Echoes From the Dead

3

Julia’s older sister, Lena Lundqvist, was clutching the keys firmly and looking nervously at the car. She glanced briefly at Julia, then looked back at their shared car.

It was a small red Ford. Not new, but still with shiny paintwork and good summer tires. It was parked on the street, next to the driveway of Lena and her husband Richard’s tall brick house in Torslanda; they had a big garden, and although there was no sea view, they were so close to the sea that Julia thought she could smell the tang of the salt water in the air. She heard the sound of shrill laughter from one of the open windows, and realized all the children were home.

“We’re really not keen on lending it out... When did you last drive?” asked Lena.

She was still holding the car keys in one hand, her arms firmly crossed over her chest.

“Last summer,” said Julia, adding a quick reminder: “But it is my car... at least, half of it is.”

A cold, damp wind swept along the street from the sea. Lena was wearing only a thin cardigan and skirt, but she didn’t ask Julia to come inside where it was warm so they could discuss things further — and even if she had, Julia would never have agreed. Richard was bound to be inside, and she had no desire to see either him or their teenage children.

Richard was some kind of big boss at Volvo. He had his own company car, of course, as did Lena, who was head of a primary school in Hisingen. They were very fortunate.

“You don’t need it,” added Julia, her voice steady. “You’ve only had it while... while I haven’t wanted to drive.”

Lena looked at the car again. “Well, yes, but Richard’s daughter is here every other weekend, and she wants—”

“I shall pay for all the gas,” Julia interrupted her.

She wasn’t afraid of her older sister, she never had been, and she had made the decision to drive to Öland.

“Yes, I know you will, it isn’t that,” said Lena. “But it doesn’t feel right, somehow. And then there’s the insurance. Richard says—”

“I’m only going to drive to Öland in it,” said Julia. “And then back to Gothenburg again.”

Lena looked up at the house; there were lights behind the curtains in almost every room.

“Gerlof wants me to go,” Julia went on. “I spoke to him yesterday.”

“But why now?” said Lena, then went on without waiting for an answer. “And where are you going to stay? I mean, you can’t stay with him at the home — there aren’t any guest rooms there, as far as I know. And down in Stenvik we’ve closed up the cottage and the boathouse for the season...”

“I’ll sort something out,” said Julia quickly, then realized that she didn’t actually know where she was going to stay. She hadn’t even thought about it. “But I can take the car, then?”

She could sense that her sister was on the point of giving in, and wanted a quick answer before Richard came out to help his wife put off lending her the car.

“Well...” said Lena. “All right, you can borrow it then. I just need to get a few things.”

She went over to the car, opened the door, and took out some papers, a pair of sunglasses, and half a bar of Marabou chocolate.

She walked back to Julia, held out her hand, and let go of the keys. Julia caught them, then Lena handed her something else.

“Take this too,” she said. “So we can get hold of you. I just got a new one through work.”

It was a cell phone, a black one. Perhaps not the smallest model, but small enough.

“I don’t know how to use these,” said Julia.

“It’s easy. There’s a code that you key in first... here.” Lena wrote it down, along with the telephone number, on a piece of paper. “When you make a call, you just key in the whole number, with the area code, and press this green button. There’s a bit of credit left on it; when that’s gone you’ll have to pay yourself.”

“Okay.” Julia took the phone. “Thanks.”

“Right... Drive carefully,” said Lena. “Love to Dad.”

Julia nodded and walked over to the car. She got in, smelled the fragrance of her sister’s perfume, started the engine, and drove off.

It was already dusk. And as she drove through Hisingen, at twenty kilometers below the speed limit, she thought about why she and Lena could never look at each other for more than a few seconds at a time. They’d been close in the past — after all, Lena was the reason why Julia had moved to Gothenburg once upon a time — but now it was just the opposite. And things had been this bad since that Friday several years earlier when Julia had been inside Lena and Richard’s house for the last time, at a small dinner party without the children, which had ended with Richard putting his wineglass down, getting up from the table, and asking:

“Do we have to sit here constantly going over this tedious nonsense about things that happened twenty years ago? I’m just wondering. Do we have to?”

He was angry and slightly drunk and his voice was rough — despite the fact that Julia had merely mentioned Jens’s disappearance in passing, simply as the reason why she was feeling the way she was.

Lena’s voice was calm as she looked at Julia, then made the comment that had made Julia refuse to accompany her sister to Öland two years later, to help Gerlof move from the cottage in Stenvik to the residential home in Marnäs:

“He’s never coming back,” Lena had said. “I mean, everybody knows that... Jens is dead, Julia. Even you must realize that?”

