Depths - By Henning Mankell & Laurie Thompson Page 0,61
been cut off from his colleagues by an open channel. He had very little food, and his only chance was to walk towards the open sea, towards Halsskär where he knew she lived.
'You might not have been here, of course,' he said. 'The cottage might have been empty. But at least I would have had a roof over my head, I could have drilled holes through the ice, fished and survived.'
'I am still here,' she said.
'No doubt the open channel will freeze over again, but you never know how long it will take.'
'I'm not alone,' she said. 'You are not the first person to come walking over the ice this winter. Somebody came from the other direction.'
'From the sea?'
'In a rowing boat, like the one you had.'
'I didn't see a rowing boat in the inlet.'
'He let it drift away when he came to the edge of the ice.'
'He?'
She sat down next to him on the floor. She smelled awful.
He was usually disgusted by people who smelled bad, such as their maid Anna. While serving on board the gunship Edda as a cadet they were carrying out a rope-ladder manoeuvre and he had been assigned to help a simple rating with rotten teeth. The smell from the man's mouth was unimaginable. Even when he was two metres away from the rating the smell hit him in the face, it was the smell of death emerging from the sailor's mouth every time he breathed.
Sara Fredrika did not smell of death. She just smelled of dirt, a friendly, sad little whiff of muck that he could put up with.
Because I love her, he thought. That's the way it is. That's why I can put up with her.
CHAPTER 96
She sat down next to him and started speaking in a low voice.
But the man hidden in the cupboard with all the nets could not understand, he could only guess at what the voices were now saying about him.
He must be scared, Tobiasson-Svartman thought. A German sailor could not have any plausible reason for being on Swedish soil. On a rocky skerry like Halsskär, with the widow of a fisherman.
He had let his rowing boat drift away. Whoever he was, he must have burned a bridge behind him, and that was dangerous.
She said: 'I am not alone here. There's somebody in there among the nets.'
He pretended to be surprised.
'Who are you hiding? Who's hiding there?'
'You spoke about the war last autumn when you were here. Sometimes I was woken up by dull thuds that made the house shake. I went to the highest point on the skerry, and there were times when I could see fires in the distance. Once when I was taking in nets at Jungfrugrunden, a hawser floated towards me. It was like a long snake in the water. The rope was as thick as my arm. It smelled of gunpowder, it smelled of death. I didn't touch it, it just wriggled past as if it were alive. It was clear that this bit of hawser had something to do with the war. A few days after Christmas two Finns turned up in a boat. One is called Juha, the other one is known as Arvo but is actually called something else that I can't say because round here it means something rude in Swedish. They hunt seals in these parts, but mostly they smuggle hard liquor. They've never done me any harm. They had an Ålander with them in their sloop. He was called Ville, his surname was something like Honka. He told me about the war, and he started crying and cursed us Swedes for not sending troops to Åland to defend the islands. I started to understand what the war was all about, those fires in the night and the shock waves and the thudding noises – it meant that people were dying in their thousands.'
And then he came? The man who's been caught in your nets in there?'
'I was scared when there was a knocking at the door. I didn't open up. I grabbed a knife. He was wearing a uniform and talking in a language I couldn't understand, it sounded like somebody who used to buy eels off us when I was a child. But when he collapsed on the doorstep, he wasn't threatening any more. I dragged him inside. His ribs felt like chicken bones under his jacket, I thought he might be ill, maybe he would die. I could have invited my own death, perhaps he