Let the Old Dreams Die (24 page)

‘Is he…’

‘Suffering from severe hypothermia. We found him in the water. You live in Sågviken, is that right?’

‘Yes…’

‘We’ll be at Refsnäs in ten minutes. An ambulance is on its way; if you can get down there you can go in with him.’

‘In?’

‘Yes, he’ll be going to the hospital in Norrtälje just to be on the safe side. Don’t worry, he’ll be fine, but he was in the water for quite a long time, so…just to be on the safe side.’

After she’d hung up she ran into the hallway and pulled on a jacket. Fortunately Josef had pumped up the tyres on the bike that morning, and she raced off across the gravel with the dynamo whining.

On many occasions she had seen death notices in the local paper,
Norrtelje Tidning
, asking for donations to the coastguard in memory
of the deceased. Only now did she understand. Her happiness and relief crystallised into a love for the coastguard that was so immense she wanted to sing them a hymn, paint them a picture; she would do anything for them.

‘Coastguards!’ she yelled. ‘I love you all!’

She reached the main road, and after a hundred metres the ambulance overtook her. She changed to third gear and stood up on the pedals. The signs showed that the speed limit was 50 kph. It felt as if she was travelling faster.

On the hill leading down to the jetty she stopped pedalling. The ambulance was standing on the quayside with its blue light silently flashing as the motor launch bobbed on the waves. The sea beyond it was black. The machinery and the resources that exist to safeguard two fragile hearts. She braked next to the ambulance. A middle-aged man in an orange jacket came over to her.

‘Hi…Anna?’

‘Yes, I’m…’

‘Magnus. We spoke on the—’

The bell on her bicycle pinged as she dropped the bike and threw her arms around Magnus. His jacket stuck to her sweaty cheek and she whispered ‘thank you’ into his shoulder. He patted her on the back and said, ‘It’s all right, it’s all right.’

‘Where is he?’

‘We were just going to…come with me.’

The deck swayed beneath her feet as she climbed on board after Magnus, who headed along by the gunwale towards an open iron door. She started to follow him, but her field of vision suddenly shrank, leaving only a small peephole in the middle where she could see the grey, shiny deck, although that too was threatening to disappear.

She stopped and leaned on the gunwale to stop herself falling. Closed her eyes and clutched the metal rail. For a moment she felt
as if she was going to throw up. The boat was rocking in time with her guts, bringing them up into her throat. She heard Magnus’s voice out of the darkness: ‘Are you all right?’

She ran a hand over her face, continuing the movement to encompass the boat, the night, the sea, death.

‘Sorry, it’s just…it’s all so big.’

Magnus looked up at the masthead light and nodded.

‘We’ve only had it for a couple of years.’

She didn’t understand what he meant, but the swell in her stomach had subsided. Her field of vision expanded. A door stood open. Beside it there was a metal sign with the words Sick Bay. She walked over and stepped over the high threshold.

She almost didn’t recognise him. The man sitting on the bunk wrapped in a thick blanket had wet, tousled hair and a bluish, swollen face. Apart from his forehead, which was dark red. Every feature had sunk in towards the centre, almost obliterated by the swelling. But the eyes were the same as those that had looked at her from the jetty only four hours earlier.

‘Josef!’

She flew into his arms and his body was cold and stiff beneath the blanket, but she would warm him. His gaze was far away, but she would bring it home. She hugged him, rubbed his skin and whispered, ‘Josef, Josef, don’t ever do that again…’

After a couple of minutes Magnus cleared his throat and said they’d better make a move. Together they helped Josef into the ambulance, and it set off for the hospital in Norrtälje. Anna blew Magnus a kiss through the rear window.

During the trip Josef told her what had happened.

Just a few hundred metres before he reached his destination, the outboard motor had stopped. The usual thing: the fuel pipe inside the engine had jumped out. He pushed it back, pumped up
more petrol and pulled the starter cord.

But he had forgotten to put the engine in neutral. When the twenty horsepower roared into life at full throttle, the boat shot forward and Josef was thrown over the stern.

It might not have been too bad. He got a soaking and cursed his own stupidity, but he was only a hundred metres from land, and he was wearing a lifejacket after all. The problem was that while he was still coughing up salt water and wiping his hair out of his eyes, no one was steering the boat, which had gone around in a tight circle.

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.