When she got home from the mainland that evening, she’d
expected Jens to come racing out of the house. Instead, two policemen were waiting for her, along with a weeping Ella and a stonyfaced Gerlof.
Julia wanted to get out a bottle of red wine right now. To sit there on the steps drinking steadily, losing herself in dreams until darkness camebut she quashed the impulse.
Scenery. This empty garden felt just as much like a stage set as the rest of the village, but the play had ended many years ago, everyone had gone home, and Julia felt a crippling sense of loneliness.
She remained there on the steps for several minutes, sitting perfectly still, until a new sound combined with the rushing of the sea. An engine.
It was a car, a tired old car, chugging slowly along the village road.
The sound didn’t go away. It continued, grew closer, and then the engine was switched off very close to the garden.
Julia got up, leaned forward, and glimpsed a round, dumpy car through the trees. An old Volvo PV.
The gate by the road squeaked as someone opened it. Julia
straightened her coat, ran her fingers automatically through her pale hair, and waited.
The footsteps approaching through the dead leaves were short and heavy.
The old man who appeared without saying a word, standing
at the bottom of the steps and looking sternly up at Julia, was also short and heavy. He reminded her of her father, but she couldn’t say why; perhaps it was the cap, the baggy trousers, and the ivory colored woolen sweater that made him look like a real boat captain.
But he was shorter than Gerlof and the cane he was leaning
on suggested that he hadn’t sailed for a long time. His hands were heavily marked with old and new abrasions.
Julia vaguely remembered meeting this man many years
earlier. He was one of Stenvik’s permanent residents. How many were left?
“Hello there,” she said, forcing her lips into a smile.
“Good day to you.”
The man nodded back at her. He took off his cap and Julia
could see the strands of gray hair combed in thin lines across his bald head.
“I just called to have a look at the place,” she said.
“Yes … It needs somebody to keep an eye on it from time to time,” he said in the strongest Oland accent Julia had ever heard, a harsh, low dialect. “That’s what he wants.”
Julia nodded. “It looks really good.”
Silence.
“I’m Julia,” she said, adding quickly with a nod toward the
cottage, “Gerlof Davidsson’s daughter. From Gothenburg.”
The old man nodded, as if it were obvious.
“Of course,” he said. “My name is Ernst Adolfsson. I live
over there.” He pointed behind him, diagonally toward the north.
“Gerlof and I know each other. We have a chat from time to
time.”
Then Julia remembered. This was Ernst, the stonemason.
He’d been walking around the village rather like some kind of museum exhibit even when she was young.
“Is the quarry open now?” she asked.
Ernst lowered his eyes and shook his head.
“No. No, there’s no work there now. People come and fetch
the reject stone sometimes … but nothing new is quarried anymore.”
“But
you work there?” asked Julia.
“I do craft work in stone,” said Ernst. “You’re welcome to
come and have a look, see if you want to buy anything … I’ve got a visitor this evening, but tomorrow is fine.”
“Okay. I might do that,” said Julia.
She probably couldn’t afford to buy anything, but she could
always go and have a look.
Ernst nodded and turned away slowly with small, unsteady
steps. Julia didn’t realize the conversation was over until he’d completely turned his back on her. But she hadn’t finished, so she took a deep breath: “Ernst,” she said, “you must have lived in Stenvik twenty
years ago?”
The man stopped and turned back toward her, but only
halfway.
“I’ve lived here for fifty years,” he said.
“I was just thinking …”
Julia stopped speaking; she hadn’t been thinking at all. She wanted to ask a question, but didn’t know which one to choose.
“My child disappeared at that time,” she went on with an
enormous effort, as if she were ashamed of her grief. “My son Jens … do you remember that?”
“Of course.” Ernst nodded briefly, without emotion. “And
we’re working on it. Gerlof and I, we’re working on it.”
“But…”
“If you see your father, tell him something from me,” said
Ernst.
“What?”
“Tell him it’s the thumb that’s most important,” said Ernst.
“Not just the hand.”
