Free Stella by Siegfried Lenz Page A

slack line to the barge rose from the water, stretched taut, and there was enough traction on it for the barge to move, turn, andfollow the course of the tug. I thought we’d be taking this last load to the mouth of the harbor, to add to the rocks shoring up the breakwater, but my father had decided against that. We threw out the anchor before reaching the breakwater, Frederik went to the winch, and as usual raised rock after rock into the air, swung them overboard, and let them sink. He didn’t send me down to check the way the stones were lying; it was enough for my father to deposit them on the bottom there so that, as he said, they would break the first onslaught of waves coming in, thus checking their full impact on the breakwater at the harbor mouth. Our work didn’t immediately seem to be having much effect, but when we’d sunk almost the whole cargo of rocks, the movement of the waves coming in changed; they rose and broke, tumbling into one another, leveled out, rippled, and lost so much strength that they dispersed as if exhausted, without the strength to gather force and rise high again.
    A rowboat came into view near Bird Island, moving with slow oar strokes and apparently making for Hirtshafen; it unexpectedly turned in our direction, and the oarsman waved a couple of times, indicating that he wanted to tie up to us. My fatherlowered his binoculars. “It’s Mathiessen, the old bird warden,” he said, and motioned to me to help the man on board. Falling easily into conversation, he and my father spoke each other’s first names and shook hands. Wilhelm? Andreas? was their form of greeting. They were old friends. Over a rum, they asked one another about their families, their future plans, and their health, and that was when I learned that Mathiessen had finally retired. “I’m packing it in, Wilhelm, it’s my arthritis. The place will be unmanned for now.” He had just been to his hut for the last time, he said, to fetch a few personal items. He reported that over the last year not much had happened. They talked about a naval rescue exercise out at sea in which a sailor had died, and then my father told me to tow Mathiessen back to Hirtshafen. He sat in the inflatable beside me, his pipe in his crooked, arthritic fingers as if he were defending it from attack, and closed his eyes now and then. When I asked him what was going to happen to his hut now, he didn’t seem surprised, just shrugged his shoulders. Was he planning to sell it? I asked, to which he replied, “Such things aren’t for sale, Christian.”
    “Is it going to stay there, then?”
    “Might as well, so far as I’m concerned. It could come in useful, a place for someone to go, take shelter there.”
    “Shelter?”
    “From bad weather, yes.”
    “People don’t easily lose their way and end up there.”
    “Don’t be so sure, there’s been folk in the hut not long ago. Could be they wanted shelter, could be they just wanted time alone together. I notice that sort of thing right away, I can feel it.” He nodded, as if to confirm what he said.
    “And does anything ever go missing?” I asked.
    “Never,” he said. “I’ve never yet known anything to go missing, and that makes me think. Sometimes people leave something behind, a handkerchief, a half-eaten chocolate bar, a barette for a woman’s hair, but those who want to be alone there have never taken anything, boy, that’s the way it is.”
    He had cast out a trolling line as we crossed the water, a long line with two wobblers on it. At the harbor entrance he pulled it in and was pleased to have caught two garfish. After I had secured his boat he gave me the two fish, saying, “Take them home, Christian, I expect your mother will pickle them in aspic,garfish in aspic, that’s the thing to do with them. See you, then,” he added, clapping me on the shoulder by way of good-bye.
    The photo of Stella and me among the sandcastles on the beach had been in my room for several