Echoes From the Dead

5

Julia walked over to Gerlof as he unwrapped the little package on the desk. She looked at his hands, where his age was visible in the wrinkled skin, the brown liver spots, and the thickened veins. His fingers were shaking, fumbling with the tissue paper. It seemed to Julia that the rustling as he opened the package was deafening.

“Do you need any help?” she asked.

“No, it’s fine.”

It took him several minutes to open the package — or perhaps it just seemed that way. At last he folded back the final layer of paper and Julia could see what it had been concealing. The shoe lay in a clear plastic bag — she couldn’t take her eyes off it.

I’m not going to cry, she thought, it’s only a shoe. Then she felt her eyes filling with an intense heat, and she had to blink away the tears in order to be able to see. She saw the black rubber sole and the brown leather straps, dry and cracked with age.

A sandal, a little boy’s worn sandal.

“I don’t know if it’s the right shoe,” said Gerlof. “As I remember it, it did look like this, but it could be a—”

“It’s Jens’s sandal,” Julia interrupted him, her voice thick.

“We can’t be sure of that,” said Gerlof. “It’s not good to be too certain. Is it?”

Julia didn’t reply. She knew. She wiped the tears from her cheeks with her hand, then carefully picked up the plastic bag.

“I put it in the bag as soon as I got it,” explained Gerlof. “There might be fingerprints...”

“I know,” said Julia.

It was so light, so light. When a mother was going to put a sandal like this on her little son’s foot, she picked it up off the floor by the outside door without even thinking about what it might weigh. Then she stood beside him and bent her back, feeling the warmth of his body and taking hold of his foot as he steadied himself by holding on to her sweater, standing there quietly or saying something, all the childish chatter that she only half listened to because she was thinking about other things. About bills that needed paying. About buying food. About men who weren’t around.

“I taught Jens to put on his own sandals,” said Julia. “It took all summer, but when I started college in the autumn he could do it.” She was still holding on to the little shoe. “And that was why he was able to go out alone that day, to sneak out... He’d put on his own sandals. If I hadn’t taught him he wouldn’t have...”

“Don’t think like that.”

“What I mean is... I only taught him to save a bit of time,” said Julia. “For myself.”

“Don’t blame yourself, Julia,” said Gerlof.

“Thanks for the advice,” she said, without looking at him. “But I’ve been blaming myself for twenty years.”

They fell silent, and Julia realized suddenly the picture in her memory was no longer fragments of bone on the shore in Stenvik. She could see her son alive, bending down with enormous concentration to put on his own sandals, finding it difficult to make his small fingers do what he wanted them to do.

“Who found it?” she asked.

“I don’t know. It came in the mail.”

“Who from?”

“There was no sender’s name. It was just a brown envelope, with an indistinct postmark. But I think it came from Öland.”

“No letter?”

“Nothing,” said Gerlof.

“And you don’t know who sent it?”

“No,” said Gerlof, but he was no longer looking Julia in the eye; he was looking down at the desk, and she got no more answers. Perhaps he suspected more than he wanted to tell her.

No answers. Julia sighed.

“But there are other things we can do,” Gerlof went on quickly. Then he stopped.

“Like what?” said Julia.

“Well...”

Gerlof blinked without replying, looking at her as if he’d already forgotten why he’d asked her to come.

But Julia had no idea either what they should do next, and didn’t say anything. She suddenly realized she hadn’t looked at her father’s room properly; she had been completely fixated on looking at the sandal, holding it in her hand.

She took a look around. As a nurse she quickly noticed the emergency call buttons along the walls, and as a daughter she discovered that Gerlof had brought his memories of the sea with him from the cottage in Stenvik. The three nameplates in lacquered wood from his cargo ships Wavebreaker, Wind, and Nore were hanging above framed black-and-white photographs of the ships. On another wall hung framed ship’s registration certificates with stamps and seals. On the bookshelf beside the desk stood Gerlof’s leather-bound logbooks in a row, next to a couple of tiny model ships that had sailed straight into their own glass bottles.

