Depths - By Henning Mankell & Laurie Thompson Page 0,5
as peculiar and terrifying sea monsters. I can also imagine the rocks slowly climbing up out of the sea becoming animals, but they do not terrify me. For me, they are no more than thought-provoking but perfectly harmless hippos rearing up among the waves, of a kind found only in the Baltic Sea.
This is where a land starts and ends, he thought once more. A rock leisurely straightening its back. A rock by the name of Sweden.
He walked to the rail and peered into the blue-grey water rushing along the hull of the destroyer. The sea never gives way, he thought. The sea never sells its skin. In the winter this sea is like frozen skin. Autumn is all calm, waiting. With sudden gusts of howling gales. Summer is no more than a brief glint in the mirror-calm water.
The sea, the elevation of the land, all these incomprehensible phenomena, they are like the slow progress from childhood to adulthood and death. An elevation of the land takes place inside every human being. All our memories come from the sea.
The sea is a dream that never sells its skin.
He smiled. My wife does not want me to see her crying. Perhaps that is for the same reasons, whatever they are, that I do not want her to see who I am when I am alone with the sea?
He returned to his sheltered spot. A freezing cold sailor emptied a bucket of waste food over the stern. Seagulls were following in the wake of the ship like a watchful rearguard. The deck was deserted again. He continued to contemplate the rocks. It was getting lighter.
These reefs and rocks are not only animals, he thought. They are also stones that are breaking free from the sea. There is no such thing as freedom without effort. But these stones are also time. Stones rising slowly out of the sea, which never lets go of them.
He tried to work out where they were. It was eleven hours since they had left Stockholm. He estimated the speed again and adjusted his previous conclusion to nine knots. They must be somewhere in the northern Östergötland archipelago, south of Landsort, north of the Häradskär lighthouse, to the south or east of Fällbådarna.
He went back to his cabin. Apart from the rating on deck he had not set eyes on a single member of the ship's large crew. Nobody could very well have seen him either, nor his hiding place.
He closed his cabin door and sat down on his bunk. In half an hour he would take breakfast in the officers' mess. At half past nine he was due to meet the ship's captain in his quarters. Captain Hans Rake would hand over the secret instructions presently locked in the ship's safe.
CHAPTER 12
He wondered why he so seldom laughed.
What was he missing? Why did he so often think he must be fashioned out of faulty clay?
CHAPTER 13
He sat on the edge of his bunk and let his eyes wander slowly around the cabin.
It was three metres square, like a prison cell with a round, brass-framed porthole. On the deck immediately below it was a corridor linking the various sections of the vessel. According to the plans, which he had memorised in minute detail, there were also two watertight, vertical bulkheads to the left of his cabin but two metres lower down in the ship. Above his head was the companionway leading to the starboard midships gun.
He thought: The cabin is a point. I am in the middle of that point at this very moment. One of these days there will be measuring instruments so precise that it will be possible to establish the exact location of this cabin in terms of latitude and longitude at any given moment. Its position will be capable of being fixed on a map of the world down to a fraction of a second. When that happens there will no longer be a place for gods. Who needs a god when the precise location of every human being can be established, when a person's inner location will coincide exactly with his external location? People making a living out of speculating about superstition and religion will have to find something else to live off. Charlatans and hydrographic engineers stand irrevocably on different sides of the crucial dividing line. Not the date line or the prime meridian line, but the line that separates the measurable from what cannot be measured and hence doesn't exist.