第20章 The Door

Odd went out at eleven with the lamp and the hank and the boat, and I went out to the north end of the jetty to watch him go, because it is the station-master's business to know who is off the station and when, and because I had promised myself in the corridor at eight that I would stand at the edge of the water one more time before the seventh night. He did not wave. He puts the lamp in the stern sheets and holds the painter in his left hand and the boat goes out into the dark on the ebb, and the last of him is the lamp going under the swell and coming up on the other side of it, and then he is a mile off and there is a gale up the strait and a bar of flat water where a shelf of rock is. I went in and I did not sleep, and Karin sat in the door of the dormitory with a blanket round her shoulders and said nothing for about four hours, which was the arrangement she had made for herself and which I did not argue with. Torsten came through at one and stood a while and went back. Sven brought tea at two in a mug that was warmer than the tea. At three o'clock the six of them went. It was the longest of the winter. Halvard was on the aerial strap with his hand flat and his eyes shut and his lips moving, and I have written that down eleven times now and I want it in the record in his own words, so I will use them: "It is not a note. It has not been a note since the third of December. It is a count, and it is counting us, and it is at six." It went for nineteen seconds. On the twenty-first second, there were three raps on the door of the wire room. They were even. They were spaced. They were the three raps of a man on a door, and the station is thirty-one metres long and the wind that night was west five and there was nothing in that wind that could make three knocks. Sven put his mug down on the table without any care at all, which from Sven is the same as a man shouting. "That is a door," he said. Nobody moved. "That is not the sea and that is not the wind and that is not a wall doing it," he said. "I have been in this building nine years and I have heard every noise it makes and I am telling you that is a man knocking on a door, because a man knocks on a door. Nothing else in this world knows that a door is a thing you knock on." "Halvard," I said. "The instrument." He did not move from the aerial. "On the table," he said. "In the middle of the room. It is on the table and I have not been able to get to it and it has not moved, and I have been looking at the side of it for an hour and the side of it is where the light is not." I looked across the room at it. It was where it had been on every night since the third of December. The short line and the long line and the mark that might have been a stop. The pointer was at eleven o'clock. "Halvard," I said. "For four months you have told me it points at the aerial wall." "It points at a wall." "Which wall." The wind came round the corner and found the same seam it had found every night since the fourteenth of November. "Get it," he said. I got it and carried it to the middle of the room, and Halvard had a torch off and put the light on it from behind, and the pointer sat at eleven o'clock, and I turned slowly on the spot with the thing in my hand and the pointer did not move, because it is a needle and it is pointing at something, and a thing in a room that does not turn when you turn is pointing at a fixed bearing, and it had been at eleven o'clock for four months while I walked round eleven o'clock like a man in a room with no other room. The door of the wire room is in the west wall. The aerial comes in through the west wall, eight feet above the door. "There," said Halvard. "It has been pointing at that wall for four months and it has been pointing at that door for four months, and there is one of them in the same wall, and nobody asked which, because I kept saying aerial, and you kept hearing aerial, and the wire comes in above the door and a man at a table in the middle of a room cannot tell the difference between a door and a lead eight feet over his head." Nobody said anything. Then Karin said, quietly, from the doorway, "It has not been counting us." "No," said Halvard. "It has been counting the six of us and it has been pointing at the seventh." And that is when I understood the whole of the winter, and it took me a woman in a doorway at four in the morning to find it, and I have been a station-master for eleven years. Six of us. Six cords. A net with a gap in it in the sixth place where the seventh one goes. And I had spent a month writing in a log book that a sound was coming *through* the gap, as though a gap in a net on a shelf of rock a mile out in a gale could get up and travel four hundred metres of open water and come in under a roof and through a wall. It could not get in. It was never getting in. It was standing outside the only door on this station that it knew about, and it had been standing there every night since the third of November, and every one of the six of us had been lying in our beds listening to it come through the wall. I put the instrument down on the middle of the table, in the place it has lived since the third of November, with the pointer at eleven o'clock, and I went and opened the door. The gale came in and took the paper off the notice board. The jetty was under two feet of water and the jetty stones were going. The dark was the dark. On the step, in the water, there was a length of cord. Three strands. Braided the old way, wet right through, and about thirty feet of it, and it had a loop in one end, and I have seen that loop twice in my life and both times I made it myself. I stood in the door of the wire room of a weather station four hundred metres off a coast in the polar night and looked at a piece of rope on my own step, and behind me five people were standing in a room with the case open on a bench, and nobody came past me, and nobody said anything, and I picked it up and it was heavy, heavier than rope that has been out in a gale ought to be, and it was warm. I took it in and put it on the table beside the case, and I wrote in the log. *27th. 03:00, note, six sources, nineteen seconds. H.K. reports modulation and current in the aerial lead. 04:20, three raps on the wire-room door, evenly spaced, not wind. 04:40, E.D. opened the door. Cord on the step, three strands, about thirty feet, loop at one end, wet, warm. Origin not established. Sixth cord laid 23:00 by O.H. O. to be brought off the rocks at 06:00. Cause unknown.