Echoes From the Dead (21 page)

“There never has been,” said Julia, wearily. “There was never anything new to say, but they kept on writing anyway.”

“We were sitting at the kitchen table and I was reading the

paper first,” said SvenOlof. “Then Lambert read it. And when I saw that he was reading about the boy, I asked him what he thought. And then Lambert lowered the paper and said the boy was dead.”

Julia closed her eyes. She nodded silently.

“In the sound?” she asked.

“No. Lambert said it had happened out on the alvar. He’d

been killed on the alvar.”

“Killed,” said Julia, feeling an icy chill sweep across her skin.

“A man had done it, Lambert said. The very day the boy disappeared, a man who was full of hatred had killed him on the alvar.

Then he had placed the boy in a grave beside a stone wall.”

A hen flapped nervously somewhere by the wall.

“Lambert didn’t say any more,” said SvenOlof, when Julia

didn’t speak. “Not about the boy, or the man.”

No names, thought Julia. Everybody was nameless in Lambert’s dreams.

SvenOlof was moving again. He came out of the coop with

the five eggs in his arms, looking anxiously at Julia as if he were afraid she might hit him as well.

Julia breathed out.

“So now I know,” she said. “Thank you.”

“Do you need a box?” asked SvenOlof.

Julia knew.

She could try and convince herself that Lambert had been

wrong, or that his brother had just made it up, but there was no point. She knew.

On the way home from Langvik she stopped on the coast

road above the deserted shore, watching the water turn to foam as the waves scurried in down below, and she wept for over ten minutes.

She knew, and the certainty was terrible. It was as if only a few days had passed since Jens’s disappearance, as if all her internal wounds were still bleeding. Now she was starting to let him into her heart as a dead person, little by little. It had to happen slowly, otherwise the grief would drown her.

Jens was dead.

She knew it. But still she wanted to see her son again, see his body. If that wasn’t possible, then she at least wanted to know what had happened to him. That was why she was here.

Her tears dried in the wind. After a while Julia got back on her bike and cycled slowly on her way.

By the quarry she met Astrid, out walking the dog; she invited Julia back for dinner and didn’t comment on Julia’s eyes, puffy with weeping.

Astrid served cutlets, boiled potatoes, and red wine. Julia ate a little and drank a good deal more, more than she should have done. But after three glasses of wine the idea that Jens had been dead for a long time was not quite so intrusive, it was merely a dull ache in her breast. And there had never been any hope, after all, not after the first days had passed with no sign of life. No hope…

“So you went to Langvik today?”

Julia’s brooding thoughts were interrupted, and she nodded.

“Yes. And yesterday I was in Marnas,” she said quickly, to get away from the thought of Langvik and Lambert Nilsson’s accurate dreams.

“Did anything happen up there?” asked Astrid, tipping the

last of the wine into Julia’s glass.

“Not much,” said Julia. “I went to the churchyard and saw

Nils Kant’s grave. Gerlof thought I ought to see it.”

“Nils’s grave,” repeated Astrid, lifting her wineglass.

“One thing I was wondering,” said Julia. “You might not be

able to tell me, but those German soldiers Nils Kant killed on the alvar … Did many of them come to Oland?”

“Not that I know of,” said Astrid. “There were maybe a hundred or so who managed to make it to Sweden alive from the war in the Baltic countries, but most of them came ashore along the coast of Smaland. They wanted desperately to go home, of course, or to travel on to England. But Sweden was afraid of Stalin, and sent them back to the Soviet Union. It was a cowardly thing to do.

But you must have read about all this?”

“Yes, a little bit… but it was a long time ago,” said Julia.

She had a vague memory from her school days of reading

about war refugees from Russia, but at the time she hadn’t

been particularly interested in Swedish history, or the history of Oland.

“What else did you do in Marnas?” said Astrid.

“Well… I had lunch with the policeman there,” said Julia.

“Lennart Henriksson.”

“He’s a nice man,” said Astrid. “Very stylish.”

