Sail of Stone

floated away in the wind.

His hips hurt, more each day. He shouldn’t have walked, but he did. It was his body, after all. This was nothing. He knew what was something. He knew.

When he came there for the first time, the city was the primary harbor for fishing fleets along this part of the coast, south of Moray Firth.

Bigger than Keith, Huntly; even bigger than Buckie.

The Buckie boys are back in town.

He didn’t stay long that time. It was when he still didn’t know who he was or where he was. That’s how it had been. Like a blindness. He knew now that he had walked and stood and talked then, but he hadn’t been aware of it.

It could make him scream at night. He could be awoken by his own screams and discover that he was sitting straight up in bed in the ice-cold room with his own breath like a white cone before him. The scream was caught in that breath. It was a dreadful feeling, dreadful. His whole throat felt mangled, as though it had been squeezed in an iron grip. What had he screamed? Who had heard him? He had gone out into the street but hadn’t seen any movement behind the black windows in the house on the other side.

No one had heard him.

He had seen the light from the city above, only a few lights.

He had thought of her then, briefly.

He had seen the telephone booth that shone in the fog. It never rang.

He would ask her.

She would do it.

She had done as he’d asked.

Now he was no longer certain.

She had looked at him last time with an expression he didn’t recognize.

He hadn’t asked.

He left the harbor behind him and walked through Seatown. The houses clung to one another, squatting under the viaducts. He walked toward his house through the streets that didn’t have names. This is where the streets have no names, he thought. He often thought in English, almost always.

Sometimes there might be a fragment of the old language, but it was only when he was very upset. There were only two other places where the streets had no names, and those were heaven and hell.

He had been to both places. Now he was traveling between them.

The houses had numbers, apparently without any order. Number seven stood beside number twenty-five, six beside thirty-eight. He lived in the black house, at the southern gables. It was number fourteen. That meant that the house had been the fourteenth one built in Seatown. That was the system here. His was the only black house.

6

Fredrik Halders lay on the sofa with his feet on its arm. An odd lamp hung from the ceiling above the sofa. Or maybe it was his perspective.

“Have I seen that lamp before?” he asked, pointing up.

“That’s a question you probably have to ask yourself,” said Aneta Djanali from the floor, where she was sitting and leaning over some photographs.

Halders giggled; at least that’s how it sounded to Aneta’s ears.

He tried to turn his head from his supine position, but that was a mistake. His neck would never be the same again. He had taken a blow once when he was being a bigger idiot than usual, and it could have been his last mistake. He would never regain his original bull neck. That was just as well. Everyone knew what happened with bull necks in the end.

“Is it from Africa?” he asked.

“What do you think?” she asked, without looking up.

He studied the underside of the lamp again. It had a pointed base and something else above that was green.

“It’s from Africa,” he said.

“Good, Fredrik.”

He applauded himself. That was called Chinese clapping.

“Can you guess from which country?” He heard Aneta’s voice from the floor. “And to make it harder I want to know what the country was called before what it’s called now.”

“That is a tricky question,” he said.

“I realize that.”

She was aware of the level of difficulty. They had talked about her homeland only three times per hour every day since they started working together and since they started to see each other during their free time. Speaking of talking. It was Fredrik who kept on talking about her exotic origins and her wonderful homeland, which he pretended not to be able to find on any map of the world, but which he, under all the talking, kept close tabs on, just as he actually kept close tabs on most things, under his tough exterior.

“This country’s former name starts with the letter u,” she said.

“Uuuuuh…,” he said.

“Yes, that’s a good start,” she said.

“Ukraine,” he said.

“That’s not in Africa,” she said.

“Well, shit.”

“The second letter is p,” she said.

“Uuu… Upper Silesia!” he shouted at the ceiling.

“Where’s that?”

“In Africa,” he said.

“Not in my Africa, anyway,” she said.

“Isn’t that a film?” he said. “My Africa?”

“To get you on the right track, I can tell you that this country’s name is made up of two words,” she said.

“Uuu… Upper Soppero!”

“One of them is right,” she said.

“Lower Soppero!”

“But it started with u, didn’t it?”

“Shit, right.”

“Now I’m done helping you,” she said.

“If we talk about something else maybe I’ll think of it,” said Halders. He propped himself up on his elbow. He could feel it in his neck. “What are those pictures?”

“From last summer,” she said.

“Am I in them?” he asked.

She held up a photo that she’d developed and copied herself. She and Fredrik were standing behind Fredrik’s children, Hannes and Magda. She could see the cord of the shutter cable coming from Hannes’s hand. He looked like he was concentrating, but happy. Everyone looked happy in that photograph.

They looked like a family.

“Where did we take that?” Halders asked from the sofa.

“Guess,” she said.

“Don’t start that again,” he said.

“Do you see the waves behind us?” she asked.

“Yeah, yeah, but which sea is it?”

“The North Sea, of course.”