A couple of minutes later the bell rang for dinner and Gerlof was back in his feeble body. His legs were stiff, his arms would never again manage to hoist a sail.
They had passed quickly, those years at sea. And there hadn’t really been that many. Gerlof had gone out as first mate with his father on his ketch Ingrid Maria at the end of the twenties, and five years later, when his father came ashore to become a ship’s broker, he’d taken over the vessel, renamed her Wind, and carrieC
cargoes of timber and wooden goods from Smaland to Oland.
He’d been a captain at the age of twentytwo.
During the Second World War he’d worked as a pilot off
Oland, and on two occasions he’d had to watch ships go down
with all their crews on board, when their skippers had thought they knew a safer route through the minefields than the pilot boat.
Gerlof had lived in constant fear of mines during those years.
In one nightmare, which still woke him in a cold sweat some
nights, he was standing by the gunwale of the pilot boat up above the shining sea at sunset, looking downand suddenly he saw a big black mine just beneath the surface of the water. Old and rusty and covered in rippling seaweed, but its spikes would hit the boat just a few seconds later and detonate the mine.
He couldn’t stop the boat, it was slipping silently closer and closer to the spikes … and just before the hull hit the mine Gerlof would always wake up.
After the war he’d bought his second small cargo boat, Wavebreaker, and had begun to sail between two ports, Borgholm and Stockholm, via the Sodertalje Canal. His cargo was Oland marble, red limestone for the building work going on in the capital, and on the return journey he often carried fuel or lime to the farmers’ cooperative in Borgholm. In the harbors along his route there were always boats he knew, and anyone who needed help could always be sure of getting it from their fellow seamen.
There was no rivalry at that time, and Gerlof had received
a great deal of help that December night in 1951 when flames gobbled at Wavebreaker as she lay at anchor in Angso. His cargo of linseed oil had caught fire, and Gerlof and his first mate, John Hagman, had only just made it onto the deck before the blaze swept through the whole ship. Neither of them could swim, but another cargo boat from Oskarshamn was lying alongside and the two men made it on board. They got all the support they needed, but all they could do for Wavebreaker was to sever the anchor and allow her to drift away into the night.
For Gerlof the burning, sinking cargo boat in the winter
night was an apt symbol for Oland’s shipping industry, even if he couldn’t see it at the time. He could have given up when he was acquitted after an investigation, but out of pure stubbornness he had used the insurance money to buy a new cargo boat with an engine, and had continued as a skipper for another nine years. More had been his last boat, and the prettiest; slender, with a beautiful stern and a wonderful, chugging compressionignition engine. He could still hear her engine chugging inside his head sometimes, in the moments just before he fell asleep.
In 1960 he’d sold More and come ashore to work in the council offices in Borgholm, and his sedentary desklife had begun.
The advantage was, of course, that he could go home to Ella every night. He had missed a great deal of his daughters’ childhood, but at least now he could watch them growing up as teenagers. And when his youngest daughter, Julia, had become pregnant at the end of the sixties, Gerlof hadn’t cared whether she was married or nothe had loved that little boy. His grandchild.
Jens Gerlof Davidsson.
And then came that day.
It was autumn, but Julia had been studying parttime to be a
nurse, and had been able to stay in Stenvik with Jens longer than usual. Jens’s father, Michael, had stayed behind on the mainland.
And Julia had left her son with Ella and Gerlof after lunch and gone across to Kalmar over the new bridge. And after they’d had coffee, Gerlof had left his wife and Jens, with no hesitation, with no premonition that something bad might happen, and gone to disentangle some fishing nets he was intending to put out the following morning.
Down by the boathouse he had watched the fog rise up from
Kalmar Sound, the densest fog he’d seen since his years at sea.
When it drifted in across the shore, he’d felt it on his skin, and he’d shivered as if he were standing in the cold on a ship’s deck. A few moments later the whole world around him was a white mist,, where nothing could be seen.
