Chapter 9 The Secrets

Every one of us had one, and I want to set them out in the order I learned them, because I did not learn them all at once, and because two of them I have never learned at all and only guessed at, and I have been careful to say which. Mine was Ingrid. I did not tell the other five that I had been the one to set the cord on the seal-rocks in the winter of fifty-eight. Not the night she died. The winter. It had come to the rocks on the ebb with the last light in it and gone back on the flood in the dark, and I had stood in the middle of that shelf of rock with my hands on the cord I had laid and listened to the strait come up under me and thought, in the ordinary way a man thinks a thing on a rock in November, that a man who spends eleven winters on an island four hundred metres off a coast ought to be permitted one hour in a month when he is not being useful. She died in the February of that winter. She was in the dormitory and it was not quick and I sat outside the door for nine hours because Torsten told me to and because I would not have gone in anyway. I have never told Odd that I was on the rocks that night. He has never asked, and I have never offered, and there is a thing about the two of us on Brevikholm that we have both agreed, without ever once agreeing, not to walk into. It is the single worst thing I have ever done to a man who did not ask me for it, and I did it out of cowardice, and the cowardice was not of the ordinary kind. I was not afraid of what he would do. I was afraid of what he would say, and I knew what it would be, and I would have had to stand there and hear it. So I carried her out to the cord myself, on the ebb, the week after, and put her hand on it for a moment because I do not know what else a man does, and I said nothing to anybody in this station for three years. Halvard's was the frequency. He had been listening to the quiet bell for six nights before he told me, and he had told me because he could not put it in the log and he could not put it in a letter without a fortnight's delay, and he came into the kitchen at about two in the morning on the twentieth and sat down opposite me and said, "Erik, it is not on a frequency." "That is not a thing that can be true." "I know what I am telling you. Listen." He had the notebook out and it was open at a page of figures in his own hand. "I have logged every second of every one of the six ringings with the short-wave going, and on every one of the six the note appears on nothing. Not faint. Nothing. There is no band. There is no sideband. There is no modulation. At three o'clock in the morning for six nights a note has come out of that object in the middle of this room and there has been nothing on any frequency on this rock, and if you want to know what that means in my trade, it means it is not transmitted. Nothing that arrives from outside is transmitted. A bird is transmitted. A man on a boat eleven miles off is transmitted. That note is not coming from anywhere." "Then where is it coming from." "I have written down four possibilities and I have crossed out four and I am not going to say the fifth one out loud on Brevikholm." He shut the notebook. "I want you to know that I did not sleep on the eleventh, and I did not sleep on the fourteenth, and on the seventeenth I sat in this chair until the sky began to go and I watched the shelf, and I am not a man who is frightened of a thing. I am frightened of a thing with no frequency, because I have nothing to do with it. There is no procedure. You cannot log a silence and you cannot raise it and you cannot put it in a report and have a man in Trondheim be any use to you." Torsten's was the generator. He told me on the second of December, at about eleven at night, in the boiler room, with the engine shut down and the light off, which is how a man tells you a thing that makes him look at the floor. "It will not carry the winter. I have known since the September and I have not written it because I did not have the number and I did not want to bring a number up that I could not stand behind." He put his hand on the flywheel housing and left it there. "The head is going. There is a crack in the head that runs from the third cylinder down into the water jacket and I can put a finger in it with the engine off, and the day that crack opens into the water jacket the head goes off and the engine will not restart without a workshop and a new head, and there is no workshop on this rock and the boat does not come before February." "How long." "Through the long dark. Perhaps the whole of it. Perhaps not." He straightened up. "I want you to understand the arithmetic the way I understand it. The radio is the emergency set. That is the only thing on this station that anybody outside this rock can hear. There is no way to warm this room without the generator running, and there is a stove in the dormitory and the dormitory is warm, and the wire room is not warm because the wire room is where the emergency set is and I would not have it in the warm with the dormitory on the same circuit. That is a decision I made in fifty-four and I would make it again. So the wire room is fed off the engine and if the engine goes, the wire room goes cold at about the same hour." "Then we move the set into the dormitory." "Then the set is off the aerial, and the set without the aerial is a box with a valve in it." He said it quite mildly. "That is all, Erik. It is a slow thing and then it is all at once, and I have been sitting on it for three months because I could not think of a single thing to say that would make it better, and there is not one." Karin's was the mainland. She did not tell me. I found it out from Halvard, who found it out from Sven, who found it out because he is the cook and a woman who does not eat for nine days is a problem a cook has to solve. There is a sister in Trondheim. The sister is ill, has been ill since the summer, and Karin has written nothing for two years. "Written nothing," Sven said. "Not a card. Not at Christmas. Two years. I know because I have been putting the post in the drawer under the cloth for two years and it has not gone out, and I do not open the drawer for anybody, and in November I did, and I put it back." Sven's was the south. I have never known what it is and I have never asked, and it is the only one of the five I am certain I have not got. He came out here in fifty-two on a boat out of a town he will not name, he has not been ashore since, and in nine years he has twice said something that stopped a conversation and then not finished it, and both times it was the same word, and the word was a place. Odd's was the rocks. He told me the seventh of December, and he told it badly, and he told it to me and not to the six. "Two years," he said. "I have not laid cord out on the rocks since fifty-eight. Two years and it is three this month." He had the hank of it on the table between us, and he was working it the whole time he spoke, three strands, over the thumb. "There is a thing I have to say and I am saying it to you because you are the only one of the six who set cord on those rocks himself and can tell me if I have it right." "Then say it." "On the night she died I was not in my bunk." He did not look up. "I was on the shelf of rock with the flood coming and I did not know it. I was out there from the middle of the afternoon and I came off on the last of the ebb and went in by the north door and up to the dormitory and the door was shut and I got my coat off and I sat on my bed, and it was after four. And nobody in this station said one word about it to me then, and nobody has said one word about it to me since, and I have not asked, and you have not said." The hall clock went. I did not write anything in the log that night. I have not written anything in the log about it since either, and I have written down everything else, and that is the closest I have come to an admission in eleven years of this book. "I was on the rocks that night," I said. Odd stopped working the cord. "You were—" "At about two. On the ebb. I had a lamp and I laid about four fathoms of it on the north end and I came back in on the flood at about midnight." I put both hands flat on the table. "I did not know you were out there. I did not look for anybody. That is the whole of what I have, Odd, and it is not much, and I have had it three years and you have had nothing for three years, and I would like you to have it now before the twentieth of January, and then you can do what you like with it." He picked the hank up and worked the cord for about a minute without saying anything. "We put cord out within an hour of each other," he said, "on the same night, in the same gale, on the same rocks, and neither of us knew, and one of us was eleven fathoms from the other and neither of us knew." He began to braid again. "There is a word for that in the old way. I am not going to say it. You can have the log book and I will have the rope and we will both of us go on doing what we are doing, and in February you will put in a report that the cord is laid on the ebb as required, and it will be true." I have thought about that a great deal since. He did not forgive me. He did not accuse me. He did a thing that was braiding, which is the only language the two of us have ever had, and he has never once referred to that night again in three years, and I have never once been able to put it in the log.