Harbor by John Lindqvist (classic novels for teens txt) 📕

of rejuvenation that had led them to celebrate their speedily executed preparations with a pizza. Neither of them had eaten pizza since the days when it was a novelty, and they chose a capricciosa purely because they vaguely recognised the name.

When Anna-Greta had eaten about half of hers, she pushed the plate away and said, ‘It was tasty at first, but it seems to be growing.’

Simon had exactly the same feeling. His stomach felt as if he had shovelled down half a litre of flour with a teaspoon. It was bubbling and swelling, and he stopped while he still had a delicious taste in his mouth.

Anna-Greta looked out of the window as Simon poked at the remains of what was probably the last pizza he would eat in this life. If you contemplated it when you weren’t hungry, it didn’t even look like human food.

‘Simon,’ said Anna-Greta. ‘You have to be careful.’

Simon, who was still meditating on the suitability of pizza as food, replied, ‘You mean about what I eat?’

Anna-Greta shook her head. ‘If I’d known you were intending to do what you did this morning, I would never have let you go.’

‘Do we have to talk about this?’

Their errands at the registration office and the goldsmith’s had distracted Simon’s thoughts from the horror of the morning, and he wanted to remain in this blissful state of forgetfulness for as long as possible. Anna-Greta turned her palms upward to indicate that she had no intention of continuing along this line, took a deep breath and said, ‘A long time ago. When I used to travel around selling things. During the war. I was involved in something…something I haven’t told you about.’

Simon didn’t need to ask. Things had changed. He was now one of those in the know, someone who could be told. He leaned back as far as he could on the straight-backed chair as Anna-Greta went on.

‘I was allowed to travel with the soldiers sometimes because I was…popular. I don’t think they were really supposed to have civilians on board, but after all I knew the archipelago and so…’ Anna-Greta looked up and frowned. ‘What are you grinning at?’

Simon waved a hand. ‘Nothing, nothing. I’ll just say one thing. Belle of the boat.’

‘I was not a belle of the boat! I knew every single…’

‘Yes, yes. But I’m sure there were plenty of others who knew the archipelago even better. They just weren’t as pretty as you.’

Anna-Greta gasped for breath, but stopped herself and looked suspiciously at Simon. ‘Are you jealous?’ she asked. ‘Are you sitting here sixty years on feeling jealous?’

Simon thought about it. ‘Now you come to mention it, yes.’

Anna-Greta looked at Simon, then shook her head at the absurdity of it all.

‘They were thinking about laying mines. Out towards Ledinge. Since the major shipping lane to Stockholm runs along there. And I went along on one of those…reconnaissance trips where they were diving to check out the conditions on the seabed. They had just started using modern diving equipment with tanks on their backs. But because visibility in the water was poor and they still weren’t sure about these new things, they used a safety line, attached to the diver.’

Anna-Greta nodded to herself and pointed vaguely in the air as if she’d just thought of something. ‘That was probably why I went along, I think. Because I wanted to see the diving.’

Simon had a very witty comment on the tip of his tongue, but he kept it to himself and Anna-Greta went on:

‘So down he went, this diver, and the line ran from a pulley on deck. There was something hypnotic about it. I mean, you couldn’t see the diver, you just had this pulley to look at, and it made a clicking sound as it turned, paying out the line as he went down. And then… it stopped. The line stopped moving, as if he’d reached the bottom. But that couldn’t be right, because only about seven or eight metres of the line had been paid out, and it was at least thirty metres deep there. The line just didn’t move for a good while, and I thought he must have found a new reef, that he was standing there speculating about what it should be called, if it should be given a name. And then…’

Anna-Greta flicked her hand so that it made a small circular movement.

‘…and then the line started moving again. But more quickly than before. Much more quickly. Ten metres, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five. And the pulley was no longer clicking, it was…clattering. Then the speed increased until it was just a continuous hum. Thirty, forty, fiftymetres. In just a few seconds. As if he were falling through the air rather than sinking through water. There was nothing we could do. Somebody tried to grab hold of the line, and burned the palms of their hands. Then it ran right to the end, another thirty metres, came off the pulley and disappeared into the water. At the same speed.’

Anna-Greta drank some of her Fanta and cleared her throat.

‘That’s what happened. And that’s why I want you to be careful.’ She put down her glass and added, ‘They had to come up with some kind of explanation, of course. So they decided he’d somehow got himself attached to a submarine. Stupid but true. He was never found. But perhaps you suspected that already.’

Simon looked at her as she sat there wiping her mouth with her serviette. She didn’t give the impression that she had just described something incomprehensible; it was more as if she had just been forced to explain this business of electricity so that you wouldn’t poke your fingers in the socket.

‘I am careful,’ said Simon. ‘I think.’

They went for a walk through Norrtälje and discussed to what extent they would change their current living arrangements after they were married. Well, it wasn’t so much a discussion—they joked about it. In fact they were both in agreement from the start that they