A Darker Shade of Sweden

by John-Henri Holmberg (Editor)

  One of the recurring central characters in his novels is fisherman Gerlof Davidsson, who also plays a lead role in this story; he is based on Theorin’s maternal grandfather, sea captain Ellert Gerlofsson. “Revenge of the Virgin” is set in the 1950s, and Johan Theorin wants his readers to remember that at that time, the dangers of smoking were much less known than now, and smoking was much more common.

  GERLOF WOKE IN A CRAMPED AND COLD WOODEN HOUSE. THE WALLS AND windows shook and rattled. The house was his own, his old boathouse, and it moved when gusts of wind pushed up from the beach to howl like a lost, unholy mare.

  When he lifted his head from his camping bed he also heard the sound from the waves at the beach. It wasn’t a roar, not yet, just a rhythmical rattle when they broke on the gravel.

  There would be a storm today, it seemed. Gerlof didn’t worry about his boathouse—his grandfather had used it for twenty years, then his father for thirty and now he had used it another ten years. He knew that the house and its foundation of stone would stand, no matter what winds blew in across the coastline. So the best thing for Gerlof would be to just stay inside. He had a day off from the sea. His boat was moored in Borgholm harbor, waiting for a new anchor.

  But Gerlof had to get up. He, John Hagman and the Mossberg cousins had put quite a few nets in the strait last night, and they had to be emptied as soon as possible. Otherwise the storm would blow the nets out into the strait—along with all the fish that had been caught in them overnight.

  Only one thing to do. Sighing, Gerlof sat up in his boathouse.

  “Up ev’ry day, bad weather or fair,” he muttered to himself and put his stockinged feet on the linoleum.

  The floor was icy. The fire in the small iron stove at the foot of the bed had gone out during the night.

  “John?”

  Gerlof bent to the other narrow bed and shook his friend’s shoulder. Finally John raised his head.

  “Wha’?”

  “Wake up,” Gerlof said. “The fish are waiting.”

  John coughed, blinked his eyes and looked at the window.

  “Can we put out?”

  “We have to. Or do you want to lose the nets?”

  John shook his head.

  “We shouldn’t have laid them yesterday . . . Erik was right about the weather.”

  “Just a lucky guess,” Gerlof said.

  “Might well go and get stormy tomorrow,” fisherman Erik Mossberg had said in his dialect the evening before, when he’d come down to the beach. His cousin Torsten waited with Gerlof and John by the boats.

  “Really?” Gerlof said. “Did they say so on the radio?”

  “Nope. But on the way here I stepped across a viper. It lay on the stairs and hardly wanted to leave.”

  “I suppose it had eaten its fill,” Gerlof said. “Are snakes supposed to become experts on what happens in the atmosphere just because they lie still?”

  “It’s proven true before,” Erik said. “I’ve seen snakes before when there was a storm brewing, and more than once.”

  Gerlof just shook his head and put the nets down on the floor of the boat. He believed neither in portents nor prophecies.

  But a little later, when they had launched their two wooden crafts on the glassy water and begun to lay their nets over the railings, Gerlof had peered north at the Blue Virgin on the horizon and seen that the granite cliff had changed its color. It had darkened from blue gray to black and seemed to have risen above the waters of the strait, as if it floated in the air.

  The weather was still fine. The sun shone on the sea and the May wind was soft and almost warm, but when Gerlof had thrown in the last of the net floats he realized that Erik had been right. A storm was coming. He didn’t believe in vipers, but the changed appearance of the Virgin had told him so. And when he rowed back to shore the cliff was no longer visible—it had disappeared in a pale, white mist.

  Harder winds were coming.

  Half an hour after they woke up the next morning, John and Gerlof were down at the beach along with Erik and Torsten.

  The boats were ready, but despite the gale drawing closer John and the two cousins persisted in smoking a cigarette each on the beach before setting out.

  Gerolf checked his watch in irritation, but the smokers just smiled.

