Echoes From the Dead

13

Julia didn’t even remember drinking the first glass of wine. She’d seen Astrid pour it out in front of her at the table in Astrid’s kitchen, seen the red liquid swirling around in the glass and had reached out her hand in anticipation — then suddenly the glass was standing empty on the table. She had the taste of wine in her mouth and a warming dose of alcohol spreading through her body, and the feeling that she had become reacquainted with an old, dear friend.

Outside Astrid’s kitchen window the sun was going down, and Julia’s legs were aching after a long bike ride along the coast.

“Would you like another glass?” asked Astrid.

“Yes, please,” said Julia, as calmly and evenly as she could manage. “That was lovely.”

She would of course have drunk the wine even if it had tasted of vinegar.

She tried to drink the second glass much more slowly. She took just a couple of sips, then placed it back on the table and breathed out.

“Difficult day?” asked Astrid.

“Quite difficult,” said Julia.

But in fact nothing much had happened.

She’d cycled north along the coast to the neighboring village of Långvik and had lunch there. And after that she’d been told by an old egg seller on a little farm that her son Jens had been murdered. Not just dead and buried long ago — murdered.

“Quite a difficult day,” said Julia again, and emptied her second glass of wine.

The sky had been clear and full of stars the previous evening as Julia got ready for another night alone in the boathouse.

The stars felt like her only friends here by the deserted shore. The moon dangled like a splinter of gray-white bone in the east, but Julia had stood down on the coal-black shore looking at the stars for half an hour before she went up to the boathouse. From there she could see another reassuring light: the outside light at Astrid’s house on the opposite side of the road. The lights of the inhabited houses to the north and south along the coast were distant and almost as faint as the glow of the stars, but Astrid’s brightly burning light showed that there were other people out there in the darkness.

Julia had fallen asleep, unusually quickly and calmly, and had woken up feeling rested eight hours later to the sound of the waves moving back and forth on the shore, almost in time with her own breathing.

The rocky landscape was peaceful, and she had opened the door and looked at the waves without thinking of fragments of bone.

She went up to Gerlof’s cottage to wash and make some breakfast, and when she took a walk around the yard afterward she found an old bike behind the toolshed. Julia assumed it was Lena’s. It was rusty and needed oiling, but there was plenty of air left in the tires.

That was when she had decided to cycle northward to Långvik for lunch. In Långvik she would try to find an old man called Lambert, and apologize for having hit him many years earlier.

The coast road to the north was dusty and stony and full of deep holes, but it was possible to cycle along it. And the landscape was just as beautiful as it had always been, with the alvar on the right and the glittering water a few yards below the edge of the cliff on the left. Julia avoided looking over toward the far end of the quarry when she cycled past; she didn’t want to know if the pools of blood were still there.

After that her cycling trip was pure enjoyment, with the sun on one side and the wind at her back.

Långvik was five kilometers north of Stenvik, but it was bigger, and a completely different kind of village. There was a proper area for swimming with a sandy beach, a marina for pleasure boats, several bigger apartment houses in the center, and developments of summer cottages both at the north and south end of the village.

PLOTS FOR SALE it said on a sign by the side of the road. Building was still going on in Långvik: fences and markers and newly laid gravel tracks ran out onto the alvar, coming to an end among huge pallets of tiles encased in plastic and piles of treated timber.

There was also a harbor hotel, of course, running the length of the sandy beach and three stories high, with a big restaurant.

Julia ate her lunch of pasta in the restaurant with a vague feeling of nostalgia. She had danced here at the beginning of the sixties. The hotel had been smaller when Julia was a teenager, cycling there from Stenvik with her friends, but it had felt quite grand even then. There had been a big wooden veranda above the beach, and that was where they’d danced till midnight. American and English rock music, interwoven with the sound of the waves out in the darkness in the gaps between records. The smell of sweat, aftershave, and cigarettes. Julia had drunk her first glass of wine here in Långvik, and sometimes she’d had a lift home on a puttering moped late at night. Full speed through the darkness, no helmet, with a deep conviction that life could only get more and more fantastic.

The veranda was gone now, and the hotel had been enlarged, with bright, spacious conference rooms and its own swimming pool.

