Юхан Теорин - The Voices Beyond

‘No, who was he?’

‘An old Swedish-American from Chicago... I met him one summer many years ago, and he claimed he’d been a driver for the Mafia back in the thirties. For Al Capone. Lundin said he used to drive Capone to meetings, until he was arrested and locked up in Alcatraz.’

‘Is he still alive, this Lundin?’

‘No, he’s every bit as dead as Capone. Most of those who came home are dead now.’

Gerlof sighed. ‘You’re absolutely right.’

‘But some are still alive,’ Bill said. ‘We’re meeting up for lunch on Friday.’

‘Who’s meeting up for lunch?’

‘Those who’ve come home to northern Öland... Those of us who are left. There’s always an annual get-together for all Swedish-Americans at the Borgholm Hotel, just after midsummer.’

‘And does everyone come along?’

‘Who knows?’ Bill said. ‘But I’ve got something I can show you, if you want more names. It’s taken from the church registers — it’s a list of everyone who emigrated from Öland during the twentieth century. My cousin has been to the House of the Emigrants in Gothenburg to do some research; he got the list from their archive.’

‘That would be very useful,’ Gerlof said. ‘And this lunch...’

‘It’s usually very good. You’re welcome to come with me.’

‘Really? I’d love to, but I’m not a Swedish-American, Bill. I’ve never even been to America.’

‘Don’t you have any emigrants in the family?’

‘Well, yes... my grandfather’s two brothers. They set off across the sea in the early 1900s. One ended up in Boston and became quite wealthy; the other is supposed to have died on the street in Chicago. That’s the closest I can get.’

‘In that case, you can be an honorary homecomer,’ Bill said.

‘Thank you.’

‘People won’t ask you many questions anyway. They’ll just go on and on, like windmills. All they want to do is talk about their own stories and adventures.’

‘Then I’m happy to listen,’ Gerlof said.

Everyone seemed to be carrying around their own little telephones these days. Everyone except the Homecomer. He had to rely on the public kiosks that still stood in the squares and picnic areas on the island, and he was standing in one of those kiosks right now.

He keyed in a number, and a hoarse male voice answered, sounding suspicious.

‘Hello?’

‘Wall?’

‘Yes...’

‘Do you know who this is?’

‘Yes...’

The arms dealer’s voice was slurred, as if he had been drinking all day.

‘I’d like to do some more business with you,’ the Homecomer said.

‘We need to sort out the last lot first,’ Wall said. ‘What the hell did you do with the ship?’

The Homecomer was silent.

‘Nothing that can be undone,’ he said eventually.

‘Exactly. Pecka called me yesterday; he was really shaken up. He told me you sank her.’

‘Yes. We had no choice... There was poison gas on board.’

Wall didn’t speak; the Homecomer heard him swigging something at the other end of the line, then he said, ‘So you want to come here and do some more business?’

‘Yes. And I’ve got money now.’

‘Tomorrow evening,’ Wall said.

The Homecomer put the phone down. He thought about the bunker not far from Villa Kloss, then about a man he had once met, a man who had made rocks fly through the air.

‘We have to be prepared to make sacrifices,’ Sven says. ‘You do understand that, don’t you?’

Aron looks at his sore hands and says nothing. Sven’s hands are in just as bad a state as his own. The skin is cracked, the nails are coming away from the flesh, there are cuts along almost every finger. They’re actually quite lucky, because some of the other workers have already lost a couple of fingers. It’s the mud and the rocks that destroy the hands, the sticky mud that hides beneath the grass, keeping the rocks firmly in place. The workers stab at the ground with their spades, trying to gain some leverage, but the clay and the rocks refuse to give way.

Life in the new country consists only of sleep and work.

Every night they sleep in a kind of hut with twenty other men, or perhaps more, on beds that are not beds. Sven’s is made up of three empty boxes, while Aron’s slightly shorter one is a few planks of wood balanced on two sawhorses.

Every day is full of digging, from morning till night. Sven, Aron and the other immigrants are building a canal through the forests, or perhaps a wide ditch. Aron doesn’t really know which, he just keeps digging. There are poles in the ground to show where they have to dig, a straight line leading towards the mountains on the horizon, and Aron doesn’t think about the eventual goal. He just keeps toiling away with his spade, but over and over again it gets stuck in the unforgiving ground. He tugs, he pulls, he sobs. He digs and digs.

Winter turns to spring, and they carry on digging.

One day when the snow has melted, the work suddenly gets easier. An energetic man in a black cap arrives from the direction of the railway, pushing a cart containing some wooden boxes. He greets the workers with a cheery wave, and when he hears that some of them are Swedish he raises his hat to them.

‘ Ruotsi! ’ he says, using the Finnish name for Sweden before continuing in Swedish. ‘I come from Esbo in Finland, but I became a mining engineer and wanted to get out and see the world. This is a fantastic country, isn’t it?’

Sven nods, but Aron just stands there.

The man looks around. ‘Any stubborn rocks you want to get rid of?’

‘Definitely,’ Sven says.

There are always huge rocks. Some of the older workers point out several waiting up ahead.

‘Excellent, in that case allow me to demonstrate a little magic trick!’ the man from Esbo says, lifting the first wooden box off the cart.

Aron helps him to carry the rest, and watches as he takes fat sticks wrapped in oiled paper out of the boxes.

‘Ammonal!’ he shouts, gathering the men around the nearest rock. He picks up the sticks. ‘These are my boys, and they’re going to work together... Put them on the opposite side of the rock from the direction you want it to go in, bury them deep in the ground so they have something to kick against and press the detonator against the fuse. But slowly! You have to treat these boys as tenderly as if they were your very own cock!’

The men burst into raucous laughter, then fall silent. They all watch with tense anticipation as the man borrows a pickaxe and makes a row of holes for the dynamite underneath the rock. He shows them in which direction to point the sticks, and how to pack them tightly in order to achieve the best possible effect.

Then the man lights a metre length of black fuse wire and, when it begins to spark and crackle, he makes everyone move back. A long way back.

The ground shakes. A cloud of smoke and fire erupts, and the rock is hurled in the air. It’s like magic! The men cheer and the man raises his cap once more.

‘Ammonal! Dynamite is the future!’

The man from Esbo teaches them how to blow up rocks, but he soon moves on, and it’s back to the spades. Aron almost wishes he had never met the mining engineer, never found out that something called dynamite even existed. He doesn’t want to know that there are balls of fire that can move mountains, when all he has is a spade.

As the days grow warmer, the mud dries out and digging becomes easier. But then the mosquitoes arrive; the air is filled with them in early summer. Clouds of mosquitoes sweep in across the forest, whining around Aron’s ears, crawling up inside his sleeves, or biting right through the fabric of his shirt. His face swells up, his skin itches and throbs from all the bites. The mosquitoes get in his eyes and his nose, even in his mouth, where they taste sweet, like blood.