This Land is no Stranger

by Sarah Hollister

  Relaxed now, Hammar reached for his phone, returning to the messages he had ignored. Brand played the obvious card for a lark, “Is there a mystery woman wanting to know where you are?” Hammar held back, for just a moment before replying, “No, just Sanna checking our progress.”

  “Good she's checked in with you. The mastermind behind luring me over here to hear out great aunt Elin’s ravings, it seems I am now surplus to requirement.”

  “Sanna’s not malicious, I don’t know, she’s just, she isn’t what you think perhaps…” The explanation seemed to turn sour in his mouth, trailing off and killing Brand’s interest in the small time worries of Sanna Dalgren.

  They joined the E45 heading north. An hour later Hammar directed her onto a narrow asphalt road. They drove along a stream course, passed over a bridge, and entered a small town. Hammar gestured toward an enormous roadside statue that stood at a traffic circle.

  “Some say hero, some tyrant,” he said. “Gustav Vasa, the first Gustav in a long line of Gustavs. Hounded by Danes and Catholic priests, he was a bit of a Christ figure himself, as a matter of fact. He escaped the Stockholm bloodbath, lived to defeat the Danes, and essentially invented Sweden.”

  The sculpted figure had been stained green by time. Snow flocked the hard-lined royal visage of the monarch. He appeared to be facing down danger, ready for the wolf packs that were sure to come. The statue spoke to Brand of ancient worlds, as though the earth had gone through an infinite number of epochs before our own.

  “These days Gustav Vasa is on the level of national myth,” Hammar said. “You should see his statue in the National Museum. It’s many times larger than this one.”

  They sped through the roundabout and left the village behind. Brand glanced into the rearview as the statue receded into the distance.

  “My grandfather was named Gustav,” Brand said.

  “Yes, Gustav Dalgren, Klara’s husband. It’s a favorite Swedish name.”

  “He died when I was a teenager.”

  “In a barn fire in New York.”

  Brand glanced over at him. “You seem to know a lot of Dalgren family history.”

  “Everyone marked your grandfather as a great man, Veronika, and not just within the family,” Hammar said. “All Sweden knew of him as a crusader for justice. His death notice ran in newspapers here. But he was ill-used by his countrymen. He and his wife Klara and her sister Alice were chased out of their home under threat of death by Nazi sympathizers.”

  A half hour later they swung into a churchyard. Hammar had timed the trip to arrive for Elin Dalgren’s memorial service. There seemed to be no one around. Several vehicles were parked in the lot. A walkway led through a grove of misshapen skeleton trees, their branches heavy with snow.

  Hammar and Brand approached the old church built of white stone, visible through the trees. The crunch of their shoes on the icy walk managed to sound forlorn. The bell tower stood beside the church as a separate structure. Both proved empty.

  “Is this right?” Brand asked as they stood inside the ancient sanctuary.

  “I can’t understand it,” Hammar said. “I know this is the Dalgren’s church. I’ve been here a few times before.”

  “There’s no one here.”

  Brand took in the small, spare interior. The church was freezing cold. Even inside, their breath clouded in the air.

  “I find the films of Ingmar Bergman overly bleak,” Hammar said. “And one of his most depressing works was filmed in this church. I can’t remember the name. I think I’ve blanked it out.”

  Finally a woman in a white surplice emerged from the sacristy. Hammar strode forward and spoke to her. He returned to Brand.

  “They’re at the gravesite.” He led her back outside.

  Clearly someone maintained the old cemetery. Grave markers poked out neatly from the snow. Small, humpbacked drifts on their windward sides obscured the stones. Here the most ancient of the Dalgren ancestors were buried. There remained a feeling of emptiness and loss. The cemetery dated to the 16th century, which meant that the dead had been lying there for a very long time. The snow’s icy, unbroken surface displayed no human footprints, although tracks of small animals appeared here and there.

  “Come,” Hammar said. “The Dalgrens will have gathered themselves on the opposite side.” He guided her by the arm along a narrow, snow-cleared walk that ran between the graves, no more than a few feet wide. Around the side of the church, they passed a series of wooden hutches, roofed in slate.