After lunch Julia had started to read the book Gerlof had given her, the one with the title Öland Crimes. In the chapter entitled “The Murderer Who Got Away,” she had read about Nils Kant and what he had done one summer’s day in 1945 out on the alvar, and what happened after that:

When the waitress came to clear the table, Julia closed the book and looked pensively out over the deserted beach below the hotel.

The story of Nils Kant was interesting, but he was dead and buried, and she still didn’t know why Gerlof thought it was so important for her to read about him.

“Can I pay you now?” said Julia to the waitress.

“Yes, of course. That’ll be forty-two kronor.”

The waitress was young, probably not even twenty yet, and she looked as if she enjoyed her job.

“Are you open all year round?” asked Julia as she handed over the money.

She was surprised that there were still so many people around in Långvik in general and at the harbor hotel in particular, even though it was autumn.

“From November to March we’re only open on weekends, for conferences,” said the waitress.

She took the money and opened the wallet around her waist to pick out some one-krona pieces.

“Keep the change,” said Julia; she glanced again out at the gray water outside the window, then went on: “Another thing I was wondering... Do you know if there’s anyone here in Långvik called Lambert? Lambert, and then something ending in — son... Svensson or Nilsson or Karlsson. Is there a Lambert here?”

The waitress looked thoughtful and shook her head. “Lambert?” she said. “It’s a name you’d remember, but I don’t think I’ve heard it.”

She was too young to know about Långvik’s older residents, thought Julia. She nodded and got up, but the waitress said suddenly:

“Ask Gunnar. Gunnar Ljunger. He’s the one who owns this hotel. He knows nearly everybody in Långvik.” She turned and pointed. “You go out through the main entrance, then left, then along to the side of the hotel. That’s where the office is — he should be there now.”

Julia thanked her and left the restaurant. She’d drunk ice water with her lunch today; it was starting to become a habit. It was nice to have a clear head as she walked out into the cold air of the hotel parking lot, even if a wine-induced sense of calm might have helped if she was going to see Lambert again...

Lambert Svensson or Nilsson or Karlsson.

Julia ran a hand through her hair and went around the side of the hotel. There was a wooden door with a number of company signs next to it, and the top one said LÅNGVIK CONFERENCE CENTER. She opened the door and walked into a small reception area with a yellow carpet and big green plastic plants.

It was like walking into an office in the middle of Gothenburg. Soft music was playing in the background. A young, smartly dressed woman was sitting at the reception desk, and an equally young man in a white shirt was leaning against it. Both looked at Julia as if she had interrupted an important conversation, but the receptionist was quickest to greet her and smile. Julia said hello back, feeling slightly tense as always when she met new people, and then she asked about Gunnar Ljunger.

“Gunnar?” said the receptionist, looking at the man by her desk. “Is he back from lunch?”

“He is,” said the man, nodding to Julia. “Come with me and I’ll show you.”

Julia followed him along a short corridor with a half-open door at the end. He knocked and pushed it open at the same time.

“Dad?” he said. “You’ve got a visitor.”

“Okay,” said a deep male voice. “Come in.”

The office wasn’t particularly large, but the view over the beach and the Baltic through the picture window was glorious. The hotel owner, Gunnar Ljunger, was sitting at the desk; he was a tall man with a gray beard and bushy gray eyebrows, and he was tapping away on a calculator. He was wearing a white shirt with suspenders, and a brown jacket was draped over the back of the chair behind him. On the table next to the calculator was an open copy of Ölands-Posten, and Ljunger appeared to be looking through the paper and doing his calculations at the same time.

“Hi,” he said, glancing up at Julia.

“Hi.”

“How can I help?”

Ljunger smiled and carried on tapping numbers into his calculator.

“I’ve just got one question,” said Julia, stepping into the room. “I’m looking for Lambert.”

“Lambert?”

“Lambert in Långvik... Lambert Karlsson, I think his name is.”

“That would be Lambert Nilsson,” said Ljunger. “There’s no other Lambert here in Långvik.”

“That’s it... Nilsson, that’s his name,” said Julia quickly.

“But Lambert’s dead,” said Ljunger, shaking his head. “He died five or six years ago.”

“Oh.”

Julia felt a quick stab of disappointment, but she had partly expected that answer. Lambert had looked old back in the seventies, that afternoon all those years ago when he had come chugging along on his moped to find out what had happened to her son.

“His younger brother Sven-Olof is still alive, of course,” added Ljunger. “He lives up on the hill, behind the pizzeria; Lambert used to live there too. Sven-Olof sells eggs, so look for a house with hens in the yard.”

