Sleet: Selected Stories

Then everything goes just the way it always does, the way it has gone a hundred times before. He lifts his bag out of its locker. At each of their stops new passengers board while well-wishers remain behind on the docks. Some hang around feigning interest in the hawsers and the gangplank, but are more likely interested in seeing whether the first mate, an amiable fellow a bit too fond of the bottle, will fall overboard this Sunday. The boat sweeps narrowly past idly rocking sailboats whose half-naked passengers are defenseless against all the probing gazes. Men with ample bellies and binoculars stand on the foredeck arguing over the names of the islands visible furthest in the distance and young girls going on holiday look out through the portholes giggling at virtually everything they see. Many people buy magazines and newspapers from him, hefty Sunday editions either to peruse or to hide their nudist magazine inside. People often ask him if the bag is heavy, and he always answers “seventy-five pounds” because that makes him sound so robust and self-assured. Then they remark to one another about the coming fall, how “it’s well on its way,” and when he hears this he can’t help thinking to himself how that’s what they always say. The captain, who is so fat that he needs help lacing his boots, stands on the bridge smoking his two hundred and fifty-pound cigar. In the galley they joke about how you can always tell when he ambles over to the port side of the vessel. After an hour or so the day seems to sink gradually into the water behind them, and the islands furthest out turn slowly blue as milk as they wrap themselves in the gathering mist. In the fairway they are joined by three other white boats. One has a large, arrogant, blue and yellow chimney, and it takes the lead, plowing a wide glistening path that the other two vessels veer into, looking something like greyhounds falling in behind the leader. As they approach the port town of Waxholm, all the docks are filled with people who look as though they will never again have a vacation. In the dusky waters below their own boat waits a rowboat laden with all Sune’s evening editions. As usual, the skipper stomps his unlaced boots and curses the oarsman’s clumsy maneuvers. Paul fishes up the bundle with a boat hook and then they glide through the narrow channel separating the port town from its great island fortress offshore. All the boats docked along the Waxholm quay have lit their evening lights and from the roof of the restaurant in port hang strings of lanterns in assorted colors.

Sune comes back inside on the middle deck with his bundle of evening papers, amid a gathering crowd eager to know the latest, or the next to latest, and it’s only then that he notices Greta standing in the doorway to the galley, watching him with a serious and intense absorption that no one has ever shown him before. Still, when the time comes he imagines everything will sort itself out. He begins to make his way through the boat, the magazines with their green and red emblazoned titles weighing him down. Compounded by the warm, stifling air of the ship’s compartments, the heavy bag soon has him perspiring prodigiously, sweat running down his arms and into his hands, down his forehead and onto his face, sweat dripping from everywhere into the bag. He makes his way onto the aft deck, amid all the passengers in their newly starched, freshly pressed tennis whites, through congested clusters of people with their own summer houses and summer tans, with their insistent voices, and he’s ashamed of his sweat and his dingy jacket, ashamed of the tips he receives and the appreciative bows he must give in return. Most of all he’s ashamed of his generally unsavory appearance as he enters the dining salon with its white table linen and sparkling clean glasses, its great gilded mirror and Alfhild’s white blouse, which has to be washed every day. At the very least he tries not to sell any newspapers in here that he may have dripped sweat on. When everyone has received his preferred newspaper — and many have bought the Evening Tribune while precious few have bought the Daily Leader — he makes his way forward again with his lightened bag to the foredeck. Along the way he passes a number of men leaning over their papers with betting-pool tickets in hand, a few of them exclaiming “nine right!” or “eight right!” or “almost got ten!” and he can’t help thinking to himself how they always say that.