Julia stared at him, bewildered, but Ernst went on:
“This will be solved. It’s an old story, it goes right back to the war … But it will be solved.”
Then he turned away again, with short unsteady steps.
“The war?” said Julia behind him. “Which war?”
But Ernst Adolfsson left without replying.
OLAND, JUNE 1940
When the horsedrawn cart has been unloaded for the last time down on the shore, it is hauled back up to the quarry and the men can begin to load the newly cut and polished limestone onto the boats. This is the heaviest work, and for the past six months it has been done by hand, since the two trucks belonging to the quarry have been requisitioned by the state and are being used as military vehicles.
There’s a world war on, but on Oland the everyday work
must continue as usual. The stone has to be quarried and taken to the cargo ships.
“Load up!” yells LassJan Augustsson, the foreman of the stevedores.
He
is directing the work from the deck of the cargo ship Wind, gesturing to the men loading her with his broad hands, dry and cracked from the rough blocks of stone. Beside him the stevedores are waiting to take the stone on board.
Wind is lying at anchor a hundred yards or so out in the
water, at a safe distance from the shore in case a storm should suddenly blow up along the Oland coast. In Stenvik there is no pier in the harbor behind which a ship can shelter, and close to the shore the shallow, rocky seabed is waiting to smash any boat if it gets the opportunity.
The blocks being loaded on board are ferried out in two open rowboats. In one of them the starboard oar is manned by boatman Johan Almqvist, who is seventeen and has been working as a quarryman and oarsman for a couple of years.
The oar on the port side is manned by Nils Kant, who is new to the job. He’s fifteen now, almost fully grown.
His mother gave Nils a job at the family quarry after he failed his examinations at school. Vera Kant has decided that he is to be a boatman despite his tender age, and Nils knows that he will gradually take over the responsibility for the whole quarry from his uncle. He knows he will one day set his mark deep in the hillside.
He would like to excavate the whole of Stenvik.
Sometimes Nils dreams of sinking down through black water at night, but during the day he rarely thinks of his drowning brother Axel. It wasn’t murder, whatever the gossips in the village say. It was an accident. Axel’s body has never been found; it was dragged down to the bottom of the sound, as is the case with so many who drown, and it never came up again. An accident.
The only memory of Axel is a framed picture of him on his mother’s desk. Vera and Nils have grown much closer to each other since Axel drowned. Vera often says Nils is all she has left, which makes Nils realize how important he is.
The rowboats are lying waiting for their load beside a temporary wooden jetty extending a dozen or so yards out into the sea; the carts arrive on the shore, piled high, and the stones are then carried out onto the jetty in an endless cycleyoungsters, women, older men, and those few men in their prime who have not yet been called up for military service. Girls too; Nils can see Maja Nyman walking around in a redchecked dress out there on the jetty. He knows that she knows he watches her sometimes.
The war hangs like a shadow over Oland. Norway and
Denmark were invaded by the Germans a month or so earlier without presenting any particular difficulty. There are extra news bulletins on the radio every day. Is Sweden really equipped to repel an attack? Foreign warships have been spotted out in the sound, and several times it has been rumored in Stenvik that southern Oland has been invaded.
If the Germans do come, the islanders know they will have to fend for themselves, because help has never come in time from the mainland when enemy forces have landed on Oland in centuries gone by. Never.
People say the army intends to put parts of northern Oland underwater in order to prevent an invasion of the island, which would be a bitter irony now that the serious spring floods out on the alvar have finally begun to evaporate in the sun.
When the sound of a distant engine was heard across the water earlier that morning, the unloading of the stones stopped, and everyone gazed anxiously at the overcast skies. Everyone except Nils, who wonders what a real bombardment by a plane looks like. Are there whistling bombs that turn into balls of fire and smoke and tears and screams and chaos?
But no plane appeared over the island, and the work resumed.
Nils
hates rowing. Hauling stones might not be much better,
but the tedious process of rowing gives him a headache right from the start. He can’t think when he has to steer the heavily laden boat with his oar, and he’s being watched the whole time. LassJan follows the progress of the boats with his peaked cap pulled right down to his eyebrows, directing the work with his voice.
