Echoes From the Dead

9

Julia made sure the two grieving old men had a cup of strong coffee. She borrowed Ernst’s white porcelain with yellow Öland suns on it, and made each of them a cup in his cottage before they left, with the feeling that she was doing something useful for once. John and Gerlof sat on the sofa, talking quietly about Ernst.

Just little stories and fragments of memories, often without any particular point, about mistakes Ernst had made as a newly employed quarry worker when he first moved to Öland, or about beautiful pieces of sculpture he’d created in his workshop as an old man. Julia realized that Ernst, apart from a few years at sea on the Baltic during the war, had worked with stone all his adult life. When the quarry closed in the 1960s, Ernst had carried on alone. He took the reject stone that had been cast aside by the quarry workers and chiseled and polished and made some kind of art out of it.

“He loved this quarry,” said Gerlof, looking out of the window. “I’m sure he would have bought it from Gunnar Ljunger over in Långvik if he’d had the money; he didn’t want to live anywhere else. He knew everything about how different kinds of stone should be cut and split and worked.”

“Ernst made the best gravestones,” said John. “If you walk around Marnäs churchyard, or down in Borgholm, you can see that.”

Julia sat quietly looking at a pile of old books about the local area that were lying on Ernst’s coffee table. She was listening to John and Gerlof, but it was hard to forget what Ernst had looked like when she found him.

The first police officer to arrive at the scene, Lennart Henriksson, had quickly placed a blanket from his car over Ernst, and led her into the house. He’d stayed with her without saying much, and that had felt good. After the day Jens disappeared, she had heard too many empty words of consolation, words she hadn’t asked for.

“Would you be able to drive me home, Julia?” asked Gerlof when both the coffee and the stories had come to an end.

“Of course.”

She got up to go into the kitchen to wash up the coffee things, almost annoyed by Gerlof’s question.

I found a man crushed underneath a block of stone, she thought, with blood coming out of his mouth and eyes that had burst out of their sockets. But I’ve seen blood before, I’ve seen dead bodies. I’ve experienced worse.

And as her thoughts went round and round, she suddenly remembered something that might be important, and turned back to her father.

“He had a message for you,” she said. “I forgot.”

Gerlof looked up.

“Ernst,” she explained. “I met him at the cottage when I arrived in Stenvik, and I was supposed to tell you something... He said it just before he left.” She stopped speaking and tried to remember. “Something about the fact that it was the thumb that was the most important, not the hand.”

“The thumb was the most important?” said Gerlof.

Julia nodded. “Do you know what he meant?”

Gerlof shook his head thoughtfully. He looked at John. “Do you?”

“No idea,” said John. “Is it some kind of proverb maybe?”

“That’s what he said, anyway,” said Julia, and went into the kitchen.

Julia and Gerlof drove back to the campsite in the Ford, and John followed them in his own car. The gray cloud cover had swept in over Kalmar Sound, and now hid the sun. The Stenvik that had been brought to life in the old men’s tales, where people lived and worked all year round and where every property and every path had its own name — that Stenvik had gone back to sleep now. All the houses were empty and closed, the sails of the windmill no longer turned, and there were no eel traps laid out in the waters of the sound.

When Julia had turned in and stopped beside the mini-golf course, John parked his car and came over to them. Gerlof rolled down his window, and John looked at Julia:

“Look after your dad.”

It was the first time John Hagman had spoken directly to her, she suddenly realized.

Julia nodded. “I’ll try.”

“Keep in touch, John,” said Gerlof beside her. “Let me know if you see anyone... any strangers.”

Strangers, thought Julia, recalling an incident from her childhood in the fifties, when a black man with a broad smile who spoke poor English and no Swedish at all had turned up in Stenvik one summer, going from house to house with a suitcase in his hand. People in the village had locked their doors and refused to open them — and when somebody finally had the courage to find out what he wanted, it turned out the man wasn’t a robber at all, just a Christian from Kenya selling Bibles and hymnbooks. People didn’t like strangers in Stenvik.

“We’ll speak soon,” said John Hagman.

Julia watched him go over toward the house and grab hold of the broom as if it were his most treasured possession. With it in his hand, he headed for the golf course and started waving his arms at his son Anders again.

“John ran the campsite for twenty-five years,” Gerlof told Julia. “Now it’s Anders’s responsibility, but he goes around in a dream most of the time. It’s still John who has to sweep and paint and keep the place from falling apart... He should take things easier, but he won’t listen to me.”

He sighed.

“That’s that, then,” he said. “We can drive over to the cottage now.”

