Echoes From the Dead (9 page)

She could have been in Gothenburg now, sitting at the kitchen table with a glass of wine and looking out at the streetlamps illuminating the empty road.

In Stenvik it was pitch dark. She had gone out for a pee, stumllng about on the stones and almost losing her bearings in the arknes just a few yards from the boathouse. She could no longer see the water down below her; she could only hear the sighing of the waves and the rattle of the pebbles as they reached the shore.

Above her dense rain clouds scudded across the sky over the island like evil spirits.

As she squatted out there in the darkness, her bare bottom

exposed to the wind, Julia’s thoughts turned involuntarily to the ghost who had turned up here on the shore one night at the beginning of the 1900s.

She remembered one of her grandmother Sara’s tales in the

twilight hour: about how her husband and his brother had gone down one stormy night to haul their little fishing boats up to safety, away from the crashing waves.

As they stood there by the foaming water, hauling and dragging at their wooden gigs, a figure suddenly emerged from the darkness, a man wearing heavy oilskins, who began to tug one of the boats in the opposite direction, out to sea. Grandfather had yelled at him, and the figure had yelled back in very broken Swedish, repeating one word over and over again: “Osel!” he’d screamed. “Osel!”

The fishermen had held on tight to their boat and the figure had suddenly turned and dashed out into the heaving waves. He had disappeared into the storm without a trace.

Julia quickly finished peeing beside the path outside the boathouse, then hurried back into the warmth and locked the door behind her. Then she remembered there was no running water

down here; she’d have to go up to the cottage to fetch some.

Three days after the terrible storm, there came news from the northern tip of Oland: a ship had run aground at Bbda and had been smashed to pieces by the waves three days earlier. The vessel had come from the Estonian island of Osel. All those on board had perished in the storm, so the seaman that the fishermen in Stenvik had met and spoken to had been dead by that time. Dead and drowned.

Grandmother had nodded at Julia in the twilight.

A ghost of the shore.

Julia believed the story; it was a good tale, and she believed all the old stories she’d heard in the twilight. Somewhere along the coast the drowned seaman was surely still wandering, lost and alone.

Julia had no desire to go out again. She had no intention of fetching water; she’d just have to do without brushing her teeth tonight.

There were thick red candles in the windows of the boathouse.

She lit one with her cigarette lighter before she went to bed, and left it burning for a while.

A candle for Jens. It was burning for his mother too.

In the glow of the flame she made a decision: no glass of wine and no sleeping pills tonight. She would fight against her grief. It was everywhere anyway, not only in Stenvik. Every time she met a young boy on the street, she could still be overcome by a sudden surge of grief.

When she saw her little address book lying on the bed beside Lena’s old cell phone, she picked up both of them on an impulse, flicked through the address book to find a number, and dialed it.

The phone worked. Two rings, three, four.

Then a muffled male voice answered. “Hello?”

It was already tenthirty on a normal weekday evening. Julia

had rung too late, but she had to continue now.

“Michael?”

“Yes?”

“It’s Julia.”

“Right… Hi, Julia.”

He sounded more tired than surprised. She tried to remember

what Michael looked like, but couldn’t get a picture in her head.

“I’m on Oland. In Stenvik.”

“Right… Well, I’m in Copenhagen, as usual. I was asleep.”

“I know it’s late,” she said. “I just wanted to tell you a new clue has turned up.”

“A clue?”

“To our son’s disappearance,” she explained. “Jens.”

“Right,” he said.

“So I’ve come here … I thought you’d want to know. It probably isn’t an important clue, but it might…”

“How are you, Julia?”

“Fine … I can give you a call if anything else happens.”

‘You do that,” he said. “You still seem to have my number. But if you could call a little earlier next time, that would be good.”

“Okay,” she said quickly.

“bye, then.”

Michael hung up, and the telephone was silent.

Julia sat there with the cell phone in her hand. Okay. So she’d tested it out and found that it worked, but she knew she’d chosen the wrong person to call.

Michael had moved on long ago, even before they separated.

