This Land is no Stranger

by Sarah Hollister

  “I haven’t thought about this place for years,” she murmured.

  She was entering into the photo for real. Brand saw a large, two-storied house, painted with the traditional falu red sealant. Its corner moldings were trimmed with white, carrying over the white of the wood-framed peaked windows, the attic roofline. Beyond the main house stood another smaller but nearly identical residence. Further back were several barns, also painted falu red. Small square windows ran along their exterior walls.

  The haze of wind-blown snow appeared pink in the headlights of the Tesla. A dozen vehicles parked alongside the lane in front of the house. “Pull in there,” Lukas told her, directing Brand to an open spot. His eyes brightened with anticipation. She herself experienced speed jitters. The drug rode on top of her exhaustion, not quite canceling it out. She suddenly wished to be elsewhere.

  They emerged from the warm, well-lit interior of the car into the frozen dark. Early evening. As she stepped out, the snow crunched beneath Brand’s boots. The passing storm had scattered the clouds overhead. Numberless stars spangled the sky. She stood staring upward. Her breath formed frosty clouds in the night air. When they approached the front door, it swung open as if on its own, throwing out a rectangular spill of yellow light.

  “Hej, hello, hello!”

  A chorus of welcome greeted Brand as she entered. She had heard of the older group of Dalgren siblings but was not prepared for the complex web of cross-generational relations that was now assembled in her honor. There was no doubt she belonged to this tribe; even to a person as pale as she, they appeared white as snow. A woman she recognized as Sanna Dalgren stepped forward from among the foreign relatives and took both Brand’s hands in hers. Sanna hugged her.

  “Det här är vår berömda kusin från Amerika!” she announced to the crowd. Lukas, entering the room behind Brand, translated. “She calls you our famous American cousin!”

  The greetings were general and enthusiastic. “Here is my brother, Folke,” Sanna said in accented English. She brought forward a slouch-shouldered man who wore a bashful expression on his face.

  “You are tall!” Folke exclaimed. His English was likewise inflected with a Swedish lilt.

  Brand remembered her grandmother’s attempts to teach her the native tongue, instruction which she fiercely resisted. She had a first-generation mother and immigrant grandparents, but she herself wanted only American English, American expressions, everything American. Still she could not escape the sounds of those three, Klara, Gustav and Alice, at the kitchen table late at night, balancing saucers of coffee in their palms, sipping the tepid liquid in the most un-American way. A peculiar tradition for cooling coffee to the perfect temperature that had never translated beyond the first generation. The rise and fall of the Swedish language sounded like singing. Even the raves and shouts of Gustav were rhythmic.

  “I tell her I don't recognize her without her long-flowing hair,” Sanna gushed. “So striking!”

  “Oh, hardly,” Brand responded.

  Sanna’s brother Folke clumsily half knelt in front of Brand, before dropping something at her feet. Brand drew back sharply, almost losing her footing.

  “Nej, nej,” he mumbled. No, no. Brand realized he had only been trying to give her a pair of embroidered wool slippers, to get her to remove her wet boots and put the slippers on.

  “This is how we do it in Sweden,” he said in English, sweeping his hands in a low gesture at the rest of the feet that stood around her.

  She removed her boots and stepped into the slippers. They looked to be handmade. Sanna took charge, guiding her in among the assembled relatives. Brand confronted a room full of people, most of them sitting in a variety of chairs that looked as though they had been specially brought in for the occasion.

  The word skål sounded like a bell. Every glass in the room rose. Brand had as yet no glass to answer with, so she simply gestured awkwardly. As a newcomer, she was expected to introduce herself. She lost herself amid a flurry of names and faces.

  “Enn-why-pee-dee Blue!” exclaimed an older man named Jörgen, the husband of a Dalgren cousin. Brand understood him to mean NYPD Blue, the classic American TV program. He grabbed her hand and shook it vigorously. “I am a large fan! Large fan!”

  “Everyone!” Lukas called out. “Our dear cousin Veronika is not familiar with our customs. And she knows not any Swedish, so we will have a good opportunity to try out our language skills.”