“Thanks.”

“If you’re going there, tell Sven-Olof from me that it’s even cheaper now to sign up to the city water supply,” said Lunger with a smile. “He’s the only one in the whole of Långvik who still thinks a well of his own is best.”

“Okay,” said Julia.

“Are you staying with us?” asked Ljunger.

“No, but I used to come here to the dances when I was young... I’m staying over in Stenvik. My name is Julia Davidsson.”

“Related to old Gerlof?”

“I’m his daughter.”

“Really?” said Ljunger. “Give him my best, then. He’s made several ships in bottles for us, for the restaurant. We’d really like some more.”

“I’ll tell him that.”

“It’s lovely over there in Stenvik, isn’t it?” mused Ljunger. “Nice and peaceful, with the quarry closed and all those empty cottages.” He smiled. “Of course, we’ve taken a different approach up here... expanding, going for tourism and golf and conferences. We think it’s the only way to keep the coastal villages in northern Öland alive.”

Julia nodded, with some hesitation. “It does seem to be working,” she said.

Should Stenvik have invested in tourism as well? Julia wondered about that as she left the hotel office and walked across the windy parking lot. There was no answer, because by now Långvik was so far ahead they’d never catch up. It would be impossible to build a beach hotel or pizzeria in Stenvik. The village would remain more or less deserted for most of the year, livening up for just a couple of months in the summer when the visitors came, and there was nothing that could be done about it.

She walked past a gas station by the harbor and continued along the wide village street past the pizzeria.

The street curved inland and up a hill, and now she had the wind at her back. At the top was a grove of trees and behind it a wall surrounding a yard containing a small whitewashed house and a stone henhouse with its own enclosure.

There was no sign of any hens, but a wooden sign by the gate proclaimed EGGS FOR SALE.

Julia opened the gate and walked along a path made of rough limestone slabs. She passed a water pump painted green, and remembered what Gunnar Ljunger at the beach hotel had said about the city water supply.

The door of the house was closed, but there was a bell. When Julia had pressed it there was silence for a few moments, then a thudding noise. The door opened. An elderly man looked out, thin and wrinkled, with fine, silvery hair combed over his bald pate.

“Afternoon,” he said.

“Afternoon,” said Julia.

“Did you want some eggs?”

The old man appeared to be in the middle of his lunch, because he was still chewing.

Julia nodded. No problem, she could buy some eggs.

“Is your name Sven-Olof?” she asked, without the usual unpleasant feeling of tension she got whenever she met someone new.

Perhaps she was beginning to get used to meeting strangers here on Öland.

“It is indeed,” said the man, clambering into a pair of big black rubber boots standing just inside the door. “How many would you like?”

“Er... six should be fine.”

Sven-Olof Nilsson walked out of his home, and just before he closed the door a cat slunk silently out behind him like a coal-black shadow. It didn’t even bother looking at Julia.

“I’ll go and fetch them,” Sven-Olof told Julia.

“Fine,” she said, but as he set off toward the little henhouse, she followed him. When he opened the green door and stepped onto the earth floor she stayed on the other side of the threshold where there were no hens, just several trays of white eggs on a small table.

“I’ll just go and get some new-laid ones,” said Sven-Olof, opening a rickety unpainted door at the far end of the room and entering the coop.

The smell of the birds drifted toward Julia and she caught a glimpse of wooden shelves along the walls, but she couldn’t see much; the light in the room wasn’t switched on, and the room was almost pitch black.

“How many hens have you got?” she asked.

“Not so many these days,” said Sven-Olof. “Fifty or so... we’ll see how long I can keep them.”

A tentative clucking could be heard from inside the coop.

“I heard Lambert had died,” she said.

“What... Lambert? Yes, he died in ’87,” said Sven-Olof in the darkness.

She couldn’t understand why he didn’t put the light on, but perhaps the bulb had died.

“I met Lambert once,” said Julia, “many years ago.”

“Oh yes?” said Sven-Olof. “Well, well.”

He didn’t seem particularly interested in hearing a story about his late brother, but Julia had no choice but to continue:

“It was over in Stenvik, where I live.”

“Oh yes,” said Sven-Olof.

