Four days before they were due to complete the soundings at Sandsänkan he rowed out to Halsskär again. He did not know why he wanted to see her again: the smell of sweat and urine was a kind of barrier between them. Nevertheless, he was tempted by it.
The sea was calm, dark clouds came rolling in from the south-east, the thermometer was falling. The water had an acrid smell to it, as if it were secreting some unknown substance.
He moored the tender in the inlet. The nets were hanging on the drying rack, damp and smelling of fish. He lifted the lid of a corf kept firmly in place by some stones at the side of her boat. There was a thrashing and splashing inside. He stuck down his hands and felt the scales of the writhing fish. Something stung him in the palm of the hand, a dorsal fin or a pair of teeth. He pulled his bleeding hand away. Reacting in fury, he struck out like a reptile. He overturned the corf and let the fish wriggle their way to freedom.
He remembered the drift net he had seen on one of the first mornings as he leaned over the
Blenda's
rail. That was in the distant past now, a vague memory of an image standing for the impossible terms of freedom.
He stood the corf up again and walked away. He went to rinse his hand in the spring water, and then he lay down behind the usual rocks and aimed his telescope at the cottage. There was no smoke coming out of the chimney, the door was closed. It started to snow, a faint white glimmer in the air.
She had made no sound, but she was immediately behind him when he turned round. She was looking him straight in the eye, as if ready to pounce.
'Why are you lying here? What do you want? What have I done to you?'
'Nothing. I was looking for you, I lay down here to wait.'
'With a telescope?'
'I like to study details.'
'What have I done?' she repeated.
'Nothing. I didn't mean to frighten you.'
'You don't frighten me. What could frighten me, after all I've been through?'
She grabbed hold of his arm.
'Help me get away from here,' she said.
Her voice was hoarse, almost snarling. He could see the change in her face.
'I'm dying here,' she said. 'Help me to get away. Let me come with you on the ship. Take me anywhere, as long as it's away from here. I can't live here any longer.'
'I can't take you on a warship. Don't you have any family?'
She shook her head impatiently.
'My family is at the bottom of the sea. I row around and fish feed at the site of my husband's grave. I sometimes expect bits of his body to come up with the nets. An arm, a foot, his head. I can't put up with that thought. I have to get away.'
'I don't think I can help you.'
Her face was close to his. It was like during the night. All the smells had gone.
'I'll do absolutely anything to avoid having to stay here.'
She ran her hands over his body. He pushed her gently away and stood up.
'I'll come back,' he said. 'I must think this over. I'll come back. In a few days. Three days, four at most.'
He hurried down to his boat. There was still snow in the air. He rowed away from Halsskär and could see her on a rock, watching him go.
She would have to wait for four days. After the fifth day the ship would already have left.
He rowed with long, vigorous strokes and longed to be back at home. Kristina Tacker sat on the stern seat, smiling at him.
His mission would soon be over.
The next day he completed the last of the soundings.
All that was left to be done now was a final check of the area sounded. It would take two days if the weather stayed fine.
The barometer was climbing, the worst of the snowy weather had moved away southwards.
For the last time he sent his lead plunging down to the bottom. Once again he had the overwhelming hope that this would be the moment when he discovered the place where there was no bottom, the point where the whole of his life would be dismantled and changed, but also be given a meaning. The lead stopped at nineteen metres. He made his final note. He had sent his lead down to the seabed 5,346 times since they started work on this mission.
They rowed back to the
Blenda.
The ratings seemed exhilarated, and rowed at full speed. Tobiasson-Svartman knew that for ages they had spent much of their free time cursing under their breath this boring task they had been ordered to perform.
Mats Lindegren, the sailor Tobiasson-Svartman had hit, still sat as far away from him as possible. His lip was no longer swollen, but he never looked Tobiasson-Svartman in the eye.
Lieutenant Jakobsson was standing, pipe in hand, as they winched the two launches on board. He was still uncommunicative. Tobiasson-Svartman was pleased that they would soon take leave of each other and never meet again.