  “If you smoked too, you’d be less cranky in the mornings,” Erik said, blowing a white cloud into the wind.

  “Tobacco isn’t healthy,” Gerlof said. “Pulling a lot of thick smoke into your lungs? Sooner or later, doctors will start warning people not to do it.”

  The other three smiled at his prophecy.

  “I’d be bedridden without my cigarettes,” Torsten said. “They keep me healthy . . . they rinse out your throat!”

  After their smoking break they walked down to the boats. Gerlof and John pushed their old Öland gig onto the water and stepped down in it. Then they pushed out past the breakers, each using one oar, and finally raised the small spritsail.

  As the wind caught the cotton canvas and the seventeen-foot gig began making way across the sea, they heard a dull whining behind them, as from a large, bad-tempered bumblebee. Erik and Torsten Mossberg had started their new outboard. The motor made their rowboat speed up and determinedly plow straight ahead, white foam mustaches at its prow.

  Gerlof didn’t want an outboard, not while there were oars and sails. They used no gas and the long-keeled gig was easy to sail. It lifted effortlessly from the waves, kept a straight course and beat to windward as steadily as a Viking ship, which the Öland gig was, in a way. At least they were related.

  When John and Gerlof had reached their nets they let out the sail and let the boat drift freely. Their three nets were north of those of the cousins, who had laid four on the night before. The cork floats holding the nets up were called läten on northern Öland and were marked by small, white pennants fluttering hard in the wind.

  Gerlof pulled up the first läte, then began hauling the net on board with long, even strokes. The net twisted around his legs, coiled down like wet hawsers into the wooden crates.

  The catch was good this morning. The first struggling flounder appeared after only a couple of yards, followed by many more. But the wind increased and while he pulled up the nets Gerlof was continually forced to try to stand steady in the rough waves lifting and pulling down the gig.

  He felt relieved when the nets were all out, lying like huge balls in their crates. The balls moved, for the flounders kept struggling.

  Gerlof gently worked loose a fourhorn sculpin that had managed to get stuck in the loops of yarn and threw it back in the water.

  “How many did you make it?”

  “Eighty-six,” John said.

  “Really? I made it eighty-four.”

  “Then I guess it’s eighty-five.”

  That was fine—Gerlof’s wife Ella in Borgholm had wanted flounders for the weekend, and their daughters liked them, too. Time to get back to land and home to the family.

  The wind had risen steadily, as had the waves. Of course, here in the strait they never grew to the steep hills of water and pools of spray Gerlof and his boat had met farther out on the Baltic, but they were closer together and made the gig’s broad planking shudder.

  He would have preferred to turn the boat and get back ashore as quickly as possible, now that the nets were up, but when he put his hand to the tiller he felt John’s touch on his shoulder and heard a question through the wind:

  “What’s that over there? In front of the Virgin?”

  Gerlof turned his eyes northward and saw something narrow and black move in the strait, around a nautical mile from the Blue Virgin—an object seeming to roll helplessly in the foaming sea.

  “Looks like a rowboat,” he said.

  “Yes,” John said, “and it’s empty.”

  Gerlof shook his head. He couldn’t see a head sticking up out of the boat, but he had seen enough small and large crafts at sea to know when one of them was loaded or not, so he said
:

  “Not quite empty. There’s something in it.”

  Or someone, a human? His glass was still lying in the wheelhouse on the boat down in Borgholm, but when the waves lifted the rowboat he could still make out something long and light within it. At this distance, it looked like a person who had lain down, or fallen, and been covered by a tarpaulin.

  Without saying anything more Gerlof set the spritsail again and set off to northwest. John sat in the bow and didn’t object. Every Ölander knew that if someone in a boat was ill or in distress that person must be helped, no matter how hard the wind.

  Fifteen minutes later they were within hailing distance of the rowboat, which now and then disappeared in the waves. Gerlof cupped his hands.

  “Ahoy,” he called. “Ahoy over there!”

