Sail of Stone

Aneta expected to catch sight of a red stain in that bed, but there was nothing there.

A white rug lay on the floor, which looked like white-stained pine.

“If it weren’t for those photos I would be snow-blind by now,” said Halders. He turned to Aneta. “Do you think this looks nice?”

“No.”

“White is the color of innocence, at least.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Maybe nothing has happened here.”

“Someone broke a window and came in.”

“Maybe just went out,” said Halders. “Maybe she couldn’t get out any other way.”

“Was she a prisoner in her own home? Anette?”

“Well, maybe she went crazy in this room. Who wouldn’t?”

“In any case, she’s not here now,” said Aneta. “So where is she?”

Halders shrugged. What is with him? she thought. Has he lost interest? Does he just feel silly? I got over that years ago, worked my way past it via lots of failures.

Aneta went back to the living room. Everything seemed to be in its place. Almost nothing was white in here.

She leaned over to the broken window and studied the floor, which wasn’t lit by the lamp just there. She didn’t want to move it, touch it. The floor was parquet, and it was a yellowish shade. She heard Fredrik behind her.

“Do you have a flashlight?”

“In the car.”

“Can you get it?”

Halders went without asking. She heard him walking on the other side of the wall, and she heard when he opened the car door farther down the wall and closed it again and came back and cursed suddenly between the bushes and the trees. He stomped across the veranda and handed over the flashlight.

“What are those spots?” she said.

“Do you want an answer right away?” said Halders.

“It could be blood,” she said.

“It could be anything.”

She shone light on the broken window right above her. She didn’t see anything.

“Give me the flashlight,” said Halders.

He shone the light from the outside, a little higher up. There was something there.

“Someone cut themselves,” said Aneta.

There will be a crime-scene investigation after all, she thought. But not where I’d thought.

Halders straightened his back.

“We have a message,” he said, nodding at something behind her.

A telephone they hadn’t seen before on one of the bookshelves had suddenly started to blink. They hadn’t heard it ring.

23

The first time they went into Aberdeen, he rubbed his face, passed his hand across his eyes. It felt like being color-blind. It was different than at sea. He knew the color of the sea. But here he was met by a city that was built out of a single granite block.

The Granite City.

They lived on the boat.

Frans tried to stay in Brentwood for a night, but it didn’t work.

They sat at the Schooner, which opened at seven in the morning. He remembered a slogan that had been by the door: “Where life begins at 7 o’clock.”

Life.

It began and it ended.

They had met the men. Arne had met them, and it did something to him. He changed quickly. Let’s stay away for now, he had said.

No one had gone along with that.

Frans had… had…

Jesus. Jesus.

He got up and walked over to the car, which he had learned to drive faster than he had expected. His body was still agile. He had discovered this when he leaned over and turned the key. He drove back to the east. The roads had improved. When he had come there the first time, freight was pulled by horses. Soldiers marched. Everyone stared at the sky. And the sea.

That was then.

He stopped at an inn and locked the car and went in and asked if he could use the toilet.

He washed off the worst. He looked at himself in the mirror, and he still recognized his own face. He turned his eyes away and dried himself with a paper towel, which was rough, and then he went out and kept driving.

After half an hour in the car he saw the sea far below.

He thought about the first time.

He had wandered along Albert Quay, wandered and waited. Gone down Clyde Street, loitered outside Caley Fisheries, passed Seaward Marine Engineering Co., Hudson Fish, North Star Shipping. Grampian Fuels, day after day he walked there and he could remember the names, and everything that went on there, any time he wanted.

They had been docked next to the Cave Sand, which had wintered here but came from Grimsby. It brought up slag and had gotten work south of the harbor. The men were black as Negroes all day long, and that was their life. Like Negroes!

He saw lots of soldiers, but never Negro soldiers, not even when the Americans came.

The cranes in the harbor were yellow and blue. That’s not something you forget either. Yellow and blue everywhere.

He wondered whether they had been repainted in the same colors.

He stopped for a cup of coffee. He didn’t remember passing this city as they drove west. He had been given some kind of directions, but he didn’t remember them now. It didn’t matter anymore.

Should I drive straight out into the sea?

At the right speed you could reach it. First you would fly, before you reached the sea.

Aberdeen. He had walked up Union Street and past Virginia and out to the beach where the city opened itself to the sea. The beach was wide; the sea was big here, and visibility was good on certain days. There was always haze and wind.

I was so young.

I didn’t have a different name yet.

There had been ice cream trucks on the field that was the amusement park. It was always dark at night there. He could stand and watch the carousels that whirled in the darkness, and the people who whirled in the carousels. The only light came from the sea. Everything that whirled in darkness, an amusement park in darkness. It didn’t fit. An amusement park should be a field of light.

They had continued up to Peterhead.

Now it was Europe’s biggest whitefish harbor. Had it been the biggest one in the world back then?

Peterhead Congregational Church.

Royal National Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen.

Fishermen’s Mission.

Everything was fishermen and harbor and fishing industry and trawlers and the smell of the sea and of everything that came from the sea.

And God. Everything was also God.