by Lars Sund
It has to be admitted that K-D spoke well, articulating his words carefully and pausing at the right points. But then, by that stage he had taken a course at Finns Adult Education College where many of the prominent individuals in the life of our country have learnt the art of public speaking.
He now got his second wind and rounded off his address.
“We have gathered here today outside this beautiful archipelago church on Fagerö to bless a stranger as he goes to his last rest. As far as can be judged we are unlikely ever to discover his name or where he came from. The simple inscription on his cross will be, ‘Here lies an unknown man.’
“But we are furnishing this unknown individual with a resting place on Fagerö. Our human fellowship and our Christian traditions bid us to do so. The Bible charges us, does it not, ‘to do unto others as you would have them do unto you’, and those are words by which we live here on Fagerö.
“We are all brothers. I am glad to see so many gathered here today to keep our unknown brother company as he goes to his place of rest. His life was short. He will almost certainly have left a family somewhere and they will have to live forever uncertain as to the fate of a son, a beloved husband or a brother. I entreat you, Heavenly Father, to have mercy upon the soul of our unknown brother.
“And I would like to thank you, my dear people of Fagerö, for the great sympathy you have shown by attending this ceremony in such numbers.
“Over and out!”
His final words may seem peculiar, but his audience did not react to any great extent for they were accustomed to K-D finishing his orations in this rather military manner. It was probably a habit left over from his time as a conscript: K-D had trained as a signaller and it had been drilled into him that all messages should conclude with a concise “Over and out!”
K-D Mattsson remained standing on his rock for a short time as if listening for the echo of his words. His large round face shone. He nodded to himself. Then he stepped down rather clumsily, but to the unsympathetic eye of Riggert von Haartman the clumsiness looked like an act, as if it were exaggerated, as if K-D were attempting to demonstrate his physical and political weight and his rank. In actual fact it was only partly an act since K-D had been suffering from a painful knee for some considerable time.
Free at last from having to stand and listen, the gathering began moving. They shuffled from one foot to the other, the gravel crunching beneath the soles of their shoes. Someone coughed. A breath of wind came in from the sea and half-heartedly plucked at the hem of Janne the Post’s flag but immediately lost interest and instead set about causing a ripple of movement in the leaves of the downy birch growing by the churchyard wall. Axmar, who had changed his fiddle for a clarinet, raised the instrument to his lips and wet the mouthpiece. He looked at the pastor, who nodded, and Axmar sounded the last post.
Those present bowed their heads. Inspector von Haartman saluted.
Not without some difficulty Ludi and his bearers lifted the coffin from the handcart with the help of ropes and manoeuvred it into position over the freshly dug grave. At a sign from Ludi they braced themselves and began lowering the coffin. The ropes creaked. The strain made the bearers’ faces go as red as ripe rose hips and their foreheads gleamed with sweat.
Then, with an audible crack, the rope at the front end snapped.
Ludi and Maximinus Brunström were on each end of the rope and they tumbled in opposite directions like skittles in a bowling alley. Ludi’s shoulder struck Pastor Lökström in the chest. Hard. With the ends of his stole flapping Fagerö’s spiritual guide was knocked backwards into the arms of an unprepared Backas Isaksson who, in turn, lost his balance and banged into K-D Mattsson. The latter, in a vain attempt to keep his footing, grabbed for support at the first thing he could, which turned out to be the sleeve of his wife’s blouse. The blouse tore with a loud ripping noise and Mrs Councillor fell over. One by one like storm-felled pines, they all hit the ground: Ludi, Lökström, Backas Isaksson, K-D and Mrs Councillor. The latter screamed. The pastor’s prayer book flew up into the air, performed a somersault and landed on K-D’s head open at the liturgical text for the sixth Sunday after Trinity.
Taken by surprise the other bearers forgot to keep hold of their ropes.
Bow first, the coffin slid down into the grave like a grey seal diving through a hole in the ice. It hit the bottom with a dull hollow thud.
There was complete silence apart from the odd squeal and groan from the fallen.
Then laughter broke out. Uncontrollable, unstoppable laughter.
The American Bar
“Christ, how we laughed! Couldn’t help it. Mrs Councillor flat on her back, blouse torn so you could see her tits! And K-D and Isaksson and the rest of them rolling around on the ground like a toppled pile of logs! Bugger me!” Axmar was recounting this at the top of his voice in the American Bar that same night. Loud, hairy, red in the face after more than a few beers and with a sodden dog-end stuck in the corner of his mouth, he had changed out of his folk dress into his ordinary gear: dirty Adidas trainers, overalls, a green windcheater with a long tear in the left sleeve and a cap advertising Fagerö Co-op.
