John Lindqvist - Harbour

Exhausted, he blinked at the bright light up above and decided to wait a while after all. It was beautiful anyway. There was nothing to hope for, but…

The gulls.

Where had the gulls gone? His field of vision was limited, but at least one bird should have been visible. But nothing was moving across the sky except thin veils of cloud, and he could hear nothing of the birds.

He got to his feet and climbed up the next step. And the next. He had to heave himself up the last step, and once again he was standing on the rocks of Gåvasten.

It was late spring.

The air was pleasantly mild, and flowers were growing in every crevice. Mayweed and chives danced in a gentle breeze coming off the sea. The lighthouse glowed chalk-white beneath an afternoon sun that was just warm enough. A wonderful day.

Anders looked around. No gulls on the water, no gulls in the sky. Not a single bird as far as the eye could see. His woolly jumper was making him itchy in the warmth, and he pulled it off and knotted it around his waist, over the top of Maja's snowsuit.

He wandered dumbstruck over the rocks. When he caught sight of Simon's boat, neatly pulled up on to the shore instead of lying abandoned out at sea, he sat down and rested his chin on his hands.

Where am I? When am I?

He squinted into the sun, sparkling on the sea, and studied the boat. It didn't look the same, somehow. It looked newer, or…healthier. There were no scratches or cracks in the hull, and the engine cowling shone. Anders was seized by a sudden sense of unease, and turned his head to the south.

Domarö was exactly where it should be. A tangled thickening of the horizon, a brushstroke of fir trees against the pale sky. But it was just the same as with the boat, it somehow looked more…newly made. Healthier. Stronger.

He felt a movement in his stomach, like the first perceptible movements of a foetus. He stuck his hand inside his shirt, placed it over his stomach and, with a feeling of disgust, realised that the black larva in there was living its own life. They had moved apart and were no longer one and the same. He was Anders, and an insect was crawling around inside his stomach.

He stood up and walked down to the boat. The mooring rope lay neatly coiled up on the prow; the freshly varnished oars shone. He pushed off and the boat slipped easily off the pebbles as he climbed in.

He pulled the string and coolant sprayed out through the little hole beneath the cowling. He felt the engine. It was vibrating. It was running. It just wasn't making any noise. He engaged the gear lever and the boat moved smoothly forward. He accelerated and the boat moved more quickly, still without a sound.

He turned the prow towards Domarö and picked up speed. The mild air should have been cold against his face as he moved faster, but it maintained exactly the same pleasant temperature whether he increased his speed or slowed down. Everything was perfect, and the fear inside him grew stronger and stronger.

The trip across to Domarö passed with incomprehensible speed, as if the distance had contracted while he was travelling. After no more than a minute he swung in alongside one of the smaller jetties next to the steamboat jetty, tied up the boat with the soft, white cotton rope and climbed out.

The boathouses were prettily painted Falun red, and looked as if they were made of velvet in the soft afternoon light. Anders looked around and noticed someone up on the steamboat jetty, with their back turned towards him.

He walked along the shoreline and when he looked up in the direction of the village he could see that the shop was open and the pennants advertising ice cream were fluttering gently. Giant Cornet, Pear Split. Neither of those was available nowadays, as far as he knew. Someone was standing up there studying the advertising posters.

MINCE 7.95/KG, GHERKINS 2.95/KG.

I know what this is, thought Anders, as he climbed up on to the steamboat jetty and went over to the person standing with his back to him. I know where I am.

'Excuse me,' said Anders, and thought he had uttered the words only in his mind, as they didn't come out of his mouth. The person in front of him was a man dressed in blue jeans and a checked shirt, not unlike the one he himself was wearing. The man did not react to the inaudible words. Anders moved closer.

'Excuse me?'

Anders felt at his lips, licked his index finger. Yes, his mouth was there, his tongue was there. It was so quiet here. Not a sound from machines or voices, no birdsong from the trees.

When the man still showed no sign of hearing, Anders walked around so that he would be able to look him in the eye or give him a shake. He passed the man's side and his stomach flipped over, everything flickered before his eyes as the whole thing turned into its opposite.

Anders was standing where the man had just been standing, staring at the man's back as he began to walk up towards the shop. Anders ran up to the man and around him, and the same thing happened again. Something switched over in his head, and he was following a man on his way down to the jetty, once again able to see only the man's back and the back of his head.

He stopped. The man resumed his previous position down on the jetty, gazing out to sea. Anders turned around and walked up to the shop. He half-expected to see his own herring box up there, his own hand-written sign.

Because it was that day. The day when a man had walked out into the water, and Cecilia had given him a lift on her bike. The best moment of his life. The same weather, the same signs, the same feeling. Apart from the fear bubbling inside him.

You want me to stay. You want me here. You're showing me what you think I want to see. My heaven. That's what you're doing.

The man who had been looking at the adverts was just walking away. On the village road to the south, a woman in an old-fashioned summer dress was also walking away. A woman in a skirt made of rough homespun fabric with a scarf around her head was standing on a slope picking lily-of-the-valley, facing away from him.

No one is seeing the same thing.

The woman picking flowers belonged neither to this century nor the last one. Presumably she couldn't see a shop, and she certainly couldn't see any adverts for ice cream. She might possibly be seeing the bakery that Anders knew had once stood on the spot where the shop was nowadays. In her eyes the steamboat jetty was probably no more than a fairly small wooden structure.

Nowadays. What is nowadays? Where are we?

Anders closed his eyes and rubbed them so hard that he squashed the eyeballs back into his head. When he opened them, he saw the same thing as before. A beautiful landscape, a beautiful day, and people moving away or with their backs turned towards him.

He kicked at the gravel and little stones rolled away without making a sound. He took a deep breath and yelled 'Maja!', but didn't. The air came out of him, his vocal cords vibrated, but nothing could be heard. The silence was so dense that it deafened him, as if he were deep under water.

Which is exactly where I am.

He turned on to the southern village road and walked towards the ramblers' hostel. Like all the buildings on this version of Domarö, it was lovelier than ever. It wasn't that it looked newly built. Brand new buildings are seldom particularly attractive. No, it was more the fact that everything was so perfectly aged that it merely emphasised the beauty of the building.

Skansen. The Swedish folk museum.

Something along those lines. Every building, every object, every plant looked as if it was part of an exhibition. As if they represented something rather than actually being something. Themselves. Life- size models.