Echoes From the Dead

Öland, June 1940

When the horse-drawn cart has been unloaded for the last time down on the shore, it is hauled back up to the quarry and the men can begin to load the newly cut and polished limestone onto the boats. This is the heaviest work, and for the past six months it has been done by hand, since the two trucks belonging to the quarry have been requisitioned by the state and are being used as military vehicles.

There’s a world war on, but on Öland the everyday work must continue as usual. The stone has to be quarried and taken to the cargo ships.

“Load up!” yells Lass-Jan Augustsson, the foreman of the stevedores.

He is directing the work from the deck of the cargo ship Wind, gesturing to the men loading her with his broad hands, dry and cracked from the rough blocks of stone. Beside him the stevedores are waiting to take the stone on board.

Wind is lying at anchor a hundred yards or so out in the water, at a safe distance from the shore in case a storm should suddenly blow up along the Öland coast. In Stenvik there is no pier in the harbor behind which a ship can shelter, and close to the shore the shallow, rocky seabed is waiting to smash any boat if it gets the opportunity.

The blocks being loaded on board are ferried out in two open rowboats. In one of them the starboard oar is manned by boatman Johan Almqvist, who is seventeen and has been working as a quarryman and oarsman for a couple of years.

The oar on the port side is manned by Nils Kant, who is new to the job. He’s fifteen now, almost fully grown.

His mother gave Nils a job at the family quarry after he failed his examinations at school. Vera Kant has decided that he is to be a boatman despite his tender age, and Nils knows that he will gradually take over the responsibility for the whole quarry from his uncle. He knows he will one day set his mark deep in the hillside. He would like to excavate the whole of Stenvik.

Sometimes Nils dreams of sinking down through black water at night, but during the day he rarely thinks of his drowning brother Axel. It wasn’t murder, whatever the gossips in the village say. It was an accident. Axel’s body has never been found; it was dragged down to the bottom of the sound, as is the case with so many who drown, and it never came up again. An accident.

The only memory of Axel is a framed picture of him on his mother’s desk. Vera and Nils have grown much closer to each other since Axel drowned. Vera often says Nils is all she has left, which makes Nils realize how important he is.

The rowboats are lying waiting for their load beside a temporary wooden jetty extending a dozen or so yards out into the sea; the carts arrive on the shore, piled high, and the stones are then carried out onto the jetty in an endless cycle — youngsters, women, older men, and those few men in their prime who have not yet been called up for military service. Girls too; Nils can see Maja Nyman walking around in a red-checked dress out there on the jetty. He knows that she knows he watches her sometimes.

The war hangs like a shadow over Öland. Norway and Denmark were invaded by the Germans a month or so earlier without presenting any particular difficulty. There are extra news bulletins on the radio every day. Is Sweden really equipped to repel an attack? Foreign warships have been spotted out in the sound, and several times it has been rumored in Stenvik that southern Öland has been invaded.

If the Germans do come, the islanders know they will have to fend for themselves, because help has never come in time from the mainland when enemy forces have landed on Öland in centuries gone by. Never.

People say the army intends to put parts of northern Öland underwater in order to prevent an invasion of the island, which would be a bitter irony now that the serious spring floods out on the alvar have finally begun to evaporate in the sun.

When the sound of a distant engine was heard across the water earlier that morning, the unloading of the stones stopped, and everyone gazed anxiously at the overcast skies. Everyone except Nils, who wonders what a real bombardment by a plane looks like. Are there whistling bombs that turn into balls of fire and smoke and tears and screams and chaos?

But no plane appeared over the island, and the work resumed.

Nils hates rowing. Hauling stones might not be much better, but the tedious process of rowing gives him a headache right from the start. He can’t think when he has to steer the heavily laden boat with his oar, and he’s being watched the whole time. Lass-Jan follows the progress of the boats with his peaked cap pulled right down to his eyebrows, directing the work with his voice.

“Let’s have some effort, Kant!” he roars across the water once the last stone has been loaded at the jetty.

“Slow down, Kant, look out for the jetty!” he yells as soon as Nils pulls on the oar too hard once the boat has been unloaded and is easy to row back.

“Get a move on, Kant!” Lass-Jan shouts.

Nils glares at him all the way out to the cargo ship. Nils owns the quarry. Or to be more accurate, his mother and uncle own it, but even so Lass-Jan has treated him like a slave right from the start.

“Load up!” yells Lass-Jan.

In the morning people chatted and laughed with each other when they began unloading, there was almost a party atmosphere, but the stone has mercilessly subdued them with its silent weight and its hard edges. Now people are carrying it doggedly, with their backs bent, their footsteps dragging, and their clothes powdered with white limestone dust.

Nils has nothing against the silence; he never speaks to anyone anyway unless he has to. But from time to time he looks over at Maja Nyman on the jetty.

“She’s full!” shouts Lass-Jan when the blocks of stone are piled a yard high in the boat Nils is sitting in, and the seawater is almost lapping at the gunwale.

Two loaders climb down and sit on the piles of stone, looking down on a little nine-year-old boy who’s there to bail out. The boy sneaks a terrified glance at Nils before he picks up his wooden pail and begins to scoop the water from the bottom of the boat, which is not watertight.

Nils pushes hard with his feet and heaves on the oar. The boat glides slowly off toward the cargo ship, where the other rowboat has just been emptied.

