Echoes From the Dead (14 page)

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 yearsafraid of running aground and mines and stormsbut 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 liedown 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 drawnout 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 any

body 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?”

OLAND, MAY 1945 ]

Nils Kant stood with his shotgun pointing at the two foreign soldiers, his finger on the trigger. The wind and the birdsong and all the other sounds on the alvar have fallen silent. The landscape has become blurred; Nils can see only the soldiers and the double barrel of the shotgun which he is keeping trained on them all the time.

The soldiers slowly get to their feet, as if obeying an order.

Their legs seem to have no strength; they grab hold of the grass to help them rise, then they raise their arms in the air. But Nils does not lower his weapon.

“What are you doing here?” he asks.

The men merely stare at him, their hands above their heads,

and don’t reply.

The one at the front moves back half a pace, bumps into the

other one, and stops. He looks younger than the one behind him,|

but both their faces are covered in a mask of gray dust, smears off mud, and faint black stubble, and it’s impossible to tell how old they are. The whites of their eyes are bloodshot with fine red lines, and their eyes look a hundred years old.

“Where are you from?” asks Nils.

No reply.

When Nils quickly looks down, he can’t see any sign that]

the soldiers have a pack or any weapons with them. The knees of their graygreen uniforms are threadbare and the seams are frayed, and the soldier in front has a wide rip in the material above the knee.

Nils has his gun, but it doesn’t make him feel calm. He tries to breathe in and out slowly through his nose so that his arms won’t begin to shake and the gun start wobbling about all over the place. An invisible band of iron is tightening around his head just above his ears; the pain makes it impossible for him to think clearly.

“Night schiessen,” says the soldier in front once again.

Nils doesn’t understand the words, but he thinks the language sounds like Adolf Hitler’s language on the radio. That means they’re Germans, from the big war. How have they ended up here?

A boat, he thinks. They must have crossed the Baltic in a

boat.

“You have to … come with me,” he says.

He speaks slowly, so the soldiers will understand. He must

take command here; he has a gun in his hands after all.

He nods at them.

“Do you understand what I’m saying?”

It feels good to talk, even if they don’t understand. It lessens the fear and makes it possible to fight against the paralysis in his head. Nils could take them with him to Stenvik; he would be a hero. What other people in the village think doesn’t matter, but his mother would be proud of him.

The soldier in front nods too, and slowly lowers his arms.

“Wir wollen nach Englandfahren,”he says. “Wir wollen in die Freiheit.”

Nils looks at him. The only word he understands is “England,”

which sounds the same as in Swedish, but he’s sure the soldiers aren’t English. He’s more or less certain they’re Germans.

The soldier at the back lowers one hand toward his pocket.

“No!”

Nils’s heart is pounding, he opens his mouth.

The soldier reaches into his pocket. His hands are moving too quickly, Nils can’t follow him with his eyes. He has to do something, and he says: “Han”

A thundering roar drowns out the rest. The shotgun jerks.

Powder smoke billows out of the barrels, obscuring the men

in front of him for a moment.

It wasn’t really Nils’s intention to shoot, he just squeezed the shotgun a little harder so he could point with it, point upward. But the gun goes off and a hail of lead shot flies out and knocks the soldier in front to the ground as if he’s been struck by a mace.

Nils sees him as a shadow behind the powder smoke, a shadow

that falls and jerks and remains lying there on the grass.

The smoke drifts away, every sound disappears, but the

soldier is still lying there on his side, his jacket ripped to shreds. For a few seconds his body looks completely unharmed, but then the blood begins to seep through the torn fabric like dark, spreading patches. The soldier closes his eyes; he looks as if he’s dying.

“Oh shit…” Nils whispers to himself

It’s done. He’s shot the soldiereven worse, he’s shot the wrong one. It wasn’t the soldier in front who put his hand in his pocket, but he’s the one who’s lying there bleeding on the ground.

Nils has shot a human being as if he’d been a hare; he shot

him, nobody else.

The soldier on the ground blinks slowly, his arms are

twitching slightly, and he is struggling to raise his head, but without success.

Nils has shot someone, he has killed someone. The initial

panic disappears, and an icy calm fills him. He’s in control now.

