He swims back and forth in an aimless panic. Up and down. He cannot see a thing. Nothing at all. The line attached to his belt keeps catching, on cargo hooks on the floor, on a seat that has been wrenched from its moorings, on a loose safety belt. Everywhere. Then he begins swimming into the line. Gets tangled up in it. It is all over the inside of the plane like a spider’s web. He cannot find his way out. He dies in there.
I’ve managed to hack a hole in the ice with my diving knife. I’m battling to make it bigger. Stabbing away. Working the knife round the edge. When it’s as big as my hand, I check the pressure metre. Twenty bars left.
I mustn’t breathe so rapidly. I must calm down. But I can’t get out. I’m trapped under the ice.
I stick my hand up through the hole. I do it without thinking. My hand reaches out for help of its own accord.
Someone up there grips my hand firmly. At first I’m relieved to know that someone is helping me. That someone is going to pull me out of the water. Save me.
Then whoever it is really does start pulling on my hand. Bending it backwards and forwards. And then it dawns on me that I’m a prisoner. I’m not going anywhere. I try to jerk my hand free, but only succeed in banging my face against the ice. A pink veil spreads across the light blue.
Eventually I realize what’s happening: I’m bleeding.
The person up there changes his grip. Clasps hold of me as if we were shaking hands.
I press my knees against the ice. My trapped hand between my legs. And then I push away. I’m free. My hand slides out of my diving glove. Cold water. Cold hand. Ouch!
I swim away under the ice. Away. Away from whoever it was.
Now I’m beneath the green door again. I thump it hard. Hammer on it. Scratch at it.
There must be another way up. A place where the ice is thinner. Where I can break through it. I swim off again.
But he runs after me. Or is it a he? I can see the person through the ice. Blurred. From underneath. Above me the whole time. Between breaths, when the air I’m exhaling isn’t thundering in my ears, I can hear footsteps on the ice.
I can only see whoever it is for brief moments. The air I’m breathing out has nowhere to go. It forms a big, flat bubble like a mirror beneath the ice. I can see myself in it. Distorted. Like in the hall of mirrors at a fairground. Changing all the time. When I breathe in, I can see the person on the ice above me; when I breathe out, I can see myself.
Then the regulator freezes. Air comes spurting out of my mouthpiece. I stop swimming. I have to devote all my strength to trying to breathe. A few minutes later the cylinder is empty.
Then it’s over. My lungs heave and heave. I fight to the bitter end. Mustn’t inhale water. I’m about to burst.
My arms are flailing. Banging in vain against the ice. The last thing I do in this life is tear off my regulator and my mask. Then I die. There’s no air now between me and the ice. No reflection of me. My eyes are open in the water. Now I can see the person up there.
A face pressing against the ice, looking at me. But what I see doesn’t register. My consciousness ebbs away like a retreating wave.
THURSDAY, 16 APRIL
At 3.15 in the morning Osten Marjavaara opened his eyes in his cottage in Pirttilahti. The light woke him. In the middle of April it was never dark at night for more than an hour or so. The fact that the blinds were closed did not make much difference. The light forced its way in between the slats, trickled in via the cord holes, poured through the gap between the blind and the window frame. Even if he had boarded up the windows, even if he had slept in a windowless room, he would still have woken up. The light was out there. Prodding and tugging at him. Gently but persistently, like a lonely woman. He might as well get up and make a pot of coffee.
Climbing out of bed, he opened the blinds. The floor was freezing cold against his bare feet. The thermometer outside the window said minus 2. It had snowed during the night. The hard crust that had formed the previous week after some milder weather and a few days of sleet had become even firmer now – strong enough for him to ski along the bank of the River Torne towards Tervaskoski. There were bound to be grayling lurking behind stones in the rapids there.
When the fire had taken hold in the kitchen stove, Marjavaara took the red plastic bucket standing in the hall and went down to the river to fetch some water. It was only a few metres to the riverbank, but he made his way carefully: there were plenty of potentially treacherous ice patches beneath the fresh snow and you could easily injure yourself.
The sun was lying in wait just below the horizon, painting the cold, wintry sky with golden-red strokes. Soon it would peer over the spruce forest, setting the red wooden panels of the cottage aglow.
The snow lay over the river like a whisper of nature. Hush, it said, be quiet. There is only you and me now.
He did as he was told, stood still with the bucket in his hand, gazing out over the river. It was true. You never come closer to owning the whole world than when you wake up before everyone else. There were a few cottages dotted along both banks of the river, but his was the only chimney with smoke rising from it. Most likely the people were not even there. They were probably fast asleep in their town houses, poor fools.
At the far end of the jetty was the water hole Marjavaara had cut in the ice. He had covered it with a polystyrene lid to prevent it from freezing over. Brushing the snow off the lid, he lifted it up. When Barbro was with him at the cottage, they always brought tap water from the town – she refused to drink water from the river.
“Yuck!” she always said with a shudder, raising her shoulders almost to her ears. “All the shit from all the villages upstream!”
She used to go on about the hospital at Vittangi, how it was a good job they lived upstream from there. How there were no sewage-treatment works or anything. No doubt someone’s appendix would be floating down the river, and God only knew what else.
“Don’t talk such rubbish!” he would say, as he had done a hundred times before. “You’re talking nonsense, woman!”
He had been drinking that water since he was a child, and his health was better than hers.
He squatted down to dip the bucket into the water. There was a length of rope attached to the handle so that he could let it sink and fill before hauling it back up again.
But he could not get the bucket to sink. There was something in the way, just beneath the surface. Something big. Black.
Maybe a waterlogged tree trunk, he thought.
You did not often find tree trunks in the water nowadays. It had been more common when he was a child, when logs were still floated down to the sawmills at the mouth of the river.
Marjavaara dipped his hand in the freezing water in order to push the log out of the way. It seemed to have got wedged in the jetty. And it was not a log. It seemed to be made of rubber or something similar.
“What the hell…” he said, sliding the bucket to one side.
He took hold of it with both hands, tried to get a firm grip, but his hands would
