Echoes From the Dead (7 page)

He balances with one foot on the side of the boat, and swings the oar again. This time he hits the foreman across the back, and watches him fall over the gunwale like a sack of flour.

“Bloody hell!” shouts someone on board the cargo ship, then there’s a loud splash as LassJan falls backwards into the water between the rowboat and the hull of the cargo ship.

Shouts echo from the shore, but Nils takes no notice of them.

He’s going to kill LassJan! He raises the oar, smashes it down into the water, and hits LassJan’s outstretched hands. The fingers shatter with a dry crack, his head jerks backwards, and he disappears beneath the surface of the water.

Nils brings the oar down again. LassJan’s body sinks in an eddy of swirling white bubbles. Nils raises the oar with the intention of continuing to hit him.

Something whizzes past Nils’s ear and hits his left hand; the fingers crunch even before the pain almost numbs his hand. Nils wobbles and is no longer able to hold the oar; he drops it into the boat.

He closes his eyes tightly, then looks up. The loader who was making fun of him is standing up by the gunwale with a long boathook in his hand. His eyes are fixed on Nils, terrified but resolute.

The loader draws the boathook back toward him and lifts it again, but by this time Nils has managed to push off from the hull of the ship with his oar, and is on his way back to the shore. He leaves the loaders on the ship and LassJan on his way to the bottom of the sea, and fixes the portside oar back in the oarlock.

Then he rows straight for the shore, the broken fingers of his left hand throbbing and aching. The little boy who does the bailing is crouching in the prow like a trembling figurehead.

“Get him out of there!” someone shouts behind him.

He hears the sound of splashing and shouting from the cargo ship across the water as LassJan’s limp body is hauled over Wind’s gunwale. The foreman is lifted to safety, the water is forced out of his body, and he is shaken back to life. He’s been luckyhe can’t swim. Nils is one of the few in the village who can.

Nils has his gaze fixed much further away, on the straight line of the horizon. The sun has found gaps in the cloud cover over there, and is shining down on the water, making it gleam like a floor made of silver.

Everything feels fine now, despite the pain in his left hand.

Nils has shown everybody who owns Stenvik. Soon he will own the whole of northern Oland, and will defend it with his life if the Germans come.

The bottom of the boat scrapes against the rocks, and Nils picks up the oar and jumps out. He’s ready, but no one attacks him.

The loaders are standing over on the jetty as if they’ve been turned to stone, women and men and children. They gaze at him mutely with terrified eyes. Maja Nyman looks as if she’s about to burst into tears.

“Go to hell!” Nils Kant roars at the lot of them, and flings the oar down in front of him on the pebbles.

Then he turns to run back to the village, home to his mother Vera in the big yellow house.

But neither she nor anyone else knows what Nils knows: he is meant for greater things, greater than Stenvik, as great as the war.

One day he will be known and talked about all over Oland. He can feel it.

Jolaf Davidsson was waiting for his daughter in his room at the residential home for senior citizens.

Today’s edition of the local newspaper, OlandsPosten, lay in front of him on the desk, and he was reading about an eightyoneyearold man suffering from senile dementia who had vanished outside Kastlosa in southern Oland. The man had simply

left his little cottage the day before and disappeared without a trace; the police and volunteers were now searching for him out on the alvarthey’d even had a helicopter out looking for him.

But it had been a cold night, and it wasn’t at all certain he’d be found alive.

Senile dementia and eightyone years old. Gerlof was only a year or so younger; his eightieth birthday was coming up. Eighty was not as old as some thought, but of course it was easier to understand when an old person disappeared without a trace than when it happened to a child. He closed the paper and looked at the clock. Quarter past three.

“I’m glad you’ve come,” he said to himself. He paused,

coughed, and went on: “You’re just as beautiful as I remember, Julia. Now you’re here on Oland, there are certain things we must do. There are things you’ll need to take care of yourself, too. And We can talk … I know I wasn’t always a good father to you when you were growing up, I was away a lot and you and your sister Were alone with Ella in Borgholm when I was at sea. It was my job, being a captain and transporting cargoes across the Baltic, far away from my family … But I’m here now, and I’m not going anywhere anymore.”