Julia nodded.

“Did you talk to Lennart about Nils Kant?” asked Astrid.

Julia shook her head, then thought about it and added:

“Well, I did mention that I’d been to see Kant’s grave. But we didn’t talk about it any more.”

“It’s probably best not to mention him to Lennart again,” said Astrid. “It upsets him a bit.”

“Upsets him?” said Julia. “But why?”

“It’s an old story,” said Astrid, taking a gulp of her wine.

“Lennart is Kurt Henriksson’s son.”

She looked at Julia with a serious expression, as if this should make everything clear.

But Julia just shook her head uncomprehendingly.

“Who?” she said.

“The police constable in Marnas,” explained Astrid. “Or the

district superintendent, as he was called in those days.”

“And what did he do?”

“He was the one who was supposed to arrest Nils Kant for

shooting the Germans,” said Astrid.

OLAND, MAY 1945

Nils Kant is sawing the end off his shotgun.

He is standing out in the heat of the woodshed where the

birch logs are stacked right up to the roof, his back bent. The pile of wood looks as if it might topple over onto him at any moment.

His Husqvarna is lying on the chopping block in front of him, and he has almost sawn right through the barrel. His booted left foot is resting on the butt of the gun and he is working the hacksaw with both hands. Slowly but with determination he saws through the barrel, occasionally waving away the flies that buzz around the shed, constantly trying to land on his sweaty face.

Outside everything is as silent as the grave. His mother Vera is in the kitchen, sorting out his rucksack. A tense air of waiting fills the warm spring air.

Nils keeps on sawing, and at last the blade bites through the final millimeter of steel and the barrel falls onto the stone floor of the woodshed with a brief metallic clang.

He picks it up, shoves it in a little hole near the bottom of the woodpile, and sets the saw on the chopping block. He takes two cartridges out of his pocket and loads the gun.

Then he goes out of the shed and places the shotgun in the

shadow by the door.

He’s ready.

It’s four days since the shooting out on the alvar, and now

everybody in Stenvik knows what’s happened. German soldiers

found deadexecuted with shotgun was splashed across the

front page of yesterday’s newspaper, OlandsPosten. The headline was just as big as when the forest near the shore outside Borgholm was bombed three years earlier.

The headlines are a lieNils didn’t execute anyone. He was

caught up in a gun battle with two soldiers, and he was the one who won in the end.

But perhaps not everyone will see it that way. For once, Nils went down into the village in the evening, walking along the road past the mill, and he was met by the silent gaze of the millers. He didn’t say anything, but he knows they are talking about him behind his back. There’s gossip. And stories about what happened out on the alvar are spreading like rippling circles on the water.

He goes into the house.

His mother Vera is sitting there silent and motionless at the kitchen table with her back to him, looking out through the window over the alvar. He can see that her narrow shoulders are tense with anxiety and sorrow beneath her gray blouse.

Nils’s own fears are equally wordless.

“I think it’s probably time now,” he says.

She merely nods, without turning around. The rucksack and

the small suitcase are on the table beside her, all packed, and Nils walks over and picks them up. It’s almost unbearable; if he tries to say anything else his voice will be thick with tearsso he simply leaves.

“You will come back, Nils,” say his mother behind him, her

voice hoarse.

He nods, although she can’t see it, and takes his blue cap off the peg by the door. His copper hip flask is hidden in the cap, filled with brandy. He pushes it into his rucksack.

“Time to go, then,” he says quietly.

He has his wallet with his own traveling money in his rucksack, as well as twenty substantial notes from his mother rolled up and tucked into his back trouser pocket.

He turns around in the doorway. His mother is now standing

in the kitchen, her profile toward him, but she still isn’t looking at him. Perhaps she can’t do it. Her hands are clasped over her stomach, her long white nails digging into her palms; her mouth is trembling.

“I love you, Mother,” says Nils. “I’ll be back.”

Then he walks quickly out of the door, down the stone steps, and into the garden. He stops briefly by the woodshed to pick up his shotgun before going around the house and in among the ash trees.

