Sail of Stone (12 page)

It was a search, as though in circles.

Bergenhem was used to driving in circles; that’s what he did with the portion of his free time that felt more forced, like a compulsion, than it did free. He drove back and forth.

What’s going on? he had thought more than once. What’s going on with me? What’s going on with my life?

I should be happy, what they call happy, or secure, what they call secure.

He worked overtime. He didn’t need to, but he might as well have: He drove around town on the thoroughfares and he was paid for it when he was on duty.

Am I someone else? he sometimes thought. Am I on my way to becoming someone else?

Martina’s face had become darker and darker. Concerned, maybe.

Ada’s face was still bright; she didn’t understand, didn’t understand yet. That was possibly the worst part: How could he sit here, out on the streets, when his little daughter was there at home?

They hadn’t spoken, he and Martina. She had tried; he had not tried.

He continued to chase burglars. He drove to the sea; they weren’t there. He could drive down to Hjuvik and just stand there. It wasn’t far from home, but it still seemed like the other side of the water.

He could get out of the car and go down to the beach and try to see his reflection in the water if it was calm.

Who am I?

What is it all about?

Who are
you
?

He saw his face from a strange angle. Maybe it was more real.

In the car on the way home, he tried to think back. He had always carried a restlessness within him, as far back as he could remember. But this was more than restlessness, worse than regular restlessness.

Or maybe it’s just that I can’t live with anyone.

But it’s not just that.

Do I need drugs? If I need drugs like
that
I have to talk to a brain doctor first.

Do I need something else?

When he parked in the carport, he didn’t know if he wanted to get out of the car or stay in it.

Is this what they call being burned out? he thought.

He heard sounds against the window. He saw small fingers. He saw Ada.

I
n the morning, Winter called Johanna Osvald’s number, but she didn’t answer; no one answered. There was no answering machine.

It was Saturday. He had the day off. There had been a suspected case of manslaughter or possibly homicide on Tuesday night, but it wasn’t a case for him and hardly for any other detective either. The deceased and the perpetrator had both been identified and linked to each other both figuratively and literally, by matrimony among other things. Till death do us part. Some people certainly take that seriously, a detective had said this past week, and then wanted to bite off his tongue when he saw that Halders was sitting there with the remains of his personal grief. But Halders had just said, It doesn’t matter, Birkman, I have been like that myself.

Till death do us part.

It was more than just words.

Winter had proposed to Angela and she had said yes: Are you finally going to make an honest woman out of me?

That had been some time ago. She hadn’t said anything more, and neither had he.

Now you have to take responsibility, Winter. You can’t just talk about things like that. It’s a big responsibility, and you have to take it.

He drove south. The sun was on its way up. It was still early morning, and a transparent haze was in the air.

Go ahead, Angela had said. If it will really help. I really hope it helps.

On Monday they had to settle the deal. Okay. He would settle it, clinch it, get the ball rolling. It was just a piece of land. They wouldn’t move there right away. He had promised, or whatever it was called … offered his decision, a future, yes indeed, the everlasting future up until. Until.

Decisions like this were heavy as stones. You couldn’t release them just any way, at any time.

The sun began to hit just right between the roofs of the houses on the
field outside of Askim. He pushed in the CD. It was Angela’s disc and it was Bruce Springsteen. He had given the guy a few chances and he was worth it. Springsteen was not John Coltrane, and he didn’t pretend to be, either. But Springsteen’s melodies were filled with pain and a melancholy light that Winter appreciated. There was almost always death there, just like in his life. Springsteen sang nakedly:

Well now, everything dies, baby, that’s a fact.

Fact. Dead. That is my job. Sometimes in that order, most often the opposite.

But maybe everything that dies someday comes back.

Not always as you’d like. But death comes back in a new cloak. But is it life, then?

Everything floated up, returned in a new guise. Nothing could be hidden.

Sooner or later.

Even secrets that lie on the bottom of the sea don’t stay. He drove past the swimming beach. All the parking lots were empty and there were no bikes. He caught a glimpse of the sea, but it was empty too, rolling in toward the end of the season. Not even on the bottom of the sea. He dialed Johanna Osvald’s number again. No answer. That didn’t ease his worry, not enough to forget it. He felt that he had betrayed something or someone when he hadn’t answered, hadn’t answered the first time. At first it had felt good, but now it didn’t feel good. What had he betrayed? His duty? Himself?

For Christ’s sake, you don’t need to chase after adventure.

The mystery will come to you when it’s become a mystery.

Do you chase after crime? Are you calling because you want affirmation?

What’s the next step? Are you going to take out an ad in the paper?

Wanted: crime. Contact the eager inspector.

The obsessed inspector.

Everybody’s got a hungry heart.

No, no. Come on.

He turned off the impassioned Springsteen on his way from one relationship to the potential other one. He had arrived. The sea rolled gently and heavily like before. He got out of the car, left it in the stand of trees. The grass was still equally green on both sides of the path he and Angela and Elsa had recently made. They had trampled it down as though it would always be there.

He stood at the edge of the beach. He took off his shoes and walked into the water, which was cold but became warm. He turned around and looked across the field. He closed his eyes and saw the house; it could be standing there within a year, maybe even sooner. Would he be happy there? Here. What would it involve, living a life so close to the sea? Could it involve anything other than something positive?

He turned toward the water again. He thought of the conversation he’d had in his office with Johanna Osvald. She had lived close to the sea, much closer than he would ever get. Her entire family. Not just close to the sea, on the sea. The sea had been their life, was their life. Life and death. Death was real in a different way for fishing families; he thought he understood that much. A working life of hazards, a life of worry for those who stayed home.

