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

Shouldn’t she be…a skeleton by this time?

He didn’t really know about these things, but he didn’t think a person who had been lying in the water for almost a year shouldstill have their fingers intact. There are many hungry creatures in the depths.

Only now did he see himself, standing here with water almost up to his knees looking at a corpse. It was as if there was a bubble around them, an unpleasant spell that was difficult to break. He could remain standing here for a long time.

Göran.

That’s what he had to do. He would wade back to the shore and contact Göran. That was it. Slowly he began to back away from the floating body. He didn’t want to turn his back on it. Once he reached the shore he finally dared to turn around, and lumbered up to his house as quickly as possible. A couple of times he glanced back over his shoulder just to check.

That she isn’t following me.

Fortunately Göran was at home and knew what had to be done. He telephoned the appropriate authorities and an hour later the lifeboat service had retrieved Sigrid’s body and transported her over to Nåten. A young police officer asked Simon some questions about the details of his discovery. When he had finished he closed his notebook and asked, ‘There’s a husband, isn’t there?’

‘Yes,’ replied Simon, glancing at Göran who was standing with his hands in his trouser pockets staring at the ground.

‘Where does he live?’

Simon pointed towards Kattudden and was just about to give directions when Göran said, ‘I can deal with that. I’ll tell him.’

‘Is that OK?’

Göran smiled. ‘It’s less awful. I think you might find Holger a bit…difficult to talk to.’

The police officer looked at his watch. He clearly had better things to do than talk to difficult people.

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘But you ought to warn him that we might have some questions later. When she’s been examined.’

‘He’s not going to run away.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The same as you, I presume.’

They looked each other in the eye and nodded in a moment of professional accord.

The officer jerked his thumb in the direction of the inlet and said, ‘I mean, she can’t have been lying in the water for a year, can she?’

‘No,’ said Göran. ‘Hardly.’

When the young man had gone back to the police launch, Göran and Simon remained on the jetty gazing out across the almost dead calm sea. Apart from the furrow ploughed by the police launch as it headed for the mainland, the water was a gigantic mirror, reflecting the sky and hiding its own secrets.

‘Something is happening,’ said Simon.

‘What’s happening?’

‘Something to do with the sea. Something’s happening to it.’

Out of the corner of his eye Simon saw Göran turn to look at him, but he kept on gazing out over the cold, bright blue surface.

‘In what way?’ asked Göran.

There were no words to formulate what Simon knew. The closest he could get was the perception that the sea was broken. He couldn’t say that, so he said, ‘It’s changing. It’s getting…worse.’

A very small event

Perhaps everything would have been different and this story would have followed a completely different course if a leaf had not fallen. The leaf in question was on the large maple tree that stood twenty or so metres inland from Simon’s jetty. Only that morning Simon had glanced at that very leaf as he sat on his porch, liberated from the heightened sensory awareness evoked by Spiritus.

Since it was the middle of October, the maple had lost many of its leaves during the storm, and those that remained were only looselyattached to their branches, in shifting shades of dying. However, it looked as if most of them would cling on for today. The afternoon was dead calm and only, very occasionally, the odd leaf drifted down to join the dry heaps already on the ground.

Who can really say how decisions are made, how emotions change, how ideas arise? We talk about inspiration; about a bolt of lightning from a clear sky, but perhaps everything is just as simple and just as infinitely complex as the processes that make a particular leaf fall at a particular moment. That point has been reached, that’s all. It has to happen, and it does happen.

The leaf in question requires no more detailed description. It was an ordinary maple leaf in the autumn. As big as a coffee saucer, some black and dark red patches on a yellow and orange background. Very beautiful and absolutely unremarkable. The cellulose threads that had kept the stalk attached to a branch halfway up the tree had dried out, gravity gained the upper hand. The leaf came away and fell towards the ground.

After Göran had gone to talk to Holger, Simon stayed on the jetty for a long time, staring out across the water. He was searching for something that was impossible to see, the way it is impossible to see land in thick fog, but it was worse than that: he didn’t even know what he was searching for.

He gave up and turned inland, intending to go inside and have a cup of coffee. As he left the jetty, his arms swinging and his gaze lost in contemplation, he saw a flickering movement. A second later he felt a caress on his hand. He stopped.

There was a maple leaf on the palm of his hand; it looked exactly as if it were stuck there. He raised his eyes and looked up at the crown of the tree. No more leaves fell. Just this one leaf had fallen, the leaf that he was holding in his hand through no effort of his own; it had drifted down and landed on his hand at the exact moment when he was passing the tree.

He lifted his hand and studied the veins on the leaf as if tryingto decipher unfamiliar writing. There was nothing there, and the leaf had no message to give him.