Echoes From the Dead (11 page)

She left the summer cottages behind and drove along the

edge of the alvar. The track curved slowly off toward the quarry along the coast road, then straightened as it approached Ernst Adolfsson’s low cottage. It stopped in front of the house at a circular turning area, where Ernst’s old white Volvo was still parked.

There was no sign of life, but another flat, polished stone with black lettering had been erected in the middle of the turning area: CRAFT WORK IN STONEWELCOME.

Julia pulled in behind the Volvo and turned off the engine.

She got out of the car and took her thin wallet out of her purse.

The wind was sighing in the long grass, and the landscape was almost completely bare of trees. On one side of the garden was the enormous wound in the hillside that was the quarry, on the other side there was only grass and isolated juniper bushes as far as the eye could see. The alvar.

She turned and looked at the house.

It was closed up and silent.

“Hello?” she called.

The wind muted her cry, and no one replied.

A broad path made of crushed limestone led to the door at

the side of the house, where there was a bell.

Julia went over and rang it.

Still no reply. But the car was here, so where was Ernst?

She rang again, keeping her finger pressed on the bell. Nothing happened.

An impulse made her try the door. It was unlocked and swung

open, like an invitation.

She poked her head in.

“Hello?”

No one replied. The light was off and the hallway was dark.

She listened for the sounds of heavy footsteps and a cane tapping along the floor, but there was only silence.

He’s not at homego and see Gerlof, urged her inner voice. But she was too curious. Didn’t people on Oland lock their doors when they went out? Did they still trust each other so much?

welcome, it said on a green plastic mat by the door. Julia

wiped her feet a couple of times and walked in.

“Hello?” she said. “Ernst? It’s Julia. Gerlof’s daughter …”

From the ceiling in the hallway hung a mobile of small wooden ships, sailing around in the draft. To the right lay a kitchen; it was clean and tidy, with a small table and two wooden chairs. To the left was a bedroom with a narrow bed, which was made.

The hallway led into a living room with a sofa, a television, and a big picture window overlooking the quarry and the blue sound beyond. There were piles of newspapers and books on the table, but the living room was empty too. On one wall was a hexagonal clock made of polished limestone, with the hands made of slate.

The only remarkable thing about the house was the fact that

the clock appeared to be the only thing made of stone. Did Ernst get enough of it when he was outdoors?

She moved back into the hallway and looked around a couple

of times, as if some unknown attacker might leap out of a crack in the walls. She went back outside and closed the door carefully.

Julia stood there motionless in the sunshine, unsure of what to do next. Ernst Adolfsson was bound to be around somewhere out here: he had merely forgotten to lock his door.

She looked over toward the stone sculptures on the quarry’s

edge. Beside them was a small shed painted red and surrounded by birch trees; in a pile outside the shed lay several blocks of stone and rocks of different sizes. Some bore the signs of having been worked on, but looked incomplete. Some resembled misshapen human beings, Julia thought. She could see deformed faces and black eye sockets in the stone, and it made her think of trolls who stole away human children and took them inside the mountain forever. Gerlof had told her that when the quarry workers’ tools went missing in times gone by, they always blamed the troll. It was unthinkable that any of their fellow workers might have stolen them.

She tore her gaze away from the stones and again looked over toward the completed, polished works of art by the sheer cliff edge above the quarry. Small lighthouses, round well lids, tall sundials, and a couple of broad gravestones. The nameplates on the gravestones were still empty.

Something was missing. There was a wide space in the long

row of sculptures, and Julia moved closer. She had seen something from the other side of the quarry the previous evening: the tall church tower that resembled the one up in Marnas was gone.

A small shallow depression gaped in the gravel by the cliff edge above the quarry.

Julia slowly walked forward between the polished stones, and the quarry opened up in front of her like an enormous empty pool.

The quarry wasn’t deep here, just a few yards, but the drop

was sheer. She stood by the edge, looking silently out across the barren, stony landscape, and suddenly caught sight of the tall church tower immediately below her. It had fallen from the edge, straight down into the quarry, and landed on its side. The top of the tower was pointing westward, toward the water.