He reported that the mission was complete. Jakobsson nodded, without speaking. Then he lit his pipe, inhaled deeply, coughed, and fell down on to the deck as if he had been struck a violent blow by an unseen fist.
He fell without a sound. Everything came to a standstill, the ratings stopped operating the winch's ropes and tackle, Tobiasson-Svartman was holding his notebook and lead in his hands.
The first to react was Lindegren. He knelt down and placed his fingers on the officer's neck. Then he stood up and saluted. His dialect was so hard to understand that he had to repeat what he said before Tobiasson-Svartman could understand.
'I believe Lieutenant Jakobsson is dead.'
Tobiasson-Svartman stared at the man lying on his back. He was holding his pipe in his right hand, staring fixedly at a point over Tobiasson-Svartman's head.
Lieutenant Jakobsson was carried to his cabin. Fredén, who had had some medical training, took Jakobsson's pulse in several places before corifirming that he was dead. The time of death was entered into the logbook. Fredén took over command of the ship. His first duty was to write a report of what had happened for Naval Headquarters in Stockholm.
The radio telegraphist went to his cabin to send the message.
For a moment Fredén was alone with Tobiasson-Svartman. Both were shaking.
'What did he die of?'
Fredén pulled a face.
'Difficult to say. It happened so quickly. Jakobsson was still comparatively young. He drank no more than anybody else, didn't get blind drunk in any case. Didn't exactly overeat either. He occasionally used to complain about pains in his left arm. Nowadays some doctors regard that as an indication that the heart is not as healthy as it might be. The way he simply fell over could suggest a massive heart attack. Either it was his heart or a blood vessel burst in his brain.'
'He always seemed to be healthy.'
'Hymn 452,' Fredén said. '"My life's a journey unto death." We sing that whenever we have a burial on board. We sung it for the German sailor we picked up. Strangely, not many people seem to realise that Wallin, the man who wrote it, knew what he was talking about. He reminds us all of what is in store for us, if only we listen.'
He excused himself and went on deck to assemble the crew and tell them what they already knew, namely that Lieutenant Jakobsson was dead.
Tobiasson-Svartman looked at the dead man again. This was the third dead person he had seen in his life, the third dead man. First his father, then the German sailor and now Lieutenant Jakobsson.
Death is silence, he thought. That's all. Trees fallen, their roots exposed.
Above all silence. Death announces its approach by silencing men's tongues.
For a second he felt as if he himself were falling. He was forced to grab hold of the chest of drawers and close his eyes. When he opened them again, it looked as though Lieutenant Jakobsson had changed his position.
He hurried from the cabin.
An invisible veil of mourning was being pulled over the ship.
It was dusk when Fredén assembled the ship's crew on the foredeck, and some of the searchlights were already lit. The arc lamps crackled away as night-flying insects flew into the filaments and were roasted.
Tobiasson-Svartman thought it was like watching something on a stage. A play was about to begin. Or, perhaps better, the last act and epilogue. The end of Lieutenant Jakobsson's story.
Lieutenant Fredén spoke very briefly. He urged the crew to master their emotions and maintain discipline. Then he dismissed them.
Tobiasson-Svartman could not sleep that night, even though he was hugging his lead. He got up at midnight, dressed and went out on deck. His mission was over, he was surrounded by death, there was a woman on a skerry when he desired and he both longed for and dreaded the imminent meeting with his wife. He had measured the depth of the sea around the Sandsänkan lighthouse, but he had not succeeded in coordinating his discoveries with the navigable channels inside himself.
The ship was rocking gently in the swell. He had the feeling of being a large animal padding round a cage. The cold night made him shiver. He set off round the ship. The sailors on watch saluted him, and he nodded in reply. Suddenly he found himself outside the door of Jakobsson's cabin. Now that the ship's master was dead he no longer felt he needed to use his title when he thought about him.
He wondered where Fredén was sleeping. Until now he had been sharing a cabin with Jakobsson.
The dead man was still there. There was a lantern on the table, he could see the light under the door. He opened it and went in. Somebody had placed a white handkerchief over Jakobsson's face. The pipe had been taken from his grasp before his hands had been crossed over his chest. Tobiasson-Svartman contemplated Jakobsson's chest, as if there might be a trace of a forgotten breath.