* Then I shut the book and put my coat on and went out into eight feet of water with a line round my waist and Sven on the jetty head with a lamp, and I waded to the shelf and I was in the water to my chest when I reached him and the tide had an hour left in it. He was sitting on the north end with the sixth cord under his knees and the lamp behind him, exactly as I had said he would be, and his hands were white, and he had not moved. "Did you lay it," I said. "I laid it." "Is it the sixth." "It is the sixth." He did not look at me. "And it is the last of the six and I have put it in and it is a good one and the shape of the thing on those rocks tonight is the shape of a net and I have not had that in my hands for three years." He put his hand flat on the rock. "Where is the lamp." "Sven has it. Hold on to the line." We went in. He was sick twice on the stones and then he stood up on the jetty in the grey of about six and would not go in, and Sven got him a blanket and a dry sweater and did not ask him a single question about his hands. Then it was light in the way it gets light, which down there in the last week of the year is not light, it is the absence of a thing that has been in the way. "Odd." "I know what you are going to ask and I have had nine years to be asked it by somebody other than you." He had his hands out in front of him and he was looking at them and not at me. "Did I know. That is what it is. Not *did you see me* and not *were you on the rocks*. Did I know." "Yes." "Then say it properly, Erik, because you have had it since the seventh of December and you have written it in a book and you have not put it in the log, and a thing that is in the book and not in the log is a thing you are ashamed of, and I have been ashamed of mine since February of fifty-eight and I would like to know what you have been ashamed of for three winters." "I was on the rocks," I said. "On the night she died. At about two, on the ebb, with a lamp, on the north end, about four fathoms of it. And I did not look for anybody, because I was fifty and it was February and I had been on this rock for eight years and I wanted four hours in a month when I was not being useful. And I came back in at about midnight and went to my bunk and you came in at four." "Yes." "And I did not know you were out there, and I have said that twice, and I am going to say it once more and then say the other thing." I could not look at him. "I did not look. That is not the same as not knowing, and I have been using it as if it were, and it is not, and you have been out on those rocks for three winters with that." Odd did not say anything for a long time. The sea came up the jetty and went back and did the whole business again and did not mean anything by it. "A man does not look," he said finally. "I did not look either. I was not looking for you, Erik. I was out there because the cord had to be laid and the gale was coming and I was forty-one years old and I did not know how to stop." He got the blanket tighter. "We were eleven fathoms apart. I have thought about it every night for three years and there is not one night of that I have been able to get past, and it is not because you were there. It is because I have gone out on every ebb since to be out there, and I have got a cord for every one of them, and I laid the first of them on the night she died about four hours after you went in, and there is nobody in the world who could have told me you had been on those rocks, and I would not have wanted to know." That is the last thing he ever said to me about it and it is enough and I have never needed to ask him anything else. At half past six I wrote the last entry of the long dark. *27th. 06:30, barometer 966, rising. Wind west four, moderating. Sun below horizon, 63 days to 16 January. Six on station. Generator down, head cracked, no restart possible. Oil four days. Emergency set on the aerial in the wire room. Five cords laid, net closed at 23:00, seventh cord taken in 04:40 and its origin not established. O.H.'s hands are affected and there is no doctor on this island. Cause unknown.* Then, because it was in the book and it was not in the log, and because a man who writes down a thing he has not seen with his own eyes is not a station-master, he is a man with a book, I turned the page and wrote one line for myself and put the book in the second drawer under the letters from the trust, where it stayed for the sixteen days until the boat came. *The seventh cord is on the shelf beside the sixth. It is not dry yet. There is a door in this station and it has not been opened since the fourteenth of November, and I am the station-master of Brevikholm and I did not open it, and I have written that down.* In the morning Sven read the account, all eleven pages of it, with the cord on the table and his hands in his blanket, and he said, "You have written a case and you have written a thing that will hold a case, and you have not decided which, and you are going to have to decide it in Trondheim in February." "I have not written a case," I said. "You have written four hundred pages," said Sven, "and you have put a name to every person in it except the man in the doorway, and that is not an accident, and I have been a cook for nine years and I know what a man leaves out of a book and why." The relief boat came in on the sixth of February at ten past two, and Torsten went out in her first with a canvas bag of tools for the head, and Halvard went out in her second with the case, which had six in it and a space where a seventh impression had been pressed into the felt, and neither of us ever established when it was made, and I have never been able to account for it, and it is the only line in this book that I have never been able to stand behind. We did not get a supply ship. We did not get an officer. We got a man from the Directorate of Fisheries who had been on the rock twice and who was in the boat for nine hours and who read my log on the deck in the rain, and at the end of it he said the thing that everybody on that boat must have been told, which is that Brevikholm is the best-run station on the coast. I said thank you. He asked to see the log again and I gave it to him, all eleven pages, up to and including the twenty-seventh, with nothing on the back and nothing on the last page, because the last page is in the second drawer under the letters, and because a station-master gives an officer the log. The sun came up on the sixteenth of January at eleven minutes past eleven in the morning, a quarter of a mile south of where it had gone under, and it took about a minute and a half to come, and the six of us stood on the south point and watched it do it, and nobody said anything, and Odd put his hand on my arm once and I let it stay there. And on the shelf in the wire room there is a length of cord about thirty feet long, three strands, braided the old way, with a loop in one end, and the sixth of the six is beside it with its nine weeks of use still in it, and the seventh is on the same shelf and it is dry now and it has never been wet with sea water in its life, and there is no one on this coast or any other who will lay it, and the man who could have laid it is dead, and I have kept the shelf clear of it for forty years, and it has not moved, and on the nights when the wind is in the west and rises after four o'clock I still go and stand in the wire room door and look at it, and I do not go in, and it has never once needed anything of me.