The last thing Josef remembered was turning his head towards the sound of an approaching engine, thinking something along the lines of: ‘Am I being rescued already?’, then everything went black.
When he opened his eyes it was dark all around him and he could no longer hear the engine. The wind had begun to get up. His head was throbbing with pain and he had no feeling in his body, no idea where he was or how long he had been out.
He floated there until the coastguard arrived. They picked him up almost one nautical mile east of the spot where he had fallen in, on his way out towards the Åland Sea.
Anna tried asking questions. What had he been thinking as he lay there in the water, how had he felt? But Josef’s eyes slid away, he rubbed his forehead and said he was in pain and didn’t want to talk about it now. Later.
They had to sit and wait for tests. Josef’s hands and feet, which had been horribly white, started to regain their colour, but as a consequence they were so itchy that he said it was better when he couldn’t feel them. Anna fetched him a cup of hot chocolate from a machine and he drank it quickly, then sat studying the pattern on the paper cup, caressing it with his finger. After a while a smile spread across his face and he held the cup out to Anna.
‘Isn’t it a beautiful pattern?’
Anna looked at the yellow shapes on a brown background; the pattern reminded her of an abstract wallpaper design from the seventies, and she shrugged her shoulders.
‘Not particularly.’
She looked from the cup to Josef, back to the cup, back to Josef. His face radiated a quiet rapture.
‘You’re alive,’ she said.
Without taking his eyes off the cup, Josef said slowly and clearly, ‘Anna. I know how we can live forever.’
She heard exactly what he said, but she still had to ask. ‘What did you say?’
Josef caught her eye, put down the cup, and placed his hands on her cheeks. His hands were still warm from the blanket.
‘I know. What to do. So that we don’t have to die. Ever.’
She covered his hands with hers and whispered, ‘Not so loud. If the doctors hear you, they’ll kill you. They’ll be out of work.’
Josef didn’t appreciate the joke. He pulled his hands away. She caught them before he managed to tuck them under the blanket, gave them a squeeze.
‘Sorry. But it does sound a bit odd, you know.’
Josef sat like a statue for a few seconds. Then he nodded. ‘Yes. But it’s true. We can live forever, if we want to.’
A nurse appeared and called out his name. With Anna’s help he got to his feet and together they went into the cubicle. Anna watched as they stuck needles into him, listened to his heart and felt at him. All the time a quiet happiness shone from his eyes.
Later a doctor came to look at Josef’s results. He was almost two metres tall, with thick black eyebrows; he frowned with concern as he read through the notes.
‘We need to keep you in overnight. At least,’ he said, handing the folder back to the nurse. ‘So we can keep you under observation.’
His deep bass voice brooked no disagreement, but Josef still dared to question the necessity of staying in hospital. He felt fine, apart from the itching in his hands and feet, a slight headache.
The doctor stopped in the doorway, looked at the nurse as if seeking confirmation that he had heard correctly, then took two long strides back to Josef and leaned over him.
‘Your body temperature when they fished you out was twenty-two degrees.’ He paused to let this sink in. When Josef didn’t react, he went on, ‘Do you know what that means? It mean a person is dead. Very dead indeed. So one night in hospital might not be too bad, in the scheme of things. If you consider the alternative.’
Anna placed her hands on Josef’s shoulders as if to protect him. The gesture seemed to appease the doctor. He took the notes back from the nurse, looked at them again and shook his head.
‘You’ve been…’ he glanced at Anna, changed it to: ‘You’ve both been incredibly lucky.’ He nodded at this pronouncement, let it hang in the air and took his leave with the words, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ and hurried away.
Josef was allocated a bed and Anna had to push him up to the ward herself. There was an unusually high number of emergency patients this evening, and staff shortages were noticeable. Anna was told which lift to use and which floor she needed, and off they went.
As they reached the lifts, a door slid open.
