the scream had come from. In the end he was convinced that it was a human scream. He set off for the inlet intending to take the boat out, but it stopped. He waited. The sea was silent.
He went back to the cottage. She was cold, pressed up against him, he put his arm round her shoulders. They lay awake as day broke, wondering who or what it had been, a person or a bird.
He got up early and scanned the sea with his telescope.
There was nothing to be seen. Breakers rolled slowly in towards the islands.
He had the feeling that the sea was like an old woman in a rocking chair.
A north-easterly storm bringing low temperatures raged over the archipelago.
Then followed dead calm. Sara Fredrika was finding it increasingly difficult to move, and she was in continous pain from her back.
He went fishing and imagined himself to be the lord of Halsskär. He rarely gave a thought to Kristina Tacker and the baby. His memory was like a vast vacuum.
Sometimes he would give a sudden start. Kristina Tacker, Ludwig Tacker were just behind him.
One morning when he went down to the inlet he heard voices. He followed the sounds, leaned over the edge of the rocks and discovered a small brown mahogany yacht anchored off the narrow headland projecting furthest to the south-west. Two little rowing boats were heading for land. In the boats were women dressed in white and with large hats, and men in blue jackets who were doing the rowing. He could see the glint of bottles, the women were laughing. In the stern of one of the boats was a man wearing a cap back to front, holding some sort of instrument in front of his face – perhaps a camera.
He hurried back to the cottage and told Sara Fredrika.
'They look like summer holidaymakers,' he said. 'But are there any this far out? I thought they were only to be seen around Stockholm and on the bathing beaches along the west coast. And it's getting late in the year, it will soon be autumn.'
'I once heard about a man who used to come with a piano on the steamboat
Tjust
from Söderköping,' she said. 'It was always the beginning of May. He'd bring the piano with him from Stockholm, and it would be lashed down in the bows. The crew had trouble in getting it on to a cattle ferry. But once he'd settled he would sit on an island playing the piano and getting drunk every day until September, and then he would go back home again.'
'This party doesn't have a piano with them.'
'What are they doing here? On my island?'
'It's not your island. And I expect they'd take no notice if anybody tried to stop them landing.'
She started to protest, but he cut her short.
'They'll wonder who I am,' he said. 'I mustn't be seen, my orders are not to allow myself to be identified.'
'How would they know you were anybody other than a man who lives here on this island with me? People judge people on their appearance. Take some of my husband's clothes.'
That thought had already occurred to him. He took some clothes out of a chest. They smelled mouldy, of old sea.
'You look as if you're wearing hand-me-downs,' she said. 'You're taller than he was, but not as bulky.'
'I'm only borrowing them,' he said. 'When we leave Halsskär I shall burn them.'
'I want to see these people,' she said.
'You can't go scrambling over the rocks.'
'If they are where you say, on that headland in the west, there are some flat ledges I can walk along. I want to see those hats.'
When they came to the headland they found that the party had already landed. They were squatting behind a big rock. It took him a while to realise that they were making a film, one of these newfangled inventions with people flitting about jerkily in moving pictures, projected on to a white screen. He tried to explain to Sara Fredrika in a low whisper, but she was not listening.
The man had placed his cine camera on a stand. The ladies in white were running around on the rocks when suddenly a man with an amazingly long moustache and a white-painted face jumped out from behind a slab of rock and rushed towards the women.
Sara Fredrika dug her nails into Tobiasson-Svartman's arm.
'He's got a tail,' she hissed. 'There's a tail sticking out of his trousers.'
She was right. The man with black rings round his eyes had an artificial tail. The women looked as if they were praying and begging for mercy, their faces twitching. The man behind the camera was winding away at full speed, the women were screaming, but without making a sound. Sara Fredrika stood up. Her scream was like a foghorn. She bellowed and started throwing stones at the man with the tail. Tobiasson-Svartman tried to hold her back.
'It's not real,' he said. 'It's not real life, it's not actually happening.'
He snatched a stone from out of her hand and gave her a shake.