Julia took a step over the threshold toward him, into the darkness. The air felt dusty and stale. She could hear the hens moving nervously along the walls, but couldn’t see if they were free-range or in cages.

“My mother Ella phoned Lambert,” she said, “because we needed... we needed help looking for someone who had disappeared. He’d been gone for three days, there was no trace of him anywhere. That was when Ella started talking about Lambert... She said Lambert could find things. He was well known for it, Ella said.”

“Ella Davidsson?” said Sven-Olof.

“Yes. She phoned and Lambert came over from Långvik on an old moped the very next day.”

“Yes, he liked to help out,” said Sven-Olof, who by now was just a shadow in the coop. His quiet voice could barely be heard over the muted clucking of the hens. “Lambert found things. He would dream about them, then he would find them. He found water for people too, with a divining rod made of hazel. They often appreciated it.”

Julia nodded. “He had his own pillow with him when he came to us,” she said. “He wanted to sleep in Jens’s room, with Jens’s things around him. And we let him.”

“Yes, that’s what he did,” said Sven-Olof. “He saw things in dreams. People who’d drowned and things that had disappeared. And future events, things that were going to happen. Lambert dreamed about the day of his own death for several weeks. He said it would happen in bed in his own room, half-past two in the morning, and that his heart would stop and the ambulance wouldn’t get there in time. And that’s exactly what happened, on the very day he’d said. And the ambulance didn’t make it in time.”

“But did it always work?” said Julia. “Was he always right?”

“Not always,” replied Sven-Olof. “Sometimes he didn’t dream about anything. Or he didn’t remember his dream... That’s the way it is sometimes, I suppose. And he never got any names, everybody in his dreams was nameless.”

“But when he saw something?” said Julia. “Was he always right then?”

“Almost always. People trusted him.”

Julia took a couple of steps forward. She had to tell him.

“I hadn’t slept for three days by that night when your brother turned up on his moped,” she said quietly. “But I couldn’t sleep that night either. I lay awake listening to him getting into the little bed in Jens’s room. I could hear the springs squeaking when he moved. Then it went quiet, but I still couldn’t get to sleep... When he got up at seven the next morning, I was sitting in the kitchen waiting for him.”

The hens clucked uneasily around her, but there was no comment from Sven-Olof.

“Lambert had dreamed about my son,” she went on. “I could see it in his face when he came into the kitchen with his pillow under his arm. He looked at me, and when I asked him he said it was true, he’d dreamed about Jens. He looked so sad... I’m sure he was intending to tell me more, but I just couldn’t cope with hearing it. I struck him and screamed at him to get out. My father Gerlof went out with him to the gate where his moped was, and I stood there in the kitchen sobbing and listening to him drive away.” She paused and sighed. “That was the only time I met Lambert. Unfortunately.”

The henhouse fell silent. Even the hens had settled down.

“That boy...” said Sven-Olof in the darkness. “Was it that terrible tragedy...? The little boy who disappeared in Stenvik?”

“That was my son Jens,” said Julia, longing desperately for a glass of wine. “He’s still missing.”

Sven-Olof didn’t answer.

“I’d really like to know... Did Lambert ever talk about what he dreamed that night?”

“There’s five eggs here,” said a voice from the darkness. “I can’t find any more.”

Julia realized Sven-Olof had no intention of answering any questions.

She breathed out, a deep, heavy sigh.

“I have nothing,” she said to herself. “I have nothing.”

Her eyes had gradually begun to grow accustomed to the darkness, and she could see Sven-Olof standing motionless in the middle of the coop looking at her, clutching five eggs to his chest.

“Your brother must have said something, Sven-Olof,” she said. “At some point he must have said something to you about what he dreamed that night. Did he?”

Sven-Olof coughed. “He only spoke about the boy once.”

It was Julia’s turn to be silent now. She was holding her breath.

“He’d read an article in Ölands-Posten,” said Sven-Olof. “It must have been five years after it happened. We were reading it at breakfast. But there was nothing new in the paper.”

“There never has been,” said Julia, wearily. “There was never anything new to say, but they kept on writing anyway.”

“We were sitting at the kitchen table and I was reading the paper first,” said Sven-Olof. “Then Lambert read it. And when I saw that he was reading about the boy, I asked him what he thought. And then Lambert lowered the paper and said the boy was dead.”

Julia closed her eyes. She nodded silently.

“In the sound?” she asked.

