Echoes From the Dead

Öland, May 1945

Nils Kant is standing 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 of 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 gray-green 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.

“Nicht 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 England fahren,” 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 soldier — even 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.

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

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.