November came, frosty nights were more frequent. He was waiting for Sara Fredrika to return.
Autumn, waiting, winds from the north.
One night he was woken up by dreaming that she had come back. He went out into the darkness and listened. Nothing but the sound of the sea.
Then he heard the beating of wings. The swishing of migrating birds, the last flocks of the autumn leaving Sweden in the night.
Over his head, this vast armada, that allowed him to stay behind.
The first snow fell over the sea on 4 November.
He took in the nets that morning, felt the damp snow seeping into him. There was only a light breeze, he had not raised the sail but rowed slowly. Off Jungfrugrunden he noticed something bobbing up and down in the water. When he came closer he saw that it was a big mine with horns sticking out from its globular casing, most of which was submerged. It was a Russian mine, and had no doubt drifted away from a minefield set elsewhere.
He tied a rope round the damaged anchor loop and towed the mine back to the skerry. He secured it using a sinker.
It was as if he had started to fortify Halsskär.
The next day, when he was making one of his leisurely tours of the skerry, he had the feeling that Sara Fredrika had tricked him.
She had no intention of returning, she had gone away, abandoning both him and Halsskär.
The thought filled him with panic. He scanned the horizon with his telescope, but there was no sign of any boats.
It was evening before he had managed to regain control of himself. Sara Fredrika would come back, he had seen it in her eyes. Something was forcing her to stay with Kristina Tacker, but sooner or later she would come ashore again on Halsskär.
All he could do was to wait. That was his only task.
One day in the middle of November he saw a little yacht sailing fast towards Halsskär. He had difficulty in holding the telescope steady. He recognised the yacht, it was Angel's boat. That convinced him. Sara Fredrika was on her way. The waiting would be over at last.
He went down to the inlet. It was a cold morning, he pulled his overcoat more tightly round him, and noticed that his long hair was hanging over the collar.
When the yacht rounded the last of the headlands, he saw that Angel was alone. Sara Fredrika had not come back.
Angel anchored the yacht and waded ashore, holding her skirt up above her knees. She was coughing badly and her eyes were bloodshot. She shook hands and gave him a letter she had stuck inside her neckband.
'It came to me,' she said. 'From Sara Fredrika. I didn't even know she was away.'
He could see that she was curious, but he paid no attention.
'Go back home,' he said. 'You're coughing and you're running a temperature. Thank you for bringing the letter.'
'I'll stay and wait in case you need to answer it.'
'That's not necessary.'
'The letter was inside another one, addressed to me. She asked me to wait for your reply.'
He tried to read the expression on her face. What had Sara Fredrika written to her?
'That's all she wrote,' she said. 'She said the baby was doing fine, and I was to wait for your reply. If there was one.'
They walked up to the cottage. She drank a ladle of water from the bucket and sat down in front of the fire. He went outside to read the letter in private.
He examined the envelope. It was not Kristina Tacker's handwriting. Somebody else had written what Sara Fredrika had dictated.
He hesitated before plucking up enough courage to open the envelope. It was like taking a deep breath before diving into the water where it was very deep.
The letter in the unknown handwriting:
I am not coming back. You are still there, but you are not for me. I now realise what I didn't want to believe before, that the German soldier didn't commit suicide, but you killed him. I don't know why, just as you cannot understand how I have realised what happened. When you read this letter I will already be on my way to somewhere else with Laura. You will never see her or me again, I'm putting as much distance between us as is possible. You can do what you like with all the things on the skerry. I will never understand who you were, you hardly understand yourself who you are or want to be. Kristina hasn't been able to help me with this letter, she is ill. I'm worried about her state of mind, she might not be able to live in the real world any more. If she doesn't get any better she will be sent to a hospital for neurotics. I have been helped to write this letter by Anna, who works in your house. I'm sending it to the midwife in Kråkmarö and I'm asking her to stay until she is sure that you have read and understood it. Then she will write to me and confirm the fact. She doesn't have an address for me, but will receive an address one day. My journey has begun, and you are no longer with me.