Back and forth with the oar, back and forth without a break. Nils’s hands ache, and the muscles in his arms and back are screaming in pain. He longs to hear the roar of German bombers right now.

The boat finally hits the hull of the ship with a dull thud. Both loaders move quickly to the stern, bend down, take hold, and begin lifting the stone blocks over Wind ’s gunwale.

“Let’s put our backs into it!” yells Lass-Jan from the deck, standing there in his stained shirt with his fat belly sticking out.

The stones are lifted over the gunwale and carried over to the open hatch, then they slide down into the hold along a broad plank.

Nils is supposed to help with the unloading. He lifts a few slabs up to the ship, then hesitates just a fraction too long with a thick block on the edge, and drops it back into the boat. It lands on the toes of his left foot, and it bloody hurts.

In a fit of blind rage he picks the block up again and heaves it over the gunwale without even looking where it lands.

“Bugger this!” he mutters to the sea and the sky, sitting down at his oar.

He undoes his shoe, feels his aching toes, and rubs them gently with his fingers. They might be broken.

Around him the last of the blocks are unloaded from the boat, and the loaders jump over the gunwale to finish sorting them out down in the hold.

Johan Almqvist follows them. Nils stays in the boat with the little boy who was bailing.

“Kant!” Lass-Jan is up above him, leaning over the gunwale. “Get up here and give us a hand!”

“I’m injured,” says Nils, surprised at how calm he sounds, when in fact an entire squadron of bombers is screaming into action like furious bees inside his head. Equally calmly, he places his hand on his oar. “I’ve broken my toes.”

“Get up.”

Nils gets up. It doesn’t actually hurt all that much, and Lass-Jan shakes his head at him.

“Get up here and start loading, Kant.”

Nils shakes his head again, his hand closing around the oar. The bombs are falling now, whistling through the air inside him.

He undoes the oarlock and lifts the oar a fraction.

He swings it slowly backwards.

“Broken his toes...” Another of the loaders, a stubby broad-shouldered lad whose name Nils can’t remember, is leaning over the gunwale next to Lass-Jan. “Better run off home to Mummy, then!” he says scornfully.

“I’ll take care of this,” says the foreman, turning his head toward the loader.

This is a mistake. Lass-Jan never sees Nils’s oar come swinging through the air.

The broad blade of the oar hits the back of his head. Lass-Jan utters a long, drawn-out “Hooooh,” and his knees give way.

“I own you!” yells Nils.

He balances with one foot on the side of the boat, and swings the oar again. This time he hits the foreman across the back, and watches him fall over the gunwale like a sack of flour.

“Bloody hell!” shouts someone on board the cargo ship, then there’s a loud splash as Lass-Jan falls backwards into the water between the rowboat and the hull of the cargo ship.

Shouts echo from the shore, but Nils takes no notice of them. He’s going to kill Lass-Jan! He raises the oar, smashes it down into the water, and hits Lass-Jan’s outstretched hands. The fingers shatter with a dry crack, his head jerks backwards, and he disappears beneath the surface of the water.

Nils brings the oar down again. Lass-Jan’s body sinks in an eddy of swirling white bubbles. Nils raises the oar with the intention of continuing to hit him.

Something whizzes past Nils’s ear and hits his left hand; the fingers crunch even before the pain almost numbs his hand. Nils wobbles and is no longer able to hold the oar; he drops it into the boat.

He closes his eyes tightly, then looks up. The loader who was making fun of him is standing up by the gunwale with a long boathook in his hand. His eyes are fixed on Nils, terrified but resolute.

The loader draws the boathook back toward him and lifts it again, but by this time Nils has managed to push off from the hull of the ship with his oar, and is on his way back to the shore. He leaves the loaders on the ship and Lass-Jan on his way to the bottom of the sea, and fixes the portside oar back in the oarlock.

Then he rows straight for the shore, the broken fingers of his left hand throbbing and aching. The little boy who does the bailing is crouching in the prow like a trembling figurehead.

“Get him out of there!” someone shouts behind him.

He hears the sound of splashing and shouting from the cargo ship across the water as Lass-Jan’s limp body is hauled over Wind ’s gunwale. The foreman is lifted to safety, the water is forced out of his body, and he is shaken back to life. He’s been lucky — he can’t swim. Nils is one of the few in the village who can.

Nils has his gaze fixed much further away, on the straight line of the horizon. The sun has found gaps in the cloud cover over there, and is shining down on the water, making it gleam like a floor made of silver.

Everything feels fine now, despite the pain in his left hand. Nils has shown everybody who owns Stenvik. Soon he will own the whole of northern Öland, and will defend it with his life if the Germans come.

The bottom of the boat scrapes against the rocks, and Nils picks up the oar and jumps out. He’s ready, but no one attacks him.

The loaders are standing over on the jetty as if they’ve been turned to stone, women and men and children. They gaze at him mutely with terrified eyes. Maja Nyman looks as if she’s about to burst into tears.

“Go to hell!” Nils Kant roars at the lot of them, and flings the oar down in front of him on the pebbles.

Then he turns to run back to the village, home to his mother Vera in the big yellow house.

But neither she nor anyone else knows what Nils knows: he is meant for greater things, greater than Stenvik, as great as the war. One day he will be known and talked about all over Öland. He can feel it.