  “Those are the old church stalls,” Hammar explained. “People would make the weekly pilgrimage to church, starting their walk on Saturday, taking shelter in stalls by the church overnight and returning to the slog of the farm after their souls had been cleansed. No doubt your Dalgren ancestors sheltered there.”

  He stopped in front of a modest and very ancient-looking gravestone, its lettering half-erased by time. “This is one of the oldest recorded in the province, Hjalmar Dalgren.”

  Raucous calls broke the silence. Black shapes showed against the colorless sky, passing quickly overhead.

  “Crows,” Hammar said, glancing up. “There’s a storm coming in, snow is on the way.”

  Darker clouds piled up on the horizon to the west, an advancing front. There had been no new snow since Brand’s first day in Sweden arrived in Sweden.

  In the far corner of the cemetery stood a small collection of mourners. Brand was dismayed at how few people were there. She counted ten. One for every decade of Elin Dalgren’s life, she thought morosely. Brand hesitated, feeling as though she was intruding. She imagined herself dropping into old Hjalmar Dalgren’s grave, cozying up in the cramped space with the dust and bones of her distant ancestor.

  “We should join them,” Hammar said briskly. As they approached the grave he lowered his voice. “When the ground is frozen like this they build an overnight bonfire to thaw it out. Relatives gather around and tend the fire through the night. Reminisces. Alcohol. Toasts to the departed.”

  Sanna and Folke Dalgren saw them and nodded solemnly. Brand followed Hammar as they took their place beside the other mourners. A clergyman intoned the liturgy, wearing a parka over his vestments. The crows passed over again. The flock appeared in frantic, random flight to avoid the coming storm.

  19.

  On the outside of a yellowed and cracked envelope, Brand saw words in a spidery script.

  Till Veronika, min brors dotterdotter, från Elin Dalgren, Veronikas gammelfaster. Written helpfully in another hand was a translation: “To Veronika, my grand-niece, from Elin Dalgren, your grandfather’s sister.”

  Sanna Dalgren presented the packet to Brand after Elin’s burial service. “I think you should read this, dear,” Sanna said.

  “What is it?” Brand asked.

  “Our family…” Sanna said, then didn’t finish the sentence. Her normally sunny face displayed a sadness. “My mamma carried the burden of many secrets. Your grandmother thought you needed to understand what happened, what brought your grandparents to emigrate to America. But Klara took her truth to the grave, leaving Elin to be the messenger.” The monologue seemed rehearsed, with Sanna's sadness slowly turning venomous as she spat out the final sentence.

  Brand sat in the Saab, in the passenger seat for once. The car remained parked in the churchyard lot. Hammar was elsewhere, inside the old church, speaking with the relatives, she guessed. She took the packet Sanna had given her. She wanted to be alone while reading it.

  Inside the envelope, a sheaf of close-written pages, first in Swedish, then, in different handwriting, a translation into English.

  Dearest Veronika,

  Now you will find out the truth. You were too young and too far away to know this. You might understand some but not all. I want to explain. We were a family, in more than just blood; Gustav, Klara, Alice, myself, and Loke Voss. Your grandfather Gustav and Loke did everything together when they were boys. Tumbling around in the green summers after berries. Swimming in the
lakes and streams, in waters so cold they made you feel more alive than the day you were born.

  Brand thought of the photograph she had discovered in Elin’s room, marked with her own name, as if it was an heirloom to be passed on. Loke Voss, the mysterious fifth figure in the shot, looked pale-eyed and dark while all the Dalgrens appeared sunny and carefree. He hovered on the edges of her family like a far-off storm cloud in a blue sky.

  Loke and Gustav grew into their young teens and their friendship turned to war, the innocent kind, village raids between the Högvålen boys and those from Västvall, where all the Vosses were. “I broke Loke’s hand with my face once,” Gustav told me, and I laughed so hard because that was exactly how he phrased it.

