A Treacherous Paradise (2 page)

She is not beautiful. But in a strange way she radiates an aura suggesting that she is a totally genuine human being.

The here and now. She is here. On the sea, on board a steamship with two funnels. A cargo of timber, on its way to Australia. Home port: Sundsvall.

The ship is called
Lovisa
. She was built at the Finnboda shipyard in Stockholm. But her home port has always been on the northern Swedish coast.

She was first owned by a shipping company in Gävle, but it went bankrupt after a series of failed speculative deals. And she was then bought by a company based in Sundsvall. In Gävle she was called
Matilda
, after the shipowner’s wife, who played Chopin with clumsy fingers. Now she is called
Lovisa
, after the new owner’s youngest daughter.

One of the part-owners is called Forsman. He is the one who arranged for Hanna Lundmark to be given a job on board. Although Forsman has a piano in his house, there is nobody who can play it. Nevertheless, when the piano tuner comes on one of his regular visits, Forsman makes a point of being there to listen.

But now the mate Lars Johan Jakob Antonius Lundmark has died, killed by a raging fever.

It is as if the swell of the sea has become paralysed. The ship is lying there motionless, as if it were holding its breath.

That’s exactly what I imagine death to be like, Hanna Lundmark thought. A sudden stillness, unexpected, coming from nowhere. Death is like the wind. A sudden shift into the lee.

The lee of death. And then nothing else.

AT THAT VERY
moment Hanna is possessed by a memory. It comes from nowhere.

She recalls her father, his voice, which had become no more than a whisper by the end of his life. It was as if he were asking her to preserve and cherish what he said as a valuable secret.

A mucky angel. That’s what you are.

He said that to her just before he died. It was as if he were trying to present her with a gift, despite the fact – or maybe because of the fact – that he owned next to nothing.

Hanna Renström, my beloved daughter, you are an angel – a right mucky one, but an angel even so.

What exactly is this memory that she has? What were his exact words? Did he say she was
stony
, or
mucky
? Did he leave it up to her to choose, to decide for herself? Stony broke, or mucky? Now as she recalls that moment, she thinks he called her
a mucky angel
.

It is a distant memory, faded. She is so far distant from her father and his death. From there, and from then: a remote house on a bank of the cold, brown waters of the River Ljungan in the silent forests of northern Sweden. He passed away hunched up and contorted by pain on a sofa bed in a kitchen they had barely been able to keep warm.

He died surrounded by cold, she thinks. It was extremely cold in January, 1899, when he stopped breathing.

That was over five years ago.

The memory of her father and his words about an angel disappear just as quickly as they came. It takes her only a few seconds to return to the present from the past.

She knows that we always make the most remarkable journeys deep down inside ourselves, where there is no time or space.

Perhaps that memory was designed to help her? To throw her the rope she needs in order to climb over the walls confining her within an atmosphere of unremitting sorrow?

But she can’t run away. The ship has been transformed into an impregnable fortress.

There is no escape. Her husband really is dead.

Death is a talon that refuses to release its grip.

THE PRESSURE IN
the boilers has been reduced. The pistons are motionless, the engines ticking over. Hanna is standing by the rail with her slop pail in her hand. She is going to empty it over the stern. The mess-room boy had wanted to take it from her when she was on her way out of the galley, but she had clung on to it, protected it. Even if this is the day she is going to watch her husband’s body being tipped into the depths of the ocean, sewn into a canvas sailcloth, she does not want to neglect her duties.

When she looks up from the pail, which is filled with eggshells, it feels as if the heat is scratching at her face. Somewhere in the mist to starboard is Africa. Although she cannot see the faintest trace of land, she thinks she can smell it.

He who is now dead has told her about it. About the steaming, almost corrosive stench of decay which you find everywhere in the tropics.

He had already made several voyages to various destinations. He had managed to learn a few things. But not the most important thing: how to survive.

He would never complete this voyage. He died at the age of twenty-four.

It’s as if he was trying to warn her, Hanna thinks. But she doesn’t know what he was warning her about. And now he’s dead.