Sara Fredrika, November 1915.
He read the letter again. Then he lay down on the bare rock and stared up at the clouds.
They were scudding, flying, towards the south-west.
He stood up when he heard Angel coming out of the cottage.
He had no idea how much time had passed.
'I've read the letter,' he said.
'She asked me to stay until you said that. I don't know what's in it, of course.'
They walked down to the inlet.
'The clouds are restless,' she said. 'The November weather is as restless as an animal kicking in its stall. I think it's going to be a long winter with lots of ice.'
He did not answer. Angel looked at him.
'I never got to know you,' she said, 'but I delivered your child. Now Sara Fredrika and the baby have left. I have a strong feeling that they will never come back. I can't know that for sure and it's none of my business. But I have to ask you even so: What are you going to do? Are you going to stay here on the skerry? Will you survive here? It's not that you can't feed yourself from the sea, you can no doubt manage that. But the isolation? You come from a big city, will you be able to survive the isolation when the storms really set in?'
'I don't know.'
'You ought to go away.'
He nodded. She waited for him to say something more, but he just stared ahead in silence.
'Well, I'll be off,' she said. 'You ought to go away. I don't think you could cope with life out here. The stones will eat you up.'
He watched her strike anchor and shake off the mud clinging to it. When she set sail, he turned and walked away.
One day the two farm labourers from Kättilö sailed into the inlet.
The rumour that Sara Fredrika had left and taken the baby with her, leaving him behind, had gone round the islands. Somebody had seen an unfamiliar sailing boat approaching Halsskär with a woman on board. But nobody knew what had happened on the skerry. All they knew was that the hydrographic engineer was wandering about the skerry like a moth-eaten animal.
Somebody maintained that he had even started to walk on all fours.
The farmhands sailed out one Sunday, taking a bottle of aquavit with them. It was pure curiosity. But he merely shook his head when they offered him a drink. He did not answer their questions.
When they got back home they reported that he had definitely started walking on all fours the moment they turned their backs.
A few days before Christmas he scratched his name into one of the rocks on the north side of the skerry, a rock that was submerged at high tide. There was a thin layer of snow over the archipelago, the temperature was now more or less constantly below zero. He had wrapped himself up in a shaggy blanket held in place by a rope round his body. He lived on with one question, the only one he still had the strength to worry about. How could she have known what happened out on the ice the day the German deserter died? He sought in vain for an answer.
He kept walking round the skerry, and feeding the cat, which was growing more and more shy, with small fish. Once every day he went to check that the mine was still at its mooring.
After Angel's visit he had stopped measuring distances altogether. He had fallen headlong into the abyss inside himself. Down there in the darkness Kristina Tacker was by his side. He tried to climb up out of the depths, but the walls were slippery, he kept sliding back down, his strength faded and eventually vanished altogether.
In the end there was nothing left.
There were moments when his thoughts were crystal clear. Then he realised that he could never have grown close to another human being because he had an irrational fear of losing himself. There were also other moments when he wanted to tear off all his clothes, wash himself, and drag himself out of his degradation.
One day he sailed through a bitter winter wind to Valdemarsvik and bought some newspapers. He read about the war, how the sea battles had been replaced by long-drawn-out fighting in the muddy fields of Flanders. He had the strong impression that life was the same for everybody, and he sank back down into his abyss, unable to raise the strength to resist.
It was clear to him that most things in his life had been based on a lunatic idea. He had built his existence on distances instead of seeking closeness.
It was then, a few days before Christmas, that he carved his name into the rock.
Afterwards he realised that he had prepared his own headstone.
On Christmas Day a northerly gale blew in over the archipelago.
He recalled that it was this very morning some years previously that Sara Fredrika had lost her husband.
When he clambered on to the rocks he discovered that the mine had broken loose from its mooring. He scanned the choppy water, but he could see no sign of it. It was drifting out to sea, into the shipping lanes.