  “I apologize,” Brand said. “With my grandparents, I should have …” She trailed off, uncertain what she meant to say.

  “When I finish loading the luggage at Arlanda,” Lukas announced, “lo and behold Veronika climbs directly into the driver’s seat of my Tesla!”

  Murmurs rose from his audience.

  “Naturally, I objected,” Lukas continued. “But ‘I have to drive,’ she says. ‘I make it a practice never to ride as a passenger.’”

  “I’m sorry,” the star of the anecdote interjected. “It’s simply that I tend to get carsick if I am not behind the wheel.”

  “Oh, she is an American!” a voice exclaimed. “They must always be in the driver’s seat.”

  Eventually, Brand managed to edge away from Sanna and duck the seemingly endless introductions. She took a moment for herself, leaning against the warm brick of the expansive fireplace. The heat emanating from an invisible source had no means of escape, turning the old family homestead into a shield against the wind howling on the other side of the walls.

  Once more Brand felt herself transported back in time. She recalled the chill on certain childhood mornings, when she would wake under a mountain of blankets in the farmhouse in upstate New York. She loved the cozy sense of lying in bed, watching her exhalations turn to cloudy vapors. Her austere grandmother, Klara Dalgren, would try and extract her from the warmth and security of her sleep cave.

  “Följ med, Veronika,” the old woman would say. But Brand resisted, anticipating the shock of that first bare foot against the cold floor. Her protests about leaving the warmth of her bed went unheeded.

  Across the crowd Brand now spotted a hunched, ancient soul—Elin Dalgren, the youngest sister of Brand's grandfather Gustav, and the sister-in-law of her grandmother, Klara. The last living sibling of the 12 or 13 that had once dominated the area. Hers had been the unintelligible scratch of a voice on the trans-Atlantic telephone call that had summoned Brand to Sweden. A shrunken, Yoda-like presence, Elin held herself apart from the hub-bub of the reunion.

  Brand had the odd sense of being pinned by the old woman’s gaze. Elin's eyes were rheumy and cloudy with cataracts, but they fixed upon the American visitor with a spooky fierceness. Brand looked around. No one stood nearby, no one else who could be the possible target of Elin’s stare. She raised her hand against her chest. Me? she wanted to ask. The primordial eyes still bore down on her. Brand waved tentatively, and got no response.

  It was an illusion, she decided, a product of her exhaustion. Elin Dalgren was not looking at her at all. The woman seemed to exist, her grand-niece thought, as a totem, a reminder, a last living witness of events that had occurred long ago. The large easy chair in which she sat threatened to swallow her up. One gnarled hand rested atop an artfully carved wooden cane.

  Amid the gusts of party chatter, Brand noticed a figure who appeared as much of an outsider as herself, a man about her age, maybe a little younger. He stood apart, narrow-shouldered and composed. A gentle, ironic expression played across his face. She hadn’t caught his name. An odd thing, but she noticed that he would appear sitting in one of the cane chairs lined against the wall, but when Brand glanced over again a few moments later he had disappeared. Then he would reappear elsewhere, on the other side of the room. Like the innocent childhood game of musical chairs, she thought.

  The formal atmosphere loosened. The dozen children present buzzed around the room. The younger ones seemed unimpressed by the visitor from America. Many of the adults wished to share drinks with Brand, pushing
tiny glasses of clear liquid upon her, toasting her with red-faced enthusiasm.

  “Skål!” The theme of the evening. She could not refuse. The fiery liquor ploughed into her exhaustion like a landslide in progress. She felt obliged to speak at least a few polite words to Elin Dalgren, but then she would have to find a place to sleep.

  At that moment the old woman surprised everyone by rapping her cane loudly on the wooden floor. Despite how frail Elin looked, there was obvious strength in her. Though the children paid little mind, much of the adult chatter in the room stopped.

  Brand took a few steps toward Elin, but Sanna formally guided the New York detective to the older woman. Brand had the annoying sense that her busy-body cousin somehow wanted to control or stage-manage the interaction. Before Sanna could say a word Elin reached out and captured one of Brand’s hands, gripping it hard.