A dead man can never answer questions.

Somebody materializes silently by her side. It’s her husband’s closest friend on board, the Norwegian carpenter Halvorsen. She doesn’t know if he has a first name, despite the fact that they have been together on the same ship for more than two months. He is never called anything but Halvorsen, a serious man who is said to go down on his knees to be readmitted into the Church every time he comes home to Brønnøysund after a few years at sea, and then signs on again when his faith can no longer sustain him.

He has large hands, but his face is kind, almost feminine. His stubble seems to have been painted on and powdered by somebody trying to be cruel to him.

‘I gather there’s something you need to ask about,’ he says.

His voice sings. It sounds as if he’s humming when he speaks.

‘The depth,’ Hanna says. ‘Where will Lundmark’s grave be?’

Halvorsen shakes his head doubtfully. She suddenly has the impression that he is like a restless bird about to fly away.

He leaves her without a word. But she knows he will find out the answer to her question.

How deep will the grave be? Is there a sea bottom where her husband can rest in peace, in his sewn-up canvas shroud? Or is there no bottom, does the sea continue downwards into infinity?

She empties her pail of eggshells, watches the white seabirds dive down into the water to capture their prey, then wipes the sweat from her brow with the towel she has tied to her apron.

Then she gives way to the inevitable, and screams.

Some of the birds riding the upwinds, waiting for a new slop pail to be emptied, flap their wings and strive to escape from the sorrowful howl that hits them like hailstones.

The mess-room boy Lars peers out in horror from the galley door. He is holding a cracked egg in his hand, observes her furtively. Death embarrasses him.

Needless to say, she knows what he is thinking. She’s going to jump now, she’s going to leave us because her sorrow is too great to bear.

Her scream has been heard by many on board. Two sweaty deckhands naked from the waist up stand by the side of the galley and gape at her, next to where one of the long hawsers is coiled up like a gigantic snake.

Hanna merely shakes her head, grits her teeth and goes into the galley with her empty pail. No, she is not going to climb over the rail. She has spent the whole of her life keeping a stiff upper lip, and she intends to continue doing so.

The heat of the galley hits her hard. Standing next to the stoves is similar to the life of the stokers down below in the engine room. Women in the vicinity of boilers and lighthouses brings bad luck.

The older generation of seafarers is horrified by the thought of having women on board. Their presence means trouble. And also arguments and jealousy among the men. But when shipowner Forsman announced that he wanted Hanna to join the crew, Captain Svartman agreed. He didn’t worry too much about superstition.

Hanna picks up an egg, cracks it, drops the contents into the frying pan and throws the shell into the slop pail. Thirty living sailors must have their breakfast. She tries to think only about the eggs, not about the funeral that is in the offing. She is on board as cook: that situation has not changed as a result of the death of her husband.

That’s the way it is. She is alive, but Lundmark is dead.

SHORTLY AFTERWARDS HALVORSEN
returns and asks her to follow him: Captain Svartman is waiting.

‘We’re going to sound the depth,’ says Halvorsen. ‘If our ropes and lines aren’t long enough, the captain will select another place.’

She finishes frying the four eggs she has in the pan, then accompanies him as bidden. She suddenly feels dizzy, and stumbles: but she doesn’t fall, she manages to keep control of herself.

Captain Svartman comes from a long and unbroken line of seafarers, she is aware of that. He’s an old man, turned sixty. The tip of the little finger on his left hand is missing: nobody knows if that is congenital, or the result of an accident.

On two occasions he has been on a sailing ship that sank. On one of those occasions he and all the crew were rescued, on the other only he and the ship’s dog survived. And when the dog reached dry land it lay down in the sand and died.

Hanna’s dead husband once said that in fact the real Captain Svartman also died, together with the ship’s dog. After that catastrophe, the captain stayed on land for many years. Nobody knows what he did. Rumour has it that for part of that time he worked as a navvy and was a member of the vanguard sent out by state-owned Swedish Railways to build the controversial Inlandsbana – a railway line linking the south of Sweden with the north of the country following an inland route rather than the existing coastal railway: the Swedish Parliament was still arguing about it.