I am taking part in the war, he thought. But I do not know on which side.
Death came at New Year, 1916.
One night there was a strong, persistent, northerly gale. The cottage caught fire. He had neglected the chimney, which had cracked, and red-hot soot had forced its way through. The walls went up as if they had been soaked in petrol.
He was woken by the dazzling light By then it was too late to control the fire. He hurried out of the burning cottage with his sounding lead, his notebooks and his clothes.
The cottage burned quickly, and was a complete ruin before dawn broke.
He felt very cold, there was a fierce wind.
During the night he thought he could see Sara Fredrika and Laura in the glow from the fire.
Kristina Tacker had not been in the flames. She was gone, silent, he could not even remember her face now.
The gale blew over by afternoon. The sea was calm once more. The ice would soon begin to form, if the cold weather continued.
He felt cold all the time, then the feeling developed into a pain approaching the intolerable.
The vital decision was creeping quietly up on him. Soon it became an obvious inevitability. There may have been a trace of fear inside him, but it was mostly exhaustion and the intense cold that he could not cope with.
He started to look for the cat so as to kill it, but he did not have the strength. It would survive the cold, it did not know what death was, it would only die if it could not find anything to eat.
He carried his sounding lead and his notebooks to the inlet, packed everything into a net and tied it to a sinker before throwing them on board.
He suddenly felt that he was in a hurry. He looked anxiously up at the sky, worried that a wind might get up again.
He wanted to set out when the sea was calm.
The boat glided out of the inlet.
He rowed to the spot where the two German sailors had sunk to the bottom of the sea. When he reached it he took in the oars, sat on the stern seat and let the boat drift. There was still no wind, the sea was as calm as a millpond. He lifted the net with his lead and the notebooks over the rail and let it sink to the bottom.
One last time he tried to clamber up the slippery walls of the abyss, but slid down again immediately.
He had made up his mind to get it all over with quickly. The sinker was heavy, he made his last measurement and decided it weighed seven kilos. He tied the rope attached to the stone round his legs.
But first he took off all his clothes. He wanted to die naked. The cold water would deaden his senses.
Then he lifted the stone over the rail and followed it down into the depths.
Some days later the boat drifted ashore at the Häradskär lighthouse. One of the pilots identified it as Sara Fredrika's sailing dinghy.
The sea froze over in mid-January.
The ice covered all the sea graves in the winter of 1916.
This story takes place in a borderland between reality and my own invention.
I have redrawn many sea charts, given islands new names, added new bays and eliminated others. Anybody who tries to sail along the shipping lanes I have sketched out must reckon with coming upon lots of unexpected shallows and other hazards.
In December 2001 the Swedish Navy handed over responsibility for hydrographic surveys in Swedish waters to civilian organisations. I hope both they and all earlier generations of hydrographic engineers will forgive me for creating my own routines regarding the charting of naval channels. What is beyond dispute is that the sounding lead that was dropped into the water and allowed to sink down to the seabed was the instrument originally used to decide the safest route for ships to follow.
I had the sounding lead used in this novel made in Manchester. That could well have been a fact, but need not be.
Many of the ships that feature in the novel did exist, but were long since sent to the scrapyard or have otherwise disappeared from our consciousness. Other vessels have been constructed by me, in my role as shipbuilder. I have increased and decreased tonnages, downsized the crew or added an artillery officer when it seemed to me appropriate.
To be frank, I have been rather self-indulgent.
Some of the people I describe have also existed. But most of them have never set foot on the islands in the beautiful, barren and occasionally stormy Östergötland archipelago. Nor have they been bosuns or captains on board Swedish naval vessels.
Nevertheless, I can imagine them – in the shadowy world where history and imagination merge, on the literary shores where the flotsam and jetsam of fantasy and reality intermingle.
Some years ago, in the early 1990s, I rowed through the fog in the Gryt archipelago. Later, when the weather had cleared up and everything seemed reminiscent of a curious dream, this story was born.
H.M.
Maputo, August 2004