  I did not participate in the wild fun. Klara, Alice and I kept ourselves apart. Klara knew Loke had feelings for her but she only had eyes for Gustav. Maybe Loke’s sourness grew out of that, with jealousy being the beginning of hatred.

  Soon for Gustav the revolution became everything. He dreamed so hard, he was so inspired! This was when he and Klara fell in love. Their courting was done to the tune of Marx and Engels.

  I too believed in the hope of social justice. I could see class war happening right in front of my eyes, the capitalists squeezing us like they wanted blood from a stone. Poverty was pitiless in those days. Then of course came the Thirties, with the rise of the Nazis in Germany, and everything went dark and then went darker still. Not only Loke Voss but many others, in Sweden and Britain as well, studied hate under the tutelage of the Germans.

  I admired his convictions, dear, dear Gustav. What turns one man one way and another man another way? Why did Gustav turn left while his old friend Loke turned right?

  Gustav was merciless with his ridicule of Adolf Hitler, whom he always called “the house painter.” The man is lower than a cannibal, he said.

  The Vosses, though, they were weaned on the housepainter’s poison. Loke Voss fell in with Baron Kron and the concept of the master race. He cast his lot with the Brownshirt bullyboys, becoming one of their leaders.

  As Brand read on, the picture of the past slowly came into focus. Two friends, brothers almost, buffeted in the tides of history and turned against each other. It was the old story of Cain and Abel. “Loke Voss,” a name she heard as a child hissed out as a curse, became less a bogeyman and more of a real flesh-and-blood figure. Still alive, Hammar had told her, and still haunting Brand’s life. Another faintly remembered name from the past appeared, not a person but a newspaper. Nordic Light.

  Here was the core group who founded Nordic Light newspaper: Gustav, of course, our older brother Anders, his wife Stella, our old friend Per, a man named Karl Gustavsson, Klara, and her sister Alice.

  Oh, those were heady times. We were intent on saving the world. The newspaper offices served as our communal home. I still remember the ugly old building, three stories high with a roof that leaked. I always went to sleep to the clatter of the big printing press rolling out copies of the truth. Asleep or awake I would often have one of the children with me, not my own (not yet) but those of Anders, Per or Karl, it didn’t matter, all kids in that community were everybody’s.

  One I loved more than others, sweet little Hanna. She was our niece, the youngest of Anders and Stella. I spoiled her most awfully, always taking her hand in mine, playing silly games. She is what we call lillgammal, a kind of spirit inside of someone young, who is older, wiser, beyond her years. Even as a baby Hanna had to wear eyeglasses, and she would stare up at me, so serious and solemn that I had to forgive myself for finding it comical.

  I felt that in her child’s heart there was the future, that she would live to see a better world. I had this idea we were shielding the little ones from all that was horrible in the outside world, injustice, ignorance, and cruelty. We had our little enclave at the Nordic Light offices, a refuge, a sanctuary where I could protect Hanna and the other children from harm.

  I was wrong.

  Brand foresaw the tragedy that was coming. She wanted to stop reading but couldn’t help herself. Maybe after all this story was why she had come to Sweden. To perform an exorcism on the past.

  She didn’t want to believe it. What possible impact could events that happened long before she was born have on her reality now? It seemed an unlikely notion. But something had twisted Brand’s life. She had struggled and thrashed, trying to understand what it was. Elin’s letter served to point the way.

  On 3 March, 1940, began one of the most terrible nights of my life, when the terrorists came to attack our offices.

  How the Nordic Light building was laid out had the kitchen and living quarters on the third floor, and what we called the Red Room meeting hall on the second floor, the printing press, telegraph, and distribution and paper supply rooms on the first. Corridors and stairwells ran up the whole center of the building.

  The attackers knew right where to go. They knew our paper supply would burn easily, setting the whole building on fire. They were using newsprint, our own weapon, against us.

  Gustav, Alice and Klara were in the distribution office on the first floor. Karl and Per were on the second floor, the babies were already asleep on the third, with Stella watching over them. When the arson hit in the paper supply room on the opposite side of the building from us, the central stairwell acted as a chimney. We all rushed out of the distribution offices to find this huge yellow beast of a fire already stalking up the stairs.