Julia shook her head. “I’m taking you back to Marnäs,” she said.

“I’d really like to have a look at the cottage,” said Gerlof. “While I’ve got such an excellent chauffeur.”

“It’s already late,” said Julia. “I was thinking of going home today...”

“There’s no rush, is there?” said Gerlof. “Gothenburg isn’t going anywhere.”

Afterward Julia couldn’t remember whether it was she or Gerlof who’d suggested spending the night in the cottage.

Perhaps it was decided when Gerlof walked into the living room with his coat on and sank down into the room’s only armchair with a deep sigh. Or perhaps when Julia went out into the street to turn on the stopcock under the lid of the well, and switched on the electricity in the kitchen. Or when she turned on the lights, put the radiators on, and made them both a cup of elderflower tea. In any event, there was an unspoken agreement between the two of them that they would spend the night in Stenvik. Julia switched on her cell phone so that Gerlof could ring the home and tell the staff what had been decided.

Afterward Gerlof took a stroll around the yard.

“No sign of rats,” he reported contentedly when he came back into the house.

Julia looked around the summer cottage’s small, dark rooms tentatively, as if she were in a museum. Part of her history was here, all the way back to her childhood, but it felt as if it were shut up in a glass case.

What was there to see in the cottage? Not much. Five cramped rooms, with the furniture swathed in white sheets, six narrow beds without any bed linens, a little kitchen with a window, the dead flies lying like sprawling letters against the glass. There was a bookcase in one corner. An old shipping chart of northern Öland, faded by the sun, hung on one wall, and on a bureau stood a framed black-and-white photograph from the sixties, showing a teenage Julia with a strained smile, her sister Lena beside her. Otherwise the room was almost as lacking in personal possessions as a rental cottage.

There were no rugs on the wooden floor, and it was ice-cold. And there was almost nothing left that Julia remembered from her childhood.

But there had been more personal items, and when Julia pulled out the bottom drawer of the desk in what had been her room when she was a child, she found one of them: a framed photograph of a sunburnt little boy in a white cotton top, smiling shyly at the photographer. For many years it had stood on the desk, but now somebody had hidden it away.

Julia put the photograph back where it ought to be. She studied the picture of her vanished son, and longed for red wine; a few glasses would warm her up and make her forget, make the cottage an easier place to be. But she had no intention of letting Gerlof see that she drank.

Gerlof didn’t appear to notice how she was feeling; he was walking slowly around every room as if this were his real home. And it was, in a way. He had spent every summer and every weekend here after he retired, first with Ella and then alone, for as long as Julia could remember. He had stood by the gate waving when the children went back to the mainland after staying for a few weeks in the summer holidays.

It isn’t summer and I must leave soon, thought Julia, standing by the door with the car keys in her hand, but what she said out loud to Gerlof was:

“Lena and I used to sleep in bunk beds when we were here... I had the top one.”

Gerlof nodded. “There wasn’t much room in the holidays when everybody was here, but nobody complained, as far as I remember.”

“No. I just remember it was great having all our cousins here, all through the summers... The sun was always shining, as I recall,” said Julia, looking at the clock. “But we’d better get to bed now...”

“Already?” said Gerlof, straightening the chart on the wall behind him. “Haven’t you got any more questions?”

“Questions?” said Julia.

“Yes...” Gerlof pulled the dust sheet off an armchair in the living room and folded it up. “Just ask away,” he said.

He sat down slowly, and at that moment Julia’s cell phone rang in her jacket pocket out in the darkened hallway.

The digital signal sounded wrong in the silence, and she hastily went to answer it.

“Hello, Julia here.”

“Hi. How’s it going?” It was Lena — possibly the only person who knew Julia’s number. “Have you arrived?”

“Yes... Well... Yes, I have.”

What was Julia supposed to say? She caught sight of her uneasy expression reflected in the darkness of the windowpane, and realized she didn’t really want to tell her sister anything about what had happened, about Jens’s sandal and the death at the quarry. “Everything’s fine,” she said at last.

“Have you seen Gerlof?”

“Yes... we’re at the cottage now.”

“The cottage in Stenvik?” said Lena. “Surely you’re not going to sleep there?”

“We are,” said Julia. “We’ve turned on the water and the electricity.”

“Dad mustn’t get cold,” warned Lena.

“He won’t,” said Julia, feeling ashamed, and then feeling ashamed because she felt ashamed. “We’re just sitting and chatting... What was it you wanted?”

“Well... It’s the car. Marika rang, and apparently she’s going to take some drama workshop in Dalsland next weekend, so she needs the car. I said that would be fine... I mean, you’re not staying on Öland, are you?”