He should have gone home then, to Ella and Jens. And he’d
thought about it. But he’d stayed at the boathouse working on the nets for another hour or so.
That’s the way it was. But because he’d stayed by the boathouse and his hearing was good, he knew one thing for certain that he’d never managed to convince anybody else of, apart from Julia, perhaps: Jens hadn’t gone down to the sea that day. Gerlof would have heard him. Sounds were slightly muted in the fog, but they could be heard. Jens hadn’t drowned, as the police believed, and his body hadn’t been sucked out to sea and sunk to the bottom of Kalmar Sound.
Jens had gone somewhere else, not down to the water.
Gerlof bent over the table and wrote a single sentence:
THE ALVAR IS LIKE A SEA.
Yes. Anything at all could happen out there, and no one would be any the wiser.
He put his pen down on the desk and closed the notebook,
and when he opened the drawer he saw once again the sandal
wrapped in its tissue paper, and beside it a slim book that had been published earlier in the year.
It was a memoir, only sixty pages, with the title Malm Freight40
Years on the cover. There was a picture of a ship beneath the title.
Ernst had lent him this book when he last visited Gerlof two weeks ago.
“This might be something,” he’d said. “Have a look at page 18.”
Gerlof opened the book and leafed through to page 18. Right
at the bottom, below the text, was a small blackandwhite picture that he’d studied many times before.
The picture was old. It showed a stone jetty in a small harbor, and a pile of long wooden planks lay on the jetty. The black stern of a small sailing ship was visible at an angle behind the wood; the ship was similar to the one Gerlof had sailed, and beside the pile of wood a group of men in black work clothes and peaked caps were lined up. Two men were standing in front of the others, one with his hand on the other’s shoulder in a friendly gesture.
Gerlof stared at the men and they stared back.
There was a knock at the door.
“Coffee time, Gerlof,” said Boel’s voice.
“Coming,” said Gerlof, pushing his chair back.
He got up from the desk with some difficulty.
But he found it difficult to take his eyes off the men in the photograph in the book.
Neither of the men was smiling, and Gerlof wasn’t smiling at them either, because after his last conversation with Ernst he was more or less certain that one of the men in the old photograph had caused the death of his grandson Jens, then hidden the boy’s body forever.
He just didn’t know which of them had done it.
With a small sigh he closed the book and pushed it back into the drawer. Then he picked up his cane and slowly made his way to the lounge for coffee.
The sun rose along the straight line of the horizon
like a silent, dazzling light, but Julia slept right through the sunrise this October morning.
There were small roller blinds at each of the three windows in Gerlof’s boathouse; once upon a time they had been dark red, but over the years they had been faded by the sun to a pale pink. Just before half past eight the blind next to Julia’s bed suddenly flew up, rolling itself up with a bang that sounded like a thunderclap in the silence.
Julia opened her eyes. It wasn’t the bang that had woken
her but the sunshine suddenly pouring in through the eastfacing window. She blinked and raised her head from the warm pillow.
She could see autumnyellow grass swaying in the wind outside the window, and remembered where she was. Strong wind and bright air.
Stenvik, she thought.
She blinked again and tried to keep her head up, but quickly sank back into the hollow in the pillow. She was always slow in the mornings, she had been all her life, and for the past twenty years the oblivion of sleep had often been very tempting. Her bouts of depression after that day had led her to sleep away far more of her adult life than she should have. But getting up in the morning was hard when there didn’t seem to be any particular reason to do so.
Getting up in Stenvik was also made more difficult by the fact that there was no nice warm bathroom to stagger to. All there was below the boathouse was a stony shore and icecold water.
Julia had a vague memory of heavy rain rattling on the roof during the night, but all she could hear now was the sound of the waves below the boathouse. The rhythmic rushing made her think about jumping out of bed, throwing off her clothes, and dashing down to leap into the sea, but the thought passed.
She stayed in the narrow bed for a few more minutes, then
got up.
The air was damp and chilly, and it was still windy outside, but the Stenvik she saw when she had put on her jacket and finally opened the boathouse door wasn’t the same ghostly landscape she’d seen the night before.
