Tore turned to him and raised his eyebrows as though he wondered whether that was all.
Yes, that’s all, thought Max. The people at the coroner’s office had kept Maj-Lis’s body long enough. It was high time for her to be laid to her final rest. High time for him to put all this behind him and move on.
He nodded to Tore, who began filling the grave with earth, and walked through the blueberries and down the forest path to Maj-Lis’s old cottage and out onto her pier.
His cell phone rang.
“There are things we need to talk about,” he said.
“I want to tell you what the shaman said,” said Pashie. “He said it wasn’t me there was something wrong with. And he was right.”
Max nodded.
“I understand,” he said.
“He said that I shouldn’t judge you, that the will of a soul isn’t easy to interpret. He said there’s something growing inside you. Something you want to protect me from.”
“I have a genetic predisposition. From my paternal grandfather. I want to tell you everything.”
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” said Pashie. “I’m not coming back. Our attempts are over, your desperate hunt for the murderer is over, the Kursk catastrophe is over. The whole damned August curse is over.”
“So you’re planning to stay in Russia?”
“I’ve gotten in touch with the head of a gulag museum up here. He’s shown me lists of people who worked on building the White Sea-Baltic Canal. I want to find out what happened to my father.”
They both fell silent, listened to the sound of each other’s breathing. They were children of the same spirit; neither of them could let go of what had been, let injustices pass into history. They had promised each other many things, the most important being that they would not stand in each other’s way.
Max fixed his gaze on Arholma, which lay over on the other side of the water. He let everything Pashie had said sink in. Put it together with the content of the text message she had sent him earlier that morning. The one in which she’d given him her news and informed him of the decision she’d made.
“There’s only one thing that’s over,” he said. “The month of August. Everything else remains.”
AFTERWORD
Parts of this story are based on real events. But my characters and their views, personalities, and circumstances are fictional. Any similarities with real individuals are unintentional.
I have simplified the spelling of certain names and expressions by omitting diacritical marks used in the Latvian language.
The lines of verse that introduce this novel are from the Dainas, a body of traditional poems produced primarily in Latvia.
The book Baltutlämningen (“The Extradition of the Balts”) by Valentins Silamikelis inspired the “Accusation against Sweden.” I warmly recommend it.
The written farewell message attributed to the captain of the Kursk in the novel is based on a note left by the real head of the turbine in compartment seven. Out of respect for the captain of the Kursk and his family, I have not used the captain’s real name.
The verse in the epilogue is from the tablet outside Rumshamn’s cholera cemetery on the island of Björkö in Roslagen.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful for the assistance of my agent, Joakim Hansson at Nordin Agency, my publisher, Karin Linge Nordh, and my editor, John Häggblom. Thank you for believing in my ideas and putting your knowledge and heart and soul into them.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2018 Sören Vilks
Martin Österdahl has studied Russian, East European studies, and economics. He worked with TV productions for twenty years and was simultaneously the program director at Swedish Television. His interest in Russia and its culture arose in the early 1980s. After studying Russian at university and having had the opportunity to go behind the Iron Curtain more than once, he decided to relocate and finish his master’s thesis there.
The 1990s were a very exciting time in Russia, and 1996, with its presidential election, was a particularly crucial year. Seeing history in the making inspired Österdahl to write the first novel in the Max Anger series, Ask No Mercy. The series has been sold to more than ten territories and is soon to be a major TV series.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Photo © 2016 Peter Sean Woltemade
Peter Sean Woltemade is an American-born literary translator who has been based in Copenhagen since 2004 and has lived in Germany and Sweden for several years, respectively. His work has appeared in Border Crossing, Columbia, Exchanges, K1N, Pusteblume, Storm Cellar, the Brooklyn Rail, the Cossack Review, the Literary Review, the Missing Slate, and Wilderness House Literary Review. He is the translator of more than a dozen published books, including Kurt Jacobsen’s Haldor Topsøe (Historika/Gads Forlag, 2015); Stefanie Ross’s Nemesis (AmazonCrossing, 2016); and Kurt Jacobsen and Anders Ravn Sørensen’s CBS (Historika/Gads Forlag, 2017). He has worked with translators Shaun Whiteside, Maureen Freely, Sasha Dugdale, Katy Derbyshire, Karen Emmerich, and B. J. Epstein; and with authors Julia Butschkow, Kristof Magnusson, and Kristina Sandberg.
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