'They're only acting,' he said. 'Nobody's going to get hurt.'
Sara Fredrika calmed down. The man behind the camera had stopped winding and turned his cap the right way round. The ladies were staring in astonishment at the pair who had materialised from the rocks. The man had removed the tail and was holding it in his hand like a piece of rope. There was a flash of light from the yacht which was bobbing up and down in the swell. Somebody was watching them through a telescope.
Tobiasson-Svartman told Sara Fredrika to wait, and went over to the film-makers. The women were young and strikingly pretty. The man with the tail had a face he thought he recognised. When he held his hand out in greeting, he remembered having seen the man in a play at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm. His name was Valfrid Mertsgren, the play was called
The Wedding at Ulfåsa.
Mertsgren ignored his outstretched hand and eyed him up and down in annoyance.
'Who are you?' he asked. 'We were told this skerry was uninhabited. They said there was a ruin of an old cottage that we could use.'
'I live here with my wife.'
'For hell's sake, you can't live here. What do you live on?'
'Fishing.'
'Plundering wrecks?'
'If somebody gets into difficulties we help them. We don't plunder.'
'Everybody does,' said Mertsgren. 'People are greedy. They'd steal their neighbour's heart if they had the chance.'
The cameraman and the two women in white had gathered round him.
'Can you really live here?' asked one of the women. 'What do you do in the winter?'
'Where there's the sea, there's food.'
'Can't we include him and the fat woman in the film?' said the other woman, with a shrill laugh.
'She's not fat,' Tobiasson-Svartman said.
The woman who had made the suggestion stared at him. He hated her intensely.
'She's not fat,' he said again. 'She's pregnant'
'In any case, you can't be in the film,' Mertsgren said. 'We can't have a woman with a bun in the oven. This is a romantic adventure, pretty tableaux alternating with scary ones. We don't want any cows with one up the spout.'
Tobiasson-Svartman was on the point of punching him. But he controlled himself, spoke slowly in an attempt to disguise his feelings.
'Why make a film on Halsskär?' he asked in a friendly tone. 'Why here of all places?'
'That's a good question,' Mertsgren said. 'I really don't know why we're filming here.'
He turned his back on the others.
'There's a bloodhound by the name of Hultman on the boat,' he snarled. 'He's a wholesale dealer, and he's put some money into this incredible mish-mash of a manuscript we're supposed to be filming. Maybe he's got nothing better to waste his money on. He's earning vast amounts from the war, churning out nails and explosives. Can you see what the boat's called?'
To his surprise Tobiasson-Svartman discovered that the yacht had the name
Goeben
on its bows. The same name as the German battleship he had a picture of on his desk, the ship he had never actually seen but had admired even so.
A yacht and a battleship with the same name! Women in white with large hats and dying sailors trapped inside their burning ships, a war and a man earning big money.
'I understand,' he said.
'Understand what?' Mertsgren asked.
'That Mr Hultman likes the war and death.'
'I don't know if he likes death. He likes watching women bathing through his telescope. He keeps far enough away not to be seen, nobody realises he's there, but then he aims his telescope at the woman or the part of her body he fancies.'
'But likes the war and death for the sake of his nails.'
'He certainly likes the Germans, at least. They're like his nails, he says. Straight, austere, all the same. He likes the German orderliness, hopes the Kaiser will win the war, curses Sweden for keeping its mouth shut and hiding behind switched-off lighthouses. While he sits in his yacht watching ladies through his telescope.'
Mertsgren leaned forward and whispered in Tobiasson-Svartman's ear.
'He's also enthusiastic about anything to do with erotic jokes. You're a fisherman, so he would have told you that he only sticks his rod into Thigh Bay.'
He contemplated the tail he had in his hand.
'In all the appalling and degrading roles I've had to play in my life, I've never had to wear a tail before. Not until now. Hamlet doesn't have a tail, nor does Lear, nor the malade imaginaire. But a man will do anything for a thousand kronor. That's what he's paying. For a week's work, plus fancy dinners and barrels of booze.'