  “Klara,” she muttered.

  “Nej, Elin, inte Klara,” Sanna said. “Klaras dotterdotter!”

  Relatives gathered around them, eager to hear the exchange.

  “Jag vet varför hon är här,” the old woman declared.

  Sanna translated. “She says she knows why you are here.”

  “She spoke to me on the phone,” Brand said. Summoning her.

  “She’s very old,” Sanna said. She turned back to Elin and spoke a quick sentence in Swedish. “I say to her that you are here for the reunion.”

  “Nej, nej,” Elin said, shaking her head slowly, still staring up at Brand. “Hon är här för att döda djävulen.”

  The whole company erupted into laughter. Sanna broke in among the general merriment. “My mamma says you are here in Sweden to arrest the bad men,” she told Brand.

  “Watch out! Watch out,” exclaimed Jörgen, the gent who had proclaimed himself a fan of NYPD Blue. He cocked his finger and made an explosive shooting sound with his mouth.

  Elin Dalgren looked as if she very much wanted to say more. Her wrinkled, age-puckered mouth moved spasmodically, attempting to form words. It was painful to watch. She fretted and turned anxious.

  Sanna intervened, made a shooing motion to the family before helping the old woman to her feet. The two slowly made their way out of the room. Before they disappeared Elin Dalgren stopped and turned, sending one more look in Brand’s direction.

  Her expression disturbed Brand. The old woman is afraid of something, she thought.

  4.

  Later in the evening, Brand escaped the crush. She wandered the low-ceilinged second floor of the old house. The alcohol-and-Adderall mix foxed her brain. She thought that if someone didn’t put her to bed soon she would drop where she stood. The hangover from the speed darkened her mood. I should not have come, she told herself.

  Seeking to clear her head, she stepped out onto a small balcony, warding off the cold with a shawl fashioned from a blanket taken from one of the upstairs bedrooms. She wanted to see the stars again.

  There was no moon, and no aurora. The Milky Way swept from horizon to horizon in a celestial wake of blue-white starlight. In the yard below, deep snow sparkled like piled diamonds. The red-painted outbuildings showed dark against the white landscape.

  The man she had noticed earlier, her fellow outsider, emerged onto the little balcony. “Ah, here you are,” he said.

  “Here I am,” she responded. They both took a moment to gaze up at the extravagant night sky.

  He broke the silence. “Barns are painted red because of the chemistry of exploded stars.”

  She glanced over at him. “Is that right?”

  “No, really, it’s true,” he said. “When stars collapse, they leave behind dust, what we call ferrous oxide. There’s a lot of iron in the earth. This ferrous oxide colors the paint red. And red paint is cheap. You know, farmers like cheap.”

  “That’s right,” Brand said, laughing. “That’s true all over the world. My Dalgren grandparents were farmers.”

  “That was Jamestown, New York, right?”

  Her smile faded. “Everyone here knows so much more about me than I do about them.”

  “Krister Hammar,” the man said, giving a curt bow. “You and I are not blood-related. My wife was a Dalgren, my connection to the family is by choice.”

  “Was? Is she here?”

  “She is…she died five years ago now. Her name was Tove.”

  Brand gave a brief consoling nod. They both went inside. Leaning against the wall next to her was a framed, colored print, a highly stylized portrait of a man holding aloft a book and wearing a narrow-brimmed cap. The print had a throwback air of Soviet realism.

  “Is this who I think it is?”

  “If you are thinking it’s Vladimir Lenin, then yes.”

  Brand nodded. “So, the barns are painted red because of ferrous oxide, is it? Not ‘red,’ as in political reds?”

  “I believe our hosts might have hidden away Comrade Lenin so as not to offend a visiting American. That piece used to hang proudly out in the hall.”

  “Have I fallen in among communists? I am shocked, shocked.”