Standing up and screaming hysterically at her sister across the dinner table hadn’t helped at all, but Julia had done it anyway.

Julia got home, parked the car on the street, and went inside to pack. When she had packed clothes for a ten-day stay, a few toiletries, and some books (and two bottles of red wine and some pills), she ate a sandwich and drank some water instead of wine. Then it was time to go to bed.

But once in bed she lay staring up into the darkness, unable to sleep. She got up and went into the bathroom, took a prescription pill, and went back to bed.

A little boy’s shoe. A sandal.

When she closed her eyes, she could see herself as a young mother, putting on Jens’s sandals, and that memory brought with it a black weight that settled on her breast, a heavy uncertainty that made Julia shiver under the covers.

Jens’s little shoe, after more than twenty years without a single trace of him. After all that searching on Öland, all that brooding through those sleepless nights.

The sleeping pill slowly began to work.

No more darkness now, she thought, half asleep. Help us to find him.

It was a long time before morning came, and it was still dark outside when Julia awoke. She had breakfast, then she washed up, locked the flat, and got into the car. She started the engine, switched on the windshield wipers to clear the leaves, then she was finally on her way out of the street where she lived, on her way out of the city in the sunrise and the morning traffic. The last traffic light turned to green, and she turned eastward onto the freeway, away from Gothenburg and out into the country.

She drove for the first few kilometers with the window down, letting the cold morning air blow away all trace of her sister’s perfume from the car.

Jens, I’m coming, she thought. I’m really coming, and no one can stop me now.

She knew she shouldn’t talk to him, not even silently to herself. It was unbalanced, but she’d been doing it on and off ever since Jens disappeared.

After Borås, the freeway came to an end and the houses grew smaller and more sparse. The dense fir forests of Småland crowded the road. She could have turned off and headed for an unknown destination, but the tracks into the forest looked so desolate. She drove on, heading across the country toward the east coast, and trying to take pleasure in the fact that she was undertaking a longer journey by herself than she had done for many years.

She pulled in at a service station a few kilometers from the coast to fill up with gas and to eat a few mouthfuls of a stew that was chewy and sticky and not worth the money, and then she set off again.

Toward the Öland Bridge. North of Kalmar, the bridge led to the island; it had been built over twenty years earlier, completed and opened the autumn that... That day.

She wouldn’t think about it anymore, not until she arrived.

The Öland Bridge stood tall and firm, spanning the sound, resting on broad concrete pillars, completely unaffected by the sharp gusts of wind that tore at the car. It was wide and completely straight, apart from an arched section close to the mainland, which allowed taller ships to pass beneath the road. The arch was a viewing point, and she could see the flat shape of the island. It extended along the horizon, from north to south.

She could see the alvar, the grassy plain that covered large parts of Öland. Dark, low clouds drifted by, like long airships above the landscape.

Both tourists and residents loved to go walking and bird-watching out there, but Julia didn’t like the alvar. It was too big — and there was nowhere to take shelter if the vast sky above came tumbling down.

After the bridge she drove north, toward Borgholm. The road was almost dead straight for several kilometers along the west coast, and she met few cars now that the tourist season was over. Julia kept her eyes fixed firmly on the road ahead in order to avoid looking out across the desolate alvar and the great expanse of water on the other side, and she tried not to think about a little sandal with a mended strap.

It didn’t mean anything, it didn’t have to mean anything.

The journey up to Borgholm from the bridge took almost half an hour. When she arrived, there was just one crossroads with a set of traffic lights, and she decided to turn left, down to the little town by the water.

She stopped at a cake shop at the edge of Storgatan, thus avoiding the harbor, the square, and the church; the church behind which she and her parents had lived when Gerlof had his own cargo boat and wanted to live near the harbor. Her childhood was in Borgholm. Julia had no desire to see herself running along the streets around the square like a pale ghost, a nine-year-old girl with her whole life ahead of her. She didn’t want to meet any young men, striding toward her along the street and making her think of Jens. She had enough reminders of that kind in Gothenburg.

The bell above the cake shop door tinkled.

“Afternoon.”

The girl behind the counter was blonde and pretty, and looked extremely bored. She listened to Julia with a vacant expression as she asked for two cinnamon pastries and a couple of strawberry cream cakes for herself and Gerlof.

