This Land is no Stranger

by Sarah Hollister

  This Land is No Stranger

  A Nordic Thriller

  Sarah Hollister & Gil Reavill

  LYS

  Copyright © 2021 Sarah Hollister, Gil Reavill & LYS

  © Copyright Sarah Hollister, Gil Reavill & LYS förlag 2021, all rights reserved

  Editor: Sarah Coats Chandler

  Cover design: Sofi Tegsveden Deveaux

  The title This land is no stranger is a translation of the line detta land är ingen främling, by the Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelöf, taken from his anthology Non serviam (1945) © Copyright Gunnar Ekelöf, licensed by ALIS, alis.org.

  Part One epigraph republished with permission of Princeton University Press, from The Death Rituals of Rural Greece, by Loring M. Danforth, 1982, permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.

  I am a stranger in this land

  but this land is no stranger within me

  Gunnar Ekelöf

  ◆◆◆

  Finally there was only a last remaining flame to die. The abuse heaped upon the girl, the blows raining down on her, the pain, the gagging stench, the humiliation, the disgust—she felt it less and less. But one flickering light wouldn’t leave her, a single hope that still burned when all others guttered.

  A hope born of hopelessness. She had nothing left to lose. Only that tiny light, a wavering pinprick that she refused to give up.

  Someone must know.

  It was impossible. Cellphones were banned in the barracks in the forest. Of course. When one of the girls was caught with one, the men used a pair of bolt cutters to remove her fingers. Paper, pens, writing implements of any kind, communication of any kind, all forbidden—it was if they had stitched up her lips. She was silenced, muted, untongued.

  The blind room, she named the foul, closet-sized cell where they kept her. No one could see in, no one could see out. What happened in the blind room went on out of sight, out of mind. The door opened and closed, making a crazy scraping sound. One man left, another entered. The scraping chafed upon her nerves like a dull knife.

  She moved her fingers in the darkness, tracing words in the blank air. I was here, she spelled out. This happened.

  Then the crippled old crone who fed the girl scraps, washed her when the men’s filth coated the girl’s skin, the nameless old woman, gruff and rough-handed, mostly mute herself, listened. Or not. The girl couldn’t tell. She couldn’t read the face of the other. Was it the girl’s own hope reflected there, like the light of the moon, which has no light of its own, but only shines with radiance from elsewhere?

  My family, she whispered to the old woman. Please. I need them to know.

  Earning a sneer and wave of a hand, as if she were a fly buzzing.

  She lied to the crone. My mother. My father. I have a sister. Please. The girl’s cracked lips moved almost soundlessly.

  Nothing. No glimmer of understanding, reflected or otherwise.

  She would die. She stopped eating. Still the men would come. It didn’t matter to her anymore. Her ordeal was almost over.

  On her last day but one, a miracle. The crone, her face twisted in fear, brought her a bar of chocolate wrapped in paper and tinfoil. A hoarse whisper: “Give me the wrapper when you are done.” Was there a knowing expression on the old woman’s face? The girl couldn’t tell. If there was one, it was lost amid the depthless wrinkles.

  The girl bit off her nail, an already shredded, barely there fingernail, and used it as a pen. Melted chocolate stood for ink. Scratching out words no one would ever read.

  Someone must know. I am lost. They stole me from the streets of Stockholm. A man with a black beard. This they did to me. And this. I am used up and have become useless to them. Tomorrow I will deny them the pleasure of murdering me. Someone must know what happens here.

  Signing the forgotten name, the one they had torn from her.

  Lel.

  The crone came and took the wrapper away, crumpling it up as though it were trash. The girl never saw the old woman again.

  Part one: The wandering bride

  Songs are just words / For those who are bitter to sing / They sing to rid themselves of bitterness / But the bitterness does not go away // Loring M. Danforth, Death Rituals of Rural Greece

  1.

