Echoes From the Dead

Öland, May 1943

Nils has owned the shore, he has owned Stenvik, and now he owns the whole of the alvar surrounding the village. When his mother doesn’t need his help in the house or the yard, he roams across it every day, taking long strides. In the yellow sunlight he walks over the Öland steppes with a rucksack slung over his shoulder and his shotgun in his hands.

The hares usually sit frozen, huddled right down to the earth, until they think they have been discovered; then they hurtle away across the ground, and you have to raise the gun to your shoulder very quickly. Nils is always ready to shoot when he’s out hunting.

His home and the alvar have been his whole world ever since his mother told him he wouldn’t be able to work at the quarry anymore after the fight with Lass-Jan some years earlier. None of the other quarry workers wanted him there. Not that it matters to Nils; he refused to go back there anyway, refused to apologize, and the only annoying thing is that his mother had to pay Lass-Jan’s wages for the weeks the stevedore couldn’t work, while his broken fingers were healing.

Shit. The whole thing was Lass-Jan’s fault, after all!

Nils also carries the memory of the fight: two broken fingers on his left hand. He refused to go to the doctor in Marnäs despite the pain, and his fingers have mended badly, curving inward and becoming more difficult to bend. But it doesn’t matter, he’s right-handed and he can still hold his gun.

People in the village avoid Nils these days, but that doesn’t matter either. Maja Nyman has been on the village road a few times when he’s gone out onto the alvar, but she just looks at him in silence, like all the rest. Maja has big blue eyes, but Nils can get by perfectly well without her.

His mother has given Nils the double-barreled Husqvarna shotgun to keep him company. And he gives her all the hares he shoots with it, so she doesn’t have to pay for expensive meat from the tightfisted farmers in the village.

The white tower of Marnäs church is visible on the horizon to the east, but Nils doesn’t need any landmarks. He has learned to find his way around the alvar’s labyrinth of long stone walls, boulders, bushes, and endless grassy plains.

Up ahead of him is the memorial cairn: the low pile of stones marking the place where some crazy servant killed a priest or a bishop, several hundred years before Nils was born. People walking by still set small stones there sometimes. Nils never does, but it’s a good spot for him to sit and eat his lunch.

He stops, considers, and notices a faint pang of hunger down in his stomach. He goes over to the cairn, takes off a couple of uneven stones, then settles down with the shotgun close beside him and the rucksack on his knee.

He opens it and discovers two cheese sandwiches and two sausage sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper, and a small bottle of milk. His mother packed all this; without asking her, Nils himself has filled his slim copper hip flask with the cognac she keeps on the floor of the larder.

He starts his lunch break by opening the flask and taking a long swig, which spreads a feeling of steady warmth down through his throat, then he opens up his packet of sandwiches. He eats and drinks with his eyes closed, letting his thoughts wander.

Nils thinks about hunting. He hasn’t got a hare yet today, but he’s got the whole afternoon to shoot one.

Then he thinks about the war, which is still filling every news program whenever you switch on the radio.

Sweden hasn’t been attacked, although three German destroyers did stray into the minefield just off southern Öland in the summer of 1941, and were blown to pieces. Over a hundred of Hitler’s men ended up in the water, and either drowned or died in the burning oil slick. And many inhabitants of Öland thought the war had definitely arrived the following summer, when for some reason a German plane dropped eight bombs in the forest below the ruined castle at Borgholm.

The explosions had been heard all the way up to Stenvik. Nils had been woken by the dull thuds, and stared out of the dark window with his heart pounding; he could have sworn he heard the plane’s engines as it flew away from the island. A Messerschmitt, perhaps. He’d listened and longed for more explosions, bombs raining down all around Stenvik.

But there had been no German invasion, and now it’s too late for Hitler to do anything. Nils has read the newspaper reports about the big surrender in Stalingrad earlier in the year, during the bitterly cold winter. Hitler seems to be on the losing side.

Nils hears a horse neigh behind him.

He opens his eyes and turns his head. There are several horses behind him. Four young animals, brown and white, have come up to the cairn, and now the animals trot in front of him in a curving line, their heads bowed, the dust whirling around their legs. Their hooves make almost no sound as they move across the grass.

Horses. They roam at will across the alvar in herds. On a few occasions when Nils has been looking for hares rather than at the ground in front of him, his boots have sunk deep into the piles of shit they leave everywhere, like small brown memorial cairns.

This little herd seems to be on the way to a definite goal, but when Nils gives a short whistle and pushes his left hand down into his rucksack, the leading horse slows and turns its head toward him.

All the horses come to a halt and look at Nils. One lowers its head to nuzzle the yellow grass of the alvar, but doesn’t begin to graze. They are waiting for something tastier.

Nils keeps his hand in the rucksack, rustling the empty greaseproof paper, while he places his right hand quietly beside him on the stones.

The horses hesitate, sniffing the air and pawing the ground with their hooves. Nils rustles the paper again, and the dark brown lead horse takes a cautious sideways step toward him. The others follow slowly, their nostrils twitching slightly.

The lead horse stops again, five yards away.

“Come on, then, feeding time,” says Nils, smiling with anticipation.

You can’t get hares to come to you like this, only horses.

The lead horse shakes its big head and gives a low, snorting neigh.

Then he takes a couple of steps forward, and Nils swiftly lifts his right hand and throws the first stone.

Good shot! The rough piece of limestone hits the animal just above its muzzle and it jerks backwards as if it’s had an electric shock. It backs away in terror, bumping into the horse behind, and spins in a blind panic as Nils stands up quickly and throws the second stone. This one is flatter and sharper and flies through the air like the blade of a saw.

It hits the lead horse on the rump. He gives a high-pitched, terrified neigh, and now all the horses grasp the danger. They turn and gallop away across the alvar at full speed, their hooves drumming on the ground. They disappear among the bushes.

Nils panics slightly, and his third stone goes too far over to the left. That’s bad. He bends down again quickly, but the fourth throw is too short.

The last he sees of the lead horse is a bloodred, glittering stripe along its right flank. The wound is deep, and probably won’t heal for several days. Nils will try to find the stone that cut the horse before he goes home, to see if there’s any blood on it.

The noise of the horses’ mad flight dies away. Silence returns to the alvar. Nils breathes out and sits down again on the cairn, smiling as he thinks about the stupid, bewildered expression on the horse’s face when the first stone hit him.

Fucking horses.

Nils has shown them who rules the alvar around Stenvik. He is still smiling to himself as he picks up the rucksack again. Has his mother put any butter toffees at the bottom?