But all of a sudden he had been transformed into the loneliest person in existence. He thought he could step outside himself and observe himself from a distance. In the middle of the night, in the freezing cold. A boy aged fifteen standing next to a window and listening to somebody snoring. He felt the urge to cry. He left the scene. Ran up the hill, over the bridge, and didn’t stop until he got back to his case and his kitbag.
He was bending down to pick them up when he noticed tracks in the snow. They weren’t his own. Something else had been there.
A dog.
He straightened up and looked round.
He tried to spot it in the cold moonlight. But there was no dog to be seen. He started to follow the tracks. They led down to the river. The snow was deep. He had to plough his way through it. But he knew now that the dog had returned. The dog that had once been heading for a distant star.
It had returned in order to say farewell.
He forced his way through the thick bushes on the bank of the river. The tracks led straight out onto the frozen river. He tried to spot the dog in the moonlight. He carefully made his way onto the snow-covered ice. The effort had made him sweaty. But there was no way he could turn back. Not now when he was so close.
The pawmarks in the snow were very clear. Before long he was a long way out onto the ice. The arch of the bridge loomed up like an enormous animal crouching by his side.
And then the tracks came to an end.
Joel looked round. He didn’t understand what he could see. Absolutely clear pawmarks that suddenly petered out. There was no hole in the ice. Nothing but an expanse of white, virgin snow.
He looked up at the night sky and turned his back on the moon. There was only one possible explanation, he thought. An explanation that somebody who has reached the age of fifteen shouldn’t really believe in. That the dog had taken off and flown away on invisible wings. Heading for the star he’d selected to be his goal.
I must be childish to believe that such a scenario is possible, Joel thought. Now, when my father’s dead and I’m a sailor, I can’t be childish any longer. Even if I am.
Joel turned and went back to the river bank. He paused once, turned round and gazed up at the sky.
The dog was somewhere up there, flapping its invisible wings.
Joel retrieved his suitcase and his kitbag and walked through the deserted little town. When he came to the station, he found that the waiting room was still locked. He put his bags behind a dustbin and walked out onto the tracks. Stood between the rails and gazed southwards. He was in a hurry now. Not long ago he’d have liked to put time on hold. Now it was passing far too slowly. He was in a hurry to get away.
Somebody eventually came and unlocked the waiting room. Joel went in and sat down. He could feel the warmth returning to his body. He checked his inside pocket, to make sure he had his rail ticket and his discharge book. And in his pocket was his money. Eighty kronor.
An old man with a rucksack came into the waiting room and sat down. He nodded a greeting to Joel.
‘Off on a trip, are you?’ he said.
Joel mumbled something inaudible in reply. He had no desire to talk to anybody just at the moment.
‘I’m going to Orsa,’ said the old man.
‘I’m going further than that,’ said Joel.
‘Are you going to Mora?’
‘I’m going to the end of the world,’ said Joel.
The old man looked thoughtfully at him.
Joel stood up and examined the map hanging on the wall. He found Gothenburg. And the harbour. And the shipyard. And the ship that was waiting for him.
The train arrived. The engine snorted and sighed. Joel scanned the platform before boarding the train, but needless to say, there was nobody there to wave goodbye to him.
Only Samuel’s ghost. Standing there nodding to him, and whispering:
‘Off you go.’
As the train passed over the railway bridge Joel contemplated his reflection in the frozen windowpane.
He was on his way now. On his way at last. Away from the little town he’d grown up in. On his way to Pitcairn Island. To the end of the world.
That existed and yet didn’t exist.
Three days later, shortly before dawn, the cargo ship Rio de Janeiro left Gothenburg. Joel woke up in his cabin when the engines started to throb.
It was late winter, 1960.
During the next few years Joel signed on with several different ships. At the beginning of 1963, a few days before his eighteenth birthday, he worked on a little cargo boat that docked at Pitcairn Island.
While on shore leave, he collected a coconut from a coconut palm.
At the beginning of December that same year, he returned to Sweden and made the long trip back to the little town where he was born.
In the evening of December 4 he got off the train and made his way straight to the churchyard. He dug away the snow and planted the coconut in the frozen soil on Samuel’s grave. He knew it wouldn’t survive, so he also spread out a few palm leaves he’d brought with him from Pitcairn Island.
The following day Joel left the little town.
He’d spent the night in a boarding house.
He didn’t pay a visit to Gertrud in her house on the other side of the river.
When his train left the station, there was nobody there to wave goodbye to him this time either.
His childhood was over.
Joel had begun his long journey out into the world.
And somewhere up there, over his head, there would always be an invisible dog flapping its invisible wings.