He waved to Sara Fredrika.
'I understand why she got upset,' he said. 'Give her my compliments and tell her I apologise. We'll leave you in peace. I'll tell Hultman that the skerry was already booked.'
Mertsgren took the two ladies by the arm and returned to the rowing boats. The man with the camera was busy winding leather straps round his stand. Tobiasson-Svartman looked hard at the camera. The man nodded.
'A miracle,' he said. 'Something for the priests to envy us for.' He rested the stand on his shoulder. 'Are you wondering what on earth I'm on about?'
'Yes.'
'I have the mystery of life in my hand. I turn the handle and decide the speed of people's movements. With the camera we can expose secrets that even the eye cannot see. A galloping horse has all four hooves in the air at the same time, that's something the camera has been able to establish. We can see more than the eye does. But we also control what we allow others to see.'
He picked up the camera and looked from Sara Fredrika to Tobiasson-Svartman. He smiled.
'I don't really know how I got mixed up in all this,' he said. 'I was a photographer to start with, with my own little studio. Then Hultman happened to hear about me, and now I'm standing here on a rock with a cine camera and some crazy idea about a tableau the Nail Master has decided should be called
The Devil on Holiday by the Sea.
But it has sharpened my eyes, I have to admit that.'
'How do you mean?'
The man put his head on one side, a shadow fell over his smile.
'Well, for example, I can see that you are not a fisherman. I don't know who you are nor what you do. But a fisherman? Never.'
He set off tentatively towards the water, carrying his equipment. Tobiasson-Svartman had the impression that the stand was part of a cross the cameraman was having to bear.
The man stopped and turned round.
'Maybe you would be a good story for a film? An escaped criminal, somebody running away from his debts. How should I know?'
He did not wait for an answer. The first rowing boat was already on its way back to the yacht. The women in white were laughing, there was a clinking of bottles.
Tobiasson-Svartman went back to Sara Fredrika.
'What kind of people were they? Those women hiding their eyes under their hats? I didn't like them. And tails are for animals, not for people.'
'It was just make-believe. A devil jumping around, that's all.'
'What were they doing here?'
They had started to walk back to the cottage. He was holding on to her, making sure she did not slip.
'Just think of them as driftwood. Something that happened to have been washed ashore here. Then the wind turned and they drifted away again. Driftwood that wasn't even fit for firewood.'
'Tails are for animals,' she said again. 'Tails are not for people.'
In the afternoon he went to the highest point of the skerry, telescope in hand. The
Goeben
had left. He scanned the horizon but could find no sign of it.
The cameraman had seen right through him. He tried to work out if that implied danger.
He could not see any.
One night she woke him up out of a dream.
Kristina Tacker had been standing in front of him, she had been saying something, but he had not been able to work out what it was.
He gave a start and sat up.
'I think the baby is on its way. It's moving, it's tensing its body.'
'But there's a long time to go yet.'
'I have no control over that.'
'What do you want me to do?'
'Stay awake. I've been on my own for long enough in my life.'
'I'm here, even if I'm asleep.'
'What do I know about your dreams?'
It's just like the man with the camera, he thought. She sees straight through me. But she does not know.
'I rarely dream,' he said. 'My sleep is empty, it's black, it doesn't even have any colours. I sometimes think I've been dreaming about flowers, but they are always grey. I've only ever dreamed about dead flowers, never about living ones.'
They stayed awake until dawn. The oyster-catchers were calling to one another, the gulls, the terns.
At about six they decided that he would sail to Kråkmarö and fetch the midwife. Even if the baby was not ready to pop out, they ought to make sure that everything was prepared.
He set sail in the easterly wind, three or four metres per second.
A thought struck him. Perhaps he should seize the moment and make a run for it, head north or south, or even east towards Gotland, and the Gulf of Riga beyond.
But he set sail in a westerly direction, to the midwife. The dinghy sped through the water, Halsskär faded into the horizon behind him.
The August day was like a buoy, he thought. Clean and white in the sunlight.
The sea was carrying him to his destiny.