She pulled in at a service station a few kilometers from the coast to fill up with gas and to eat a few mouthfuls of a stew that was chewy and sticky and not worth the money, and then she set off again.
Toward the Oland Bridge. North of Kalmar, the bridge led to
the island; it had been built over twenty years earlier, completed and opened the autumn that… That day.
She wouldn’t think about it anymore, not until she arrived.
The Oland Bridge stood tall and firm, spanning the sound,
resting on broad concrete pillars, completely unaffected by the sharp gusts of wind that tore at the car. It was wide and completely straight, apart from an arched section close to the mainland, which allowed taller ships to pass beneath the road. The arch was a viewing point, and she could see the flat shape of the island. It extended along the horizon, from north to south.
She could see the alvar, the grassy plain that covered large parts of Oland. Dark, low clouds drifted by, like long airships above the landscape.
Both tourists and residents loved to go walking and bird
watching out there, but Julia didn’t like the alvar. It was too big and there was nowhere to take shelter if the vast sky above came tumbling down.
After the bridge she drove north, toward Borgholm. The road
was almost dead straight for several kilometers along the west coast, and she met few cars now that the tourist season was over.
Julia kept her eyes fixed firmly on the road ahead in order to avoid looking out across the desolate alvar and the great expanse of water on the other side, and she tried not to think about a little sandal with a mended strap.
It didn’t mean anything, it didn’t have to mean anything.
The journey up to Borgholm from the bridge took almost half
an hour. When she arrived, there was just one crossroads with a set of traffic lights, and she decided to turn left, down to the little town by the water.
She stopped at a cake shop at the edge of Storgatan, thus
avoiding the harbor, the square, and the church; the church behind which she and her parents had lived when Gerlof had his own cargo boat and wanted to live near the harbor. Her childhood was in Borgholm. Julia had no desire to see herself running along the streets around the square like a pale ghost, a nineyearold girl with her whole life ahead of her. She didn’t want to meet any young men, striding toward her along the street and making her think of Jens. She had enough reminders of that kind in Gothenburg.
The bell above the cake shop door tinkled.
“Afternoon.”
The girl behind the counter was blonde and pretty, and looked extremely bored. She listened to Julia with a vacant expression as she asked for two cinnamon pastries and a couple of strawberry cream cakes for herself and Gerlof.
This girl could have been her thirty years earlier, but of course Julia had moved away from the island when she was just eighteen, and had lived and worked in both Kalmar and Gothenburg before the age of twentytwo. In Gothenburg she had met Michael and gotten pregnant with Jens after just a few weeks, and much of her restlessness had disappeared then and never returnednot even after their separation.
“There aren’t many people here now,” she remarked as the
girl lifted the cakes out of the glass display counter. “In the autumn, I mean.”
“No,” said the girl, without smiling.
“Do you like living here?” asked Julia.
The girl shook her head briefly. “Sometimes. But there’s nothing to do. Borgholm only comes to life in the summer.”
“Who says that?”
“Everybody,” said the girl. “People from Stockholm, anyway.”
She fastened the box of cakes and handed it over. “I’m moving to Kalmar soon,” she said. “Will that be all?”
Julia nodded. She could have said that she too had worked in Borgholm as a teenager, in a cafe down by the harbor, and that she too had been bored, waiting for life to begin. Then all of a sudden she wanted to talk about Jens, about her sorrow and the hope that had made her come back. A little sandal in an envelope.
She said nothing. A fan was humming away; otherwise the
cake shop was silent.
“Are you a tourist?” the girl asked.
“Yes … no,” said Julia. “I’m going up to Stenvik for a few days. My family has a cottage there.”
“It’s like Norrland up there now,” said the girl as she handed Julia her change. “Practically all the houses are empty. You never see a soul up there.”
It was half past three in the afternoon by the time Julia emerged from the cake shop and looked along the street. Borgholm was virtually deserted. There were a dozen or so people around, one or two cars, not much else. The huge ruined castle looked down from the hill above the town, its windows dark, empty holes.
A cold wind was sweeping along the streets as Julia walked
back to the car. It was almost eerily silent.
She passed a big notice board covered in a patchwork of posters, all stuck on top of one another: American action films at the cinema in Borgholm, rock concerts in the ruined castle, and various evening classes. The posters had faded in the sun, and their corners had been chewed to pieces by the wind.
This was the first time Julia had visited the island as an adult so late in the year. During the low season, when Oland slowed down. She walked back to the car.
I’m coming now, Jens.
North of the town the dry, grassy plain of the alvar continued on both sides of the road. The road headed slowly inland from the coast, pointing straight into the flat landscape, where round, lichencovered gray stones had been lifted from the fields and used to build long, low walls. The walls formed a gigantic pattern right across the alvar.
Julia had a slight feeling of agoraphobia out here beneath
the vast sky, and longed for a glass of red winea longing which grew stronger as she got closer to Stenvik. At home she was trying to stop drinking every day, and she never drank when she was driving, but out here in this desolate place the bottles of wine in her bag seemed like the only interesting company she had. She wanted to lock herself in somewhere and devote all her attention to them until they were empty.
On the way north she met only two vehicles, a bus and a
tractor. She drove past yellow signs bearing the names of small villages along the road, names she remembered from all those earlier journeys. She could recite them by heart, like a nursery rhyme. They were places she had only driven past for years. For her mother and father there had been only Stenvik every summer, and the holiday cottage they had built there at the end of the 1940smany years before the tourists had discovered the village.
Autumn, winter, and spring in Borgholm, but the summer had
always been Stenvik for Julia. Before she went up to Marnas to see Gerlof, she wanted to see the village again. There were bad memories up there, but many good ones too. The memory of long, hot summer days.