The heavy overnight rain seemed to have washed away all
the grayness; the sun was shining again, and the rocky Oland coast was clean and austere and beautiful. The inlet that had given the village its name wasn’t deep, curving out on either side of the boathouse, carved out of the glittering waters of the sound. A few hundred yards from the shore, gulls were bobbing on top of the waves, their wings outstretched, screaming or laughing shrilly at each other through the wind.
Within the sunlight there was a sense of sorrow that not everything was as beautiful as it seemed to be, but Julia tried to suppress it. She just wanted to feel good. She didn’t want to think about fragments of bone or talk to the memory of Jens this morning.
She heard a cheerful bark. When she turned her head, she
saw a whitehaired woman in a red padded jacket walking from
the coast road with a little light brown dog; it wasn’t on a lead, and it was running backwards and forward, snuffling at the road. With their backs toward Julia they turned off and walked quickly into one of the houses on the other side of the road.
Ernst wasn’t the only person living in Stenvik, Julia realized.
Her drowsiness disappeared, and she was filled with energy.
She picked up a plastic container and walked quickly up to
Gerlof’s house to fill it with drinking water from the tap in the garden.
In the sunshine the cottage looked really welcoming, despite the overgrown grass surrounding it, but Gerlof hadn’t given her a key, so she couldn’t go in to look at her own childhood bedroom As she was running the water she realized she could actually stay on Oland for longer than just one day. If there was anything useful to be doneif Gerlof could pull himself together and come up with some suggestions as to what she should do, or look for she could stay for another two days, or three.
Then she looked around the empty garden and decided. No. She would go home to Gothenburg today, but not until later.
On the way back to the boathouse, holding the water container tightly, she stopped to look at the yellow house behind the hawthorn hedge below the cottage. It was surrounded by tall, spreading ash trees and was barely visible behind the hedge, but what could be seen wasn’t attractive. The house wasn’t just empty, it was completely abandoned. Virginia creeper had spread all over the walls and begun to cover the cracked windows.
Julia had a vague memory of an old woman living there, a
woman who never went out or mixed with anyone else in the village.
It
was strange that the house had been left to decay; it was a
fine house beneath all the cracks. Somebody ought to do up the whole place.
Julia hurried back down to the boathouse to make a cup of tea and some breakfast.
Fortyfive minutes later she locked the door of the boathouse, one bag over her shoulder and the other in her hand. Inside, the bed had been made, the electricity switched off, and the blinds pulled down. The boathouse was empty again.
Julia walked across the ridge to the car, looked around without seeing a single person along the coast, and got in. She started the engine and took one last look at the boathouse. She looked at the ridge, the decaying windmill, and all the glittering water below her, and felt the sorrow return.
She quickly turned the car toward the main road.
She drove past the farm that was now a summer cottage, past
the deserted yellow house, and past the gate to Gerlof’s cottage.
Goodbye, goodbye.
Goodbye,Jens.
To the left of the village road was another road leading to
another group of summer cottages, and there was also a rectangular piece of limestone embedded in the ground with the words craft work in stone 1 km painted on it in white. On an iron post above it was a sign showing the symbol indicating that there was no through road.
Julia saw the sign and remembered what she’d been thinking
of doing this morning before she went to say goodbye to Gerlof: stopping off at the old quarry to have a look at Ernst Adolfsson’s sculptures.
She didn’t really have any money to buy that sort of thing, but she thought she would like to see his work. And perhaps she might try and ask some more questions about Jens, if Ernst remembered his disappearance and if he might be willing to tell her where he himself had been that day. It couldn’t do any harm.
She turned off onto the narrow track, and the little Ford immediately began to bounce and list from one side to the other. It was the worst road Julia had driven on so far on Oland, largely because of the cloudburst. The rainwater was still lying in the wheel tracks in long narrow pools; she slowed and crept forward in first gear, but the car still slipped and slid in the muddy hollows.