The Voices Beyond

Epilogue

It was a sunny day in the middle of August when Gerlof said goodbye to John in Marnäs churchyard.

John was lying in a beautiful white coffin, which was definitely closed. Gerlof waited and listened, but of course there wasn’t a sound from the coffin during the ceremony.

The grave was to the west of the church, well away from the Kloss family graves, but Gerlof didn’t want to go over there. Instead, he walked slowly along the path towards the gate. Up above, he could see two big birds; they looked like buzzards. They were on their way south, as if they had begun their long journey to Africa.

Already? Was the summer really over, for the migrant birds, too?

‘Gerlof?’ said a voice beyond the churchyard gate. ‘Would you like a lift?’

It was John’s son, Anders, and he was pointing to his car.

Gerlof had already refused a lift from his daughters Lena and Julia, who were going straight back to Gothenburg, but he nodded to Anders and allowed himself to be helped into the passenger seat.

Anders got in. ‘Do you want to go to the home?’

Gerlof thought for a moment, then said, ‘Take me down to the cottage; I’d just like to check on it.’

Anders put the car in gear and set off. They drove in silence for a while, until Gerlof said, ‘Did John like me, Anders? Was I nice to him?’

Anders turned on to the main road and said, ‘He never thought about that kind of thing... He did once say that you’d never given him a single order in your whole life.’

‘Really? I thought I gave orders all the time when were at sea.’

‘No. He said you asked questions when you wanted something done. You’d ask if he’d like to hoist the sail, and he would do it.’

‘You could be right.’

Neither of them spoke until Anders turned down on to the village road; as they drove in among the summer cottages, he said quietly, ‘I put her in the water last night.’

‘Sorry?’ Gerlof said; he had been thinking about John.

‘I put your boat in the water... the skiff.’

‘You mean the gig?’

‘The gig, that’s right,’ Anders said. ‘I had nothing else to do, so I dragged her down to the water.’

‘Did she float?’

‘She leaks a bit, but if she stays there for a few days the timbers will swell.’

‘Good,’ Gerlof said, then he went back to thinking about John, and what he could have done differently.

One thing was clear: they should have stayed away from the Kloss family.

After a few minutes they had reached the cottage. Anders stopped by the gate, and Gerlof slowly got out.

‘Thank you, Anders. You take care of yourself... Get away somewhere, have a holiday.’

‘Maybe,’ Anders said.

‘Or find a wife.’

Anders smiled wearily. ‘Not much chance of that around here,’ he said. ‘But life goes on.’

Gerlof didn’t reply; he merely raised a hand and opened the gate. When Anders had gone, he stepped into his garden.

He unlocked the door of the cottage and went straight in, without taking off his shoes. He went and stood in the main room.

Everything was quiet now. The cottage was cool and peaceful. The old wall clock next to the television had stopped, but Gerlof didn’t bother winding it up.

There was a black-and-white photograph next to the clock. It was fifty years old, and showed Gerlof and John on the South Quay in Stockholm, with the church spires of the Old Town in the background. They were both young and strong, smartly dressed in suits and black hats. Smiling into the sunshine.

Gerlof turned away. He looked out of the window at the weathervane, an old man sharpening his scythe. It had shifted during the morning and was now pointing towards the shore. The weather forecast on the radio had also predicted a westerly wind with a speed of three to four metres per second for today. A gentle but steady breeze, blowing offshore. Anything that ended up in the water off Stenvik would quickly drift out to sea.

Interesting.

Here he stood in his cottage, the last of his contemporaries still alive, at the end of the twentieth century. If the world didn’t implode at the turn of the millennium, he would be celebrating his eighty-fifth birthday in exactly ten months. He was born on 12 June, the same day as Anne Frank. When she died in Bergen-Belsen, Gerlof was the captain of a cargo ship negotiating the minefields of the Baltic Sea.

He had now lived for fifty-five years since her death. He had survived the whole of the twentieth century — he had outlived the children killed in the camps, the refugees who had died of hunger, the prisoners who had been executed, the soldiers who had fallen in battle. He had lived longer than millions of people who had been younger than him, so he ought to be satisfied. But the body was greedy; it always wanted one more day.

But not in a hospital bed. Gerlof had made up his mind; he had no intention of ending his days with tubes and wires attached to his body.

He took out his notebook and wrote down a final message. A few words to his daughters, and a couple of requests: ‘Play lots of music,’ he wrote. ‘Hymns are fine, but I’d like some Evert Taube and Dan Andersson, too.’

Then he paused, pen in hand. Should he add anything more? Some pearls of wisdom, polished over the years?

No, that was enough. He put down the pen, left the notebook open and got to his feet. Left the cottage, still wearing his funeral suit.

