for a week he took Stefan Dorflinger with him on to the ice. It developed into a peculiar sort of game, with him drawing up an imaginary line a hundred metres from where he had prepared the trapdoor in the ice. He taught the deserter how to drill, explained the principles of depth sounding and let him drop the lead down to the seabed and do the calculations. Tobiasson-Svartman played the role of magician who would occasionally predict an accurate measurement even before the lead had reached the bottom.
Nothing is as magical as exact knowledge, he thought. The man who had run away from his German naval ship had found a strange magician in the Swedish winter landscape. A man who can see through the ice, who can measure depths, not by using a sounding lead but by using his magical powers.
The deserter became calmer as the days went by. Every morning he would gaze out to sea, but when there was no sign of a ship he seemed to forget all about being tracked down.
He would occasionally talk about his life. Tobiasson-Svartman asked his questions diplomatically, always politely, never intrusive. He soon formed his opinion of the deserter's character. Dorflinger was a limited young man, with no knowledge, no interests. His greatest resource was his fear, the fear that had driven him to try to row away to freedom.
They spent the mornings out on the ice. They drilled and measured. Now and then they could see Sara Fredrika on the rocks on Halsskär.
In the afternoons he left them on their own. Every evening he told Sara Fredrika about the sailor's progress, about his increasing trust.
'I'll take him with me when I leave,' he said. 'I have colleagues who hate the German military, they will help him. I'll take him with me, look after him. Then I'll come back here and fetch you.'
Her response was always the same.
'I don't believe it. Not until I see you on the ice.'
'I'll leave you my telescope,' he said. 'That will help you to see me sooner. It will make your wait shorter.'
He spent an hour every afternoon writing up his diary. He wrote about the deserter. On 17 February he wrote:
The day is approaching when I can do my duty and capture the German deserter who has fled to Sweden and is in hiding here. One can well ask oneself if he has made up the whole story. Perhaps he has been placed here as the furthest outpost in a network of spies preparing for a German attack on Sweden. Since I think he could well resist, I am planning for all possible circumstances.
He hid his diary, wrapped up in a waterproof pouch, in a clump of hawthorn bushes next to the path to the inlet.
It seemed to him that he was living in many different worlds at the same time. Each one of them was equally true.
The day was approaching. He was waiting for a change in the weather. He was waiting for a chilly morning with fog.
CHAPTER 103
On 19 February, at about nine in the morning, he trained his telescope on the two hunters, father and son, who were returning to the inner archipelago over the ice. They passed to the south of Halsskär and had evidently had plenty of success. They were pulling a net behind them over the ice, full of dead birds.
Then he aimed his telescope out to sea. He sensed that a change of weather was on the way. The sun was hidden behind thick cloud and the temperature was falling. Everything suggested that they would have fog for the next few days. That day he had asked Dorflinger to drill some holes and take some measurements without supervision.
He scrutinised the man on the ice, hunched over the drill. Sara Fredrika came up to him. She had spent the morning catching cod with lines through several holes in the ice on the west side of the skerry. He suspected that she had been watching him before making her presence known.
'Why does one man watch another through a telescope?'
I once saw you naked, he thought. Without a telescope. I watched you getting washed, I saw your body. I have never forgotten that. I might forget you eventually, but I'll never forget your body.
'I'm just checking to make sure he's doing it right.' She grabbed hold of his arm. 'I can't stay here.' 'What would have happened if I hadn't come?' 'I'd have asked him to take me with