  Scandinavian Airlines Flight SK904 approached Stockholm’s Arlanda airport after an eight-hour trans-Atlantic journey from Newark. The red-eye left Veronika Brand thoroughly exhausted. She had not slept. Most of the other passengers took advantage of the long trip to check out, sleep masks in place. She felt alone in the darkened cabin. She hoped at least someone in the cockpit remained awake.

  Tall, light-haired, thirty nine years old, Brand had no doubts about fitting in with the native population of Sweden. It was the land of her ancestors, at least on her mother’s side of the family, the Dalgrens. She had never before visited. Whatever bits and pieces she knew of the language had come from summers spent with her Swedish immigrant grandparents, who kept a farm in upstate New York. In her own mind, the affinity with the country was more theoretical than real.

  Brand had found herself on a plane to Stockholm because of a series of unconnected events that had happened within a space of a few weeks back home.

  Home. New York, well, New York was part of the problem. She had to get out. Recently her career as a New York City police detective had cratered spectacularly. Due to a chain of bad choices involving politically connected figures in the NYPD, she had been suspended after fourteen years on the force.

  At the same time her job troubles were happening, Brand’s speed habit kicked itself up a few notches. She’d been juggling multiple Adderall scripts at once, as well as occasionally skimming off pills seized in drug busts. The medication was ubiquitous, overprescribed, used legally and illicitly. An addict always imagines other addicts are everywhere. To Brand the whole NYPD, from the brass to the file clerks, seemed jacked up on speed like a corps of Nazi blitzkriegers. Amphetamine made for a very energetic style of policing.

  On a bleak afternoon on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, she had experienced a stark, crossing-the-line moment with her pill habit. It was finals week for local high school students. Brand knew the little privileged brats would be well supplied with meds for their study sessions. She braced a half dozen teens on Columbus Avenue, cleaned out their backpacks for baggies of Addy, then sent them on their way with a kick in the pants.

  Standing there in the weak winter sunshine, counting her confiscated beans, she spilled a few onto the sidewalk. Instantly she was on her knees scrambling to scoop them up. As her knuckles scraped the cold concrete, Brand suddenly stopped, realizing it was all too much. Tears welled in her eyes. Lately she had been reduced to three modes of being: drunk, tweaked, or weeping. Job troubles exacerbated her pill habit, and vice versa. She was spiraling down, but she couldn’t stop.

  One final development had sent her flying out of Newark to Sweden, hurtling over the Atlantic Ocean in the dark. As she parked her suspended ass in her lonely Murray Hill apartment, feeling shell shocked amid the smoking ruins of her life, her cell phone rang. The number displayed indicated a foreign caller. Aware of various phone scams that were proliferating, she told herself not to answer. She would never know why she did.

  The voice came through in Swedish. The caller sounded older than old. The words didn’t belong on a telephone, but on a wax cylinder. The voice of god, provided god was a woman. It spoke a cadence of syllables that Brand didn’t understand.

  “Du måste komma hit. Jag har en hemlighet som du måste se.”

  The tone was hoarse and insistent. Foreign on the one hand and somehow naggingly familiar on the other. Brand puzzled out what she could. Du mås
te komma hit. “You have to come here.” Hemlighet? What was that? “Something at home?”

  “I’m sorry, um, I don’t speak…”

  The person on the other end of the line stammered in frustration. “Kom hit!” she rasped, then, in accented English, a command: “Come here!”

  The line went dead. Brand tried to figure it out. What had just happened? The phone was still in her hand when it rang again.

  Another, different voice, a little sunnier. “Hello, is this Veronika Brand?” Brand had been hearing an ancient oak tree. Now here was the breeze whistling through the leaves.

  The second voice was that of her second cousin, Sanna Dalgren. Veronika knew her. The two had met briefly a single time, over coffee during a tourist visit Sanna had made to New York City. Brand had cut short the meeting, pleading work pressures, but in truth had felt unnerved by her foreign cousin’s unflinching gaze. Since then she had been included in Sanna’s pointless family emails, all in Swedish which Brand had little interest in translating. She left the communications mostly unanswered, and vaguely considered blocking them.