This girl could have been her thirty years earlier, but of course Julia had moved away from the island when she was just eighteen, and had lived and worked in both Kalmar and Gothenburg before the age of twenty-two. In Gothenburg she had met Michael and gotten pregnant with Jens after just a few weeks, and much of her restlessness had disappeared then and never returned — not even after their separation.

“There aren’t many people here now,” she remarked as the girl lifted the cakes out of the glass display counter. “In the autumn, I mean.”

“No,” said the girl, without smiling.

“Do you like living here?” asked Julia.

The girl shook her head briefly. “Sometimes. But there’s nothing to do. Borgholm only comes to life in the summer.”

“Who says that?”

“Everybody,” said the girl. “People from Stockholm, anyway.” She fastened the box of cakes and handed it over. “I’m moving to Kalmar soon,” she said. “Will that be all?”

Julia nodded. She could have said that she too had worked in Borgholm as a teenager, in a café down by the harbor, and that she too had been bored, waiting for life to begin. Then all of a sudden she wanted to talk about Jens, about her sorrow and the hope that had made her come back. A little sandal in an envelope.

She said nothing. A fan was humming away; otherwise the cake shop was silent.

“Are you a tourist?” the girl asked.

“Yes... no,” said Julia. “I’m going up to Stenvik for a few days. My family has a cottage there.”

“It’s like Norrland up there now,” said the girl as she handed Julia her change. “Practically all the houses are empty. You never see a soul up there.”

It was half past three in the afternoon by the time Julia emerged from the cake shop and looked along the street. Borgholm was virtually deserted. There were a dozen or so people around, one or two cars, not much else. The huge ruined castle looked down from the hill above the town, its windows dark, empty holes.

A cold wind was sweeping along the streets as Julia walked back to the car. It was almost eerily silent.

She passed a big notice board covered in a patchwork of posters, all stuck on top of one other: American action films at the cinema in Borgholm, rock concerts in the ruined castle, and various evening classes. The posters had faded in the sun, and their corners had been chewed to pieces by the wind.

This was the first time Julia had visited the island as an adult so late in the year. During the low season, when Öland slowed down. She walked back to the car.

I’m coming now, Jens.

North of the town the dry, grassy plain of the alvar continued on both sides of the road. The road headed slowly inland from the coast, pointing straight into the flat landscape, where round, lichen-covered gray stones had been lifted from the fields and used to build long, low walls. The walls formed a gigantic pattern right across the alvar.

Julia had a slight feeling of agoraphobia out here beneath the vast sky, and longed for a glass of red wine — a longing which grew stronger as she got closer to Stenvik. At home she was trying to stop drinking every day, and she never drank when she was driving, but out here in this desolate place the bottles of wine in her bag seemed like the only interesting company she had. She wanted to lock herself in somewhere and devote all her attention to them until they were empty.

On the way north she met only two vehicles, a bus and a tractor. She drove past yellow signs bearing the names of small villages along the road, names she remembered from all those earlier journeys. She could recite them by heart, like a nursery rhyme. They were places she had only driven past for years. For her mother and father there had been only Stenvik every summer, and the holiday cottage they had built there at the end of the 1940s — many years before the tourists had discovered the village. Autumn, winter, and spring in Borgholm, but the summer had always been Stenvik for Julia. Before she went up to Marnäs to see Gerlof, she wanted to see the village again. There were bad memories up there, but many good ones too. The memory of long, hot summer days.

She saw the yellow sign from some distance away: Stenvik 1, and beneath it the word CAMPSITE crossed out with black tape. She braked and turned onto the village road, away from the alvar and down toward the sound.

After five hundred yards the first little cluster of summer cottages appeared; they were all closed up, with white blinds pulled down at the windows. Then the kiosk, where the villagers gathered in summer. Its front had been cleared of notices and adverts and pennants, and there were shutters at its windows. Next to the kiosk was a sign pointing south toward the campsite and a mini-golf course. The campsite was run by a friend of Gerlof’s, she remembered.

The road led toward the water, curved to the right along the rocky ridge above the shore, and led northward, where more closed-up cottages lined the eastern side of the road. On the other side was the shore, covered in stones and pebbles; small waves ruffled the surface of the water out in the sound.

Julia drove slowly past the old windmill, standing up above the water on its sturdy wooden base. The mill had stood there abandoned for as long as Julia could remember, but now it had turned gray and lost almost all of its red color, and all that remained of its sails was a cross of cracked wooden slats.

