Depths (26 page)

The attack on Ludwig Tacker aroused a lot of attention. There were prominent articles in the newspapers. Everybody agreed that the assailant must be a madman.

But his father-in-law did not die. He had a broken jaw, a badly broken nose and he had bitten deeply into his tongue. The doctors treating him established that he also had concussion.

It was evening. Kristina Tacker had been to see her father. Tobiasson-Svartman was in his study, reading a meteorological journal, when she came into the room.

'I don't want to disturb you,' she said.

He put the journal down and pointed to the sofa in front of one of the two high windows. She slumped down.

'You're not disturbing me,' he said. 'How could you do that?'

I've been thinking about what happened.'

'We must be grateful that he wasn't more badly injured.'

She shook her head. 'What kind of a person would try to kill a man he didn't know?'

'It's like in a war.'

'What do you mean?'

'You don't kill people, you kill enemies. And the enemy is nearly always faceless. This man is conducting a secret war. Everybody is his enemy, nobody is his friend.'

She asked no more questions but left the room. He picked up a newspaper and read about himself. About the madman they were looking for.

I am completely calm, he thought. Nobody is going to arrest me, nobody knows. The man who appeared out of the darkness has vanished. He will never reappear. He will remain a riddle.

The next day they went to visit his father-in-law; he was in bed at home, receiving only a few visitors.

He was tempted, just for an instant, to tell Ludwig Tacker who it had been, hidden behind the scarf.

'I'm very sorry to hear about what happened,' he said. 'It's the duty of the police to track down the madman. Let us hope they succeed. Thank goodness it didn't end in catastrophe, at least'

Ludwig Tacker looked hard at him without saying a word. Then he made a dismissive gesture. He wanted to be left in peace.

Tobiasson-Svartman sat down on a bench in Humlegården.

It's not me, he told himself. For short periods I am somebody else, perhaps my father, perhaps somebody I could never imagine. I am searching for something, a bottom that does not exist, neither in the sea nor in myself.

His thoughts faded away. Children were playing in the park. His head was a complete vacuum. He started to feel extremely weary, it was like a bank of fog creeping up on him.

When he woke up it was late afternoon. He went home.

In the flat he found the maid waiting for him, red-eyed. Kristina Tacker had been rushed into hospital some hours previously. She had gone into labour, although the baby was not due for a long time yet.

The shock, he thought. Her shock and fear are now mine as well. I hoped her father would die. It might end up with me killing my own child instead.

Kristina Tacker gave birth to a daughter that evening.

The doctors were very doubtful if the baby would live. For the next few days Tobiasson-Svartman did not leave the flat. He sent the maid back and forth, bringing news from the Serafimer Hospital.

The days were sultry. At night, when the maid had fallen asleep in exhaustion, he took to wandering about the flat naked. He frequently sat at his desk to write down his thoughts. But over and over again he discovered that he did not have any thoughts. All around him and inside him was nothing but a vast vacuum.

One night when he could not sleep he packed a suitcase. He tried to fold his clothes as if it had been his wife doing the packing for him.

The china figurines stood silently on their shelves. He waited.

On 2 August he received a telephone message from a hospital consultant by the name of Edman.

He was asked to attend the hospital as soon as possible. His panic reaction was such that he had stomach pains. He hurried out of the flat doubled up in agony.

If the baby had died his wife would be very critical. He had stayed away for too long, had avoided his responsibilities. Or had something happened to her? Had she caught an infection? He had no idea, and sat shivering in the cab.

Then it struck him: Ludwig Tacker. Has he realised that I was the one who attacked him? Has he told her?

When he arrived at the hospital the first thing he needed to do was to go to the lavatory. Then he knocked on the consultant's door, heard a loud 'Come', and went in. Dr Edman was tall and bald. He invited his visitor to take a seat.

'You look very frightened.'

'Obviously, I was very worried when I was summoned here.'

'Everybody always fears the worst when they are bidden to come to the hospital. I've tried to drum it into my staff that they should try not to sound so damned dramatic on the telephone. But hospitals are frightening places, whether one likes it or not. However, you have no need to worry. Your daughter will survive. She is strong and has a powerful lust for life.'

His relief was beyond words. Once he had injured his arm when he fell from a companionway. The pain was intense and he had been given a morphine injection by the ship's doctor. He had never forgotten the feeling of relief when the injection started working. It was the same now, as if somebody had pumped some drug into his veins. His stomach pains ceased, Dr Edman stood before him like a beaming redeemer, dressed in white.

'They had better stay in hospital for a while yet,' the doctor said. 'We learn a lot every time we have an opportunity to study a premature baby.'

He left Dr Edman's office and walked along the corridor.

I do not deserve this, he thought. But my daughter wants to live, she has more of a will to live than I have.

He went to look at the little miracle.

It seemed to him that she looked like a dried mushroom. But she's mine, he thought. She's mine and she's alive.

Kristina Tacker had a small private room. She was pale and tired. He sat down on the bed and took her hand.

'She's a beautiful baby,' he said. 'I want her to be called Laura.'

'As we had agreed,' she said with a faint smile.

He did not stay for long. Just before he left, he told her that he would have to set out on his mission now. He ought to have left already, but he had asked for a postponement until he could be confident that the baby would survive.

'Thank you for staying,' she said.

'Everything will be all right,' he said. 'I'll soon be back.'

He left the hospital. It was a relief, like sinking into warm water.

That night he wandered around the flat naked.

Shortly before dawn he opened the door of the maid's room. She had thrown off the covers and was lying naked in her bed. He stood looking at her for a long time before leaving.

When she woke up he was no longer there.