  Sanna identified the person Brand had heard initially as the clan’s matriarch, Elin Dalgren. The sister of Brand’s grandfather, the woman would soon turn ninety-five years old. Sanna informed Brand that Elin Dalgren wanted especially to invite the American detective to her upcoming birthday celebration.

  “You’ve never met,” Sanna said.

  “No,” Brand responded. “I didn’t quite get the Swedish. It sounded as though it were something like an emergency.”

  Her cousin gave a musical laugh. “Oh, no, nothing like that. Mamma said she had some family secrets to tell you. Probably cake recipes.”

  Sanna Dalgren told Brand Elin’s ninety-fifth birthday would be the occasion of a family reunion. “We would love to invite you over here to meet your Swedish relatives.”

  Just when New York City had turned radioactive on her, the phone call from her relatives offered Brand an escape. She didn’t really want to go. What she wanted to do was lock the door of her Manhattan apartment, climb into bed and pull the covers over her head. When she gazed into her immediate future, she saw disciplinary hearings, cold shoulders in the precinct house, perhaps media coverage, public disgrace.

  She didn’t really believe any of the powerfully connected cops she had gone up against would have the stones to move against her physically. But the possibility couldn’t be discounted entirely. Walking the streets of Manhattan, she found herself checking her back. In the past few weeks a faint whiff of danger had marked her days. Her enemies were high up in the NYPD hierarchy. They could sink her.

  The situation was untenable. Brand felt uncertain whether her Swedish escapade was a flying to or a fleeing from. She couldn’t shake the suspicion she was attempting a geographical cure for her professional difficulties. But she also continued to hear the urgency in an old woman’s voice, a summons that sounded as though it came from the edge of the grave.

  So, Sweden. At 9:30 in the morning local time, on the day after she had left New York, the Scandinavian Airlines plane swung into its glide path. Brand heard somewhere that air travelers came in three types, window seats for dreamers, aisle seats for achievers, middle seats for the passive and hapless. Though she had an aisle seat for the flight, she felt misplaced. She didn’t know where she fit. Out on the wing, perhaps?

  Through the windows opposite appeared glimpses of the landscape below, not the expected winter wonderland but a dour countryside of sullen, February gray. Sunlight seemed to be having some difficulty punching through to the earth.

  The cabin lights came on and everywhere around her the dead awakened. Brand experienced the moment of landing as a snapping back into a real-world ho-hum perspective after the magic of flight.

  The plane taxied to the gate. Her fellow passengers listened for the chime and watched for the seatbelt light to go off, then jumped to their feet like a collection of jack-in-the-boxes. They began aggressively flipping open the storage spaces over their seats, hauling out their luggage and claiming a place in the line to disembark.

  Slinging her carry-on over her shoulder, Brand exited the plane. The Arlanda terminal seemed almost eerily empty of people. She reunited with her duffel bag at baggage claim, then proceeded to customs. Brand was well aware her baggage contained items of contraband that could land her into trouble. That included a baggie of evidence-room Adderall she had filched in New York. She would just have to bull her way through. In the face of authority she prided herself on maintaining an absolute, dead-eyed calm. Approaching customs she could have been hooked up to a heart-rate monitor without seeing a blip.

  A uniformed agent motioned Brand over. The woman had curly brown hair and to Brand’s eyes looked vaguely un-Swedish.

  “Could you please remove your head covering?” the agent asked in perfect English.

  Brand took off her black knit watch cap. She offered the agent both her U.S. passport and her NYPD badge wallet.

  “Just the passport,” the agent directed. But the move had its effect. Brand thought she detected a glimmer of respect in the young woman’s eyes. “You’re a police officer?”

  “A detective, yes,” Brand said.

  “How long is your stay in Sweden?” she asked.

  “A week.” A white lie. Her plans were open-ended. Brand didn’t know how long she’d be in the country.