“I’m staying for a while longer,” said Julia.

Marika was the daughter of Lena’s husband Richard from his first marriage. Julia had thought the relationship between Marika and Lena was pretty bad, but clearly it was good enough now for her to be lending Julia’s car to her stepdaughter.

“For how long?”

“Hard to say... A few days.”

“Yes, but how long... three days?” said Lena. “So you’ll bring the car back here on Sunday?”

“Monday,” said Julia quickly.

Whichever weekday Lena had said, she would have added another day.

“Come early, then,” said Lena.

“I’ll try,” said Julia. “Lena...”

“Great. Love to Dad. Bye, then.”

“Lena... Was it you who put the photo of Jens in the desk drawer?” Julia asked quickly.

But Lena had already hung up.

Julia turned off her phone with a sigh.

“Who was that?” said Gerlof from his armchair.

“Your other daughter,” said Julia. “She sends her love.”

“Aha,” said Gerlof. “Does she want you to come home?”

“Yes. She’s checking up on me.”

Julia sat down in the corner opposite Gerlof’s armchair. Her elderflower tea with honey was lukewarm, almost cold, but she drank it anyway.

“Is she worried about you?” said Gerlof.

“A bit,” said Julia.

Worried about her car, anyway, she thought.

“It’s safer here than in Gothenburg,” said Gerlof with a smile.

But then he seemed to remember what had happened earlier in the day over at the quarry, and his smile faded. He looked down at the floor. Julia didn’t say anything either.

The air in the cottage was slowly warming up. Night was falling outside the windows; it was almost nine o’clock. Julia wondered if there were sheets in the cottage. There ought to be.

“I’m not afraid of death,” said Gerlof suddenly. “I used to be when I was young and at sea, for many years — afraid of running aground and mines and storms — but now I’m too old... And a lot of the fear disappeared when Ella ended up in hospital. That autumn when she went blind and slowly faded away from us.”

Julia nodded without speaking. She didn’t want to think about her mother’s death either.

Jens had been able to leave the cottage and go out into the fog that September day for two reasons. One had been the fact that Gerlof wasn’t at home. And the other reason was that Jens’s grandmother Ella had gone for a lie-down and fallen asleep, in the middle of the afternoon. A chronic exhaustion had crept up on Ella that summer, draining away her usual energy. It had seemed totally inexplicable, until the following year when the doctors had established that she was suffering from diabetes.

Jens had disappeared and his grandmother had lived for only a few years after that. She had wasted away, tortured by grief and a guilty conscience at having fallen asleep that day.

“Death becomes a bit like a friend when you get old,” said Gerlof. “An acquaintance, at any rate. I just want you to know that, so you won’t think I can’t cope with this... with Ernst’s death.”

“Good,” said Julia.

But she hadn’t really had time to think about how Gerlof might be feeling.

“Life goes on,” said Gerlof, and drank his tea.

“In one way or another,” said Julia.

There was silence for a minute or so.

“Did you want me to ask you something?” said Julia eventually.

“Yes. Ask away.”

“About what?”

“Well... Would you like to know what that rounded sculpture was called, the one somebody knocked down into the quarry?” Gerlof looked at Julia. “That shapeless stone... Maybe the police officers from Borgholm asked about it? Or Lennart Henriksson?”

“No,” said Julia. She thought about it. “I don’t think they even saw it; they were looking further away, at the sculpture of the church tower and...” She stopped. “I didn’t think about that stone either. Is there something special about it?”

“Maybe,” said Gerlof. “It’s mainly the name, though.”

“So what was it called, then?”

Gerlof took a deep breath and leaned back in the armchair. He exhaled with a long drawn-out sigh.

“Ernst wasn’t really very happy with it...” said Gerlof. “It had cracked and hadn’t turned out very well, he thought. So he christened it ‘the Kant stone.’ After Nils Kant.”

Gerlof was looking at Julia as if she ought to react, but she didn’t know why.

“Nils Kant,” she said.

“Have you heard that name before?” asked Gerlof. “Did anybody mention him when you were growing up?”

“Not that I remember,” said Julia. “But I think I’ve heard the name Kant somewhere.”

Her father nodded.

“The Kant family lived here in Stenvik,” he told her. “Nils was the son, the black sheep... but when you were born, after the war, he wasn’t here anymore.”

“Right.”

“He’d gone away,” said Gerlof.

“So what did Nils Kant do that was so terrible?” asked Julia. “Did he kill somebody?”