Nils knows how to leave the village without being spotted. He stoops and moves along the cow paths, through the dense thickets far away from the road, climbing over lichencovered stone walls and stopping occasionally to listen for whispering voices beyond the humming of the insects in the grass.

He emerges in the sunshine on the alvar southwest of the village, without being discovered.

Out here the danger is past; Nils can find his way here better than anyone, moving rapidly and easily across the grass. He can spot anybody before they see him. He walks almost directly toward the sun, giving a wide berth to the place where he met the Germans. He doesn’t want to see if the bodies are still there or have been carted off. He doesn’t want to think about them, because they are the ones who are forcing him to leave his mother.

The dead soldiers are forcing him to go away, for a while.

“You need to keep away,” his mother said the previous evening. “Take the train to Borgholm from Mamas, then take the ferry over to Smdland. Uncle August will meet you in Kalmar, and you must do what he tells youand take your cap off when you’re thanking him. You’re not to speak to anyone else, and you’re not to come back to Oland until all this has settled down. But it will be fine, Nils, if we just wait.”

Suddenly he thinks he hears a muted shout behind him, and

he stops. But he hears nothing more. Nils moves more cautiously through the juniper bushes, but he can’t go too slowly. The train won’t wait.

After a couple of kilometers he reaches the graveled main

road. A cart is approaching from the south, and he quickly hurries across the road and hides in the ditch. But the cart is being pulled by a lone horse, its head drooping, and Nils is far away from the road by the time it draws level. He is roughly in the middle of the island now, and he thinks about what he read in the newspaper: it was along this road that the German soldiers are presumed to have sneaked a week or so earlier, when their boat suffered engine failure and drifted ashore to the south of Marnas.

He’s not going to think about them, but for a moment he

remembers the little box of gemstones he took from the soldiers, and sees himself burying it deep beneath the memorial cairn. In recent days while he and his mother have mostly stayed in the house, he has almost told her about his spoils of war several times, but something has made him keep silent. He will tell her, he will dig them up and show his mother the treasure, but he intends to leave all that until he comes home again.

After another twenty minutes’ walking, the gravelcovered

railway track appears ahead of him. It’s the narrowgauge track between Btida and Borgholm, and he turns north and walks alongside it toward the station in Marnas. The twostory wooden station house stands alone just to the south of the village. It’s a post office and railway station combined, and he catches sight of the house just as the two tracks divide and become four just ahead of him.

The track is empty. His train hasn’t arrived yet.

Nils has been to Borgholm and back three times before, and

knows how a traveler should behave. He walks into the station, where everything is quiet, goes over to the window, and buys a single ticket to town.

The miserablefaced woman with glasses behind the iron

grille looks up at him, then hastily looks down at the desk as she issues the ticket. The steel nib of her pen rasps across the paper.

Nils waits anxiously, feeling as if he’s being watched, and

looks around. Half a dozen people, mostly men in neatly buttoned suits, are sitting on the wooden benches in the waiting room. They are waiting alone or in groups, and several have black leather bags with them. Nils is the only one with both a rucksack and a suitcase.

“There

you are. Last carriage, number three.”

Nils takes the ticket, pays, and walks out onto the platform, his rucksack over his shoulder and his suitcase in his hand. After just a few minutes he hears the screech of a train whistle, and the train chugs slowly into the station with its three redpainted wooden carriages.

There is an enormous power in the black, puffing steam

engine as it slows down in front of the station house, its brakes squealing.

Nils climbs aboard the last carriage. The stationmaster calls out something behind him; the doors of the station house open and the other travelers emerge.

Nils turns around on the top step and stares silently at them; they choose to go toward the other carriages.

The compartment is dark and completely empty. Nils lifts his suitcase onto the luggage rack and sits down on a leathercovered window seat with a view over the alvar, his rucksack beside him.

The train jolts, heavy and steady, and begins to move. Nils closes his eyes and breathes out.