About a hundred yards past the windmill lay the Davidsson family’s boathouse. It looked well cared for, with red wooden walls, white windows, and tar-black roof. Someone had painted it recently. Lena and Richard?

Julia had a picture in her memory of Gerlof, sitting there mending his long nets on a stool in front of the boathouse in the summer, while she and Lena and their cousins ran about on the shore down below, the sharp smell of tar in their nostrils.

But Gerlof had been down at the boathouse cleaning his flounder nets. That day.

Now there was no one at the boathouse. Dry grass quivered in the wind. A wooden skiff, painted green, lay on its side in the grass beside the house — it was Gerlof’s old boat, and its hull was so dried out that Julia could see strips of daylight between the upper planks.

She switched off the engine, but didn’t get out of the car. Neither her shoes nor her clothes were suitable for the Öland autumn wind; besides, she could see an iron bar with a large padlock across the boathouse door. The blinds were pulled right down inside the small windows, as they were in the cottages in the rest of the village.

Stenvik was empty. Scenery, it was all just scenery for a summer theater. A gloomy play, at least as far as Julia was concerned.

Okay. She would go and look at Gerlof’s house, the holiday cottage. Gerlof had built it himself on land the family had owned for years. She started the car and drove along the village road, which forked up ahead. She took the right-hand road, inland. There were groves of low-growing trees here, protecting the few houses that were occupied over the winter, but all the trees were leaning slightly away from the shore, bowed by the constant wind.

In a large garden stood a tall, yellow wooden house which looked as if it were about to fall to pieces behind the tall bushes. The paint was flaking off the walls, and the roof tiles were cracked and covered in moss. Julia couldn’t remember who it had belonged to, but had no recollection of the place ever having looked smart and well cared for.

Among the trees a narrow track led off the road, a strip of knee-high yellow grass growing down the middle. Julia pulled in and switched off the engine. Then she put on her coat and got out into the chilly air.

The wind was soughing in the dry leaves on the trees, and behind that was the more muted sound of the waves on the shore. But apart from that, there was no sound: no birds, no voices, no traffic.

The girl in the cake shop had been right: this was just like the mountains of Norrland.

The track leading to Gerlof’s cottage ended at a low iron gate set in a stone wall. Julia opened the gate and it gave a faint squeak. She went into the garden.

I’m here now, Jens.

The little house, painted brown with white eaves, didn’t look quite so closed up as many of the other cottages in Stenvik. But if Gerlof had still been here, he would never have let the grass grow so tall, or allowed yellow pine needles and leaves to litter the garden.

They had been a hardworking couple, Gerlof and Julia’s mother. Ella, who had remained a housewife all her life, had sometimes seemed like a visitor from the nineteenth century, from an age of poverty when there was neither the time nor the energy for laughter and dreams on the island, and every scrap of kitchen paper had to be dried and used several times. Ella had been small and silent and had a dogged determination about her; the kitchen was her empire. Julia and Lena had had a pat on the cheek from their mother occasionally, but never a hug. And of course Gerlof had been away at sea most of the time while she was growing up.

Nothing was moving in the garden. When Julia was little, there had been a water pump in the middle of the lawn, a yard high, painted green, with a big spout and a pretty curved handle, but it was gone now. All there was in its place was a concrete cover over the well.

To the east of the cottage was a stone wall, and beyond it the grassy alvar began. It ran all the way to the horizon in the east. If the trees hadn’t been in the way, Julia would have been able to see Marnäs church sticking up like a black arrow over there; she had been christened in that church when she was just a few months old.

Julia turned her back on the alvar and walked toward the cottage. She went around a trellis covered in vines that had grown wild, and climbed up the pink limestone steps that had seemed so enormous when she was a child. The steps led up to a little veranda with a closed wooden door.

Julia pushed down the handle, but the door was locked. As expected.

This was both the beginning and the end of her journey.

It was remarkable that the cottage was still here, thought Julia, because so much had happened out in the world since Jens had disappeared. New countries had come into being, others had ceased to exist. In Stenvik, the village was now virtually empty of visitors for most of the year — but the house that Jens had left that day was still there.

Julia sat down on the steps and let out a sigh.

I’m tired, Jens.

She looked at a little collection of stones that Gerlof had piled in front of the house. On the top lay an uneven, grayish black stone that he maintained had fallen from the sky as a burning lump and had made a crater over in the quarry sometime toward the end of the nineteenth century, when Gerlof’s own father and grandfather were working there. This ancient visitor from outer space was spattered with bird dirt.