  Nothing moved in the boat, but Gerlof saw that the tarpaulin was dry. That meant the rowboat couldn’t have drifted for very long in the strait.

  Behind them, a rattling outboard came closer.

  “What’s up?”

  The Mossberg cousins had followed and reached them. Erik gave more gas, yawed narrowly across a wave and went up alongside the rowboat. Gerlof was envious at how easy it was with the outboard.

  Torsten stretched out his arm and caught hold of the boat’s railing. In the calm of a trough he crossed to the rowboat, stood up and threw a rope to his cousin. Now the two boats were tied together.

  Finally Torsten bent down, lifted the tarpaulin and looked at what was underneath it.

  “It’s just rocks!” he called to the others.

  “Rocks?”

  Gerlof turned his gig round. It closed the distance to the rowboat a bit, and he saw that Torsten was right: in the bottom of the rowboat was a large pile of rounded rocks. They looked like water-smoothed beach stones.

  Gerlof had no more time to consider their strange find. A huge wave broke against his boat, drenching both fishes and fishermen in ice-cold spray.

  He shook himself and blinked at the wind. Now the waves had grown to sloping walls. There was a storm in the Kalmar strait, no point in denying it.

  Gerlof tried turning his gig around to catch the waves on the aft quarter, but suddenly there was a short bang and an extended, tearing sound. The boat straightened and the sail lost all power. When he raised his eyes there was a large tear in the canvas.

  “Pöt!”

  John cursed in the Öland dialect and held on to the gunwhale as the boat heaved on a wave. He rushed forward to take in the torn sail.

  At the same time, Gerlof let go of the tiller for a couple of seconds to get the oars in. When he was done, John took over between the oarlocks and started rowing, but it was hard work for him to make steerageway.

  “The waves are steering us!” Gerlof yelled through the wind.

  “What?”

  Gerlof cupped his hands.

  “It’s too late to turn back . . . We might as well make the Virgin, until it lulls.”

  “What about this one?” Torsten called from the rowboat. “What do we do with it?”

  “Tow it!” Gerlof said.

  After all it was a solid boat, and Ölanders have taken care of lost property adrift on the sea since time immemorial.

  Laboriously they made their way north and saw the Blue Virgin grow in front of them, immobile and heedless of the storm.

  Gerlof was always amazed that the strangely round island cliff rose here, just a few nautical miles from the coast of Öland. The Blue Virgin was older than Öland, millions of years older.

  The island of witches. And indeed the waters around it looked like a boiling cauldron.

  It was to this island the witches came at Easter, according to popular belief, to revel with Satan himself. The place had been in bad repute for centuries. In fact it had another name, an older name than the Blue Virgin, but saying it out loud meant bad luck. Gerlof didn’t intend taking any such risk, for out here on the waves he was more superstitious than ashore.

  He turned the tiller to make the gig run parallel to the steep rock, dancing in the water. John stayed on the seat, fighting the oars.

  “Can we make landfall in this wind?”

  “Not here!” Gerlof said. “The east side is better.”

  There were no natural harbors on the Virgin, just rocks plunging into the sea—but on the opposite side of the island the wind was less hard. The sea was calmer there as well, though choppy and foaming close to shore.

  Gerlof had taken the oars and both steered and paddled, closer and closer to the granite. The gig rolled back and forth in the water, but John was used to waves and managed to jump from the prow at the right moment. He landed, kept his balance by the heels of his boots and was ashore, almost dry-shod and with a rope to make fast the boat.

  Shortly after him the Mossbergs’ boat reached the shore thirty-five feet away and its outboard fell silent. Now there was only the deep rumble of the storm above the cliffs.

  Well ashore, Gerlof blinked against the wind and looked searchingly up at the spruce growing on top of the island. No people were to be seen. Had the abandoned boat in the strait come from here? That’s what he suspected. But who would have picked the island as their goal on a day like this? In bad weather, nobody willingly set off for the Virgin.

  “Give me a hand.”