He opened the drawer in the bureau attached to the wall. It contained a few notebooks and a framed photograph. It was of a woman. He looked furtively at the photograph. She was very beautiful. He stared at the picture as if bewitched. She was one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen. On the back was the name Emma Lidén.
He sat down and started thumbing through the notebooks. To his surprise he saw that Jakobsson had been keeping a private diary in parallel with the official logbook.
Tobiasson-Svartman glanced at the man lying with a handkerchief over his face. It felt both dangerous and amusing to penetrate his private world. He leafed through to the date when he had joined the ship.
It took him an hour to read to the end. Jakobsson had made the last entry only a couple of hours before he died. He had noted 'a pain in my left arm, some slight pressure over my chest' and reflected on why his bowel movements had been so sluggish these last few days.
Tobiasson-Svartman was shaken. The man who ended his life with a worried comment about a stomach upset had been in possession of colossal strength, of both love and hatred.
Emma Lidén was his secret fiancée, but she was already attached to another man and had several children. The diaries were full of notes about letters exchanged and then burned, of a love that exceeds all bounds, that is a blessing without equal, but can never be anything but a dream. The phrase 'woke up in tears again this morning' was repeated at regular intervals.
Tobiasson-Svartman tried to picture it. The man with the pipe and the shrivelled hand, weeping in his cabin. But the image was no more than a blur.
He could never have imagined that Jakobsson had hated him so intensely, but the lieutenant had taken a dislike to him the moment he stepped on board. 'I will never be able to trust that man. Both his reserved manner and his smile seem to be false. I have an illusion on board.'
Tobiasson-Svartman tried to recall the moment when he had met the
Blenda's
master for the first time. His own impression had been quite different. Jakobsson must have been a man turned inside out. He had not been who he was.
Tobiasson-Svartman read every diary entry for the period that he had been on board. Jakobsson never referred to him by his name, only as 'the sea-measurer', a term exuding deeply felt contempt. It sounds like a grub, he thought. A beetle that hides in the cracks of his ship.
The hatred that emerged from the diary was shapeless, like a lump of mud that spread out over the pages. Jakobsson never vouchsafed the reason for his antagonism and hatred. Tobiasson-Svartman was no more than 'a mud-dipper, repulsive, stuck-up and stupid. He also smells like sludge. He has mud in his mouth, he is a man rotting away.'
It was almost one thirty by the time he closed the last of the diaries. A half-empty bottle of brandy was sticking up out of a jackboot. He removed the cork and drank. He pulled the handkerchief aside and tipped some drops of brandy into Jakobsson's nostrils and eyes. Then he opened Lieutenant Jakobsson's trousers, eyed his wrinkled, shrivelled penis and poured brandy over that as well. He put the bottle back in the jackboot, put the handkerchief back in place and left the cabin with the diaries in his hand.
Once back in his own cabin he took out the oilskin pouch he used for his sounding notes, put the diaries inside it, together with some steel edging he had kicked loose from the floor.
He went out on deck, walked to a point by the rail where none of the lookouts could see him, and dropped the diaries into the sea.
Somewhere in the distance one of the watchmen started coughing. The moon was half full, and its reflection formed a path over the water between the ship and the Sandsänkan lighthouse.
He remained by the rail for a long time. Even if he did not recognise himself in what the diaries had said about him, he could not get away from the fact that, as far as Jakobsson was concerned, it was the truth. It was what he had taken with him into death. No one could bring it back.
On 2 December an easterly gale was blowing over the sea to the north of Gotland.
The
Svea
had appeared on the horizon at about nine in the morning. That afternoon Tobiasson-Svartman packed his bags and said goodbye to the officers. He thanked the ratings who helped him with his work the previous day. Mats Lindegren did not put in an appearance, however; but Tobiasson-Svartman had not ordered him to turn up.