He fell silent and stared down at the desk. He’d written his speech to Julia down in his notebook. Ever since she’d told him which day she was coming to the island, he’d been trying to learn itand it sounded that way. He had to get it to sound like a father talking to his child in a perfectly ordinary way.

“I’m glad you’ve come,” said Gerlof, again. “You’re just as beautiful as I remember.”

Or pretty? Pretty, that was probably a better description of a muchmissed daughter.

At last, when it was almost four o’clock and there was only an hour left before dinner, he heard a knock on the door of his room.

“Come in,” he said, and the door opened.

Boel stuck her head in.

“Yes, he’s here,” she said quietly to someone behind her, then in a louder voice: “You’ve got a visitor, Gerlof.”

“Thank you,” he said, and Boel smiled as she stepped back.

Another woman came forward; she took several steps into the hallway, and Gerlof took a deep breath so that he could start his speech: “I’m glad you’ve come …” he began, then fell silent.

He saw a middleaged woman in a crumpled coat looking at him from the hallway; her eyes were tired, her forehead furrowed.

After only a couple of seconds her gaze slid away from him, and she wrapped her arms around her brown shoulder bag as if it were some kind of protective shield as she took a few more steps into the room.

Gerlof gradually recognized his daughter in the woman’s furrowed, serious face, but Julia looked much more weary than he’d expected. More weary and much thinner. She made him think about bitterness and selfpity.

His daughter had grown old. So how old did that make him?

“Hello, Gerlof,” said Julia, then she didn’t speak for a few seconds. “Well, here I am again.”

Gerlof nodded and noted the fact that she still had no intention of calling him Dad, not even facetoface. She said Gerlof, in a tone that suggested she might be talking to a distant relative.

“How was your journey?” he asked.

“Fine.”

She unbuttoned her coat, hung it on a hook in the hall, and placed her bag on the floor. It seemed to Gerlof that she was moving slowly, without any energy. He wanted to ask how she was feeling, but perhaps it was too soon.

“Right.” Silence again. “It’s been a long time,” he said.

“Four years, I think,” said Julia. “More than four years.”

“Yes. But we’ve kept in touch by phone.”

“Yes. I meant to come and help when you moved here from Stenvik, but it wasn’t…”

Julia stopped speaking, and Gerlof nodded.

“The move went very well anyway,” he said. “I had a lot of help.”

“Good,” said Julia. She’d come halfway into the room. She sat on the bed.

Gerlof suddenly remembered the little speech he’d been practicing.

“Now

you’re here,” he said, “there are certain things we

need to”

But Julia interrupted him.

“Where is it?”

“What?”

“You know,” said Julia. “The sandal.”

“It’s here. In the desk.” Gerlof looked at her. “But first I thought we could”

“Can I see it?” Julia broke in. “I’d really like to see it.”

“You might be disappointed. “It’s just a shoe. It has no … no real answers.”

“I want to see it, Gerlof.”

Julia got up. She hadn’t even smiled so far, and now she was staring so intensely at Gerlof that he was beginning to think the whole thing was a mistake. Perhaps he shouldn’t have called her.

But something had already been set in motion, and he couldn’t stop it now.

Still, he tried to delay things as long as possible.

“You didn’t bring anybody else with you?” he asked.

“Like who?”

“Jens’s father, perhaps,” said Gerlof. “Mats … was that his name?”

“Michael,” said Julia. “No, he lives in Malmo. We hardly keep in touch anymore.”

“I see,” said Gerlof.

Silence again. Julia took another step forward, but Gerlof thought of something else:

“Did you do what I said on the telephone?” he asked.

“What?”

“Did you think about how thick the fog was that day?”

“Yes … maybe.” Julia gave a distracted nod. “What’s all this about the fog?”

“I don’t think …” Gerlof chose his words carefully. “I don’t think anything could have happened … that things could have gone so badly if it hadn’t been for the fog. And how often do we get fog on Oland?”

“Not very often,” said Julia.

“No. Three or four times a year, maybe. As thick as it was that day, anyway. And lots of people knew it was coming; it had been mentioned in the weather forecast.”