Everything was just as neatly arranged as in a maritime museum, clean and shining, and Julia realized she envied her father; he could stay in his room with his memories, he didn’t have to go out into the real world, where you had to make things happen and pretend to be young and sharp and try to prove your worth all the time.

On the table next to Gerlof’s bed lay a black Bible and half a dozen pill bottles. Julia looked over toward the desk again.

“You haven’t asked me how I am, Gerlof,” she said quietly.

Gerlof nodded. “And you haven’t called me Dad,” he said.

Silence.

“So how are you?” he asked.

“Fine,” said Julia tersely.

“Are you still working at the hospital?”

“Oh yes,” she said, without mentioning the fact that she’d taken an extended leave of absence. Instead she said, “I drove through Stenvik before I came here. I had a look at the cottage.”

“Good. How are things looking down there?”

“Just the same. It was all closed up.”

“No broken windows?”

“No,” said Julia. “But there was a man there. Or rather, he turned up while I was there.”

“I expect it was John,” said Gerlof. “Or Ernst.”

“His name was Ernst Adolfsson. I presume you know each other?”

Gerlof nodded. “He’s a sculptor. An old stonemason. He’s from Småland originally, but...”

“But he’s all right in spite of that, you mean?” said Julia quickly.

“He’s lived here for a long time,” said Gerlof.

“Yes, I vaguely remember him from when I was little... He said something odd before he left, something about a story from the war. Was he talking about the Second World War?”

“He keeps an eye on the cottage,” said Gerlof. “Ernst lives over by the quarry, and he picks up the leftover reject stone sometimes. Fifty men used to work there in the old days, but now there’s just Ernst... He’s been helping me a bit with working all this out.”

“All this? You mean what happened to Jens?”

“Yes. We’ve talked about it, speculated a bit,” Gerlof said, then asked, “How long are you staying?”

“I...” Julia wasn’t prepared for the question. “I don’t know.”

“Stay for a couple of weeks. That would be good.”

“That’s too long,” said Julia quickly. “I have to get home.”

“Do you?” said Gerlof, as if it came as a surprise to him.

He glanced at the sandal on the desktop, and Julia followed his gaze.

“I’ll stay for a while,” she said. “I’ll help you.”

“With what?”

“With... whatever we need to do. To move forward.”

“Good,” said Gerlof.

“So what are we going to do, then?” she asked.

“We’re going to talk to people... listen to their stories. Like in the old days.”

“You mean... several people?” said Julia. “Did several people do it, then?”

Gerlof looked at the sandal.

“There are certain people here on Öland I want to talk to,” he told her. “I believe they know things.”

Once again he hadn’t given Julia a straight answer. She was beginning to grow tired of it, and really just wanted to leave, but she was here now — and she’d brought cakes.

I’ll stay, Jens, she thought. For a few days. For your sake.

“Is it possible to get some coffee around here?” she asked.

“It usually is,” said Gerlof.

“Then we can have coffee and cakes,” said Julia, and despite the fact that she thought she sounded unpleasantly like her older sister, always planning ahead, she asked, “Where am I going to stay tonight? Any suggestions?”

Gerlof reached slowly toward the desk. He pulled out a little drawer and felt around inside. There was a rattling sound, and he took out a bunch of keys.

“Here,” he said, handing them to her. “Sleep in the boathouse tonight... There’s electricity in there now.”

“But I can’t...”

Julia stood by the bed looking at Gerlof. He seemed to have planned everything that was happening.

“Isn’t it full of fishing nets and that sort of thing?” she asked. “Floats and stones and tins of tar?”

“All gone, I don’t fish anymore,” answered Gerlof. “Nobody fishes in Stenvik.”

Julia took the keys. “You could hardly get in there before, there was so much stuff,” she said. “I remember...”

“It’s all been cleaned up,” said Gerlof. “Your sister’s made it really nice in there.”

