Echoes From the Dead

6

It was evening at the residential home for senior citizens in Marnäs. 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 Öland 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 Öland to any port in the world, then come back home again. Fantastic. Such freedom.

A couple of minutes later the bell rang for dinner and Gerlof was back in his feeble body. His legs were stiff, his arms would never again manage to hoist a sail.

They had passed quickly, those years at sea. And there hadn’t really been that many. Gerlof had gone out as first mate with his father on his ketch Ingrid Maria at the end of the twenties, and five years later, when his father came ashore to become a ship’s broker, he’d taken over the vessel, renamed her Wind, and carried cargoes of timber and wooden goods from Småland to Öland. He’d been a captain at the age of twenty-two.

During the Second World War he’d worked as a pilot off Öland, and on two occasions he’d had to watch ships go down with all their crews on board, when their skippers had thought they knew a safer route through the minefields than the pilot boat.

Gerlof had lived in constant fear of mines during those years. In one nightmare, which still woke him in a cold sweat some nights, he was standing by the gunwale of the pilot boat up above the shining sea at sunset, looking down — and suddenly he saw a big black mine just beneath the surface of the water. Old and rusty and covered in rippling seaweed, but its spikes would hit the boat just a few seconds later and detonate the mine.

He couldn’t stop the boat, it was slipping silently closer and closer to the spikes... and just before the hull hit the mine Gerlof would always wake up.

After the war he’d bought his second small cargo boat, Wavebreaker, and had begun to sail between two ports, Borgholm and Stockholm, via the Södertälje Canal. His cargo was Öland marble, red limestone for the building work going on in the capital, and on the return journey he often carried fuel or lime to the farmers’ cooperative in Borgholm. In the harbors along his route there were always boats he knew, and anyone who needed help could always be sure of getting it from their fellow seamen.

There was no rivalry at that time, and Gerlof had received a great deal of help that December night in 1951 when flames gobbled at Wavebreaker as she lay at anchor in Ängsö. His cargo of linseed oil had caught fire, and Gerlof and his first mate, John Hagman, had only just made it onto the deck before the blaze swept through the whole ship. Neither of them could swim, but another cargo boat from Oskarshamn was lying alongside and the two men made it on board. They got all the support they needed, but all they could do for Wavebreaker was to sever the anchor and allow her to drift away into the night.

For Gerlof the burning, sinking cargo boat in the winter night was an apt symbol for Öland’s shipping industry, even if he couldn’t see it at the time. He could have given up when he was acquitted after an investigation, but out of pure stubbornness he had used the insurance money to buy a new cargo boat with an engine, and had continued as a skipper for another nine years. Nore had been his last boat, and the prettiest; slender, with a beautiful stern and a wonderful, chugging compression-ignition engine. He could still hear her engine chugging inside his head sometimes, in the moments just before he fell asleep.

In 1960 he’d sold Nore and come ashore to work in the council offices in Borgholm, and his sedentary desk-life had begun. The advantage was, of course, that he could go home to Ella every night. He had missed a great deal of his daughters’ childhood, but at least now he could watch them growing up as teenagers. And when his youngest daughter, Julia, had become pregnant at the end of the sixties, Gerlof hadn’t cared whether she was married or not — he had loved that little boy. His grandchild.

Jens Gerlof Davidsson.

And then came that day.

It was autumn, but Julia had been studying part-time to be a nurse, and had been able to stay in Stenvik with Jens longer than usual. Jens’s father, Michael, had stayed behind on the mainland. And Julia had left her son with Ella and Gerlof after lunch and gone across to Kalmar over the new bridge. And after they’d had coffee, Gerlof had left his wife and Jens, with no hesitation, with no premonition that something bad might happen, and gone to disentangle some fishing nets he was intending to put out the following morning.

Down by the boathouse he had watched the fog rise up from Kalmar Sound, the densest fog he’d seen since his years at sea. When it drifted in across the shore, he’d felt it on his skin, and he’d shivered as if he were standing in the cold on a ship’s deck. A few moments later the whole world around him was a white mist, where nothing could be seen.

He should have gone home then, to Ella and Jens. And he’d thought about it. But he’d stayed at the boathouse working on the nets for another hour or so.

That’s the way it was. But because he’d stayed by the boathouse and his hearing was good, he knew one thing for certain that he’d never managed to convince anybody else of, apart from Julia, perhaps: Jens hadn’t gone down to the sea that day. Gerlof would have heard him. Sounds were slightly muted in the fog, but they could be heard. Jens hadn’t drowned, as the police believed, and his body hadn’t been sucked out to sea and sunk to the bottom of Kalmar Sound.

Jens had gone somewhere else, not down to the water.

Gerlof bent over the table and wrote a single sentence:

THE ALVAR IS LIKE A SEA.

Yes. Anything at all could happen out there, and no one would be any the wiser.

He put his pen down on the desk and closed the notebook, and when he opened the drawer he saw once again the sandal wrapped in its tissue paper, and beside it a slim book that had been published earlier in the year.

It was a memoir, only sixty pages, with the title Malm Freight — 40 Years on the cover. There was a picture of a ship beneath the title.

Ernst had lent him this book when he last visited Gerlof two weeks ago.

“This might be something,” he’d said. “Have a look at page 23.”

Gerlof opened the book and leafed through to page 23. Right at the bottom, below the text, was a small black-and-white picture that he’d studied many times before.

The picture was old. It showed a stone jetty in a small harbor, and a pile of long wooden planks lay on the jetty. The black stern of a small sailing ship was visible at an angle behind the wood; the ship was similar to the one Gerlof had sailed, and beside the pile of wood a group of men in black work clothes and peaked caps were lined up. Two men were standing in front of the others, one with his hand on the other’s shoulder in a friendly gesture.

Gerlof stared at the men and they stared back.

There was a knock at the door.

“Coffee time, Gerlof,” said Boel’s voice.

“Coming,” said Gerlof, pushing his chair back.

He got up from the desk with some difficulty.

But he found it difficult to take his eyes off the men in the photograph in the book.

Neither of the men was smiling, and Gerlof wasn’t smiling at them either, because after his last conversation with Ernst he was more or less certain that one of the men in the old photograph had caused the death of his grandson Jens, then hidden the boy’s body forever.

He just didn’t know which of them had done it.

With a small sigh he closed the book and pushed it back into the drawer. Then he picked up his cane and slowly made his way to the lounge for coffee.