Юхан Теорин - Echoes From the Dead

“Of course.”

She got up to go into the kitchen to wash up the coffee things, almost annoyed by Gerlof’s question.

I found a man crushed underneath a block of stone, she thought, with blood coming out of his mouth and eyes that had burst out of their sockets. But I’ve seen blood before, I’ve seen dead bodies. I’ve experienced worse.

And as her thoughts went round and round, she suddenly remembered something that might be important, and turned back to her father.

“He had a message for you,” she said. “I forgot.”

Gerlof looked up.

“Ernst,” she explained. “I met him at the cottage when I arrived in Stenvik, and I was supposed to tell you something... He said it just before he left.” She stopped speaking and tried to remember. “Something about the fact that it was the thumb that was the most important, not the hand.”

“The thumb was the most important?” said Gerlof.

Julia nodded. “Do you know what he meant?”

Gerlof shook his head thoughtfully. He looked at John. “Do you?”

“No idea,” said John. “Is it some kind of proverb maybe?”

“That’s what he said, anyway,” said Julia, and went into the kitchen.

Julia and Gerlof drove back to the campsite in the Ford, and John followed them in his own car. The gray cloud cover had swept in over Kalmar Sound, and now hid the sun. The Stenvik that had been brought to life in the old men’s tales, where people lived and worked all year round and where every property and every path had its own name — that Stenvik had gone back to sleep now. All the houses were empty and closed, the sails of the windmill no longer turned, and there were no eel traps laid out in the waters of the sound.

When Julia had turned in and stopped beside the mini-golf course, John parked his car and came over to them. Gerlof rolled down his window, and John looked at Julia:

“Look after your dad.”

It was the first time John Hagman had spoken directly to her, she suddenly realized.

Julia nodded. “I’ll try.”

“Keep in touch, John,” said Gerlof beside her. “Let me know if you see anyone... any strangers.”

Strangers, thought Julia, recalling an incident from her childhood in the fifties, when a black man with a broad smile who spoke poor English and no Swedish at all had turned up in Stenvik one summer, going from house to house with a suitcase in his hand. People in the village had locked their doors and refused to open them — and when somebody finally had the courage to find out what he wanted, it turned out the man wasn’t a robber at all, just a Christian from Kenya selling Bibles and hymnbooks. People didn’t like strangers in Stenvik.

“We’ll speak soon,” said John Hagman.

Julia watched him go over toward the house and grab hold of the broom as if it were his most treasured possession. With it in his hand, he headed for the golf course and started waving his arms at his son Anders again.

“John ran the campsite for twenty-five years,” Gerlof told Julia. “Now it’s Anders’s responsibility, but he goes around in a dream most of the time. It’s still John who has to sweep and paint and keep the place from falling apart... He should take things easier, but he won’t listen to me.”

He sighed.

“That’s that, then,” he said. “We can drive over to the cottage now.”

Julia shook her head. “I’m taking you back to Marnäs,” she said.

“I’d really like to have a look at the cottage,” said Gerlof. “While I’ve got such an excellent chauffeur.”

“It’s already late,” said Julia. “I was thinking of going home today...”

“There’s no rush, is there?” said Gerlof. “Gothenburg isn’t going anywhere.”

Afterward Julia couldn’t remember whether it was she or Gerlof who’d suggested spending the night in the cottage.

Perhaps it was decided when Gerlof walked into the living room with his coat on and sank down into the room’s only armchair with a deep sigh. Or perhaps when Julia went out into the street to turn on the stopcock under the lid of the well, and switched on the electricity in the kitchen. Or when she turned on the lights, put the radiators on, and made them both a cup of elderflower tea. In any event, there was an unspoken agreement between the two of them that they would spend the night in Stenvik. Julia switched on her cell phone so that Gerlof could ring the home and tell the staff what had been decided.

Afterward Gerlof took a stroll around the yard.

“No sign of rats,” he reported contentedly when he came back into the house.

Julia looked around the summer cottage’s small, dark rooms tentatively, as if she were in a museum. Part of her history was here, all the way back to her childhood, but it felt as if it were shut up in a glass case.

What was there to see in the cottage? Not much. Five cramped rooms, with the furniture swathed in white sheets, six narrow beds without any bed linens, a little kitchen with a window, the dead flies lying like sprawling letters against the glass. There was a bookcase in one corner. An old shipping chart of northern Öland, faded by the sun, hung on one wall, and on a bureau stood a framed black-and-white photograph from the sixties, showing a teenage Julia with a strained smile, her sister Lena beside her. Otherwise the room was almost as lacking in personal possessions as a rental cottage.

There were no rugs on the wooden floor, and it was ice-cold. And there was almost nothing left that Julia remembered from her childhood.

But there had been more personal items, and when Julia pulled out the bottom drawer of the desk in what had been her room when she was a child, she found one of them: a framed photograph of a sunburnt little boy in a white cotton top, smiling shyly at the photographer. For many years it had stood on the desk, but now somebody had hidden it away.

Julia put the photograph back where it ought to be. She studied the picture of her vanished son, and longed for red wine; a few glasses would warm her up and make her forget, make the cottage an easier place to be. But she had no intention of letting Gerlof see that she drank.

Gerlof didn’t appear to notice how she was feeling; he was walking slowly around every room as if this were his real home. And it was, in a way. He had spent every summer and every weekend here after he retired, first with Ella and then alone, for as long as Julia could remember. He had stood by the gate waving when the children went back to the mainland after staying for a few weeks in the summer holidays.

It isn’t summer and I must leave soon, thought Julia, standing by the door with the car keys in her hand, but what she said out loud to Gerlof was:

“Lena and I used to sleep in bunk beds when we were here... I had the top one.”

Gerlof nodded. “There wasn’t much room in the holidays when everybody was here, but nobody complained, as far as I remember.”

“No. I just remember it was great having all our cousins here, all through the summers... The sun was always shining, as I recall,” said Julia, looking at the clock. “But we’d better get to bed now...”

“Already?” said Gerlof, straightening the chart on the wall behind him. “Haven’t you got any more questions?”

“Questions?” said Julia.

“Yes...” Gerlof pulled the dust sheet off an armchair in the living room and folded it up. “Just ask away,” he said.

He sat down slowly, and at that moment Julia’s cell phone rang in her jacket pocket out in the darkened hallway.

The digital signal sounded wrong in the silence, and she hastily went to answer it.

“Hello, Julia here.”

“Hi. How’s it going?” It was Lena — possibly the only person who knew Julia’s number. “Have you arrived?”