Out of the lift came a bed, pushed by a tall, white-haired woman in a floral blouse. She could have been any age between seventy and ninety. In the bed lay a man, or the remnant of a man. He was lying on his side in the foetal position underneath a blue sheet, staring vacantly into space. His body had been eaten up by illness and lying in bed, and all that was left was a skeleton covered in skin, the vertebrae making sharp folds in the sheet.
The woman nodded to them, smiled and pushed the bed out of the lift. She was wearing rubber boots, and set off with a sure tread. On the way to some kind of test, presumably.
‘Anna!’
The lift doors were closing. She moved forward quickly, placed her hand between them and they slid open. She pushed Josef inside and pressed four. They didn’t speak as the lift rose.
The Emergency Department had been busy but there was plenty of room on the ward, and Josef was allocated a private room. An extra bed was brought in for Anna, and a nurse explained that she would have to pay the relatives’ rate for breakfast. When they were alone Anna moved her chair closer to the bed and leaned her arms on the rail.
‘What you said before—what was that all about?’
Josef remained silent for a few seconds, then asked; ‘Do you really want to know? I want you to want to know, but…do you?’
‘Of course I do.’
‘It’s…’ Josef’s gaze searched the room, as if looking for a clue as to where to start. ‘It’s quite…what’s the word…quite overwhelming.’
Anna said nothing. Josef leaned back on the bed, closed his eyes.
‘You asked me before what I was thinking about as I lay there in the darkness. I don’t believe I was thinking very much at all. I was very calm. Strange. I’d imagined a situation like that would be the worst thing that could happen to me. Having plenty of time to contemplate the fact that you’re going to die. The panic, the terror, all that kind of stuff.
‘But it wasn’t like that. I thought about you, of course. About how happy we’ve been. I was sorry that you would be unhappy when I died. That was what hurt, I think. The idea that you would be unhappy. The image of myself. The thought that I might be… mutilated. I couldn’t feel my body at all.’
Josef laughed.
‘For a while I thought maybe my head was just floating around on its own. But I managed to bend my head like this, heard the life jacket rasping against my stubble. Couldn’t feel it though. I could kind of hear it inside my head, because apart from that I couldn’t hear anything at all. As if everything was frozen, right down inside my ears. The only diversion was when water splashed up into my eyes from time to time. Apart from that, I could just as easily have been in outer space.
‘But what tormented me was the thought that perhaps I looked horrible, that they would eventually find me and you’d have to come and identify me. And at the same time I hoped I would be found so that you wouldn’t…’
A sob juddered through Anna’s body as she breathed out. Josef placed his hand on her head. ‘I’m sorry. I realise it must have been…I mean, I can imagine how I’d feel if you…’
Anna shook her head, wiped the tears from her eyes. ‘It’s just… go on.’
Josef sighed. ‘So anyway, I was very calm apart from that. No fear of death, nothing like that. And after a while, when I was thinking about those insect traps I used to make when I was little… a glass jar, buried in the ground. How they could be improved. Then…’
Josef’s hand reached for Anna’s.
She took it and squeezed it
. The skin was still hot, dry, and his hand was shaking. She looked up at him. His eyes were wide open, staring at the wall opposite the bed.
‘…then death came.’
Josef screwed up his eyes, opened them again. ‘This is really hard to explain. It was as if I was a glove, and death…was putting me on. It came into me, slowly and…’
Josef fell silent and let go of Anna’s hand. His eyes were still gazing unseeingly at the wall, or through it, out towards the sea far away. Anna asked, ‘Did you start to feel warm?’
He shook his head. ‘On the contrary. I could no longer feel the cold from the sea, but death came like a more intense cold inside me. I think it found its way in under my toenails and moved…upwards.’
Josef coughed. Breathed in and choked, coughed even more. He leaned forward, retching, and Anna stroked his back as he waved his hand and said, ‘…I’m fine…’ between coughs.