It must have been very dangerous before. The war. The mine barriers, the U-boats, the destroyers, the coast guard. The storms, the waves, the collisions, the crush injuries, the pressure from all directions. It must have been a very great pressure. How did they handle it?

The colleagues. What sort of life did they live together?

He had listened to Johanna Osvald and he started to understand what she had really been talking about. Behind her words there was an unease that he had not been able to understand but that he thought of now. A fear that had been passed down from generation to generation to generation.

He sat down in the sand, which was still warm after the summer. He heard two seagulls laughing at some inside joke. He could see them now, on approach to
his
land, soon to be his land. Were they part of the deal? Was that what they were having such a damn good time about? Now they were laughing again, belly-landing elegantly on the path, taking off again, rattling out another laugh in his direction, returning to the winds in the bay and gliding out toward the sea. He followed them with his gaze until they disappeared and he could see only the contours
of the islands in the southern archipelago. He got out his phone again and called right across the bay to those islands, but no one answered this time either.

Johanna had been the most beautiful person he had seen up to then. She was dark like no one else, as though she came from a different group of people, which was of course true in a way.

He had met her brother, but he was already on his way out to sea in earnest. His name was Erik, too.

Johanna hadn’t mentioned him when she came to see Winter.

He and Erik had drunk a beer down at Brännö pier one time, but they never went up to join the dancing. They had spoken, but Winter didn’t remember about what. He remembered that Erik hadn’t cursed. He remembered that he’d talked to Johanna about it. No one on the islands cursed, ever. There were no curses there.

Life could be hard, but it wasn’t necessary to reinforce that fact with words.

He remembered that the Mission Covenant Church was important for the people on the islands, and it became more important the closer they lived to the open sea. Vrångö farthest out. And Donsö. Donsö in particular, she had said, and laughed a laugh that glimmered like the crests of waves around them where they lay on the cliffs on southern Styrsö, looking out over the more God-fearing island on the other side of the sound.

Then she had sat atop him and started to move, slowly, and then faster and faster. The church may have guided her life as well, but she was still just a person, sinful like him.

In the car on the way home his phone suddenly blared from its place on the dash.

“Yes?”

Möllerström again, always Möllerström.

“She called again. You obviously haven’t contacted her.”

“I haven’t done anything
but
!”

“Okay.”

“Are you in the office?” asked Winter.

“Where else?” said Möllerström.

“Can she be reached at this number I got before?”

“Yes.”

“Thanks, Janne. And take a vacation now.”

Möllerström hung up without saying anything more. Winter called again, a number he now thought he would never forget. She answered after the first ring.

H
e came back with trembling hands.

He prayed.

Jesus!

Outside, a child biked by. He went to the window. There was a wind from the sea. The wind tugged at the child’s hair, which was black. There were no blond children here. He had thought about that. No blue eyes, no blond hair. Not like on the other side. Why was it like that? It was the same sky, the same sea.

The other place was only a night and a day away, in navigable weather. Maybe it went even faster now. No minefields.

He could see a ferry now and then, when the hard winds forced the vessels closer to land. They were too far north, sometimes too far south. He didn’t know where they were going, and he didn’t care.

He was finished with the sea.

He lived next to it, but never on it, or off it, never again.

He had been on board when the trawler went under. He carried what had happened with him. What he himself had done. His guilt. The thing that could never be forgiven. He had
been there.
He knew more than anyone else.

There was no one else left.

Jesus had not been able to forgive him.

But ’tis strange:

And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,

The instruments of darkness tell us truths,

Win us with honest trifles, to betray’s

In deepest consequence.

He felt the sea in his face as he walked across the breakwater. He had salt in his face that would never leave his skin. What hit his face now didn’t stick, but it wasn’t because he washed it away. The wind took it.

He had sores all over his body.

The eczema from the oilcloth had dried and turned into scars all over his body, like patterns.

Like a map of his life at sea. Yes.

He sometimes rubbed his hand across his shoulders and legs. It was in the dark, as if he were blind and could follow his life on his body with his finger. His memories were scars. The scars were soft and smooth under his fingers, and he could imagine that all these scars were the only soft parts of his body. But there were many. His body was more soft than it was hard, but for the wrong reasons. He had a young man’s body, but for the wrong reason.

It shouldn’t be him. Not him, living an old man’s life.

Jesus,
Jesus
!

He stayed standing there and waited for the sun to go down, and it did as the child biked by again; a boy, he lived in the house by the steps and there were always clothes hanging from the line, and he could see a young woman come out and hang the wash, or take it down, and her hair was black, like the boy’s, and there was a transparent pallor to her face, which was the sea’s fault. The sea marked these people, shaped their forms. Farther up, all the way up in the north, in Thurso, Wick, people were bent like dwarf birches on a mountain, black, pale, blown to pieces, blown through.

He turned in toward the room at the same time as the sun disappeared over to other continents. The room was exactly as dark as he wanted it. He went to one of the easy chairs and sat down and drank again from the whisky that waited in the glass. It was one of the cheap kinds.

He looked around with the liquor still in his mouth. He swallowed.

No. I won’t leave this.

It was the last time.

I will stay here.

           
Present fears

Are less than horrible imaginings:

My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical …

He ran his hand over his right arm; his finger slid across the smooth skin that had been dead for so many years now. There was no life in most of his skin, only a surface that was silky and at the same time, when he pressed a little harder, completely hard, hard as stone.