Echoes From the Dead

Öland, May 1945

Everything has changed. Big things are going to happen, both out in the world and in Nils Kant’s life. He can feel it in the wind.

The sun above the alvar is stronger than ever, the Öland winds are fresher, the air clearer, and the flowers are in full bloom. The grass is green, not yet burned by the sun of high summer. Vague, flickering little marks in the sky grow into swallows, swooping down like black arrows over the flat ground for a few moments, then gathering speed as they soar upward again, and suddenly there they are, high in the sky once more.

Spring has come to Öland with a vengeance, and Nils Kant can sense changes in the air. He is almost twenty years old now, finally grown up and completely free. Life lies ahead of him, and big things are going to happen. He can feel it in the whole of his body.

Nils is getting too old to be wandering around out here in the silence, hunting hares. He has other plans. He’s going to go off out into the world when the war is over, anywhere he wants to. He would like to take Maja Nyman with him, the girl who lives in a cottage down by the ridge in Stenvik. He remembers what she looks like, and thinks of her quite often. But they have never really spoken, just said hello when they’ve met, if nobody else was with her. If he doesn’t get the opportunity to talk to her properly soon, he’ll travel alone.

On this particular day he is further away from Stenvik than usual, almost over on the eastern side of the island. Before he crossed the main road he shot two hares; he’s left them under some bushes so that he can pick them up on the way home. He’s intending to shoot one or two more before he goes home to his mother, and perhaps a few swallows on the way back, just for fun.

The water from the melted snows of winter is still lying in big pools all over the alvar; it’s a bit like walking in a boggy landscape, full of small lakes. The water is drying up quickly in the sun. Nils is wearing big, sturdy boots, and can wade straight through if he wants to. He is completely free and he owns the whole world.

Adolf Hitler tried to own the world. He’s dead now; he shot himself in Berlin a week or so ago. That was the end for Germany. Nobody there had the will or the strength to fight the Russians and the Americans any longer.

Nils splashes up out of a pool of water and pushes through a clump of juniper bushes. He remembers that he liked Hitler when he was younger; he had great respect for Hitler’s strength of will, at any rate.

He used to listen reverently to fragments of Hitler’s thundering speeches from Germany when his mother had the radio on in the living room, and for several years he waited for the German bombers to sweep in across Öland, for the war to come at last, but now Hitler is gone and the might of Germany has been smashed to pieces by the English bombers.

Germany doesn’t seem particularly interesting any longer. England, on the other hand, is tempting. And America seems huge and full of promise, but too many people from Öland have already gone there and never returned; thousands disappeared without a trace in the nineteenth century. Nils wants to travel the world and then return to Stenvik like an emperor.

Nils hears something, a low but solid sound, and he stops.

There is no sign of a hare, and yet Nils feels as if...

He isn’t alone.

Someone is there.

He has heard something in the wind, a brief sound which is neither birdsong nor the humming of insects nor the neighing of horses. He has been walking around on the alvar for years; he knows when things are as they should be, and when they are not. Right now there’s something that definitely isn’t right. He can feel prickles of unease running down the back of his neck and his spine.

This is no hare, this is something else.

Wolves? Nils’s grandmother, long dead now, used to tell stories about wolves on the alvar. There used to be wolves there. But not now.

People?

Somebody creeping up on him?

Nils slowly unhooks the Husqvarna shotgun from his shoulder, raises it in both hands, ready to shoot, and releases the safety catch with his thumb. Two cartridges from Gyttorp cartridge factory are ready to fly down the barrel.

He looks around: there are juniper bushes almost everywhere here, most of them twisted and bent by the wind and no more than a yard high, but they are still dense and impossible to see through. If Nils stands up, he can look over them and see a long, long way, and nobody can creep up on him, but when he crouches down the bushes seem to grow and loom over him.

He can’t hear a sound now — if he ever did hear anything. Perhaps it was just inside his head; it’s happened before when he’s been out here alone.

Nils stands there in the grass in silence, absolutely motionless, waiting. He is breathing calmly, and has all the time in the world. The hares always come out when he waits, their nerve always goes in the end and they hurtle out of their hiding places and rush blindly away from the huntsman with their hopping gait. Then all he has to do is raise the gun calmly to his shoulder, aim at the brown shape, and press the trigger. Then walk over and pick up the faintly twitching body.

Nils is holding his breath. He’s listening.

He can’t hear anything now, but there’s a sudden breeze, and he catches the distinct aroma of stale sweat and oily fabric in his nostrils. The acrid smell of a human body, or several bodies, is carried toward him on the breeze.

There are people, very close by.

Nils swings round to the right, his finger on the trigger.

Terrified eyes are staring out of a juniper bush, only a yard or so away.

The eyes of another human being, meeting his own.

A man’s face takes shape in the darkness beneath the thick junipers, a man’s face gray with dirt and overshadowed with tousled hair. Behind the head is a body pressing itself into the ground, dressed in bulky green clothes. A uniform, Nils realizes.

The man is a soldier. A foreign soldier, with neither a helmet nor a gun.

Nils is holding the shotgun in front of him; he can feel his heart pounding, right to the tips of his fingers. He raises the barrel an inch or two.

“Come out,” he says loudly.

The soldier opens his mouth and says something. It isn’t Swedish, at least no Swedish that Nils has ever heard. It’s a foreign language. It sounds like German.

“What?” Nils says quickly. “What are you saying?”

The soldier slowly raises his hands — he has dirty, cracked hands — and at that moment Nils realizes he is not alone in his hiding place. Behind him beneath the juniper bushes, another staring man in a dirty uniform is pressing himself down into the grass. They both have a hunted look, as if they were running away from terrible memories.

“Bitte nicht schiessen,” whispers the soldier closest to Nils.