Echoes From the Dead

2

Gerlof Davidsson was sitting in his room at the residential home for senior citizens in Marnäs, watching the sun go down outside the window. The kitchen bell had just fallen silent after ringing for the first time, and it would soon be time for dinner. He would get up and walk to the dining room. His life wasn’t over.

If he’d still been living in the fishing village he came from, Stenvik, he could have sat by the shore watching the sun sink slowly into Kalmar Sound. But Marnäs was on the east coast, which meant that each evening he watched the sun disappear behind a grove of birch trees, between the residential home and Marnäs church in the west. At this time of year, in October, the branches of the birch trees were almost completely bare, and looked like slender arms reaching out toward the orange disc of the sinking sun.

The twilight hour had arrived — the time for bloodcurdling stories.

When he had been a child in Stenvik, this had been the time when the work in the fields and around the boathouses was over for the day. Everyone would gather in the cottages as the evening drew in, but the paraffin lamps wouldn’t be lit just yet. The older people would sit there in the twilight hour, discussing what had been achieved during the day and what had happened elsewhere in the village. And from time to time they would tell the children a story.

Gerlof always thought the scariest stories were the best. Tales of ghosts, dire warnings, trolls, and evil deeds in the Öland wilderness. Or tales of how ships were driven toward the shore along the stony coastline and smashed to pieces against the rocks.

The kitchen bell rang for the second time.

A boat captain who had been caught up in the storm and drifted too close to the shore would sooner or later hear the rocks on the seabed scraping against his keel, louder and louder, and that was the beginning of the end. Sometimes he might be skillful enough and fortunate enough to drop an anchor and slowly haul himself against the wind back into clear water again, but most boats couldn’t move once they’d gone aground. Usually the captains had to abandon their vessels quickly in order to save themselves and their crews, trying to make their way onto dry land through the crashing waves; then they would stand there on the shore, soaking wet and frozen to the marrow, watching the storm drive their boats harder and harder aground until the waves began to smash them to pieces.

A small cargo boat that had run aground was like a battered coffin.

The kitchen bell rang for the last time, and Gerlof grabbed the edge of the wooden desk and pulled himself up. He could feel Sjögren coming to life in his limbs. He could feel it, and it was painful. He considered the wheelchair standing at the foot of his bed, but he had never used it indoors, and he had no intention of doing so now. But he picked up his cane in his right hand, gripping it tightly as he made his way toward the hallway, where his outdoor clothes hung on their hangers and his shoes were neatly arranged. He stopped, leaned on the cane, then opened the door to the corridor. He went out and looked around.

He could hear shuffling steps along the corridor, and saw them coming along one after the other: his fellow residents. They came slowly, with the help of canes or walkers. The residents of the Marnäs senior center gathering to eat.

Some of them greeted each other quietly; others kept their eyes fixed on the floor the whole time.

So much knowledge moving along this corridor, thought Gerlof as he joined the tired stream on its way into the dining room.

“Good evening, lovely to see you all!” said Boel, who was in charge of their section, smiling among the food trolleys outside the kitchen.

Everybody sat down carefully in their usual places around the tables.

So much knowledge. Around Gerlof sat a shoemaker, a churchwarden, and a farmer, all with experience and knowledge that nobody was interested in anymore. And then there was Gerlof himself; he could still tie a bowline knot with his eyes closed in just a few seconds, to no purpose whatsoever.

“Could be a frost tonight, Gerlof,” said Maja Nyman.

“Yes, the wind’s coming from the north,” agreed Gerlof.

Maja was sitting next to him, tiny and wrinkled and skinny, but brighter than anyone else in there. She smiled at Gerlof, and he smiled back. She was one of the few who could pronounce his name correctly, Yairloff.

Maja came from Stenvik but had married a farmer and gone to live northeast of Marnäs in the 1950s; Gerlof himself had moved to Borgholm when he became a boat captain. Before he and Maja met up again in the residential home, they hadn’t seen each other for almost forty years.

Gerlof picked up a piece of crispbread and began to eat, and as usual he was grateful that he could still chew. No hair, poor eyesight, no strength, and aching muscles — but at least he still had his own teeth.

The aroma of cabbage was spreading from the kitchen. There was cabbage soup on the menu today, and Gerlof picked up his spoon as he waited for the food trolleys to arrive.

After dinner most of the residents would settle down to watch TV for the rest of the evening.

These were different times. All the stranded ships had disappeared from Öland’s shores, and no one told stories in the twilight hour any longer.

Dinner was over. Gerlof was back in his room.

