Sail of Stone

“I spoke with my colleague in London. The Scottish one, from the Inverness area. He may be able to help.”

“How?”

“He knows people up there.”

She didn’t answer. She seemed to look away across the water.

“Well…,” said Winter.

“Well what?”

“There’s probably not much more I can-”

“I wanted you to come out here,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“There’s something that I don’t understand here. That I’ve never understood. I have to talk about it with you. That’s why I wanted you to come over.”

“What is it?” said Winter.

“That I don’t understand?” She looked up. “It has to do with all of this. With Grandpa’s disappearance, first of all, with everything that happ-”

“Well, hello there.”

The voice came out of nowhere. Winter looked up, and at first he couldn’t see anything against the light.

He remembered the voice. And the dialect. The archipelago dialect: the sharp intonation, the indifference to consonants, to indefinite articles-they were interchangeable and so on, and so on, almost like the rolling sea, like the waves themselves. An international sea-speak that was part of the coastal regions all over the North Sea. This island was a few miles from the city of Gothenburg, but there could have been continents between them.

“’Sben a while,” said the voice, which still didn’t have a face.

Winter got up. The sun disappeared. The face became visible.

“Well, hi,” said Winter.

“’Sben a while,” repeated the man, who was about his age. Osvald. Erik Osvald. He was as tall as Winter. Osvald offered a hand. He was wearing a black cap and work clothes. Winter recognized him as the man who seemed to be studying him from the trawler as the Silvertarnan came into the harbor.

Johanna had also gotten up.

“This’n’t good, all this,” said Osvald. Winter could sense a distance in the man’s dialect, as though he wanted to emphasize something. His sister didn’t speak so… artfully. No. Not that. She spoke as though she lived on land. Her brother lived at sea.

Winter nodded, as though he completely understood what Osvald meant.

“We ha’n’t heard nothing,” said Osvald.

“I know,” said Winter.

“This’n’t like’m,” said Osvald.

“Sorry?”

“This isn’t like him,” translated his sister. Winter might have seen a weak smile in the corner of her mouth. “Dad, he means. Not like him. Not to call. But I’ve told you that.”

“’N’t like’m,” repeated Osvald, and now Winter realized that he was laying it on thick, extra thick. He just didn’t understand why. The guy was as far from a village yokel as he could be.

Johanna nodded past Winter, toward the blue trawler fifty yards away. Winter could see the name again, MAGDALENA.

“Erik has coffee ready in the mess,” she said.

Osvald seemed to laugh suddenly, and he turned around and walked toward the boat.

“Did the thing about the coffee come as a surprise to him?” said Winter to Johanna.

“Grandpa was a farmer’s son from Hisingen,” said Osvald, pouring the coffee. They were sitting in the mess, which was as modern as could be, wooden floors, woodwork on the walls. They left their shoes above deck, in the little hall inside the bridge. Osvald’s pronunciation was different now, as though he had wanted to show something, or prove something, earlier.

He had been out of coffee, but he returned from the store with more after five minutes. He no longer looked surprised.

“They were fishermen, too,” said Osvald. “They caught sprat and horse mackerel, which they sold to the people on Donso for longline fishing, which was a tradition here.”

“Hooks?” said Winter.

“Exactly,” said Osvald, with surprise in his voice. “You know this stuff.”

“No. But I heard about longline fishing when we had the house on Styrso.”

Osvald drank his coffee and Winter noticed how strong it was when he drank too. He could have used a knife and fork for it. He would lose face if he asked for milk.

“Grandpa found a woman here, or a girl, I guess you could say, and it went fast,” said Johanna. “He came here to work on a trawler. He’d gotten in contact with a skipper.”

“He was quite young,” said Winter.

“For what?” said Osvald.

“To get married and have kids,” said Winter.

Neither sibling answered. But then it wasn’t a question. Maybe there was nothing strange about it. Those who lived here wanted to begin life immediately, and continue it.

And to disappear, thought Winter. Quite young to disappear. He had his young family, a son, and another son on the way.

“He had two brothers,” said Johanna. “John had.”

“What?” said Winter.

“Two brothers came along,” she said. “Bertil and Egon. They were on the same boat.”

“The same boat? The same boat that disappeared?”

“One of them came back,” said Osvald. “Bertil.”

“Explain,” said Winter.

The Osvald brothers were a few of the people who dared to cross the sea during the beginning of the war. John Osvald was the youngest. The trawlers that could make it over to England and Scotland and unload-there was a fortune to be had. The fish were there; the harbors were farther west. It was a world at war.

Many “passed on,” as Osvald put it, “but they were propelled by the money.”

A fixed price was put on fish in the beginning of the war. It turned out that the price was extremely high.

“But the other price was even higher,” said Johanna.

Winter nodded. The other price was death.

“The ones who made it became rich,” said Osvald. “People here were able to build new houses with all the most modern things you can imagine, and when the workmen left the house, everything was paid for! With taxed money.”

“The ones who came back,” said Johanna.

“But your grandpa didn’t come back,” said Winter. “What happened?”

He heard the boat move. It was big, bigger than he’d thought a trawler could be, more modern. It must have been very expensive. It must have weighed several hundred tons, have thousands in horsepower. There were mounts for two trawls in the stern. Osvald had seen his glance, and he’d said that this was a twin rigger. He sounded proud.

“Marino was out fishing in the North Sea, and they weren’t on their way west just then, but the Germans came up from the south and they decided to get out, and fast,” said Osvald.

“Marino?”

“That’s what the trawler was called.”

Marino. Not Marina, not a woman’s name, like Magdalena.

“How many people were on board?” asked Winter.

“Eight men, normally,” said Osvald. “That was the usual number.”

“How many are on this boat?”

“Four.”