When the coughing abated and Josef was leaning back on the pillows with tears in his eyes from the exertion, Anna said, ‘Well, this isn’t so strange. I can understand it must have been, what did you say, overwhelming, but…’
He cleared his throat. ‘It’s not that. I’m absolutely convinced that it wasn’t coming from my own body. When I said I was like a glove that death was putting on, that’s exactly what I meant. Do you understand?’
‘Yes, I suppose it would probably feel like that.’
Josef shook his head.
‘It didn’t “feel like that”. It was like that. Death is something that comes from outside. A big parasite that enters the body, stays there for a while, gathers what it needs, then leaves the body. Then you’re dead. That’s the way it is.’
Josef nodded slowly to himself, rubbing a corner of the sheet between his fingers. Suddenly he said, almost defiantly, ‘It’s colourless. It changes shape. At least when it’s in the water. It can think. It has a language. You can talk to it.’
‘Did you talk to it?’
Josef gazed searchingly into Anna’s eyes, looking for any sign that she might be making fun of him. He found none. He shook his head. ‘No. It’s heard everything. There’s nothing to say. In that situation.’ He sucked at the corner of the sheet and went on, ‘We human beings are just…material to them.’
Tentatively Anna asked, ‘What do you mean, them?’
Josef looked at her, glanced shiftily to the side as if she’d asked an unusually stupid question, then said, ‘Well, there are lots of them, of course.’ He snorted. ‘It’s a big planet, after all.’
He seemed to be on the point of saying something else, but stopped himself and said instead, ‘I’m sorry. This is hard to believe. I understand that. Sorry.’ He took her hand again, said imploringly, ‘But listen…that’s how it is. I’m absolutely certain. Death, Anna, is a creature capable of thought. There are ways of…negotiating with it.’
Anna nodded and got to her feet. For a while she had been aware of a clicking sound from Josef’s tongue when he was speaking. ‘Would you like a drink of water?’ she asked. ‘Or…?’
Josef smiled.
‘It’s all right, I’m not afraid it’s going to leap out of the tap or anything, it’s not like that. Yes please.’
Anna gave a slightly forced laugh and went over to the washbasin, filled a paper cup and gave it to Josef, who knocked it back in one. His movements suddenly seemed easier, his expression clearer. The happiness was there again. Anna would have preferred to talk about pleasant things, forget all this. But still she said; ‘But you’re alive. You’re sitting here.’
Josef nodded. ‘Yes. I was rescued before it had finished. It left me. When the boat came…when I saw the boat and thought, I’m going to live after all, it withdrew. Slowly. Like when…like when we’ve made love and I pull out really slowly so that it won’t hurt. Like that.’
That thought gave birth to the next one. He glanced at Anna’s belly and asked, ‘And how are you feeling?’
Anna stroked her stomach absentmindedly. Somewhere deep inside there was a life, as small as a dust mote, like a tick.
‘I don’t know. I feel…empty. Empty and happy.’
They didn’t sleep much during the night. The unfamiliar surroundings and the itching in Josef’s hands and feet kept them awake. They lay close together in Josef’s narrow bed, made up a story together and played twenty questions. In the morning Josef was discharged from the hospital.
Anna was not by nature a sceptic. Gabriella, the only friend from art school she still saw, once told her that she almost fell in front of a subway train. At the very last moment a great hand had caught her and pushed her back up onto the platform. Gabriella believed it was her guardian angel. Anna didn’t contradict her. Personally, she didn’t believe in angels and that kind of thing, but you couldn’t rule out the possibility.
What worried her about Josef’s vision was the business of not dying, of living forever. That was a little bit more serious than seeing a ghost, for example.
They would talk about it in due course. Josef had experienced something that had come between them. It would take several evenings of conversation before they got back in step. But they would. They had to.
One day passed. Two, three. The supervisor at the nursery realised that Josef needed time to recover, and suggested he sign himself off for a week at least.
He stayed at home during the day, and Anna had no real contact with him. He did little jobs in the garden, brought up seaweed and spread it around the shrubs and on the vegetable patch. He got the boat back from the coastguard and tried to fix the engine. When he couldn’t do it himself, he took it over to the marina to be repaired. He spent a lot of time down on the jetty, gazing out to sea.