Jens had walked past the stone from space that day. He’d put on his little sandals, left the house where his grandmother lay sleeping, gone down these steps and out into the garden. That was the only thing that was absolutely definite. Where he had gone after that, and why, nobody knew.

When she got home from the mainland that evening, she’d expected Jens to come racing out of the house. Instead, two policemen were waiting for her, along with a weeping Ella and a stony-faced Gerlof.

Julia wanted to get out a bottle of red wine right now. To sit there on the steps drinking steadily, losing herself in dreams until darkness came — but she quashed the impulse.

Scenery. This empty garden felt just as much like a stage set as the rest of the village, but the play had ended many years ago, everyone had gone home, and Julia felt a crippling sense of loneliness.

She remained there on the steps for several minutes, sitting perfectly still, until a new sound combined with the rushing of the sea. An engine.

It was a car, a tired old car, chugging slowly along the village road.

The sound didn’t go away. It continued, grew closer, and then the engine was switched off very close to the garden.

Julia got up, leaned forward, and glimpsed a round, dumpy car through the trees. An old Volvo PV.

The gate by the road squeaked as someone opened it. Julia straightened her coat, ran her fingers automatically through her pale hair, and waited.

The footsteps approaching through the dead leaves were short and heavy.

The old man who appeared without saying a word, standing at the bottom of the steps and looking sternly up at Julia, was also short and heavy. He reminded her of her father, but she couldn’t say why; perhaps it was the cap, the baggy trousers, and the ivory-colored woolen sweater that made him look like a real boat captain. But he was shorter than Gerlof and the cane he was leaning on suggested that he hadn’t sailed for a long time. His hands were heavily marked with old and new abrasions.

Julia vaguely remembered meeting this man many years earlier. He was one of Stenvik’s permanent residents. How many were left?

“Hello there,” she said, forcing her lips into a smile.

“Good day to you.”

The man nodded back at her. He took off his cap and Julia could see the strands of gray hair combed in thin lines across his bald head.

“I just called to have a look at the place,” she said.

“Yes... It needs somebody to keep an eye on it from time to time,” he said in the strongest Öland accent Julia had ever heard, a harsh, low dialect. “That’s what he wants.”

Julia nodded. “It looks really good.”

Silence.

“I’m Julia,” she said, adding quickly with a nod toward the cottage, “Gerlof Davidsson’s daughter. From Gothenburg.”

The old man nodded, as if it were obvious.

“Of course,” he said. “My name is Ernst Adolfsson. I live over there.” He pointed behind him, diagonally toward the north. “Gerlof and I know each other. We have a chat from time to time.”

Then Julia remembered. This was Ernst, the stonemason. He’d been walking around the village rather like some kind of museum exhibit even when she was young.

“Is the quarry open now?” she asked.

Ernst lowered his eyes and shook his head.

“No. No, there’s no work there now. People come and fetch the reject stone sometimes... but nothing new is quarried anymore.”

“But you work there?” asked Julia.

“I do craft work in stone,” said Ernst. “You’re welcome to come and have a look, see if you want to buy anything... I’ve got a visitor this evening, but tomorrow is fine.”

“Okay. I might do that,” said Julia.

She probably couldn’t afford to buy anything, but she could always go and have a look.

Ernst nodded and turned away slowly with small, unsteady steps. Julia didn’t realize the conversation was over until he’d completely turned his back on her. But she hadn’t finished, so she took a deep breath:

“Ernst,” she said, “you must have lived in Stenvik twenty years ago?”

The man stopped and turned back toward her, but only halfway.

“I’ve lived here for fifty years,” he said.

“I was just thinking...”

Julia stopped speaking; she hadn’t been thinking at all. She wanted to ask a question, but didn’t know which one to choose.

“My child disappeared at that time,” she went on with an enormous effort, as if she were ashamed of her grief. “My son Jens... do you remember that?”

“Of course.” Ernst nodded briefly, without emotion. “And we’re working on it. Gerlof and I, we’re working on it.”

“But...”

“If you see your father, tell him something from me,” said Ernst.

“What?”

“Tell him it’s the thumb that’s most important,” said Ernst. “Not just the hand.”

Julia stared at him, bewildered, but Ernst went on:

“This will be solved. It’s an old story, it goes right back to the war... But it will be solved.”

Then he turned away again, with short unsteady steps.

“The war?” said Julia behind him. “Which war?”

But Ernst Adolfsson left without replying.