THE ISLAND

The fog has lifted. I get up to go. Oskar is shuffling his cards. He uses his thumb to lay them out in a row along the table. He stirs them around with his index finger. With his thumb he pushes them together again into a stack.

“Shall we put them out tonight?”

“Yes. We should get more tomorrow.”

“I’ll be along at about seven. Bye till then.”

“Bye.”

Oskar is sitting on the chair. It is a quarter past seven. Soon he will lie down on his bed. Soon he will sleep for a few hours.


The island is in the outer archipelago. It is shaped like a truncated boomerang. There are oaks, birches, cliffs, and sand. From three sides you can look straight out to the open sea. The fourth side slopes down into a narrow strait that leads to an island with a fishing village.

On a national survey map the island is shown as a nameless rocky islet.

The customs boat ties up at the island once in the spring, once in the autumn. There is a radio antenna on the highest point. The customs officers usually come down to Johansson’s old sauna to say hello. You can hear Radio Nord blaring out across the water. The customs men laugh, and so does Oskar. One of them goes around to the back of the cabin. There is a food store there, dug into the ground. A square one meter deep, with a wooden cover. They fetch out the cans of beer, go back into the cabin, and every now and then you hear the sound of Oskar’s rough voice shouting out.