A narrow plume of water shot out of the snorkel. Then he took off his mask, held on to the seaweed with one hand as he thrust the crab over to Klaus with the other.
“There are lots more down there!” he said.
His skin was white with cold. But he didn’t seem to notice, just swam out again and pulled out crab after crab, not stopping for half an hour, by which time the bucket was full of crawling and restless creatures that were constantly rubbing against each other with a bonelike rustle. He was shivering as he stood drying himself with a towel, but he was in a good mood, and told us to search for fuel for a bonfire while he changed. I kept down on the sea rocks so as not to disturb the many gulls, and by the time I’d been around the entire islet, I had my arms full of driftwood, dry as tinder after the long, hot summer.
When I arrived, Dad and Klaus had seated themselves in a grassy hollow in front of a fire that lit up a wide circle of rocks around them. The reddish yellow gleam from the flames seemed to form an inlay in their otherwise shadowy faces. To avoid having to use my hands to get up there, I made a detour, following a gently ascending spine of rock behind them, and as I was about to turn down again, I saw something white against the darkness of the rock in front of me, stopped, and knelt down: it was a dead seagull. I put my wood down and felt it. Its body was still warm. Presumably it was the one that had been chased by the others, I thought. The ground surrounding it was covered in feathers. I saw the thickening at the joints of the thin legs, the reptile-like fold of skin between the claws, the empty eyes, and was filled with nausea.
“Come along and sit down!” Dad called. “We’re going back home soon!”
I picked up my wood, carried it to the fire, and sat down next to them. Dad handed me the bag of sausages and a skewer. Then he took out a Coke from the freezer bag and opened it for me. He really had thought of everything tonight.
“What were you looking at just now?” he asked.
I speared a sausage and held it over the flames, took a sip of Coke before answering.
“A dead seagull,” I said.
“Sure it’s dead?” he asked.
I nodded.
He tilted his head back without shifting his gaze, as he often did, and crossed one foot over the other. I’ve since noticed myself sitting in precisely the same attitude in photographs. And that’s odd, because I’ve never had any desire to be like him, but, on the contrary, I’ve always cultivated the things that separated us.
“Did you know that seagulls were angels once?” he said.
He lied about everything, but his lies were various; this one fortunately was only meant to tease us.
“I didn’t know that,” I said, and laughed. I could hear how forced it sounded.
The ferry to Denmark glided slowly past on the sea behind him. Its many small lights made it look like an enormous chandelier, I thought. Shortly after came the throb of its engines, somber and secretive, and the first waves began to wash ashore below us. I took the sausage out of the flames, blew on the shining skin. It was covered in black crusts and small, soft blisters. I noticed how my mouth had filled with saliva as I took the first bite. No one spoke, and the silence started to grow oppressive, it reminded us all that this wasn’t how it was meant to be. A father out with his two sons, round a fire, with sausages and Coke, shouldn’t the conversation between them be light and jokey?
Dad sat staring into the flames. I watched him furtively, his high forehead, his thick, black hair, the marked rounding of the back of his head as it turned down toward the neck. The fleshy lips that caused an imbalance in his otherwise clean-cut features, and that, together with his oddly light eyes, gave his face an impression of susceptibility that bordered on the defenseless, as if you saw something you weren’t meant to see when you looked at him.
“What a load of crabs we got!” I said.
Klaus sent me a look full of disdain. And I knew what it meant: we weren’t supposed to help him.
But Dad smiled.
“I’ll cook them when we get home,” he said. “Then there’ll be crab for supper tomorrow.”
He put another stick on the fire, folded his hands round his knees, as if he were still cold, looked at us one after the other.
“There are more sausages,” he said. “But no more Coke.”
We sat there for maybe a quarter of an hour more. Then he got up and began packing things away, sent Klaus down for some water to douse the fire, and just as he’d gone, turned to me.
“Where did you find the seagull?”
I pointed up toward it.
“Come along,” he said. “I’ll show you something.”
He switched the flashlight on and began to walk up the gently sloping ridge. I followed him.
“There,” I said when we got to the place.
Dad squatted down, handed me the flashlight, and carefully picked up the gull. It looked almost alive in the concentrated light. Dad spread out the wings and pushed some of its breast feathers aside.
“Can you see?” he asked.
“What?” I said.
“Come right up close, then you’ll see.”
I bent forward. And then I saw it. A tiny little arm, no longer than the tip of my finger, thin as a piece of wire, lay against its breast under the wing.
“It’s a hand,” Dad said. “Can you see?”
I nodded.
There were even nails on the pine-needle-thin fingers.
“Can I feel it?”
“If you’re careful.”
He raised the gull to me and I brushed the small hand with my fingertips. The pressure moved it slightly back and forth.
“You’ll see five fingers if you look,” he said.
“Why is it so small?”
“They don’t need them anymore. So they’ll disappear eventually. It’s the same as our little toes. They’ll get smaller and smaller, and eventually disappear too.”
He leaned forward and laid the gull on the ground again, folding up its wings carefully. Its yellow eyes glinted in the light.
A hissing noise came from below as Klaus threw water on the fire. Dad got up and took the flashlight from me. But he made no move to go. Even though he stood in the dark, and I couldn’t see his face properly, I knew he was staring at me. Neither of us spoke. Slowly he turned the flashlight beam on my face.
“Are you scared of me?” he said.
FIFTEEN years later he was dead. And so violent were the circumstances surrounding his death that it not only altered our future, but also our past. If he’d died in a car accident or slowly succumbed to illness, everything would have remained as it was, but the wildness of what he finally did had retrospective force, and now in some strange way is present in the whole of our childhood. A kind of coldness has spread through it, something solemn that we didn’t know about at the time, but that now colors everything that happened, even the most trivial and humdrum of the things we did. And it’s a disquieting thought that not even the past is done with, even that continues to change, as if in reality there is only one time, for everything, one time for every purpose under heaven. One single second, one single landscape, in which what happens activates and deactivates what has already happened in endless chain reactions, like the processes that take place in the brain, perhaps, where cells suddenly bloom and die away, all according to the way the winds of consciousness are blowing.