“How do you know?”

“I rang the weather bureau,” said Gerlof. “They keep the forecasts.”

“Was

the fog so important?” said Julia.

“I think … somebody was making the most of the fog,” said Gerlof. “Somebody who didn’t want to be spotted in the area.”

“Didn’t want to be spotted on that particular day, you

mean?”

“Didn’t want to be spotted at all,” said Gerlof.

“So somebody was using the fog to … take Jens away?” said Julia.

“I don’t know,” said Gerlof. “But I do wonder if that was the aim. Who knew he was going to go outside that day? Nobody.

Isn’t that right? Jens didn’t even know himself, he just… took the chance when it arose.” Gerlof could see that Julia had begun to press her lips together as they started to talk about her son’s disappearance, and he went on quickly: “But the fog that came that day… That was predicted.”

Julia said nothing. She was just staring at the desk now.

“We should think about that,” Gerlof insisted. “We need to think about who would have had the most to gain from the fog that day.”

“Can I see it now?” said Julia.

Gerlof knew he couldn’t put it off any longer. He nodded, and spun his chair around to face the desk.

“It’s here,” he said.

He pulled out the top drawer, reached in, and carefully lifted out a small object. It didn’t seem to weigh any more than a few ounces, and it was wrapped in white tissue paper.

Julia walked over to Gerlof as he unwrapped the little package on the desk. She looked at his hands, where his age was visible in the wrinkled skin, the brown liver spots, and the thickened veins.

His fingers were shaking, fumbling with the tissue paper. It seemed to Julia that the rustling as he opened the package was deafening.

“Do you need any help?” she asked.

“No, it’s fine.”

It took him several minutes to open the packageor perhaps it just seemed that way. At last he folded back the final layer of paper and Julia could see what it had been concealing. The shoe lay in a clear plastic bagshe couldn’t take her eyes off it.

I’m not going to cry, she thought, it’s only a shoe. Then she felt her eyes filling with an intense heat, and she had to blink away the tears in order to be able to see. She saw the black rubber sole and the brown leather straps, dry and cracked with age.

A sandal, a little boy’s worn sandal.

“I don’t know if it’s the right shoe,” said Gerlof. “As I remember it, it did look like this, but it could be a”

“It’sjens’s sandal,” Julia interrupted him, her voice thick.

“We can’t be sure of that,” said Gerlof. “It’s not good to be too certain. Is it?”

Julia didn’t reply. She knew. She wiped the tears from her cheeks with her hand, then carefully picked up the plastic bag.

“I put it in the bag as soon as I got it,” explained Gerlof.

“There might be fingerprints …”

“I know,” said Julia.

It was so light, so light. When a mother was going to put a sandal like this on her little son’s foot, she picked it up off the floor by the outside door without even thinking about what it might weigh. Then she stood beside him and bent her back, feeling the warmth of his body and taking hold of his foot as he steadied himself by holding on to her sweater, standing there quietly or saying something, all the childish chatter that she only half listened to because she was thinking about other things.

About bills that needed paying. About buying food. About men who weren’t around.

“I taught Jens to put on his own sandals,” said Julia. “It took all summer, but when I started college in the autumn he could do it.” She was still holding on to the little shoe. “And that was why he was able to go out alone that day, to sneak out… He’d put on his own sandals. If I hadn’t taught him he wouldn’t have …”

“Don’t think like that.”

“What I mean is … I only taught him to save a bit of time,”

said Julia. “For myself.”

“Don’t blame yourself, Julia,” said Gerlof.

“Thanks for the advice,” she said, without looking at him.

“But I’ve been blaming myself for twenty years.”

They fell silent, and Julia realized suddenly the picture in her memory was no longer fragments of bone on the shore in Stenvik.

She could see her son alive, bending down with enormous concentration to put on his own sandals, finding it difficult to make his small fingers do what he wanted them to do.

“Who found it?” she asked.

“I don’t know. It came in the mail.”

“Who from?”

“There was no sender’s name. It was just a brown envelope, with an indistinct postmark. But I think it came from Oland.”

“No letter?”

“Nothing,” said Gerlof.

“And you don’t know who sent it?”