Echoes From the Dead

Öland, May 1945

A fat, green, shimmering fly comes buzzing across the alvar in the sunshine. It zigzags through the air between juniper bushes and plants, and finally lands heavily in the center of an outstretched palm. The fly’s wings stop moving, and it extends its legs and holds on tight, ready to take off at the least sign of danger, but the hand lies motionless on the grass.

Nils Kant is still standing there with his shotgun raised, looking at the fly resting its wings on the German soldier’s hand.

The soldier is lying on his back on the grass. His eyes are open, his face is turned to the side, and it’s almost possible to believe that he’s looking at the fly in surprise. But half the soldier’s neck and his left shoulder have been blasted away by Nils’s shot, the blood has soaked the jacket of his uniform, and the soldier can’t see anything.

Nils breathes out and listens.

Without even the buzzing of the fly, there is absolute silence on the alvar, even though Nils’s ears are still ringing slightly from the two blasts of the shotgun. The shots must have echoed far and wide, but Nils doesn’t think anyone has heard them. There are no tracks nearby, and people seldom venture this far out onto the alvar. Nils feels very calm.

After the first shot, after the what-was-that? shot that felled the first German, it was as if two invisible hands had taken hold of his shaking shoulders and steadied them. The blood had stopped pounding in his fingers, his hands had stopped shaking, and he had felt more secure than ever as he pointed the Husqvarna shotgun at the other German. His gaze was direct, his finger just nudging the trigger, the barrel’s aim steady. If this was war, or almost war, it was a lot like hunting hares.

“Give that to me,” he said again.

He reached out his hand and the German understood. With a cautious flick of his hand, he passed over the little sparkling gemstone he had been holding.

Nils closed his fingers around the stone without looking down or lowering the gun and pushed it into his back pocket. He nodded to himself and slowly curled his finger around the trigger.

The German raised his hands helplessly and realized at that moment how hopeless the situation was; he bent his knees and opened his mouth, but Nils had no intention of listening to him.

“Heil Hitler,” he said quietly, and fired the shotgun.

A final explosion and then silence. It was that simple.

Now both of the soldiers are lying there beside the juniper bushes, one half-thrown backwards with his back arched, lying on top of the other one. The fly crawls up the index finger of the soldier on top, extends its wings, and takes off without any effort whatsoever. Nils follows it with his eyes until it flies around a big juniper bush and is gone.

Nils takes a step forward, places one boot against the soldier on top, and pushes. The body slowly slides off the soldier underneath and settles on the grass. That looks better. He could arrange the soldiers even more nicely, like for a real wake, but that will have to do.

Nils looks at the bodies. The soldiers look old, but they are his own age, and as they lie there he wonders again who they are.

Where do they come from? He didn’t understand them, but he’s fairly sure they were speaking German. Their uniforms are muddy and ragged, with frayed seams and worn, shiny knees. Neither has a gun, but the one who was lying on top had a green cloth bag over his shoulder which was thrown to one side when he fell. Nils hadn’t noticed it until now.

He bends down and picks up the bag, which is dry and almost completely free of blood. He opens the flap and sees a whole pile of different objects: a couple of cans with no labels, a small knife with a worn wooden handle, a bundle of letters tied up with string, half a loaf of dry black bread. A few bits of rope, a couple of grubby brown bandages, a small compass made of unpolished brass.

Nils takes out the knife and puts it in his pocket, as a memento. It probably isn’t worth anything.

There’s something else in the bag too: a little metal box, slightly smaller than the butt of a gun. Nils picks it up; something rattles inside. He presses it with his thumb and opens the lid.

The box is full of sparkling gemstones. He tips them out into his hand, feeling their hardness and their polished surfaces. Some are as small as gunshot, some as big as teeth, more than twenty altogether. And next to them is something bigger, wrapped in a piece of green cloth. He takes it out and opens up the fabric.

It’s a crucifix made of pure gold, as big as the palm of his hand, with a row of glittering red gemstones inlaid in the gold. Beautiful. He looks at the cross for a long time, before wrapping the cloth around it again.

Nils closes the lid of the box and drops his spoils of war in his rucksack. He closes the bag and places it beside its dead owner. There really isn’t anything more he can do here. He ought to bury the soldiers, of course, but he has nothing to dig with.

The bodies can lie where they are, protected by the bushes, then maybe he can come back with a proper shovel another day. But he reaches out and closes their eyes, so they at least won’t have to lie there staring up at the sky.

Then he straightens his back; it’s time to go home. He shrugs on his rucksack, lifts the shotgun, still warm and smelling of powder, and sets off westward toward Stenvik. The sun is shining between the clouds.

After fifty steps or so he turns around for a moment and looks back over the bright grassy plain. The hollow among the juniper bushes is in the shade and the soldiers’ green uniforms melt into the landscape, but a motionless white hand is sticking up out of the grass, clearly visible between the crooked trunks of the junipers.

Nils keeps on walking. He starts wondering what he’s going to tell his mother, how he’s going to explain the drops of blood on his trousers. He wants to tell her everything, not to have any secrets about what he does out on the alvar, but sometimes he feels there are things she doesn’t really want to hear about. Perhaps his battle with the soldiers is one of those things. He needs to think about that.