From the beginning he’d been certain that Jens had gone down to the water and drowned. Sometimes she’d hated him for that conviction, sometimes she’d just been crippled by envy.

A few minutes later, when Julia had turned out the light and got into bed, still wearing her pants and sweater, down came the torrential rain that had been hanging in the air all evening.

It started very suddenly, hammering rapidly and frantically

on the tin roof of the boathouse. Julia lay there in the darkness, listening to small streams beginning to babble along down the slope outside. She knew the boathouse was safe; it had survived every violent storm up to now, and she closed her eyes and fell asleep.

She didn’t hear the rain stop half an hour later. She didn’t hear any footsteps over by the quarry in the darkness; she didn’t hear a thing.

OLAND, MAY 1943

Nils Kant owned the shore, he has owned Stenvik, and now he

owns the whole of the alvar surrounding the village. When his mother doesn’t need his help in the house or the yard, he roams across it every day, taking long strides. In the yellow sunlight he walks over the Oland steppes with a rucksack slung over his shoulder and his shotgun in his hands.

The hares usually sit frozen, huddled right down to the earth, until they think they have been discovered; then they hurtle away across the ground, and you have to raise the gun to your shoulder very quickly. Nils is always ready to shoot when he’s out hunting.

His home and the alvar have been his whole world ever since

his mother told him he wouldn’t be able to work at the quarry anymore after the fight with LassJan some years earlier. None of the other quarry workers wanted him there. Not that it matters to Nils; he refused to go back there anyway, refused to apologize, and the only annoying thing is that his mother had to pay Lass Jan’s wages for the weeks the stevedore couldn’t work, while his broken fingers were healing.

Shit. The whole thing was LassJan’s fault, after all!

Nils also carries the memory of the fight: two broken fingers on his left hand. He refused to go to the doctor in Marnas despite the Pain, and his fingers have mended badly, curving inward and becoming more difficult to bend. But it doesn’t matter, he’s righthanded and he can still hold his gun.

People in the village avoid Nils these days, but that doesn’t matter either. Maja Nyman has been on the village road a few times when he’s gone out onto the alvar, but she just looks at him in silence, like all the rest. Maja has big blue eyes, but Nils can get by perfectly well without her.

His mother has given Nils the doublebarreled Husqvarna

shotgun to keep him company. And he gives her all the hares he shoots with it, so she doesn’t have to pay for expensive meat from the tightfisted farmers in the village.

The white tower of Marnas church is visible on the horizon

to the east, but Nils doesn’t need any landmarks. He has learned to find his way around the alvar’s labyrinth of long stone walls, boulders, bushes, and endless grassy plains.

Up ahead of him is the memorial cairn: the low pile of stones marking the place where some crazy servant killed a priest or a bishop, several hundred years before Nils was born. People walking by still set small stones there sometimes. Nils never does, but it’s a good spot for him to sit and eat his lunch.

He stops, considers, and notices a faint pang of hunger down in his stomach. He goes over to the cairn, takes off a couple of uneven stones, then settles down with the shotgun close beside him and the rucksack on his knee.

He opens it and discovers two cheese sandwiches and two

sausage sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper, and a small bottle of milk. His mother packed all this; without asking her, Nils himself has filled his slim copper hip flask with the cognac she keeps on the floor of the larder.

He starts his lunch break by opening the flask and taking a

long swig, which spreads a feeling of steady warmth down through his throat, then he opens up his packet of sandwiches. He eats and drinks with his eyes closed, letting his thoughts wander.

Nils thinks about hunting. He hasn’t got a hare yet today, but he’s got the whole afternoon to shoot one.

Then he thinks about the war, which is still filling every news program whenever you switch on the radio.

Sweden hasn’t been attacked, although three German destroyers did stray into the minefield just off southern Oland in the summer of 1941, and were blown to pieces. Over a hundred of

Hitler’s men ended up in the water, and either drowned or died in the burning oil slick. And many inhabitants of Oland thought the war had definitely arrived the following summer, when for some reason a German plane dropped eight bombs in the forest below the ruined castle at Borgholm.