  The four fishermen managed to get their boats higher up on the rocky beach, then lifted out their nets and their catch and turned the hulls on their side against the wind, supported by a few driftwood planks.

  They sat down in the lee of their boats to take a breather.

  “Fine,” was all Gerlof managed to say.

  Before darkness fell, he realized, they would have to get up to the forest to get some spruce twigs in order to be able to sleep comfortably on the rock under their boats. Unless the wind fell.

  After a while John got up to untangle the nets and take care of their catch. There were matches in the boat, as well as salt and ground coffee and a can of drinking water, so surviving on the island wouldn’t be a problem.

  At least not for the first week, Gerlof thought. He remembered an old legend he’d heard about three shepherds who hundreds of years ago had spent a summer on the Virgin, but who had been trapped there by a prolonged storm in the strait. First they had slaughtered their animals to survive, and when all the sheep had been eaten two of the shepherds had dined on the third.

  He walked over to the cousins who were already picking the fish from the nets. They had let the abandoned rowboat remain bobbing in the water, tied by a piece of rope in its prow. The boat was too heavy to drag out of the sea while the pile of rocks remained in it, but if the wind turned the waves would quickly slam it to pieces.

  “Should we bring the boat home?” Gerlof said.

  “Sure, it could come in handy,” Erik said. “But the stones should remain here.”

  “They make fine ballast.”

  “True,” Erik said, “but they bring bad luck. The weather will never improve as long as they’re still in the boat.”

  Gerlof sighed at the superstition.

  “I guess I’ll have to empty it, then.”

  He pulled the rowboat to a small cove and jumped down in it. Then he folded back the tarpaulin and began lifting out the stones. They were round and quite beautiful, pale gray and polished to large egg shapes by the water. He became even more convinced that they actually had come from the Virgin. Just as when he’d pulled up the flounders earlier in the morning he counted the stones before throwing them ashore: one, two, three . . .

  Stone followed stone over the railing, back to all the others.

  Twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one . . .

  He had put his hand out to the thirty-second stone when he stopped himself. It was round and grayish white, but didn’t quite look like the others. He turned it over and froze.

  “Erik,” he called into the wind. “Come take a look at this.”

  Both the cousins stopped gutting flounders and walked down to the water’s edge. />
  “What?”

  “Look at this,” Gerlof said again.

  What he held up to them wasn’t a round granite rock.

  It was a skull. A human skull, pale gray and with deep, black sockets. The lower jaw had fallen off, but the upper smiled broadly with white teeth.

  Nobody on the beach said a word.

  Gerlof carefully handed the skull to Erik Mossberg and looked down at the pile of stones in the boat.

  “There’s another one down there under the rocks,” he said quietly. “And bones.”

  The cousins looked but said nothing. Erik silently accepted the second skull and put both of them on the flat rock, out of reach of the waves. Then he and Torsten and Gerlof together picked all the bones out of the boat and put them beside the skulls.

  When they were done, two almost complete skeletons were laid out on the rock. Tall enough to have been adults, Gerlof saw. They had been dressed when they died, since there were pieces of pant fabric around their hips.

  The mood on the beach was even more subdued than before.

  “How old can they be?” Erik said.

  “Difficult to say,” Gerlof said. “What’s left of their clothes looks modern . . . but I don’t think they’re really fresh.”

  “What should we do with them?” Torsten said.

  Gerlof had no answer. He looked out across the empty sea, then glanced back at the island. He sniffed the wind and thought that he caught a whiff of smoke. And hadn’t he seen something move as well, at the corner of his eye?

  Now he saw nothing. He slowly walked over to John Hagman, who had quickly turned his back on the dead and gone to deal with the nets. Gerlof knew that John had a thing about dead bodies, as who hadn’t?

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  John nodded. Gerlof glanced back up the the Virgin and opened his mouth.

  “I thought I caught a smell of . . .”

  Then something clicked up on the cliffs and he heard a brief, whistling sound a few feet over his head.