  “The reason for your visit? You’re not on a criminal case, are you?”

  “No, no,” Brand said. “A family reunion.”

  The agent broke her official manner to smile broadly. “You have relatives here? Where will you be staying?”

  “Um, I don’t know how to say it exactly. Härjedalen? I think it’s a county or, they call it a kommun? Somewhere named Jämtland, I think? I can get the address.”

  The agent gave a negative shake of her head. “It is also called a landskap,” she said helpfully. The agent released the strap on the duffel bag and lifted the first few items from their tightly packed home. The agent’s non-committal glance inside went no further and the depths of Brand’s duffel remained unsearched.

  “Ask your family why in the world they scheduled a get-together in Sweden in February,” the agent said, releasing the duffel back to Brand with a smile. “Enjoy your visit.”

  The halls of the Arlanda terminal were filled with large mirrors. Brand caught a view of herself in one of them. She winced at how much of a stereotypical New Yorker she appeared: black sweatshirt, black jeans, black boots. As if there were no other color in the universe. She had recently chopped her blonde hair short, and wondered if she made for an ominous figure. The Grim Reaper. She almost laughed. All she lacked was a scythe.

  Cored out as Brand was, her journey wasn’t over. She had a six-hour car trip ahead of her. Lukas Dalgren, one of Brand’s countless second cousins, had arranged to pick her up at Arlanda. He and his family would immediately bring Brand to the clan’s homestead in western Sweden, near the border to Norway. In the flurry of emails prior to the trip, she had pleaded to be allowed a stopover at a hotel, for a day of rest or even two, to give herself a chance to decompress. The dates wouldn’t make sense if that was the plan, she was told.

  “You will sleep on the drive,” Sanna Dalgren informed Brand in an email message. Brand had immediately regretted agreeing to come to Elin Dalgren’s birthday celebration. Her arrival became an event. A “homecoming,” Sanna termed it.

  Marshaled by her cousin, the extended Dalgren clan had started bustling around, organizing, planning, scheduling. Brand came to understand she was more well-known among them than they were to her. She was a New York City police detective. Like on television.

  “We told her you are coming from America in honor of her birthday,” Sanna wrote to Brand in an email. “We know you don’t want to disappoint her. Your visit is something mamma lives for.”

  The whole concept of cousinage left Brand a bit cold. She never saw herself as much of a family type of girl. S
he wasn’t even a Dalgren. She was a Brand. There were issues between herself and her own mother, Marta, who had been born a Dalgren, and with her maternal grandparents, Klara and Gustav. Hints of estrangement between branches of the family, unspoken but real, hovered in the background.

  As directed, Brand was to meet cousin Lukas outside the terminal. They would coordinate via text exchanges. But as soon as she emerged from the terminal she realized the plan would not come off. Her phone refused to recognize the Stockholm cell networks offered to it. No signal, no texts, no calls.

  Secretly she felt relieved. She would check into a hotel, get a good night’s sleep, pick up her family responsibilities tomorrow. Rent a car, drive herself.

  The airport’s public address system had been periodically spitting out unrecognizable phrases in Swedish. She heard her own name pronounced in clear unaccented English.

  “Veronika Brand, please meet your party in the passenger pick-up area. Veronika Brand, please meet your party in the passenger pick-up area.”

  Brand found herself standing among other milling travelers in, yes, the passenger pick-up area. But where was Lukas?

  A few traffic lanes away a young male stood with a phone cocked to his ear. His head was shaved clean. The two of them caught each other’s eye at the same instant. Lukas Dalgren put his cellphone in his pocket. He raised a hand in greeting.

  “Hallå, Veronika,” he called out. He wore an expensive mid-length brown cashmere overcoat and narrow, elegantly cut trousers. He stood beside a midnight silver Tesla sedan.

  Brand crossed to him, slipping slightly on the frozen roadway of the air terminal. Her cousin moved forward.

  “Black ice, Veronika,” he said. “Be careful. Your shoes are wrong.”