Leaning heavily on his stick, he made his way out on to the village road, which was empty now. But there were people around somewhere; he could hear a dog barking, then a car door slammed. It was time to go home, get back to work. The summer might not be over, not quite, but the holidays definitely were.

The coast road was also deserted when he crossed it, although he could see one or two figures swimming over by the jetty.

He walked past the mailboxes and down to the shore without anyone seeing him. A series of small ripples made the water look darker; the wind was definitely blowing offshore.

A few gulls were standing on the rocks by the water’s edge. One of them caught sight of Gerlof and stretched his neck. He began to scream warning cries to the sky, his beak wide open, and the others joined in.

The gig lay beside them with half the keel in the water, just as Anders had said.

Swallow.

She was beautiful, almost like new. Ready to sail away.

Slowly, Gerlof made his way down to her. He placed his stick in the prow, unhooked the line securing Swallow to the anchor pin and grabbed hold of the gunwale so that he could push her out.

But Swallow didn’t move. Gerlof pushed as hard as he could, but it was hopeless. The gig was too heavy, and he was too weak.

The deeper water was irritatingly close, only half a metre from the prow. He made one last attempt, bending down behind the gig and leaning on the stern with every scrap of his strength.

It was impossible. His journey ended here; he couldn’t do it.

‘Do you need some help down there?’

Gerlof turned his head. Two people were standing up on the ridge: a middle-aged man and a teenage boy, both in shorts and sunglasses. The man was smiling. Gerlof had no idea who they were, but he straightened up.

‘Please.’

They came down on to the shore, striding across the rocks.

‘Nice boat,’ the man said. ‘A bit like a smaller version of the ships the Vikings used, wouldn’t you say?’

Gerlof gave a brief nod.

‘She’s pretty old, isn’t she?’

‘She’s seventy-five years old,’ Gerlof said. ‘We’ve been renovating her, my friend John and I.’

It felt good to mention John’s name, in spite of the fact that it was quickly carried away on the wind.

‘Really?’ the man said. ‘I think it’s great that the old boats are still used here on the island. Are you planning a little trip in her?’

‘Yes. One last trip,’ Gerlof said, then added, ‘For this summer.’

‘In that case, we’ll give you a hand... OK, Michael?’

The boy looked bored. No doubt he couldn’t wait to get back to the mainland.

The man and the boy — father and son, Gerlof guessed — didn’t seem to be suffering from any aches and pains. They stepped forward, grabbed hold of the gig and tensed their leg muscles.

‘On three,’ the man said. ‘One, two... three!’

Swallow slipped straight into the water, almost as if she were on wheels. For a moment, Gerlof thought she might sail away out into the Sound without her captain, but the man held on to the gunwale so that a part of the keel was still in contact with the ground.

‘There you go... All set,’ he said. He looked at Gerlof, then at the boat. ‘But how are you going to get her back ashore?’

‘It’ll sort itself out.’

The man nodded and set off back towards the ridge.

‘Thank you very much,’ Gerlof said. ‘Do you live in the village?’

‘No, we just stopped off in the car... We’re driving around the island looking for a boathouse to buy. Is that one for sale?’

He jerked his head towards Gerlof’s boathouse. ‘I don’t think so,’ Gerlof said. ‘So where are you from?’

‘Stockholm. We live in Bromma, but we’re spending a couple of weeks touring Öland.’

‘I see.’

They weren’t just from the mainland, they were from Stockholm. There were a lot of things Gerlof could have said to them, but he restrained himself.

‘Welcome to Öland, in that case,’ he said instead. ‘I hope you like it here.’

‘We love it.’

He watched as father and son disappeared in the direction of the coast road.

They were alone on the shore once more, Gerlof and his boat.

He must be careful not to make any mistakes now; with the help of his stick, he managed to step up on to one of the rocks next to Swallow; laboriously, he climbed aboard. First the right leg, then the left.

He could have used one of the oars, but he might as well carry on with his stick. He placed the end on the rock he had just been standing on and pushed as hard as he could. The boat slipped easily out into the water without scraping.

Good.

Gerlof was no swimmer, and he had always managed to avoid ending up in the water when he was at sea. Nor had one of his ships ever run aground, not in thirty years. He had lost one ship in a fire, of course, and he had been forced to sell his last ship, Nore, at a ridiculously low price, when the lorries had outdone him in commercial terms. But run aground? Never.

Now it was time to let the wind take over. With the last of his strength, he picked up the oars and threw them overboard in the direction of the shore. First one, then the other. Perhaps someone else would find a use for them.