“Let’s have some effort, Kant!” he roars across the water once the last stone has been loaded at the jetty.
“Slow down, Kant, look out for the jetty!” he yells as soon as Nils pulls on the oar too hard once the boat has been unloaded and is easy to row back.
“Get a move on, Kant!” Lass Jan shouts.
Nils glares at him all the way out to the cargo ship. Nils owns the quarry. Or to be more accurate, his mother and uncle own it, but even so LassJan has treated him like a slave right from the start.
“Load up!” yells LassJan.
In the morning people chatted and laughed with each other
when they began unloading, there was almost a party atmosphere, but the stone has mercilessly subdued them with its silent weight and its hard edges. Now people are carrying it doggedly, with their backs bent, their footsteps dragging, and their clothes powdered with white limestone dust.
Nils has nothing against the silence; he never speaks to anyone anyway unless he has to. But from time to time he looks over at Maja Nyman on the jetty.
“She’s full!” shouts LassJan when the blocks of stone are piled a yard high in the boat Nils is sitting in, and the seawater is almost lapping at the gunwale.
Two loaders climb down and sit on the piles of stone, looking down on a little nineyearold boy who’s there to bail out. The boy sneaks a terrified glance at Nils before he picks up his wooden pail and begins to scoop the water from the bottom of the boat, which is not watertight.
Nils pushes hard with his feet and heaves on the oar. The boat glides slowly off toward the cargo ship, where the other rowboat has just been emptied.
Back and forth with the oar, back and forth without a break.
Nils’s hands ache, and the muscles in his arms and back are screaming in pain. He longs to hear the roar of German bombers right now.
The boat finally hits the hull of the ship with a dull thud. Both loaders move quickly to the stern, bend down, take hold, and begin lifting the stone blocks over Wind gunwale.
“Let’s put our backs into it!” yells LassJan from the deck, standing there in his stained shirt with his fat belly sticking out.
The stones are lifted over the gunwale and carried over to
the open hatch, then they slide down into the hold along a broad plank.
Nils is supposed to help with the unloading. He lifts a few slabs up to the ship, then hesitates just a fraction too long with a thick block on the edge, and drops it back into the boat. It lands on the toes of his left foot, and it bloody hurts.
In a fit of blind rage he picks the block up again and heaves it over the gunwale without even looking where it lands.
“Bugger this!” he mutters to the sea and the sky, sitting down at his oar.
He undoes his shoe, feels his aching toes, and rubs them gently with his fingers. They might be broken.
Around him the last of the blocks are unloaded from the boat, and the loaders jump over the gunwale to finish sorting them out down in the hold.
Johan Almqvist follows them. Nils stays in the boat with the little boy who was bailing.
“Kant!” LassJan is up above him, leaning over the gunwale.
‘Get up here and give us a hand!”
m
“I’m injured,” says Nils, surprised at how calm he sounds, when in fact an entire squadron of bombers is screaming into action like furious bees inside his head. Equally calmly, he places his hand on his oar. “I’ve broken my toes.”
“Get up.”
Nils gets up. It doesn’t actually hurt all that much, and Lass Jan shakes his head at him.
“Get up here and start loading, Kant.”
Nils shakes his head again, his hand closing around the oar.
The bombs are falling now, whistling through the air inside him.
He undoes the oarlock and lifts the oar a fraction.
He swings it slowly backwards.
“Broken his toes …” Another of the loaders, a stubby broad shouldered lad whose name Nils can’t remember, is leaning over the gunwale next to LassJan. “Better run off home to Mummy, then!” he says scornfully.
“I’ll take care of this,” says the foreman, turning his head toward the loader.
This is a mistake. LassJan never sees Nils’s oar come swinging through the air.
The broad blade of the oar hits the back of his head. LassJan utters a long, drawnout “Hooooh,” and his knees give way.
“I own you!” yells Nils.