To get his sweating under control he walks out onto the foredeck to be in the wind. Like so many others out there, he stands at the railing, listening to the steady pulse of the engines belowdecks and watching the shiny cylindrical oil tanks at Höggarn slip past. Now even the nearby islands are blue, and a tall silo looming on the horizon gives off a ghostly green hue. The restaurant at the Fjäderholmarna Isles glimmers from afar like a colored lantern atop a rocky perch. A tiny sloop has just docked there, unloading a cargo of festive passengers well on their way to a lost evening. Suddenly the city begins to rise up out of the waters ahead. There are no lights to be seen as yet, just a bluish band hugging the horizon, except for the church spires jutting up like small needles. And now Sune hears the voices of Barbro and Paul somewhere behind him, Barbro saying, “Yes, definitely,” and Paul mentioning that he’ll be alone in the fo’c’sle now for the whole trip back out. He hears him say, “Do you like gin?”
And then all his apprehensions fall away from him, all his disgust and resistance. He is gripped instead by a vigorous, intense feeling of delight. It’s just a matter of opening the door, taking off your clothes and pulling back the blanket, he thinks. And tomorrow you can talk about it as casually as anybody else. Everyone’s always going on about how it doesn’t matter what she looks like. It’s just that one thing that matters. And as he comes back into the light on the middle deck, he almost seems to be gliding along in an oddly charged aura, a feeling intensely good. And it seems to him that others should be able to sense this about him, that somehow they should know how in less than an hour he will lie with a woman in a bunk on this very boat, in a cabin right below this deck, and that when it’s all done he’ll go back into his own space in the aft saloon and lie awake the whole night long in the grips of this feverish delight.
When the boat begins to glide slowly into Nybroviken Harbor, sounding its whistle at an errant ferry that is in the way, he leans out over the railing of the upper deck to take hold of a small sandbag Paul is feeding up to him from a porthole on the lower deck. The sandbag is attached to a long, thin rope, and that rope to the rough hawser astern. The idea is that he will throw the thin line to shore as quickly as possible so that the heavy hawser can be pulled to the quay and fastened to the iron mooring ring. Every Sunday he is filled with dread when it comes time to perform this duty, because one Sunday he threw the sandbag too early, and it didn’t reach the quay. They had to hoist the rope up out of the muck of the harbor and their stern rammed right into another boat,
The usual crowd of relatives stands waiting on the quay with handkerchiefs and forced smiles at the ready, but among the rest Sune notices two unusual figures — one short and slender, the other tall and heavy-set — both wearing fully buttoned trench coats even though it’s summer. The heavy man is smoking a cigar and the smaller one stands with his hands brought together at the small of his back. Sune throws the sandbag with such force that it hits an older gentleman in the back of the crowd right in the chest before it tumbles to a halt near a blue car parked alongside the quay with its door wide open. The heavy man in the trench coat collects the sandbag and begins to haul in the stern line with his fat cigar projecting up out of the middle of his mouth like a canon. The smaller man, meanwhile, walks over to the gangplank with his hands still clasped at his back and then inspects each and every person as they disembark. The older man who was just hit in the chest begins to scold Sune for casting the sandbag the way he did, but Sune tells him that’s the only way to do it. The man then scolds him for his impertinence, but Sune is already busy by then double-checking that the gangplank is securely fastened to the upper deck before he darts down it himself, remembering all of a sudden that a girl has asked him to mail a letter for her in town. The whole time he’s off searching for a mailbox he’s nervous that the boat might depart without him before he makes it back there, and this thought is so distracting that he doesn’t spot a mailbox until he is as far away as Stureplan.
