Echoes From the Dead

Öland, 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 DEAD — EXECUTED WITH SHOTGUN was splashed across the front page of yesterday’s newspaper, Ölands-Posten. The headline was just as big as when the forest near the shore outside Borgholm was bombed three years earlier.

The headlines are a lie — Nils 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 tears — so 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 lichen-covered 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 Marnäs, then take the ferry over to Småland. Uncle August will meet you in Kalmar, and you must do what he tells you — and 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 Öland 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 Marnäs.

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 gravel-covered railway track appears ahead of him. It’s the narrow-gauge track between Böda and Borgholm, and he turns north and walks alongside it toward the station in Marnäs. The two-story 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 miserable-faced 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 red-painted 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 leather-covered 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.

The train stops again, with a dull hiss. The carriages remain still.

Nils opens his eyes, waits. He’s still alone in the carriage.

A minute passes, then two. Is something wrong?

Somebody shouts something outside, and at last he feels the train begin to move again. It slowly picks up speed, and Nils sees the station house slip past and disappear behind him. Cool air blows into the carriage through gaps in the windows; it feels like a sea breeze on the shore at Stenvik.

Nils’s shoulders slowly drop. He places a hand on his rucksack, opens it, and leans back in his seat. The train’s speed is increasing all the time. The whistle screams.

Suddenly the door of his compartment opens.

Nils turns his head.

A well-built man wearing a black police uniform with shiny buttons and a police cap walks in. He looks Nils straight in the eye.

“Nils Kant from Stenvik,” says the man, his expression serious.

It isn’t a question, but Nils nods automatically.

He’s sitting there as if he were nailed to the seat as the train races across the alvar. The greenish brown landscape outside the window, blue sky. Nils wants to stop the train and jump off, he wants to get back out onto the alvar. But the train is moving swiftly now, the wheels pounding along the track, the wind howling.

“Good.”

The man in the uniform sits down heavily on the seat diagonally opposite Nils, so close that their knees are almost touching. The man straightens his coat, which is buttoned up despite the heat. His forehead is shiny with sweat beneath the brim of his cap. Nils recognizes him, vaguely. Henriksson. He’s the district police superintendent in Marnäs.

“Nils,” says Henriksson, as if they knew each other, “are you going to Borgholm?”

Nils nods slowly.

“Are you going to visit someone down there?” asks Henriksson.

Nils shakes his head.

“What are you going to do, then?”

Nils doesn’t answer.

The police officer turns his head and looks out of the window.

“Anyway, we can travel together,” he says, “and we can have a little chat in the meantime.”

Nils says nothing.

The police officer goes on:

“When they phoned and told me you were here, I asked them to hold the train for a few minutes so that I could come along and join you.” He turns his gaze back to Nils almost reluctantly. “I’d really like to talk to you, you see, about all those long walks on the alvar...”

The train begins to slow down again at one of the stations between Marnäs and Borgholm. A little cottage surrounded by apple trees slips past Nils’s window. He imagines he can smell the aroma of pancakes through the window; his mother had made him fresh pancakes with sugar the previous evening.

Nils looks at the policeman.

“The alvar... there’s nothing to talk about,” he says.

“I can’t really agree with you there.” The police officer takes a handkerchief out of his pocket. “I think we do need to talk about it, Nils, and many other people agree with me. The truth will always come out.”

The policeman holds Nils’s gaze as he slowly wipes the sweat from his face. Then he leans forward.

“Several people from Stenvik have got in touch with us over the past few days. They’ve said that if we want to know who’s been shooting out on the alvar with a shotgun, we ought to talk to you, Nils.”

Nils can see the two dead soldiers lying out there on the alvar; he can see their staring eyes inside his brain.

“No,” says Nils, shaking his head.

There’s a rushing sound in his ears. The train begins to brake.

“Did you meet the foreigners out on the alvar, Nils?” asks the policeman, putting his handkerchief away.

The train stops, jolting the carriages slightly. After only half a minute or so it begins to move again.

“You did, didn’t you?”

All the time the policeman is looking at him and waiting for a reply. His steady gaze sears Nils’s face.

“We’ve found the bodies, Nils,” he says. “Was it you who shot them?”

“I didn’t do anything,” says Nils quietly, his fingers fumbling with the opening of his rucksack.

“What did you say?” asks the policeman. “What have you got there?”

Nils doesn’t reply.

The wheels begin to pound again, the whistle screams, his fingers tremble and search and burrow into the rucksack, which falls over on its side. His right hand gropes among his clothes and possessions.

The police officer half gets up from his seat; perhaps he has realized that something is about to happen.

The train whistle screams in terror.

“Nils, what have you got—”

Inside the rucksack, Nils’s fingers close firmly around the sawn-off shotgun. He presses the trigger and the gun jerks among the clothes inside the rucksack.

The first shot shreds the bottom of the rucksack, ripping up the seat beside the policeman. Splinters of wood spray up toward the ceiling.

The police officer jumps at the noise, but doesn’t try to take cover.

He has nowhere to go.

Nils quickly lifts the torn rucksack and fires again, without even looking where he’s shooting. The rucksack is ripped apart.

The second shot hits the policeman. His body is flung back against the wall so hard that Nils can hear the crack, he falls heavily, his back rolls across the shattered seat and crashes down on the carriage floor.

The wheels pound against the rails, the train hurtles across the alvar.

The police officer is lying on the floor in front of Nils, his arms twitching slightly. Nils keeps hold of the shotgun, but lets go of the torn rucksack and stands up, his legs unsteady.

Shit.

“Take the train to Borgholm,” he hears his mother saying inside his head.

Her plan is ruined now.

Nils gazes around, and sees the landscape racing past the window.

The alvar is still there, and the sunshine.

He turns the rucksack upside down and ripped clothes stinking of gunpowder come tumbling out: socks, pants, a woolen sweater. But there’s a little bag of butter toffees right at the bottom, and his wallet and hip flask full of brandy are undamaged. He picks up the flask, takes a quick swig of lukewarm brandy, and slips the flask into his back pocket. That feels better.

The money, the sweater, the flask, the gun, and the toffees. He can’t take anything else with him. He’ll have to leave the suitcase of clothes.

Nils climbs over the policeman’s motionless body, opens the door, and makes his way out into the thundering din between the carriages.

The train rolls on across the alvar. The wind tugs at him, he screws up his eyes against it. Through a window he can see into the carriage in front of him; a man in a black hat is sitting with his back to him, swaying in time with the train’s movement. The sound of the shots was deadened by the clothes in the rucksack — the train thunders on along the track, and no one seems to have heard a thing.

Nils opens the side door, catches the scent of the plants on the alvar and sees the gravel on the track hurtling past beneath him like a pale gray river. He climbs down onto the last step above the ground, sees that the track behind is empty, and jumps.

He tries to jump through the air and hit the ground with his legs moving, but the impact knocks his feet from underneath him. The wheels of the train thunder on, the world spins around. He is hurled to the ground, takes a hard blow on the forehead, and tenses his body, aware of the risk that he might die beneath the train. But the track knocks him out of the way.

He raises his head and sees the train moving away, sees the last carriage, the one he has just left, growing smaller and smaller along the track.

The train disappears in the distance. There isn’t a sound.

He made it.

Slowly he gets up and looks around. He’s back out on the alvar, his shotgun still in his hand.

No buildings are in sight, no people. Just the endless grass and the blue sky.

Nils is free.

Without a single glance back toward the railway line, he quickly strides out onto the alvar, toward the west coast of the island.

Nils is free, and now he’s going to disappear.

He’s already disappeared.