“No. Lambert said it had happened out on the alvar. He’d been killed on the alvar.”

“Killed,” said Julia, feeling an icy chill sweep across her skin.

“A man had done it, Lambert said. The very day the boy disappeared, a man who was full of hatred had killed him on the alvar. Then he had placed the boy in a grave beside a stone wall.”

A hen flapped nervously somewhere by the wall.

“Lambert didn’t say any more,” said Sven-Olof, when Julia didn’t speak. “Not about the boy, or the man.”

No names, thought Julia. Everybody was nameless in Lambert’s dreams.

Sven-Olof was moving again. He came out of the coop with the five eggs in his arms, looking anxiously at Julia as if he were afraid she might hit him as well.

Julia breathed out.

“So now I know,” she said. “Thank you.”

“Do you need a box?” asked Sven-Olof.

Julia knew.

She could try and convince herself that Lambert had been wrong, or that his brother had just made it up, but there was no point. She knew.

On the way home from Långvik she stopped on the coast road above the deserted shore, watching the water turn to foam as the waves scurried in down below, and she wept for over ten minutes.

She knew, and the certainty was terrible. It was as if only a few days had passed since Jens’s disappearance, as if all her internal wounds were still bleeding. Now she was starting to let him into her heart as a dead person, little by little. It had to happen slowly, otherwise the grief would drown her.

Jens was dead.

She knew it. But still she wanted to see her son again, see his body. If that wasn’t possible, then she at least wanted to know what had happened to him. That was why she was here.

Her tears dried in the wind. After a while Julia got back on her bike and cycled slowly on her way.

By the quarry she met Astrid, out walking the dog; she invited Julia back for dinner and didn’t comment on Julia’s eyes, puffy with weeping.

Astrid served cutlets, boiled potatoes, and red wine. Julia ate a little and drank a good deal more, more than she should have done. But after three glasses of wine the idea that Jens had been dead for a long time was not quite so intrusive, it was merely a dull ache in her breast. And there had never been any hope, after all, not after the first days had passed with no sign of life. No hope...

“So you went to Långvik today?”

Julia’s brooding thoughts were interrupted, and she nodded.

“Yes. And yesterday I was in Marnäs,” she said quickly, to get away from the thought of Långvik and Lambert Nilsson’s accurate dreams.

“Did anything happen up there?” asked Astrid, tipping the last of the wine into Julia’s glass.

“Not much,” said Julia. “I went to the churchyard and saw Nils Kant’s grave. Gerlof thought I ought to see it.”

“Nils’s grave,” repeated Astrid, lifting her wineglass.

“One thing I was wondering,” said Julia. “You might not be able to tell me, but those German soldiers Nils Kant killed on the alvar... Did many of them come to Öland?”

“Not that I know of,” said Astrid. “There were maybe a hundred or so who managed to make it to Sweden alive from the war in the Baltic countries, but most of them came ashore along the coast of Småland. They wanted desperately to go home, of course, or to travel on to England. But Sweden was afraid of Stalin, and sent them back to the Soviet Union. It was a cowardly thing to do. But you must have read about all this?”

“Yes, a little bit... but it was a long time ago,” said Julia.

She had a vague memory from her school days of reading about war refugees from Russia, but at the time she hadn’t been particularly interested in Swedish history, or the history of Öland.

“What else did you do in Marnäs?” said Astrid.

“Well... I had lunch with the policeman there,” said Julia. “Lennart Henriksson.”

“He’s a nice man,” said Astrid. “Very stylish.”

Julia nodded.

“Did you talk to Lennart about Nils Kant?” asked Astrid.

Julia shook her head, then thought about it and added:

“Well, I did mention that I’d been to see Kant’s grave. But we didn’t talk about it any more.”

“It’s probably best not to mention him to Lennart again,” said Astrid. “It upsets him a bit.”

“Upsets him?” said Julia. “But why?”

“It’s an old story,” said Astrid, taking a gulp of her wine. “Lennart is Kurt Henriksson’s son.”

She looked at Julia with a serious expression, as if this should make everything clear.

But Julia just shook her head uncomprehendingly.

“Who?” she said.

“The police constable in Marnäs,” explained Astrid. “Or the district superintendent, as he was called in those days.”

“And what did he do?”

“He was the one who was supposed to arrest Nils Kant for shooting the Germans,” said Astrid.