The explosions had been heard all the way up to Stenvik. Nils had been woken by the dull thuds, and stared out of the dark window with his heart pounding; he could have sworn he heard the plane’s engines as it flew away from the island. A Messerschmitt, perhaps. He’d listened and longed for more explosions, bombs raining down all around Stenvik.

But there had been no German invasion, and now it’s too

late for Hitler to do anything. Nils has read the newspaper reports about the big surrender in Stalingrad earlier in the year, during the bitterly cold winter. Hitler seems to be on the losing side.

Nils hears a horse neigh behind him.

He opens his eyes and turns his head. There are several horses behind him. Four young animals, brown and white, have come up to the cairn, and now the animals trot in front of him in a curving line, their heads bowed, the dust whirling around their legs. Their hooves make almost no sound as they move across the grass.

Horses. They roam at will across the alvar in herds. On a few occasions when Nils has been looking for hares rather than at the ground in front of him, his boots have sunk deep into the piles of shit they leave everywhere, like small brown memorial cairns.

This little herd seems to be on the way to a definite goal, but when Nils gives a short whistle and pushes his left hand down into his rucksack, the leading horse slows and turns its head toward him.

All the horses come to a halt and look at Nils. One lowers its head to nuzzle the yellow grass of the alvar, but doesn’t begin to graze. They are waiting for something tastier.

Nils keeps his hand in the rucksack, rustling the empty greaseproof paper, while he places his right hand quietly beside him on the stones.

The horses hesitate, sniffing the air and pawing the ground

with their hooves. Nils rustles the paper again, and the dark brown lead horse takes a cautious sideways step toward him. The others follow slowly, their nostrils twitching slightly.

The lead horse stops again, five yards away.

“Come on, then, feeding time,” says Nils, smiling with anticipation.

You

can’t get hares to come to you like this, only horses.

The lead horse shakes its big head and gives a low, snorting neigh.

Then he takes a couple of steps forward, and Nils swiftly lifts his right hand and throws the first stone.

Good shot! The rough piece of limestone hits the animal just above its muzzle and it jerks backwards as if it’s had an electric shock. It backs away in terror, bumping into the horse behind, and spins in a blind panic as Nils stands up quickly and throws the second stone. This one is flatter and sharper and flies through the air like the blade of a saw.

It hits the lead horse on the rump. He gives a highpitched,

terrified neigh, and now all the horses grasp the danger. They turn and gallop away across the alvar at full speed, their hooves drumming on the ground. They disappear among the bushes.

Nils panics slightly, and his third stone goes too far over to the left. That’s bad. He bends down again quickly, but the fourth throw is too short.

The last he sees of the lead horse is a bloodied, glittering stripe along its right flank. The wound is deep, and probably won’t heal for several days. Nils will try to find the stone that cut the horse before he goes home, to see if there’s any blood on it.

The noise of the horses’ mad flight dies away. Silence returns to the alvar. Nils breathes out and sits down again on the cairn, smiling as he thinks about the stupid, bewildered expression on the horse’s face when the first stone hit him.

Fucking horses.

Nils has shown them who rules the alvar around Stenvik. He

is still smiling to himself as he picks up the rucksack again. Has his mother put any butter toffees at the bottom?

It was morning at the residential home for senior citizens in Marnas. Gerlof “was sitting at his desk, his notebook open in front of him. He was holding a ballpoint pen, but hadn’t written anything.

When

Gerlof sat there at his desk, he could easily convince

himself that he wasn’t as old as he thought, and had plenty of strength left; in a minute or two he would stand up on his strong legs, stretch, and off he would go.

Out. Down to the shore at Stenvik, push the skiff out, and row over to the ship that was waiting in deeper water. Weigh anchor, set sail, and off out into the world.

It had always fascinated Gerlof that a sea captain from the waters of Oland could reach any coast he wanted. With a little bit of luck, a great deal of skill, the right equipment, and plenty of supplies on board he could sail from Oland to any port in the world, then come back home again. Fantastic. Such freedom.