The church tower hadn’t smashed to pieces.

But beneath the oblong stone sculpture, Ernst Adolfsson lay

outstretched. He was staring up at the sky from the bottom of the quarry, his mouth bleeding and his body shattered.

OLAND, MAY 1945

Big things are going to happen, both

out in the world and in Nils Kant’s life. He can feel it in the wind.

The sun above the alvar is stronger than ever, the Oland winds are fresher, the air clearer, and the flowers are in full bloom. The grass is green, not yet burned by the sun of high summer. Vague, flickering little marks in the sky grow into swallows, swooping down like black arrows over the flat ground for a few moments, then gathering speed as they soar upward again, and suddenly there they are, high in the sky once more.

Spring has come to Oland with a vengeance, and Nils Kant

can sense changes in the air. He is almost twenty years old now, finally grown up and completely free. Life lies ahead of him, and big things are going to happen. He can feel it in the whole of his body.

Nils is getting too old to be wandering around out here in the silence, hunting hares. He has other plans. He’s going to go off out into the world when the war is over, anywhere he wants to.

He would like to take Maja Nyman with him, the girl who lives in a cottage down by the ridge in Stenvik. He remembers what she looks like, and thinks of her quite often. But they have never really spoken, just said hello when they’ve met, if nobody else was with her. If he doesn’t get the opportunity to talk to her properly soon, he’ll travel alone.

On this particular day he is further away from Stenvik than

usual, almost over on the eastern side of the island. Before he crossed the main road he shot two hares; he’s left them under some bushes so that he can pick them up on the way home. |

He’s intending to shoot one or two more before he goes home

to his mother, and perhaps a few swallows on the way back,

just for fun.

The water from the melted snows of winter is still lying in big pools all over the alvar; it’s a bit like walking in a boggy landscape, full of small lakes. The water is drying up quickly in the sun. Nils is wearing big, sturdy boots, and can wade straight through if he wants to. He is completely free and he owns the whole world.

Adolf Hitler tried to own the world. He’s dead now; he shot

himself in Berlin a week or so ago. That was the end for Germany Nobody there had the will or the strength to fight the Russians and ‘. the Americans any longer.

Nils splashes up out of a pool of water and pushes through a clump of juniper bushes. He remembers that he liked Hitler when he was younger; he had great respect for Hitler’s strength of will, at any rate.

He used to listen reverently to fragments of Hitler’s thundering speeches from Germany when his mother had the radio on in the living room, and for several years he waited for the German!

bombers to sweep in across Oland, for the war to come at last, but now Hitler is gone and the might of Germany has been smashed to pieces by the English bombers.

Germany doesn’t seem particularly interesting any longer.,

England, on the other hand, is tempting. And America seems

huge and full of promise, but too many people from Oland have already gone there and never returned; thousands disappeared without a trace in the nineteenth century. Nils wants to travel the world and then return to Stenvik like an emperor.

Nils hears something, a low but solid sound, and he stops.

There is no sign of a hare, and yet Nils feels as if…

He isn’t alone.

Someone is there.

He has heard something in the wind, a brief sound which

is neither birdsong nor the humming of insects nor the neighing of horses. He has been walking around on the alvar for years; he knows when things are as they should be, and when they are not. Right now there’s something that definitely isn’t right. He can feel prickles of unease running down the back of his neck and his spine.

This is no hare, this is something else.

Wolves? Nils’s grandmother, long dead now, used to tell stories about wolves on the alvar. There used to be wolves there. But not now.

People?

Somebody creeping up on him?

Nils slowly unhooks the Husqvarna shotgun from his shoulder, raises it in both hands, ready to shoot, and releases the safety catch with his thumb. Two cartridges from Gyttorp cartridge factory are ready to fly down the barrel.

