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.
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
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 Branno 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. Vrango farthest out. And Donso. Donso 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 Styrso, 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?”
Mollerstrom again, always Mollerstrom.
“She called again. You obviously haven’t contacted her.”
“I haven’t done anything
“Okay.”
“Are you in the office?” asked Winter.
“Where else?” said Mollerstrom.
“Can she be reached at this number I got before?”
“Yes.”
“Thanks, Janne. And take a vacation now.”
Mollerstrom hung up without saying anything more. Winter called again, a number he now thought he would never forget. She answered after the first ring.
13
He 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
There was no one else left.
Jesus had not been able to forgive him.
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.