Then he suddenly went to sea again, now as the captain of a steamship. He was one of the select few who didn’t abandon the seafaring life once sailing ships began to die out, but chose to be part of modern developments.

He has never told anybody about those years he spent away from the sea – what he did, what he thought, not even where he lived.

He seldom says anything beyond the necessary minimum; he has as little faith in people’s ability to listen as he has in the reliability of the sea. He has lavender-coloured flowers in pots in his cabin, which only he is allowed to water.

So he has always been an uncommunicative sea captain. And now he has to establish the depth at which one of his dead mates will be buried.

Captain Svartman bows as Hanna approaches him. Despite the heat he is dressed in his full uniform. Buttons fastened, shirt pressed.

Standing next to him is the bosun, Peltonen, a Finn. He is holding a plumb bob, attached to a long, thin line.

Captain Svartman nods, Peltonen throws the bob over the rail and allows it to sink. The line slides between his fingers. Nobody speaks. At one point there is a black thread tied round the line.

‘A hundred metres,’ says Peltonen.

His voice is shrill. His words bounce away over the swell.

After seven black threads, 700 metres, the line comes to an end. The plumb bob is still hanging down there in the water, it hasn’t yet reached the bottom. Peltonen ties a knot and attaches the line to a new roll. There too is a black thread marking every hundred metres.

At 1,935 metres, the line goes slack. The bob has reached the sea bottom. Hanna now knows the depth of her husband’s grave.

Peltonen starts to haul up the line, winding it round a specially carved wooden board. Captain Svartman takes off his uniform cap and wipes the sweat from his brow. Then he checks his watch. A quarter to seven.

‘Nine o’clock,’ he says to Hanna. ‘Before the heat becomes too oppressive.’

She goes to the cabin she has shared with her husband. His was the upper bunk. They often shared the lower one. Without her knowing about it, somebody has taken away his blanket.

The mattress is lying there uncovered. She sits down on the edge of her own bunk and contemplates the bulkhead on the other side of the cramped cabin. She knows that she must now force herself to think.

How did she come to end up here? On a ship, swaying gently on a distant ocean. After all, she was born in a place about as far away from the sea as it’s possible to get. There was a rowing boat on the River Ljungan, but that was all. She sometimes accompanied her father in it when he went fishing. But when she said she wanted to learn to swim – she was about seven or eight at the time – he told her he couldn’t allow it. It would be a waste of time. If she wanted to bathe, she could do that by the bank of the river. If she wanted to get over to the other side, there was a boat and also a bridge.

She lies down on her bunk and closes her eyes. She travels back in her memory as far as she can, back into her childhood where the shadows grow longer and longer.

Maybe that is where she can hide away until the moment comes when her dead husband disappears into the sea for good.

Leaves her. For ever.

HER CHILDHOOD, DEEP
down there. As if at the bottom of an abyss.

That was Hanna’s first memory: the cold, writhing and twisting away inside the cavities in the wooden walls, close to her face as she slept. She would wake up over and over again, and feel how thin the gap was between the newspapers pasted on to the walls – there was no money for wallpaper in the squalid house in which she grew up – and the cold that was constantly trying to gnaw its way through the wood.

Every spring her father worked his way over the house, as if it were a ship on a slipway, patching and mending wherever possible, before the onset of the next winter.

The cold was a sea, the house a ship, and the winter an endless waiting. He would keep on filling the holes and gaps until the frosts arrived in full force. Then it was not possible to do any more, they would have to make the best of it. The house was launched into the winter yet again, and if there were still any leaks allowing the cold to seep through, that was too bad: there was nothing else he could do.

Her father was Arthur Olaus Angus Renström, a lumberjack who worked for Iggesund and shared a log hoist with the Salomonsson brothers who lived further down the river. He worked all out in the forest for next to nothing. He was one of the many men of the woods who never knew if the money they earned for their efforts would be sufficient to live on.