  “I don’t know if you were aware of it back then, but you had fallen in among Soviet-style communists when you spent time with your grandparents. Gustav and Klara were not just painted red, they were red through and through.”

  “In my childhood, they kept their beliefs to themselves,” Brand said.

  “Yes, the political atmosphere was dangerous for communists when they emigrated to America—to speak out was dangerous. I read where J. Edgar Hoover, your FBI director, used to pronounce the word ‘common-ism.’”

  “You know a lot about America.”

  “I went to school there. Boston College, international relations. I came back here to study law. Immigrant rights.”

  “You must be overwhelmed with all the immigration action here lately. And what, are you barn-red yourself?”

  “Well, I guess I’m left, liberal, like most of the Dalgren family is now. Though if you dig deeper, you’ll find some of the old guard. Didn’t Gustav and Klara speak to you about anything?”

  Brand gazed out the window. “Grandma Klara used to talk about this, the night sky in Sweden,” she said quietly.

  The two of them gazed up at the starry night for a long beat. “Most of us live in cities,” he said. “We don’t often stop to look up at the stars, too busy looking down at phones. They say this type of situation breeds atheism.”

  “So that’s what causes it!” Brand said, laughing again.

  “How could you not believe in something bigger than yourself, looking up at this every night?”

  Brand turned to face him directly. “Where are you from?” she asked. “What part of Sweden?”

  “As far north as you can go. At least, that’s where I was born. You call it Lapland.”

  “Reindeer,” Brand said. “Santa Claus.”

  “Yes, although nowadays the Sami people—my people, my mother was Sami— herd reindeer with motocross bikes, and the tourists jet in on package tours, cramming in the obligatory culture stop before skipping over to Finland’s more coveted Santa’s workshop. There are two of them, competing with each other to attract customers.”

  Brand appraised the man openly. “I felt there was something about you. I’ve never fit in anywhere either. I don’t think I’m doing so well with this crowd.”

  “Give them a chance,” Hammar said.

  They stood in uncomfortable silence. Brand had the sense the man had something to get off his chest. She tried to wait him out.

  “I'm tired” she said finally. “I think I need to go to bed.”

  “Listen, just now I have a case,” Hammar said abruptly. “A young girl, a Romani teenager named Varzha who has disappeared. Because she is an immigrant, no one cares to look for her.”

  “Romani?”

  “Gypsy, as you say. Her disappearance may be part of a pattern. I thought since you’ve worked against traffickers in America…” He trailed off.

  Brand stared. “Oh, hell no,” she said
. “You want me to look into this disappearance of yours?”

  “Your knowledge, as a New York City detective, here among us, such expertise could be invaluable.”

  “You have police in this country, am I correct?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “And I assume they investigate disappearances?”

  “Well, yes. But—”

  Brand cut him off. “Then that’s the best course of action. I’m a big fan of letting people do their jobs.”

  “Okay, of course, of course,” Hammar said quickly. “And you must have your own thing while you are in Sweden.”

  “That’s right, I have my own thing.”

  “Americans are never without their own thing,” Krister said. “Yes, right. This gypsy girl, she is of no importance.”

  “Oh, for pity’s sake,” Veronika exclaimed, mildly irritated at last. “I think we ought to leave Comrade Lenin and the gypsies and head back downstairs.”

  “All right.” Hammar sighed. “We don’t want your people to think we’re conspiring up here.”

  They turned towards the stairs. The largest room on the second floor was more like a hallway, long and narrow and running half the length of the house. Brand noticed the wooden floorboards were over three feet wide. That had to mean they had been milled a very long time ago, from timber taken out of old-growth forest. Everything was painted white, walls and floor both.

  The rise and fall of Dalgren voices still sounded from downstairs. Brand wondered where she was going to sleep. Maybe right where she stood would do just fine. She felt so tired she was dizzy.

  Hammar headed toward the stairway. He turned back around. “They didn’t translate what she said exactly right.”

  Brand couldn’t summon the effort to understand what Hammar was talking about. She was worn out. Fatigue, she knew from long nights spent on police casework, could develop into an almost hallucinatory state.