  Gustav dashed forward but an explosion blew him straight off his feet, and he came flying back into my arms. Solid smoke, so thick that it was like hot black cotton, burst at us. We crawled close to the floor, trying for escape.

  I could hear them. I hear them still. I have heard them every day of my life from that moment on. Hanna crying, screaming, oh, oh, oh, mamma, mamma! Auntie! Auntie! Gustav, Alice, Klara and I threw ourselves toward the stairs, but again we were thrown back, our clothes and hair smoking and half on fire.

  Now no voices came from the third floor. Only the roar of the beast. It was so hot that our tears sizzled and instantly turned to steam as they streamed down our faces. We staggered outside and collapsed on the street in front of the building, staring back in horror at our beloved home that had turned into a death trap.

  Karl did not make it out. Per, neither. Stella died huddled together with Hanna, and Karl’s child Peter.

  Just by fate, we had the twins with us that night. Sanna and Folke were colicky newborns and had to be kept separate to keep from waking everyone in the shared upstairs. I remember holding them, watching the burning building collapse, two squalling babies, their parents dead, all of us survivors made orphans of the fire. I raised them myself so the memory of evil was kept fresh in their souls.

  Brand remained lost in a tangle of black thoughts. Lives destroyed. Brutality, fire and death had burned through three generations. She had received hints of the truth before, but now it appeared confirmed. A ghost had sunk its teeth into her family, a still-living ghost named Loke Voss.

  The pain the man inflicted had even crossed oceans, dooming Gustav to a life half-lived, then brutalized her mother. In adulthood, alcohol served as Marta’s painkiller. Her marriage to Brand’s father broke apart. The woman’s life became a series of bad choices and failed attempts at reform.

  Like some virus, her mother bestowed the dark gift upon Brand next. Her life turned into the same sort of mess as her mother’s. So it goes, Brand mused, on and on forever. Until someone breaks the chain.

  How much did her own grandmother know about poor Elin’s doomed fate? Did Sanna and Folke know their true lineage or had they been spared from the ghosts of the past? An unimaginable fantasy broke into her thoughts then. Brand pictured herself consumed with fury, wielding her Glock automatic as a sword. She would be the one to right the wrong. She would transform into a vengeful angel screaming down on Loke Voss. It was a strange, alien vision, but a pleasurable one. She tried to reject it, but it found a home in her exhausted, disordered brain.
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  A flash of paranoia hit her. Could this be why the Dalgrens summoned her to Sweden in the first place? Sanna and the others, making up a cabal, using her as their cat’s paw. No, no, she reasoned. But the concept had such power, such vividness…

  Hammar returned to the Saab. Preoccupied, Brand didn’t notice his coming. She was surprised when he opened the car door. He took one look at her face and knelt down beside her.

  “Are you all right? Jesus, you look…” He left the sentence unfinished.

  Brand remained seated, staring out toward the desolate churchyard. “I want to go to Västvall,” she said.

  20.

  “Is that the town?” Brand gazed down at a farm village at the bottom of a deep valley.

  “Yes, that’s Västvall,” Hammar said.

  Earlier that afternoon at the churchyard, Brand had told Hammar about her great-aunt’s account of the Nordic Light arson. She had tried to be matter-of-fact, but her throat had a catch in it during the telling of the tale. They stood together, leaning against the Saab in the church parking lot. A cold wind blew. Advancing storm clouds piled in the west.

  Hammar responded readily to Brand’s account. “You know, you could fly home and forget about this whole business. It’s not up to one person to right the wrongs of history.”

  “They don’t want me in New York, either,” Brand had reminded him. “Right now I’m without a country.”

  “Evidently, from your reception at the Ljusdal polisstation, the authorities here would like to be shut of you. There might even be fireworks at your departure.”

  Brand smiled ruefully. “And signs reading ‘Yankee go home’.”

  “Well, you disturb the Swedish peace. It’s always a celebration when an American busybody takes her leave.”