Let The Old Dreams Die Part 19

Their love is so big and strong, but there is still room to fear two things: the child and death.

Sometimes they lie in bed, gazing into each other's eyes and thinking: My happiness is complete. I want things to stay just like this forever. They haven't just fallen in love, they know what it's all about. 'I want things to stay like this' pretty much sums it up: a life filled with hard work, sometimes boring, sometimes joyous. And they lie there, four eyes fixed on each other, sounding each other's depths, and they try to think: This moment is eternity. This moment is forever.

But we grow older, things change. A time will come when illness and frailty ravage their bodies. Senility, weakness, teeth falling out, a wheelchair ramp up the porch. Perhaps then they will look back on their happy life and feel contented.

But that isn't what they want! No! They want what they have now to last forever! It's not fair that love should be subject to the same limitations as our frail bodies. That it should wither and die along with our flesh.

Of course some people believe in heaven. But not Anna and Josef. Unfortunately.

And The Child? It must have capital letters, it has a.s.sumed such proportions. At family parties everyone asks, 'Don't you think it's getting time? I mean, everything's going so well for you, and Josef is so good with children, and you'll be such a wonderful mother, Anna.'

Everything seems to tend in its favour. But they're afraid.

The greatest cathedrals are finely balanced. Move a few stones from the foundations of the Globe Arena, and it will roll away. Maybe. You never know. And isn't the basic premise of love a mutual freedom? The fact that you can leave?

Neither of them wants to leave, not for all the tea in China, but the possibility should be there. The idea that you choose each other, not because you have to and not because you have children or a house to consider, but because that's what you want, every day.

But a child. A child...

They can't decide, so they allow chance, fate to determine what happens; their only form of contraception is to make love during Anna's safe periods. If it happens anyway, well, it happens. To tell the truth, they're not all that careful about the dates either.

And it does happen.

Anna misses a period, Josef picks up a pregnancy test on the way home from work. Anna pees on the stick, they put it on the kitchen table and stand there for three minutes, hugging each other, eyes closed. The world all around them is silent, holding its breath.

When they look there is a pale blue line showing: the child's first sign of life.

They neither laugh nor cry. The little line fills them with trepidation, leaves them dumbstruck. When one of them finally speaks, it's Anna who says in a fake falsetto voice, 'I want ice cream!'

Josef laughs. They take a litre out of the freezer, put it on the table next to the pregnancy test, get two spoons and eat the whole lot. His tongue stiff with cold, Josef asks, 'How does it feel?'

'It feels good. How about you?'

'Yes. Good. It'll be quite something.'

'Yes. Probably.'

She licks ice cream off his lips and carries on into his mouth. This is going to be good. They'll just be happy in a slightly different way. Hand in hand they go to bed, despite the fact that it's Anna's unsafe period. After all, it doesn't matter anymore.

A week went by. It would be an exaggeration to say that they drifted apart, but they were lost in their own thoughts. Perhaps it's as Pascal says: we are incapable of living in the present, it's only the past and the future that have the capacity to occupy our minds.

The future had changed shape. It took a while to get used to the idea. Anna painted gulls flying over salt-spattered cliffs, even though it was the wrong week. She had a lot to think about, and she could paint the gulls on autopilot, as it were. It was the end of September now, and most of her stock had been sold at the markets over the summer.

She stopped with the brush poised over the crest of a wave just as she was about to dab it with flake white to make the surf. Next summer. Would they be struggling around the markets with...a buggy? Reins? Could they carry on living like this? How much would they need to change?

Josef finished work early and cycled home from the bus stop because the car was out of action. Something to do with the carburettor. After they'd eaten he set off in the boat with his fishing rod to catch a few autumn perch. Anna stood at the kitchen window watching him go, and a shiver of apprehension that began in her womb fluttered through her body. The thought of never seeing him again. Bravely she went back to her seagulls, spent a couple of hours applying colour.

When she came out of the garage the wind had got up, and dusk fell quickly. Josef hadn't come home. She went down to the jetty, gazing out across the dirty grey water. After a quarter of an hour she was frozen stiff.

She went inside and made herself a cup of coffee, sat down by the kitchen window.

Come on Josef, don't do this...

But he didn't come. When it was so dark that she could no longer see the jetty she rang the emergency services and was put through to the coastguard. The receiver shook in her hand as she spoke to a man on a motor launch at Refsnas jetty, via a crackling mobile link.

'Do you have any idea what area he might be in?'

'Yes, roughly. It's by...hang on...let me just...'

The names of the islands around the area where Josef usually fished had disappeared. She stood up to fetch the chart and her legs gave way. Her heart was pounding so much she could hardly breathe. On all fours she crawled to the bookcase, grabbed the chart and opened it out.

There were holes in the cover along the folds, and the map was stained or worn in those places. She tried to focus, but the letters were crawling like maggots over the grey vomit of the archipelago. He was out there somewhere. A little voice called, 'h.e.l.lo, are you there?' from the receiver. She swallowed, rubbed her eyes and picked it up.

'I think there are some small islands east, no north of Gisslingo where he usually...the map's torn...Josef.'

'Sorry?'

'Josef. That's his name.'

'Right. So somewhere around Fjardskaret, then?'

She looked at the map for confirmation. It was illegible, worn in that particular area. She could see her Josef there, floating in the black waves in a place that didn't exist, a hole in the world. She started to cry. On the other end of the line she heard an engine start up.

'Don't worry. I'm sure he's just got some mechanical problem with the boat. We'll go out and take a look.'

'Thank you. He's...he's going to be a father.'

A pause. A small sigh. Then: 'We'll be in touch as soon as we know anything.'

She gave them her number and hung up. In the silence that small sigh grew into an ominous, cold wind. She wrapped a blanket around her, leaned her forehead against the windowpane and stared out into the darkness. She was alone.

After a few minutes her legs started to move. She tried doing the washing-up to keep calm, but it was impossible. She walked around and around the house, but found no peace anywhere.

They must be there by now. They'll be searching now.

Searchlights sweeping across the surface of the water. Her legs kept on walking and walking. In the end she understood what they wanted: they wanted to go down to the jetty, position themselves right at the very end on the border between land and sea and wait there as women have waited for their men to come home from the sea for thousands of years. It was the only thing to do. But she lived in the twenty-first century, and her place was by the telephone.

They would get a mobile. When Josef got home they would get a mobile phone at long last, and he could take it with him when he went out. Who was it who hadn't wanted a mobile? It was Anna. If he'd had a mobile now...it was all her fault.

After two hours without any news, a black madness began to creep up on her. She fell to her knees on the kitchen floor with the blanket over her, joined her hands together, pressed them to her forehead and mumbled, 'Dear Lord, please let him come back. You can have anything you want. Anything. take the house, all my things, take...yes, take my child. I don't want it. You can have it, if you'll just let Josef come back. As long as I can spend my life with Josef. Take it now.'

The telephone rang.

She flung off the blanket, hurled herself at the phone. Her hands were sweaty from the warmth of her coc.o.o.n, and at first she couldn't grasp the receiver. Even before it reached her ear she could hear the crackling. Her heart expanded, filling her chest.

'h.e.l.lo?'

'h.e.l.lo, Magnus Jansson from the coastguard here. We've got him. He's alive.'

'Is he...'

'Suffering from severe hypothermia. We found him in the water. You live in Sgviken, is that right?'

'Yes...'

'We'll be at Refsnas 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 Norrtalje 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 encompa.s.s 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 Norrtalje. 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 land 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.'