He looks around: there are juniper bushes almost everywhere

here, most of them twisted and bent by the wind and no more

than a yard high, but they are still dense and impossible to see through. If Nils stands up, he can look over them and see a long, long way, and nobody can creep up on him, but when he crouches down the bushes seem to grow and loom over him.

He can’t hear a sound nowif he ever did hear anything.

Perhaps it was just inside his head; it’s happened before when he’s been out here alone.

Nils stands there in the grass in silence, absolutely motionless, waiting. He is breathing calmly, and has all the time in the world.

The hares always come out when he waits, their nerve always goes in the end and they hurtle out of their hiding places and rush blindly away from the huntsman with their hopping gait. Then all he has to do is raise the gun calmly to his shoulder, aim at the brown shape, and press the trigger. Then walk over and pick up the faintly twitching body.

Nils is holding his breath. He’s listening.

He can’t hear anything now, but there’s a sudden breeze, and he catches the distinct aroma of stale sweat and oily fabric in his nostrils. The acrid smell of a human body, or several bodies, is carried toward him on the breeze.

There are people, very close by.

Nils swings round to the right, his finger on the trigger.

Terrified eyes are staring out of a juniper bush, only a yard or so away.

The eyes of another human being, meeting his own.

A man’s face takes shape in the darkness beneath the thick junipers, a man’s face gray with dirt and overshadowed with tousled hair. Behind the head is a body pressing itself into the ground, dressed in bulky green clothes. A uniform, Nils realizes.

The man is a soldier. A foreign soldier, with neither a helmet nor a gun.

Nils is holding the shotgun in front of him; he can feel his heart pounding, right to the tips of his fingers. He raises the barrel an inch or two.

“Come out,” he says loudly.

The soldier opens his mouth and says something. It isn’t

Swedish, at least no Swedish that Nils has ever heard. It’s a foreign language. It sounds like German.

“What?” Nils says quickly. “What are you saying?”

The soldier slowly raises his handshe has dirty, cracked

handsand at that moment Nils realizes he is not alone in his hiding place. Behind him beneath the juniper bushes, another staring man in a dirty uniform is pressing himself down into the grass.

They both have a hunted look, as if they were running away from terrible memories.

“Bitte Night schiessen, “whispers the soldier closest to Nils.

julia called Gerlof on Ernst Adolfsson’s phone and told him

what had happenedthat she’d found Ernst, where he’d been lying, and that he was dead.

Gerlof had understood what she was telling him, but had tried not to think or feel too much, but to concentrate almost entirely on listening to her voice. It sounded tense, of course, but not shaky.

Julia was in control.

“So Ernst is dead,” said Gerlof. “Are you sure?”

“I’m a nurse,” said Julia.

“Have you called the police?”

“I rang the emergency number. They’re sending somebody.

But they won’t need an ambulance for Ernst… It’s too late.” She stopped. “But the police are bound to come as well, even if it is an accident. He’s …”

“I’ll come down to you,” said Gerlof. He made the decision at the same moment as he spoke the words. “The police are sure to be there soon, but I’m coming, too. Sit down on Ernst’s sofa and wait for them.”

“Okay, I’ll wait,” said Julia. “I’ll wait for you.”

She still sounded calm.

They hung up, and Gerlof stayed where he was at his desk for a minute or two, gathering his strength.

Ernst. Ernst was dead. Gerlof allowed this fact to sink in. Up to now he’d had two close friends remaining in his life, John and Ernst. Now he had only one.

He picked up his cane and got up. He was utterly resolute,

despite the fact that his rheumatism and his grief made it more difficult than ever to move. He went out into the corridor, heard laughter coming from the kitchen, and made his way there.

Boel was standing there with some new young girl who was

clearly being instructed in how to use the dishwasher. They caught sight of Gerlof and Boel smiled at him, then she saw his face and her expression instantly became serious.

“Boel, I have to go to Stenvik. There’s been an accident. My best friend has died,” said Gerlof firmly. “Somebody will have to take me.”