Nils breathes out, takes a step toward the soldier, and nods toward the little stone.

“Give that to me,” he says calmly.

cess.

His breath is coming in short gasps, he coughs, breathes out, 1

but never breathes in. His uniform is covered in blood. His gaze |

wanders all around, back and forth, and finally stops, his eyes fixed on the sky. |

The other soldier is standing behind him, the one who was!

fumbling in his pocket, his mouth compressed into a thin line, his eyes empty. He is standing utterly still, but he is holding something between his left thumb and his index finger. Something he took out of his pocket just before the shot went off.

Not a gun, something smaller. It looks like a small dark red stone, shining and glittering, although there is no sun on the alvar.

Nils is holding the gun, the soldier is holding his little stone.

Neither of them lowers his eyes.

Gelof didn’t reply to Julia’s question about Nils Kant. He simply pointed over her shoulder, toward the darkness outside the window.

“The

Kant family lived just down here,” he said. “In the big

yellow house. They’d been living there for a long time before we built this cottage.”

“I remember some old woman lived there when I was little,”

said Julia.

“That was Nils’s mother, Vera,” said Gerlof. “She died at the beginning of the seventies. Before that she lived alone for many years. She was rich… her family owned a sawmill in Smaland, and she owned a lot of land here along the coast, but I don’t think; she ever got any pleasure from her money. I assume her relatives Ś

are still squabbling about what’s left of their inheritance, because the house is just falling apart down there. Or maybe nobody dares> live there.”

“Vera Kant…” said Julia. “I’ve just got a vague memory of her. She wasn’t very popular, was she?”

“No, she was too bitter for that, and she bore grudges,” said Gerlof. “If your grandfather had done her some injustice, she would hate your mother and you and your dog, for the rest of your life. Vera was stubborn and proud. When her husband died,|

she went straight back to her maiden name.”

“And she never went out in the village?”

“No, Vera was a recluse,” said Gerlof. “She spent most of her time sitting in her house, longing for her son.”

“So what did he do?” Julia asked again.

“A lot of things …” said Gerlof. “When he was young, people suspected that he’d drowned his little brother down by the shore.

Evidently only Nils and his brother were there when it happened, and afterward Nils swore it was an accident… so we’ll never know the truth about that.”

“Were you friends? You and Nils?”

“No, no. He was a few years younger than me, and I soon left and went to sea. So I hardly ever ran into him when he was little.”

“And when he grew up?”

Gerlof almost smiled, but when it came to Nils Kant, there

was nothing to smile about.

“Definitely not when he grew up,” he replied. “He left the

village, as I said.” He raised his hand and pointed toward the narrow bookcase in the corner of the room. “There’s a book about Nils Kant over there. At least it’s partly about him. It’s on the third shelf down, it’s got a narrow yellow spine.”

Julia got up and went over to the shelves. She looked and

finally pulled a book out from the third shelf. She read the title.

” Oland Crimes.’”

She looked inquiringly at Gerlof.

“That’s it,” he said. “A colleague of Bengt Nyberg’s on the local paper wrote it a few years ago. Read it, it’ll fill you in on most things.”

“Okay.” She looked at the clock. “But not tonight.”

“No. Time for bed,” said Gerlof.

“I’d like my old room,” said Julia. “If that’s all right.”

It was. Gerlof chose the bedroom next door, the one he and

Ella had shared for many years. Their old double bed was gone, but the new beds stood in the same spot. While Gerlof was in the bathroom, Julia made up one of them for him; making beds was something her father could no longer manage.

When Julia had finished and had gone into her own room, Gerlof undressed down to his long Johns and Tshirt and got into bed.

The mattress here was harder than he was used to nowadays.

He lay there for a while in the darkness thinking, but he no longer felt any more at home here in the cottage than he did in his room up at Marnas. It had been a big step, admitting he was too old to manage on his own in Stenvik and moving up there, but perhaps it had been the right decision. At least he didn’t have to wash dishes and make his own coffee.

Gerlof listened to the wind in the trees for a while, then he fell asleep. And at some point during the night he dreamed he was lying on a bed of hard stones over in the quarry.