My brother, with whom I sometimes discussed this, usually brushed it aside by saying that I’d have thought differently if the dead had been close to me, and I agreed with him. Yes, maybe so, I’d say, but deep down I knew it wasn’t true; no one in my life was important enough for that, not even him, my brother, sitting next to me now on the bench in the wispy darkness of a summer evening as we passed the two gas tanks and could make out the electric glow from the town as a faint vaulted dome of light between the forested hills. He meant nothing to me. Neither did my father, I thought as I turned, looked out across the sound between the two islands, at the black, even surface of the water, at the pulse from the lighthouse, the way it splintered the darkness into short intervals, as if something were being opened and closed, the rapid beating of a heart. .
We pushed slowly past the shipyard and the new housing estate, always accompanied by the even drone of the engine, the swish of the bow cleaving the water. We passed the line of deserted bunkers, which I wouldn’t have seen if I hadn’t known they were there, surrounded as they were by the duskiness of trees, then all the holiday homes among the drumlins, then the naval base, with its gray-painted, faceless warships, which were always moored there, as if closed in on themselves. I’d begun to feel cold, and was glad we were almost there. It was nearly ten o’clock, I saw and met my father’s gaze. He smiled at me. I smiled back.
“Will you do the rope, Henrik?” he called.
I nodded, grabbed the rope, and got onto the deck as he slackened speed and bent forward to find the grapnel. A few minutes later we were on our way up the island. The black sea rocks still radiated warmth. We’d landed near the older of the two lighthouses — it stood in darkness in the middle of the island and seemed to draw all the lines of the landscape toward it — and dropped our things against its white wall. Dad got out a thermos of coffee, handed out plastic cups, poured, and lit a cigarette.
The gulls that had taken screaming to the air when we arrived were still circling above us. When we walked down to the sea on the other side, they dive-bombed us, more aggressively than I’d ever known before. They must be sitting on eggs close by, I thought, and raised the shaft of the landing net above my head. They must have reckoned it was part of my body, as their attacks halted above it, and then they flew up again to gather themselves for the next dive. Even so my heart was in my mouth.
“It’s all right!” Dad shouted. “They’re not dangerous!”
He stood waiting on a ledge of rock with Klaus. Carefully I began to walk down. Three of them followed me. They screeched out their ugly cries each time they came winging out of the dark, and didn’t stop until I was on the sea rocks. When I turned to look at them, one was being chased by the other two, first across the sea, then up toward the lighthouse, where I lost sight of them.
Dad had stopped down at the water’s edge and set his bag on the rock. When he began to undress I wasn’t quite sure what to think.
“Are you going swimming now?” I asked.
“We’re going crab fishing, son!”
I’d been crab fishing with other parents, I knew the drill, it was simple: you shone a light down into the water and then scraped up the crabs that collected on the rock, either with a rake or a landing net.
In only his underpants he bent forward and took out a towel and swimming trunks from his bag, wrapped the towel around his waist, put his hand underneath and worked his pants off, and drew on his trunks, while I stood looking at the rock in front of me. Couldn’t he have changed without using a towel? There was no one else out here. And if there had been, they wouldn’t have seen anything, enveloped in darkness as we were.
Dad took out his face mask, snorkel, and flippers. The air was still filled with the protests of gulls. I turned and saw them flying to and fro over the little island, like thoughts that remain disturbed and disquieted long after the tension of the situation that unleashed them has abated.
“Can you hold the bucket ready, Klaus?” Dad said.
Klaus nodded.
Dad put on his equipment and waddled the last few yards to the edge of the water. Whether it was his skinny legs or the childish face mask or the obvious pleasure he radiated at finally doing something together with us, at any rate I felt a spasm of tenderness for him. He didn’t know how to go about crab fishing, but had decided to do it his way, for our sakes. The least I could do for him, I thought, was to show a little enthusiasm.
“Is it cold?” I shouted, after he’d jumped in and lay splashing in the water, with that ridiculous mask over his face and the flashlight waving in his hand.
He removed the mouthpiece.
“No, no,” he said. “Just follow me.”
Then he put the mouthpiece back and began to swim across, seeming to glide above the bottom in the dark water, twitching his flippers occasionally to keep on course. I met Klaus’s gaze. He only shook his head, and we smiled at each other.
Perhaps five minutes passed. Then Dad lifted his head out of the water, pulled the mask onto his forehead.
“There aren’t any crabs here!” he shouted. “Let’s go over there.”
He pointed, and we began to walk across the slabs while he swam by beside us, Klaus still clutching the red bucket.
I could hardly bear to think of what it would be like if he didn’t get any crabs at all. Far too much capital had been invested.
For a long while he lay motionless in the new location he’d chosen. The beam from the flashlight, refracted in the water, gathered like a ball of light in front of him. His breath whistled in and out of the snorkel. I crouched down, rubbing my bare forearms. The seagulls had calmed down at last, and apart from the almost imperceptible clunking of the water slapping on the rock, everything was still. In a few places silvery patches on the surface of the water reflected the weak sheen of the gloaming. A ship blazed with light on the horizon. It must be the ferry to Denmark, I thought. Just then Dad’s flippers moved and he dived to the bottom. Klaus got up and went down to the edge of the rock, and was standing ready with the red bucket when, twenty seconds later, Dad surfaced again with a bristling crab in one hand.