“Am I supposed to sleep in Stenvik?” she said. “All on my own?”

“The village isn’t empty. It just seems that way.”

Half an hour after taking her leave of Gerlof, Julia was back in Stenvik, standing down by the dark water. The sky was just as cloudy as it had been in the morning, and full of shadows. It was almost twilight, and Julia longed for a glass of red wine — and another one to follow it. Wine, or a pill.

It was the waves’ fault. The waves were washing peacefully over the pebbles along the shoreline this evening, but when there was a storm they could be six feet high, hurtling in toward the shore with a long drawn-out thunderous roar. They could carry anything with them from the bottom of the sound — wreckage, dead fish, or fragments of bone.

Julia didn’t want to look too closely at what might be lying there among the pebbles on the shore. She had never gone swimming in Stenvik again after that day.

She turned around and looked at the little boathouse. It looked small and lonely, up above the shore.

So close to you, Jens.

Julia didn’t know why she’d accepted the keys from her father and gone along with the idea of sleeping there, but it would probably be all right for one night. She’d never been particularly afraid of the dark, and she was used to being alone. One or maybe two days, that would be okay. Then she’d go back home.

A final blast of cold air swept in from the sound and pushed her into the darkness as she undid the padlock on the white door of the boathouse.

When the door closed behind her, the howling of the autumn wind was abruptly cut off. Everything was silent within the boathouse.

She put on the main overhead light and stood there just inside the door.

Gerlof had been right. The boathouse wasn’t the way she remembered it at all.

This was no longer a fisherman’s working environment, full of stinking nets and broken floats and yellowing copies of Ölands-Posten piled up on the floor. Since Julia had last seen it, her sister had completely renovated the boathouse and decorated it as a little holiday cottage, with polished wooden panels on the walls and a varnished pine floor. There was a small refrigerator, an electric heater, and a hotplate by the window facing the shore. On a table beneath the window facing inland stood a big ship’s compass made of bronze and polished brass; another of Gerlof’s mementos of his years at sea.

The air inside the boathouse was dry. There was only a faint scent of tar, and it would smell even fresher once Julia had pulled up the blinds and opened the small windows. She would be able to live down here without any problems, except for the total isolation.

Presumably Ernst Adolfsson over by the quarry was her nearest neighbor. Ernst had been driving an old Volvo PV and she would have been happy to see it coming along the village road right now, but when she peered out through the window above the compass, nothing was moving out there, only the sparse grass on the ridge in the wind. Even the gulls had disappeared.

There were two narrow beds in the boathouse. She unpacked her bags on one of them: clothes, her toiletry bag, spare shoes, and the bundle of romantic paperback novels she had pushed into the bottom of her bag; she read them in secret. She placed the books on the bedside table.

On the wall by the door hung a little mirror with a varnished wooden frame, and Julia studied her face in it. She looked wrinkled and tired, but her skin wasn’t quite as gray as it seemed in Gothenburg. The stiff breeze on the island had actually put a little color in her cheeks.

What should she do now? She’d bought a hot dog that tasted of nothing from a little kiosk next to the old people’s home after visiting Gerlof, so she wasn’t hungry.

Read? No.

Drink the wine she’d brought with her? No, not yet.

She decided to do some exploring.

Julia left the boathouse and walked slowly back down to the shore and then southward along by the water. It became easier and easier to walk across the pebbles as she began to regain some of the innate sense of balance she’d had as a little schoolgirl in Stenvik, when she’d spent entire days jumping about down by the sea without even stumbling.

Diagonally below the boathouse, Gray-eye was still there, but it had slowly been drawn closer to the sea by the waves and the winter ice. Gray-eye was a narrow, yard-long boulder that resembled a horse’s back. Julia had made it her very own stone once upon a time, and now she patted it briefly as she walked past. It seemed to have sunk down into the ground over the years.

The mill also seemed smaller. It was the tallest building in Stenvik, the old windmill standing on the edge of the ridge a couple of hundred yards south of the boathouse. But when Julia got there, the rocks were too steep for her to be able to clamber up to it.