She saw the yellow sign from some distance away: Stenvik 1, and beneath it the word campsite crossed out with black tape. She braked and turned onto the village road, away from the alvar and down toward the sound.
After five hundred yards the first little cluster of summer cottages appeared; they were all closed up, with white blinds pulled down at the windows. Then the kiosk, where the villagers gathered in summer. Its front had been cleared of notices and adverts and pennants, and there were shutters at its windows. Next to the kiosk was a sign pointing south toward the campsite and a mini golf course. The campsite was run by a friend of Gerlof’s, she remembered.
The road led toward the water, curved to the right along the rocky ridge above the shore, and led northward, where more closedup cottages lined the eastern side of the road. On the other side was the shore, covered in stones and pebbles; small waves ruffled the surface of the water out in the sound.
Julia drove slowly past the old windmill, standing up above
the water on its sturdy wooden base. The mill had stood there abandoned for as long as Julia could remember, but now it had turned gray and lost almost all of its red color, and all that remained of its sails was a cross of cracked wooden slats.
About a hundred yards past the windmill lay the Davidsson
family’s boathouse. It looked well cared for, with red wooden walls, white windows, and tarblack roof. Someone had painted it recently. Lena and Richard?
Julia had a picture in her memory of Gerlof, sitting there
mending his long nets on a stool in front of the boathouse in the summer, while she and Lena and their cousins ran about on the shore down below, the sharp smell of tar in their nostrils.
But Gerlof had been down at the boathouse cleaning his
flounder nets. That day.
Now there was no one at the boathouse. Dry grass quivered
in the wind. A wooden skiff, painted green, lay on its side in the grass beside the houseit was Gerlof’s old boat, and its hull was so dried out that Julia could see strips of daylight between the upper planks.
She switched off the engine, but didn’t get out of the car.
Neither her shoes nor her clothes were suitable for the Oland autumn wind; besides, she could see an iron bar with a large padlock across the boathouse door. The blinds were pulled right down inside the small windows, as they were in the cottages in the rest of the village.
Stenvik was empty. Scenery, it was all just scenery for a summer theater. A gloomy play, at least as far as Julia was concerned.
Okay. She would go and look at Gerlof’s house, the holiday
cottage. Gerlof had built it himself on land the family had
owned for years. She started the car and drove along the village road, which forked up ahead. She took the righthand road, inland.
There were groves of lowgrowing trees here, protecting the
few houses that were occupied over the winter, but all the trees were leaning slightly away from the shore, bowed by the constant wind.
In a large garden stood a tall, yellow wooden house which
looked as if it were about to fall to pieces behind the tall bushes.
The paint was flaking off the walls, and the roof tiles were cracked and covered in moss. Julia couldn’t remember who it had belonged to, but had no recollection of the place ever having looked smart and well cared for.
Among the trees a narrow track led off the road, a strip of
kneehigh yellow grass growing down the middle. Julia pulled in and switched off the engine. Then she put on her coat and got out into the chilly air.
The wind was soughing in the dry leaves on the trees, and
behind that was the more muted sound of the waves on the shore.
But apart from that, there was no sound: no birds, no voices, no traffic.
The girl in the cake shop had been right: this was just like the mountains of Norrland.
The track leading to Gerlof’s cottage ended at a low iron gate set in a stone wall. Julia opened the gate and it gave a faint squeak.
She went into the garden.
I’m here now, Jens.
The little house, painted brown with white eaves, didn’t look quite so closed up as many of the other cottages in Stenvik. But if Gerlof had still been here, he would never have let the grass grow so tall, or allowed yellow pine needles and leaves to litter the garden.
They had been a hardworking couple, Gerlof and Julia’s
mother. Ella, who had remained a housewife all her life, had sometimes seemed like a visitor from the nineteenth century, from an age of poverty when there was neither the time nor the energy for laughter and dreams on the island, and every scrap of kitchen paper had to be dried and used several times. Ella had been small and silent and had a dogged determination about her; the kitchen was her empire. Julia and Lena had had a pat on the cheek from their mother occasionally, but never a hug. And of course Gerlof had been away at sea most of the time while she was growing up.
Nothing was moving in the garden. When Julia was little,
there had been a water pump in the middle of the lawn, a yard high, painted green, with a big spout and a pretty curved handle, but it was gone now. All there was in its place was a concrete cover over the well.
To the east of the cottage was a stone wall, and beyond it the grassy alvar began. It ran all the way to the horizon in the east.
If the trees hadn’t been in the way, Julia would have been able to see Marnas church sticking up like a black arrow over there; she had been christened in that church when she was just a few months old.
Julia turned her back on the alvar and walked toward the cottage.
She went around a trellis covered in vines that had grown
wild, and climbed up the pink limestone steps that had seemed so enormous when she was a child. The steps led up to a little veranda with a closed wooden door.
Julia pushed down the handle, but the door was locked. As
expected.
This was both the beginning and the end of her journey.
It was remarkable that the cottage was still here, thought
Julia, because so much had happened out in the world since Jens had disappeared. New countries had come into being, others had ceased to exist. In Stenvik, the village was now virtually empty of visitors for most of the yearbut the house that Jens had left that day was still there.
Julia sat down on the steps and let out a sigh.
I’m tired, Jens.
She looked at a little collection of stones that Gerlof had piled in front of the house. On the top lay an uneven, grayish black stone that he maintained had fallen from the sky as a burning lump and had made a crater over in the quarry sometime toward the end of the nineteenth century, when Gerlof’s own father and grandfather were working there. This ancient visitor from outer space was spattered with bird dirt.
. Jens had walked past the stone from space that day. He’d
put on his little sandals, left the house where his grandmother lay sleeping, gone down these steps and out into the garden. That was the only thing that was absolutely definite. Where he had gone after that, and why, nobody knew.