And so he thinks, but doesn’t come up with a good answer. And now he’s getting close to the road that leads down to Stenvik. It’s deserted, and he walks on.

No, the road is not completely deserted. Somebody is coming toward him just where the road curves, a few hundred yards from the first houses in the village.

Nils’s first impulse is to hide, but all he can see behind him are small, stunted juniper bushes. And anyway, why should he run and hide? He’s just been part of something big out there on the alvar, something earth-shattering, and he has no need to be afraid of anyone anymore.

Nils stops behind the stone wall a few yards from the village road and watches the figure as it approaches.

Suddenly he sees that it’s Maja Nyman.

Maja, the girl from Stenvik that he’s looked at and thought about, but never spoken to. He can’t talk to her now either, but she’s getting closer and closer, smiling as if this were just an ordinary summer’s day. She’s seen Nils, and although she doesn’t increase her pace, it seems to him that she straightens her back, lifts her chin a bit, and sticks out her chest.

Nils stands beside the road as if he were frozen to the spot, and watches Maja stop on the other side of the low stone wall.

She looks at him. He looks back at her but can find no words, not even to say hello. The silence is made all the more unbearable by the joyous song of a nightingale rising from the ditch along by the wall.

In the end Maja opens her mouth.

“Have you shot something, Nils?” she asks cheerfully.

He almost reels backwards at the question. At first he thinks Maja knows everything, but then he realizes she isn’t talking about the soldiers. He has a shotgun; he’s usually carrying the hares he’s shot when he gets back to the village.

He shakes his head. “No,” he says. “No hares.” He takes a step backwards, feeling the weight of the little metal box in his rucksack, and says, “I have to... go now. To my mother, in the village.”

“Aren’t you taking the village road?” asks Maja.

“No.” Nils is still moving backwards. “I can get there quicker across the alvar.”

The words are coming more and more easily; he can actually talk to Maja Nyman. He’ll talk to her some more another day, but not today.

“Bye, then,” he says, and turns away without waiting for an answer.

He can sense that she is standing there watching him, and he walks directly away from the village road, counting up to two hundred steps, then he turns off and heads back down toward the village.

The whole time he can hear the faint rattle of the metal box moving around in the bottom of his rucksack, and he realizes he daren’t take it home with him. He must be careful with his spoils of war.

After a few hundred steps more, when the village road has disappeared behind the juniper bushes, a little pile of stones appears in front of him.

The old memorial cairn. It’s a marker Nils almost always walks past on his way to and from Stenvik, but now he goes over to it and stops. He looks at the pile of large and small stones, thinks for a moment, and looks around.

The alvar is completely deserted. The only sound is the wind.

An idea is growing within him, and he shrugs off the rucksack and sets it down. He takes out the box containing the gemstones, holds it in his hand, and stands right beside the cairn.

Almost directly to the east lies Marnäs church. Nils can see the church tower sticking up, like a little black arrow on the horizon. He orientates himself by the church tower, positions himself as if he were standing at attention, and takes a big stride away from the cairn. Then he begins to dig.

He lifts the top layer of turf in small pieces and then digs down into the ground with his hands and the German’s little knife. The rock isn’t far below the surface here; the layer of soil is shallow all over the alvar.

Nils scrapes away the soil to make the hole bigger, hacking and digging and looking around him all the time.

When he has made a broad hole in the ground, about a foot deep, Nils has already hit the rock, but it’s deep enough. He takes the metal box and places it carefully in the bottom of the hole, then lifts several flat stones from the cairn and builds a little vault around it. He quickly fills in the hollow, packing the soil down as hard as he can with the palm of his hand.

He devotes most of his time to replacing the pieces of turf on top of the soil — it’s important that everything looks the same as usual around the cairn.

It takes a long time to get the turf right, but in the end he gets up and looks at the spot from different directions. The ground looks untouched, he thinks, but his hands are dirty when he puts his rucksack back on.

He sets off toward home again.

He’ll tell his mother about the encounter with the Germans, he decides, but he’ll tell her carefully so she doesn’t get worried. He won’t tell her about the gemstones he’s hidden. Not yet, that will be a surprise for her. Right now the spoils of war are hidden treasure that only he knows about.

He finally climbs over the stone wall and is back on the village road, but closer to the village than when he met Maja. He’s almost back in Stenvik.

Before he reaches home, two men in heavy boots come up onto the road from the sea and trudge past him. They are eel fishermen, carrying a freshly tarred hoop net between them, their hands blackened.

Neither of them says hello; both look away when they are passing Nils. He doesn’t remember their names, but it doesn’t matter. Their rudeness doesn’t matter either.

Nils Kant is bigger than them; he’s bigger than the whole of Stenvik. Today he has proved that, during the battle out on the alvar.

It’s almost dusk. He opens the gate to his own house and goes into the silent garden, striding proudly up the stone path. The empty garden is flourishing and turning green. The grass scents the air.

Everything looks just as it did this morning when he left home to hunt for hares — but Nils himself is a new person.