He was walking beside the river, a winding path between dry nettles and patches of tall ferns.

It was the third day after his flight from Stockholm, Kristina Tacker and the baby. In the market square at Söderköping he had gone round the fish stalls looking for somebody who would be sailing home through Slätbaken and then turning off in the direction of Finnö. A couple of farm labourers from Kättilö were willing to take him with them, and wanted paying in aquavit. They were due to meet at the mouth of the river two days later, by which time the labourers hoped to have sold all the fish they had caught in their spare time to boost their income.

There was an opening by the side of the path, a clearing leading down to the brown river. He sat on a large stone and closed his eyes. Although he had been moving slowly without exerting himself, he was breathing heavily, as if he had been running. It was not only when he moved, but also when he was sitting down, or sleeping. He was still running.

Even before he went aboard the train that was to take him south he had written a letter to Kristina Tacker. He explained his sudden departure by telling her that the war had entered an unexpected and very worrying phase. As usual, everything was top secret, every letter he wrote to her, especially if it contained the slightest reference to the character of his work, meant that he was exposing himself, his wife and the baby to danger.

He sat at a table in the first-class dining room at the Central Station. His hand shook as he wrote the name Laura. He lost control of himself and burst into tears. A waitress watched him nervously but said nothing. He pulled himself together and started to invent his new, urgent mission.

The war is coming closer to our shores. The people cannot be told anything about it yet, but military men like myself are aware of the situation. The work of securing our borders must be intensified. I shall be on board several different ships. The location will vary, to both the north and the south of the Baltic Sea, or along the Halland and Bohus coast in the west. My letters will not be channelled via the military post office in Malmö. They will be sent from special Swedish Navy bases along the east coast. You must not mention anything I write to anybody. That would put me in danger, there could be repercussions, I could even be dismissed. I shall write again soon.

He posted the letter at the railway station, bought a ticket to Norrköping and left Stockholm. Before Södertälje the train passed through a local forest fire. The smoke was like fog outside the windows.

That is what I am looking for, he thought. I can row into the fog, just like when I approached a remote skerry and found Sara Fredrika.

He continued as far as Söderköping and spent the night in the hotel on the bank of the canal. Without understanding why, he checked in under an assumed name. He called himself Ludwig Tacker, gave no occupational title and stipulated Humlegårdsgatan as his home address.

It was a sultry night. He lay awake, on top of the covers.

Nobody here knows who I am, he thought. I am safe at present. When my position can be fixed, I have gone astray.

As dawn broke, he went for a walk along the canal, strolled up to the top of Ramunderberget, went back to the hotel, had coffee and wrote another letter to his wife. He described himself as exhilarated, happy about the birth of their child, but at the same time very conscious of his duty.

It was a short letter. He sealed the envelope and left the hotel.

It was a hot day. Only when he came to the path meandering along the river did he feel anything that could remotely be described as cool.

As he sat on the stone in the clearing, he started thinking. Should he extend his mission and make it longer than he had at first intended? The path next to the river, the warm, damp smell of mud, led his mind to other continents, perhaps Africa, or Asia. A courier could take his letters and post them in Sweden. Kristina Tacker would be worried about distant dangers, diseases, insects and snakes. There again, the distance would make his secret all the bigger, she would never tell anybody, not even her father. Besides, she knew nothing about naval ships. If he told her that there was a ship that could sail at the prodigious speed of eighty knots, she would not question it.

Kristina Tacker never questioned secrets.

He sat on the stone and played with the thought of expeditions to distant countries.

He made a measurement he had never attempted before. How far from the truth could he transport a fantasy before it collapsed in ruins?

There was no answer to that, of course. He also imagined transforming his sounding lead into a diving bell and descending into the depths himself. How strong a pressure would he be able to tolerate? Would the shell hold or would it shatter so that he was sent shooting back up to the surface and the real world once more?

It was already late afternoon when he left his stone and continued walking towards the mouth of the river. He imagined himself trudging along a path somewhere inside a steaming rainforest in a tropical land without a name.

The boat was the same type as Sara Fredrika's, but the sail was patched and the farm labourers drunk. They were asleep, tangled together among the empty herring barrels and baskets in the bottom of the boat. It was six o'clock when he woke them up. One of them, the older one called Elis, asked Tobiasson-Svartman if he had brought the aquavit with him. He showed them the bottles but said he had no intention of handing them over until they were south of Finntarmen and preferably had reached their destination.

And what was the destination? It was the younger man, Gösta, who asked.

'It's secret. A military operation,' he replied. 'I am to be dropped on a skerry and I shall be collected from there by a naval vessel.'

'Which island?' Gösta wondered.

'I'll show you when we get close to it.'

The men were hung-over and starting to moan, and wanted to wait until the next day before leaving the mouth of the river. But he cajoled them into setting out to sea right now, there was no time to waste. There was a following wind that would take them out of Slätbaken before they lay up for the night. Gösta sat at the tiller and Elis kept an eye on the sail. He cursed every time he tightened the sheet or let it go.

Tobiasson-Svartman made himself comfortable in the bows. He had his rucksack with the sounding lead between his legs. There was an acrid smell coming from the sea. He recognised it from his time aboard the
Blenda.

They anchored for the night in a creek on the edge of the approach to Slätbaken. He had spent a night with Sara Fredrika on the other side of the narrow channel.

He suddenly felt pangs of guilt. It was as if he were no longer being taken south, but was descending the sounding line inside himself. He found it difficult to breathe.

It was not until the fire had died out and the farm labourers had fallen asleep that he could feel his panic subsiding.

He looked at the sleeping labourers. I envy them, he thought. But between their lives and mine is a distance that can never be bridged.