As far as he was concerned, the wind was in charge now. It would carry him out into the middle of the Sound — or however far the boat stayed afloat. He looked up at the deep blue sky. In the west, high above the thin, dark strip that formed the mainland, he could see a paler shape, getting bigger all the time. A plane. Gerlof followed it with his eyes, thinking that he had sailed the Baltic for several decades, but he had never been on a plane.

So many islanders had left Öland and travelled west to the USA, south to the ports of Germany and as far afield as Africa or Australia — or east, like Aron Fredh. But Gerlof had always stuck to familiar territory, the Baltic Sea. He was too attached to his wife and children to set off for the Equator. Staying in the Baltic was a way of maintaining contact with Öland, because every Baltic port was directly connected to every other port.

And now he was at sea for the very last time.

He looked down; there were already rivulets of water in the bottom of the boat. There were cracks in the hull; the timbers were not yet sealed. If the gig was left lying in the water for long enough, the planks would swell and the tiny gaps would disappear, but Gerlof didn’t have that sort of time.

And if John had been on board he would have sat in the stern with a bailer, but there was no one there.

The gig slowly drifted away from the shore, carried by the wind.

Gerlof relaxed. He thought about death — about that summer’s day some seventy years earlier when he had dug Edvard Kloss’s grave up in Marnäs churchyard and heard the sound of knocking from inside the coffin. Three hard blows in quick succession, then three more. Clear as a bell, from down below.

He had wondered about it ever since, but had never come up with a satisfactory explanation. And if there wasn’t one, it meant that the farmer’s spirit had caused the knocking, from beyond the grave.

In which case, there must be life after death, and Gerlof’s adventure wasn’t over. Perhaps he would soon meet up with friends and relatives. His wife Ella, his friend John, his grandson Jens. All those who had gone before him.

The water was now covering the bottom of the boat. Gerlof slid off his seat and sat down on the planks. His best trousers got wet, but that didn’t matter. He shuffled along and lay down on his back, his breathing calm and even. What would be would be, as the saying went.

As Gerlof felt the cold water through his trousers, another memory came into his mind from that terrible funeral when he was just fifteen.

The chilled bottles of beer.

He remembered Bengtsson, the gravedigger, offering him a beer. It must have been the first one Gerlof had ever drunk. The bottles had been covered in condensation, and the beer inside had been at least as cold as the water that was now seeping into the boat.

But how could the beer have been so cold on such a hot, sunny summer’s day? This was well before the time of refrigerators. People cut blocks of ice in the winter and saved them in earth cellars on the island, but there were no fridges or freezers. If you wanted something cold in the summer, you had to bury it with some old ice.

Had the gravedigger had a little cellar of his own for the bottles? A wooden box he had buried, or perhaps an empty tar barrel? An old drainpipe somewhere in the churchyard, the opening hidden under a piece of turf?

Gerlof recalled that Bengtsson had been standing slightly behind everyone else when the knocking began. So the gravedigger could have lifted his spade or his boot when all the others were looking at the coffin and banged on the top of the pipe. Three sharp blows with the spade or the heel of his boot. That would have sounded like knocking from inside a coffin. Like the sound of an uneasy spirit.

Gerlof remembered the dirty looks Bengtsson had given the Kloss brothers that day. How much had he really disliked the two wealthy farmers? Had he decided to play a trick on them, pretend that their brother had come back to haunt them? If so, it had been a nasty trick that had got completely out of hand.

Was that what had happened? Gerlof had no one to discuss it with, because everyone else who had been there was dead. But perhaps the hole in the ground was still there, a few metres from the grave?

Perhaps — but Gerlof couldn’t go and start looking for it now. It was too late. He was lying in a leaky rowing boat on his way out into Kalmar Sound.

There was nothing he could do.

Drowning was a pleasant death. That’s what he had always heard from old sea captains, although of course you couldn’t ask anyone who had actually been through it. But Gerlof thought it was probably true. You closed your eyes and slowly slipped away towards the great darkness, not as a seaman but as a passenger on the ferry across the River Styx...

He opened his eyes. Something was wrong. His body was attuned to the movements of the sea, and he could feel that something had happened. He sat up, his back soaking wet, and looked over the gunwale.

It was the wind — it had turned, without any warning. And the ripples had grown into little waves, which were gently but firmly nudging Swallow along. Gerlof’s boat was on its way back to the shore.

A change of destination, he thought. Stenvik, not the Styx.

He let out a long breath and looked up at the vast brightness of the sky. The gulls were circling way up high, their wings outstretched as they drifted on the winds, using each gust and screaming at one another.

It was easy to imagine these were exactly the same gulls that had welcomed him with their loud screams over eighty years ago, when he came down to the shore for the very first time.

Gerlof smiled at them.

The birds were survivors, just like him.