Later in the evening he was invited to a little party in the gunroom. Fredén, the new commanding officer, had given his permission on condition that they were not too noisy, in view of the fact that they had a dead man on board. One of the petty officers and the chief engineer had good singing voices and performed some sea shanties. They had drunk punch laced with liberal quantities of aquavit. When they were all drunk, of course, they started talking about the dead man. Several of the officers present maintained that Lieutenant Jakobsson had approved of and been impressed by Tobiasson-Svartman's work. He did not need to make an effort in order to appear surprised. But he did not feel up to staying long at the impromptu party and withdrew, saying he had some reports to finish.
The last he heard before dropping off to sleep was the deep but unclear male voices singing, possibly in Italian.
When he left the gunboat and walked along the gangway for the last time, he glanced over his shoulder, as if to make sure that Jakobsson had not returned to life.
Two ratings helped carry his bags to the same cabin as he had occupied at the beginning of his mission.
He stood quite still in the cabin. He was back at the beginning once more.
Captain Rake welcomed him on board. He had shaved off all his hair and gave the impression of being very tired. His left eye was infected and running. His eczema was in full bloom.
They sat down. Captain Rake served brandy, despite the fact that it was not yet noon.
'I'm a man who lives in accordance with strict routines,' Rake said. 'I hate any form of lax discipline. People can never achieve dignity if they don't recognise the importance of obeying both themselves and others. But now and then I allow myself one little step from the straight and narrow. One example is the occasional indulgence in a glass of spirits before lunch, and possibly even two.'
They drank each other's health.
'All these dead bodies,' muttered Rake out of the blue. 'On the way here my bosun Rudin died. Then you fished up that corpse wearing the uniform of a German sailor. And now Lieutenant Jakobsson. Was it his heart?'
'His heart or his brain.'
Rake nodded and stroked his shaven head. Tobiasson-Svartman noticed that Rake's finger was shaking.
'It's the tiny blood vessels we can't see that can be our weakest point,' Rake said. 'When they burst we are sent into free fall, which leads to death and the grave, or paralysis and an iron lung, to an instant's agony or long-drawn-out and horrific suffering.'
He screwed up his eyes and stared hard at Tobiasson-Svartman.
'What is your weakness? You don't need to tell me if you don't want to, of course. It's a man's right not to reveal the misery he is saddled with. Weakness and misery are the same thing in my book. It's merely a question of which word you choose.'
It seemed to Tobiasson-Svartman that his weakness was a woman who lived alone on a skerry half a nautical mile south-west of the destroyer he was on. But he did not say so. Rake was somebody he was now looking forward to saying goodbye to for ever.
'I have many weaknesses,' he said. 'It's not possible to pick just one.'
Rake stood up to indicate that the conversation was over.
'My question was a general one. We are expecting to dock at Skeppsbron tomorrow at nine in the morning. I'm afraid we can't travel at top speed.'
'Engine trouble?'
'An unfortunate decision made by Naval Headquarters. In a mistaken attempt to nurse the engines, top speeds are allowed only in actual battle situations. There are very few engineers and officers with technical qualifications at headquarters. Engines need to be stretched, not often but regularly. Otherwise there is a bigger risk of engine trouble when it really matters.' Rake gave a laugh. 'It's the same with people. We too need to be forced to work at the limit of our abilities. The difference between a machine and a person isn't all that great'
Rake opened the cabin door and looked forward to seeing him at table that evening.
Tobiasson-Svartman went back to his cabin and lay down on his bunk. He was soon fast asleep.
He awoke with a start an hour or more later. A plaintive scraping sound was spreading through the ship's hull, indicating that anchors and cables were being pulled aboard. He got up, put on his jacket and went out on deck. The
Blenda
was out of sight. The
Svea's
engines were throbbing, smoke was pouring out of the four big funnels. The ship turned slowly on its own axis and then set course to the north-east.
He stared hard at Halsskär, but could see nothing. The sea was frighteningly deserted.
There's something I don't understand, he thought. A warning. I am right now making a mistake, but I do not know what it is.
Halsskär faded into the mist.
Tobiasson-Svartman thought about the spot he had been looking for, the point where his sounding lead never reached the bottom of the sea.