He placed his cane beside the bookshelf and sat down at the desk again. It was evening now outside the window. If he leaned over the desk and pressed his nose right up against the glass, he would just be able to catch a glimpse of the fields north of Marnäs and beyond them the shore and the dark sea. The Baltic, his former workplace. But he couldn’t manage such gymnastic contortions any longer, and had to content himself with looking out across the birch trees behind the old people’s home.

It wasn’t called an “old people’s home” by those who decided these things any longer, but of course that’s what it was. They were always trying to come up with new words that would sound better, but it was still a collection of old folk bundled together, far too many of whom simply sat around waiting for death.

A black notebook lay beside a pile of newspapers on the desk, and he reached out and picked it up. After sitting at his desk just staring out of the window for the whole of his first week at the home, Gerlof had pulled himself together and gone into the village to buy the notebook in the little grocery store. Then he’d begun to write.

The notebook consisted of both thoughts and reminders. He wrote down things that had to be done, and crossed them out when they’d been accomplished, except for the reminder SHAVE! which was written at the top of the first page and was never crossed out, as it was a daily task. Shaving was necessary, and was something he’d remembered to do earlier today.

This was the first thought in the book:

This was a worthwhile quotation from Proverbs, chapter sixteen. Gerlof had started to read the Bible at the age of twelve, and had never stopped.

At the back of the book were three lines that hadn’t been crossed out. They read:

He didn’t need to pay the bills for the telephone, newspapers, the upkeep of his wife Ella’s grave over in the churchyard, and his monthly fees for staying at the home until next week.

And Julia was on her way, she’d finally promised to come. He mustn’t forget about that. He hoped Julia would stay on Öland for a while. After all these years she was still full of sorrow, and he wanted to take her away from that.

The last reminder was just as important, and also had to do with Julia. Ernst was a stonemason in Stenvik, one of the few people who lived there all year round these days. He and Gerlof and their mutual friend John spoke on the telephone every week. Sometimes they even sat there in the twilight hour telling each other old stories, something Gerlof really appreciated, even though he’d usually heard them already.

But one evening a few months earlier, Ernst had come to Marnäs with a new story: the one about the murder of Gerlof’s grandchild, Jens.

Gerlof wasn’t at all ready to hear the story — he didn’t really want to think about little Jens — but Ernst had sat over there on the bed and insisted on telling his tale.

“I’ve been giving some thought to how it happened,” said Ernst quietly.

“Oh yes,” said Gerlof, sitting at the desk.

“I just don’t believe your grandchild went down to the sea and drowned,” Ernst had said. “I think perhaps he went out onto the alvar in the fog. And I think he met a murderer out there.”

“A murderer?” said Gerlof.

Ernst had fallen silent, his callused hands folded on his knee.

“But who?” Gerlof had asked.

“Nils Kant,” said Ernst. “I believe it was Nils Kant he met in the fog.”

Gerlof had just stared at him, but Ernst’s gaze had been serious.

“I really believe that’s what happened,” he said. “I believe Nils Kant came home from the sea, from wherever he’d been, and caused even more misery.”

He hadn’t really said any more on that occasion. A short story in the twilight hour, but Gerlof hadn’t been able to forget it. He hoped Ernst would soon come back and tell him more.

Gerlof kept flicking through his notebook. There were far fewer thoughts noted down than reminders, and soon he’d got to the end.

He closed the book. He couldn’t do much more at the desk, but remained there anyway, watching the swaying birch trees in the darkness. They reminded him a little of sails in a stiff breeze, and from that thought it wasn’t far to the memory of himself standing on deck in autumn winds like these, watching the coast of Öland slipping slowly by, either at close quarters with its rocks and cottages, or as just a dark strip along the horizon — and just as he was picturing the scene, the telephone on the desk suddenly rang.

The sound was shrill and loud in the silent room. Gerlof let it ring once more. He could often sense in advance who was calling; this time he wasn’t sure.

He lifted the receiver after the third ring.

“Davidsson.”

No one answered.

The line was open, and he could hear the steady hiss of electrons or whatever it was that whirled around the telephone cables, but the person holding the receiver didn’t say a word.

Gerlof thought he knew what the person wanted anyway.

“This is Gerlof,” he said, “and I received it. If it’s the sandal you’re calling about.”

He thought he could hear the sound of quiet breathing on the other end.

“It came in the mail a few days ago,” he said.

Silence.

“I think it was you who sent it,” said Gerlof. “Why did you do that?”

Only silence.

“Where did you find it?”

The only thing he could hear was the hissing noise. When Gerlof had been pressing the receiver to his ear for long enough, it began to feel as if he were sitting there all alone in the entire universe, listening to the silence of black outer space. Or to the sea.

After thirty seconds, someone gave a deep cough.

Then there was a click. The receiver at the other end had been put down.