South of the windmill there were several more boathouses, in the inner part of the inlet where Stenvik’s long swimming jetty was placed during the summer. There wasn’t a living soul in sight.

Julia went up onto the road, northward, past Gerlof’s boathouse. She stopped and gazed out over the water, toward the mainland. Småland was just a narrow gray stripe along the horizon. There were no ships to be seen.

She turned so that she could take in the whole of the surrounding area, as if the coastal landscape were a riddle she could solve if she could just find the right clues.

If what everyone feared had actually happened, if Jens had managed to make his way down to the water that day, then he would have walked along here in the fog that evening. She could search for traces of him now, but of course that had already been done. She’d searched, the police had searched, everyone in Stenvik had searched.

She started walking again, and after a few hundred yards she reached the quarry.

It was closed, of course. Nobody quarried limestone any longer. The letters STEN IK STONE LTD could just be made out on a wooden sign by the coast road, its paint flaking and peeling off. There was a side track leading toward the alvar, but both the track and the yellow-brown landscape ended abruptly, disappearing into a broad pit in the ground. Julia stepped closer to the edge of the cliff, which plunged straight down to the bottom at a ninety-degree angle.

The quarry was no more than four or five yards deep at most, but it was bigger than several football pitches. The inhabitants of Öland had been quarrying there for centuries, working their way down into the rock, but to Julia it looked as if everybody had suddenly thrown down their tools one day and gone home forever. Finished blocks of stone still lay down there on the gravel, neatly lined up.

On the opposite side of the quarry, tall, pale figures were lined up on the alvar; it was too dark and they were too far away for her to be able to make out any details, but after a moment Julia realized they were stone statues. They looked like a series of artworks made of stone, all different sizes. Right on the edge of the quarry stood a block of stone some six feet tall; the top came to a point, and it looked like a medieval church tower. A replica of Marnäs church, perhaps.

Julia realized she was looking at Ernst Adolfsson’s work.

Behind the stone statues stood a wooden house, a dark red rectangle out on the alvar among the low-growing trees and the juniper bushes, and beside the house stood Ernst’s bulky, rounded Volvo. Lights showed in several windows of the house.

She decided to take a closer look at Ernst Adolfsson’s artwork the following morning, before leaving Stenvik.

From here she could also make out Blå Jungfrun, a small blue-gray mound on the horizon. Blåkulla was another name for the island, where according to legend the witches would go to celebrate with Satan. No one lived there, the whole island was a national park, but you could go there on a day trip by boat. Julia had gone there as a little girl one sunny day, along with Lena and Gerlof and Ella.

There had been lots of round, pretty pebbles on the shores there, but Gerlof had warned her against taking any of them away with her. It would bring misfortune, he’d told her, so she hadn’t done it. But of course she’d had misfortune in her life anyway.

Julia turned her back on the witches’ island and turned back toward the boathouse.

Twenty minutes later she was sitting on the bed in the boathouse, listening to the wind and not feeling tired in the slightest. At around ten o’clock she tried to start reading one of the love stories she had with her, entitled The Secret of the Manor, but it was slow going. She closed the book and stared at the old compass on the table by the door.

She could have been in Gothenburg now, sitting at the kitchen table with a glass of wine and looking out at the streetlamps illuminating the empty road.

In Stenvik it was pitch dark. She had gone out for a pee, stumbling about on the stones and almost losing her bearings in the darkness just a few yards from the boathouse. She could no longer see the water down below her; she could only hear the sighing of the waves and the rattle of the pebbles as they reached the shore. Above her dense rain clouds scudded across the sky over the island like evil spirits.

As she squatted out there in the darkness, her bare bottom exposed to the wind, Julia’s thoughts turned involuntarily to the ghost who had turned up here on the shore one night at the beginning of the 1900s.

