Юхан Теорин - Echoes From the Dead

“Nicht schiessen,” says the soldier in front once again.

Nils doesn’t understand the words, but he thinks the language sounds like Adolf Hitler’s language on the radio. That means they’re Germans, from the big war. How have they ended up here?

A boat, he thinks. They must have crossed the Baltic in a boat.

“You have to... come with me,” he says.

He speaks slowly, so the soldiers will understand. He must take command here; he has a gun in his hands after all.

He nods at them.

“Do you understand what I’m saying?”

It feels good to talk, even if they don’t understand. It lessens the fear and makes it possible to fight against the paralysis in his head. Nils could take them with him to Stenvik; he would be a hero. What other people in the village think doesn’t matter, but his mother would be proud of him.

The soldier in front nods too, and slowly lowers his arms.

“Wir wollen nach England fahren,” he says. “Wir wollen in die Freiheit.”

Nils looks at him. The only word he understands is “England,” which sounds the same as in Swedish, but he’s sure the soldiers aren’t English. He’s more or less certain they’re Germans.

The soldier at the back lowers one hand toward his pocket.

“No!”

Nils’s heart is pounding, he opens his mouth.

The soldier reaches into his pocket. His hands are moving too quickly, Nils can’t follow him with his eyes. He has to do something, and he says:

“Han—”

A thundering roar drowns out the rest. The shotgun jerks.

Powder smoke billows out of the barrels, obscuring the men in front of him for a moment.

It wasn’t really Nils’s intention to shoot, he just squeezed the shotgun a little harder so he could point with it, point upward. But the gun goes off and a hail of lead shot flies out and knocks the soldier in front to the ground as if he’s been struck by a mace.

Nils sees him as a shadow behind the powder smoke, a shadow that falls and jerks and remains lying there on the grass.

The smoke drifts away, every sound disappears, but the soldier is still lying there on his side, his jacket ripped to shreds. For a few seconds his body looks completely unharmed, but then the blood begins to seep through the torn fabric like dark, spreading patches. The soldier closes his eyes; he looks as if he’s dying.

“Oh shit...” Nils whispers to himself.

It’s done. He’s shot the soldier — even worse, he’s shot the wrong one. It wasn’t the soldier in front who put his hand in his pocket, but he’s the one who’s lying there bleeding on the ground.

Nils has shot a human being as if he’d been a hare; he shot him, nobody else.

The soldier on the ground blinks slowly, his arms are twitching slightly, and he is struggling to raise his head, but without success.

His breath is coming in short gasps, he coughs, breathes out, but never breathes in. His uniform is covered in blood. His gaze wanders all around, back and forth, and finally stops, his eyes fixed on the sky.

The other soldier is standing behind him, the one who was fumbling in his pocket, his mouth compressed into a thin line, his eyes empty. He is standing utterly still, but he is holding something between his left thumb and his index finger. Something he took out of his pocket just before the shot went off.

Not a gun, something smaller. It looks like a small dark red stone, shining and glittering, although there is no sun on the alvar.

Nils is holding the gun, the soldier is holding his little stone. Neither of them lowers his eyes.

Nils has shot someone, he has killed someone. The initial panic disappears, and an icy calm fills him. He’s in control now.

Nils breathes out, takes a step toward the soldier, and nods toward the little stone.

“Give that to me,” he says calmly.

Gerlof didn’t reply to Julia’s question about Nils Kant. He simply pointed over her shoulder, toward the darkness outside the window.

“The Kant family lived just down here,” he said. “In the big yellow house. They’d been living there for a long time before we built this cottage.”

“I remember some old woman lived there when I was little,” said Julia.

“That was Nils’s mother, Vera,” said Gerlof. “She died at the beginning of the seventies. Before that she lived alone for many years. She was rich... her family owned a sawmill in Småland, and she owned a lot of land here along the coast, but I don’t think she ever got any pleasure from her money. I assume her relatives are still squabbling about what’s left of their inheritance, because the house is just falling apart down there. Or maybe nobody dares live there.”

“Vera Kant...” said Julia. “I’ve just got a vague memory of her. She wasn’t very popular, was she?”

“No, she was too bitter for that, and she bore grudges,” said Gerlof. “If your grandfather had done her some injustice, she would hate your mother and you and your dog, for the rest of your life. Vera was stubborn and proud. When her husband died, she went straight back to her maiden name.”

“And she never went out in the village?”

“No, Vera was a recluse,” said Gerlof. “She spent most of her time sitting in her house, longing for her son.”

“So what did he do?” Julia asked again.

“A lot of things...” said Gerlof. “When he was young, people suspected that he’d drowned his little brother down by the shore. Evidently only Nils and his brother were there when it happened, and afterward Nils swore it was an accident... so we’ll never know the truth about that.”

“Were you friends? You and Nils?”

“No, no. He was a few years younger than me, and I soon left and went to sea. So I hardly ever ran into him when he was little.”

“And when he grew up?”

Gerlof almost smiled, but when it came to Nils Kant, there was nothing to smile about.

“Definitely not when he grew up,” he replied. “He left the village, as I said.” He raised his hand and pointed toward the narrow bookcase in the corner of the room. “There’s a book about Nils Kant over there. At least it’s partly about him. It’s on the third shelf down, it’s got a narrow yellow spine.”

Julia got up and went over to the shelves. She looked and finally pulled a book out from the third shelf. She read the title.

“Öland Crimes. ”

She looked inquiringly at Gerlof.

“That’s it,” he said. “A colleague of Bengt Nyberg’s on the local paper wrote it a few years ago. Read it, it’ll fill you in on most things.”

“Okay.” She looked at the clock. “But not tonight.”

“No. Time for bed,” said Gerlof.

“I’d like my old room,” said Julia. “If that’s all right.”

It was. Gerlof chose the bedroom next door, the one he and Ella had shared for many years. Their old double bed was gone, but the new beds stood in the same spot. While Gerlof was in the bathroom, Julia made up one of them for him; making beds was something her father could no longer manage.

When Julia had finished and had gone into her own room, Gerlof undressed down to his long johns and T-shirt and got into bed. The mattress here was harder than he was used to nowadays.

He lay there for a while in the darkness thinking, but he no longer felt any more at home here in the cottage than he did in his room up at Marnäs. It had been a big step, admitting he was too old to manage on his own in Stenvik and moving up there, but perhaps it had been the right decision. At least he didn’t have to wash dishes and make his own coffee.

Gerlof listened to the wind in the trees for a while, then he fell asleep. And at some point during the night he dreamed he was lying on a bed of hard stones over in the quarry.