On the fourth day a fat envelope arrived. It was full of drawings from the children at the nursery: ‘GET WELL SOON’ and ‘HOP YOU SOON FEEL BETER’, written, by those who could, in spidery letters. Most of the drawings were the usual red cottages with the sun and a tree. A couple showed a matchstick man lying in a billowing sea. The children had obviously been told what had happened.
Anna was making an omelette for lunch. Suddenly she heard Josef laughing out loud, the first real laughter she had heard from him in four days. She switched off the hotplate and went over to him. He was still laughing as he held out a drawing.
The picture, which must have been done by one of the older children, showed a person floating in the water. The child had talent; the figure was more than a matchstick man, and you could tell that it was supposed to be Josef from the medium-length brown hair.
The surface of the water was represented by blue wavy strokes that crossed the figure at approximately chest height. On the left-hand side a boat was on its way into the picture. Nothing remarkable there. The funny part was what was beneath the figure. A shark. An enormous shark with its mouth wide open, heading for the figure’s feet. A speech bubble coming out of the man’s mouth contained one word: ‘HELPHELP’.
Josef doubled up with laughter. Anna smiled and placed her hand on the back of his neck. He looked up at her with tears in his eyes. Pointed at the drawing, said, ‘helphelp’, and started laughing again.
He rocked back and forth, clutching his stomach. The laughter slipped into a long drawn-out howl that was hacked to pieces, became a sob. Anna fell to her knees next to Josef’s chair and put her arms around him. After a while the sobbing subsided, he extracted his arms from her embrace and hugged her back. Everything went quiet. Anna stroked his back, said, ‘You’re alive. You’re alive. You’re here. With me.’
‘It’s too much. I can’t.’
‘Josef. You nearly died. It’s going to take time.’
He shook his head vigorously as if to chase away an unpleasant thought. ‘It’s not that. It’s just that I know…what to do.’
‘What to do?’
‘To avoid dying. Ever. It’s driving me crazy.’
Anna took a deep breath. Many times over the past few days she had asked him how he was feeling, tried to get him to tal
k about the accident, but he had avoided the topic, answered in monosyllables or said he didn’t want to talk about it at the moment.
But here it was in all its simplicity: Josef still thought he had discovered the key to the secret mankind had been seeking for thousands of years, and Anna knew this was impossible. A wall between them.
Knew?
She knew nothing.
With an imperceptible effort she cleared her brain of all preconceptions and prepared to listen to him, to believe him if possible. Quietly she said, ‘OK. Tell me.’
‘You won’t believe me.’
‘We’ll see. If it’s as you say, and I can believe it, then we’ll talk about what we’re going to do. Together.’
Josef shook his head mechanically for a long time, then said, ‘I can’t talk about it. There’s only one thing I want to know: do you want to live with me? Forever?’
The question was posed in such a way that there was no room for manoeuvre. Anna was silent for a moment, then said the only thing she could say. She said: ‘Yes.’
Josef gave a brief nod. ‘OK.’ His gaze returned to the drawing. Anna took it away.
‘Josef, I can’t cope with this. You have to tell me what’s going on.’
‘If I tell you, you won’t believe me. Not until you’ve seen it.’
‘Seen what?’
Josef reached out his hand; she thought he was going to caress her cheek, and was about to move back—she didn’t want to be patted like a child who understood nothing. But his hand kept on moving downwards, to the drawing in her hand. Pointed at the shark. His index finger right in the middle of its mouth.
‘That.’
Autumn was turning into winter.
The summer visitors no longer came out to their cottages. The jetties in the bay stretched out into the grey sea like frozen fingers, robbed of the boats that clothed them. The larger ones had been taken to Gräddö Marina to be stored over the winter, while the smaller ones had been taken out of the water and lay along the shoreline, turned upside down and as helpless as a beetle on its back.