She remembered one of her grandmother Sara’s tales in the twilight hour: about how her husband and his brother had gone down one stormy night to haul their little fishing boats up to safety, away from the crashing waves.

As they stood there by the foaming water, hauling and dragging at their wooden gigs, a figure suddenly emerged from the darkness, a man wearing heavy oilskins, who began to tug one of the boats in the opposite direction, out to sea. Grandfather had yelled at him, and the figure had yelled back in very broken Swedish, repeating one word over and over again:

“Ösel!” he’d screamed. “Ösel!”

The fishermen had held on tight to their boat and the figure had suddenly turned and dashed out into the heaving waves. He had disappeared into the storm without a trace.

Julia quickly finished peeing beside the path outside the boathouse, then hurried back into the warmth and locked the door behind her. Then she remembered there was no running water down here; she’d have to go up to the cottage to fetch some.

Three days after the terrible storm, there came news from the northern tip of Öland: a ship had run aground at Böda and had been smashed to pieces by the waves three days earlier. The vessel had come from the Estonian island of Ösel. All those on board had perished in the storm, so the seaman that the fishermen in Stenvik had met and spoken to had been dead by that time. Dead and drowned.

Grandmother had nodded at Julia in the twilight.

A ghost of the shore.

Julia believed the story; it was a good tale, and she believed all the old stories she’d heard in the twilight. Somewhere along the coast the drowned seaman was surely still wandering, lost and alone.

Julia had no desire to go out again. She had no intention of fetching water; she’d just have to do without brushing her teeth tonight.

There were thick red candles in the windows of the boathouse. She lit one with her cigarette lighter before she went to bed, and left it burning for a while.

A candle for Jens. It was burning for his mother too.

In the glow of the flame she made a decision: no glass of wine and no sleeping pills tonight. She would fight against her grief. It was everywhere anyway, not only in Stenvik. Every time she met a young boy on the street, she could still be overcome by a sudden surge of grief.

When she saw her little address book lying on the bed beside Lena’s old cell phone, she picked up both of them on an impulse, flicked through the address book to find a number, and dialed it.

The phone worked. Two rings, three, four.

Then a muffled male voice answered. “Hello?”

It was already ten-thirty on a normal weekday evening. Julia had rung too late, but she had to continue now.

“Michael?”

“Yes?”

“It’s Julia.”

“Right... Hi, Julia.”

He sounded more tired than surprised. She tried to remember what Michael looked like, but couldn’t get a picture in her head.

“I’m on Öland. In Stenvik.”

“Right... Well, I’m in Copenhagen, as usual. I was asleep.”

“I know it’s late,” she said. “I just wanted to tell you a new clue has turned up.”

“A clue?”

“To our son’s disappearance,” she explained. “Jens.”

“Right,” he said.

“So I’ve come here... I thought you’d want to know. It probably isn’t an important clue, but it might...”

“How are you, Julia?”

“Fine... I can give you a call if anything else happens.”

“You do that,” he said. “You still seem to have my number. But if you could call a little earlier next time, that would be good.”

“Okay,” she said quickly.

“Bye, then.”

Michael hung up, and the telephone was silent.

Julia sat there with the cell phone in her hand. Okay. So she’d tested it out and found that it worked, but she knew she’d chosen the wrong person to call.

Michael had moved on long ago, even before they separated. From the beginning he’d been certain that Jens had gone down to the water and drowned. Sometimes she’d hated him for that conviction, sometimes she’d just been crippled by envy.

A few minutes later, when Julia had turned out the light and got into bed, still wearing her pants and sweater, down came the torrential rain that had been hanging in the air all evening.

It started very suddenly, hammering rapidly and frantically on the tin roof of the boathouse. Julia lay there in the darkness, listening to small streams beginning to babble along down the slope outside. She knew the boathouse was safe; it had survived every violent storm up to now, and she closed her eyes and fell asleep.

She didn’t hear the rain stop half an hour later. She didn’t hear any footsteps over by the quarry in the darkness; she didn’t hear a thing.