“Fagerö people know how to have some fun at a funeral,” Maximinus Brunström said.
“Wobbling all over Mrs Councillor was,” Axmar said with a leer. “You should have seen it, Elis, given your liking for the older woman!”
Axmar nudged Elis from Nagelskär in the ribs, winked with his good eye and gave a pointed smile. Elis paid no attention. Like the other regulars in the American Bar he had long since given up taking any notice of Axmar’s endless alcoholic ramblings. Elis had been over to Örsund with his taxi boat all day and so had to make do with the eyewitness account of the funeral provided by Axmar, Axmar’s brother Fride and Maximinus Brunström. Elis scraped the bowl of his pipe with a matchstick, tapped out some ash, pressed the remaining tobacco down with a nicotine-yellow thumb and struck a light.
“It wasn’t too clever of you to drop the coffin into the grave,” he said.
“What do you mean?” Fride asked.
“It’s a bad omen. I remember my granny saying that if a corpse was lowered into the grave unusually hastily there’ll soon be more to follow.”
“That’s what your granny said, is it?” Fride laughed.
“She knew a lot about things like that, Granny did. Believe what you like, but we’ll soon be seeing more bodies here,” Elis from Nagelskär said, sucking at his pipe as if it were a nipple.
Your scribe was more than a touch hesitant about bringing his unfortunate reader into the American Bar, it being a place with a pretty dubious reputation. To say nothing of the decor! The walls of the American Bar are papered with multicoloured posters of the Statue of Liberty and the skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan, the Congress building in Washington, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Grand Canyon, cars jam-packed along an eight-lane highway, neon-lit hotels along the The Strip in Las Vegas, a cowboy on a horse, a red Coca-Cola machine outside a tumbledown petrol station in the desert and so on.
Up behind the bar hangs a star-spangled banner, which is said to have come from the wreck of the American steamship Park Victory. The hoarse voice of Johnny Cash can be heard singing “I walk the line” on the jukebox, a Wurlitzer Model 1300 Americana with a chrome front, pulsating neon lights and a two hundred record capacity.
That’s the American Bar.
Kangarn is the man who runs the American Bar, but it’s mostly as a sideline. He derives his main income from selling electricity to the population of Fagerö and renting out rooms to summer visitors. The islanders know next to nothing about Kangarn’s background and origins. He simply turned up here one day many years ago, accompanied by a shy taciturn woman and twin boys who were little more than infants. They moved into one of the empty flats at Miners’ Place, which is what the people of Fagerö still call the small settlement built on the northern side of the island over twenty years ago to house the families of miners brought over from t
he mainland to dig iron ore far beneath the seabed in “the most modern mine in the world”.
Much discussed in its day, it was a project on a grand scale and was thought to promise a great future for Fagerö and the whole of the south-west archipelago. Sailors had known for ages that you couldn’t rely on the compass in the waters north of Fagerö – the needle refuses to point north and spins willy-nilly around every point of the compass. It had also been known for years that the reason for this magnetic interference in the Kvigharufjärden was that there were huge deposits of iron ore beneath the seabed. A mining company acquired a concession and sent geologists and prospectors to Fagerö where, after many tests, they estimated that there were between twenty and thirty million tons of quality iron ore waiting to be extracted from beneath the waters. Fagerö became the scene of extensive works: a concrete tower thirty metres tall quickly went up on the surface while drills rattled and explosive charges roared below ground. They excavated a main shaft 350 metres deep and then drove a tunnel out beneath the seabed to the main source of ore. Workers’ housing was built, neat two-storey blocks faced with Eternit, grouped around a small street along with a canteen and a café – the latter is now the American Bar. And a diesel-powered generator was installed to provide all the electricity the mine needed.
An economic downturn and a drastic fall in the price of iron ore meant, however, that the whole project came to nothing before even a single ounce of ore had been extracted. The Fagerö mine was deserted more or less overnight. The mining company filed for bankruptcy, the workers went back to the mainland and the windows of the neat blocks of housing were boarded up with sheets of Masonite. Miners’ Place was left to rot until Kangarn and his lot arrived.
Ludi, who along with his police duties had oversight of the deserted mine on behalf of the bankrupt estate, quickly discovered that Miners’ Place now had residents. Even though he was the supervisor he had not been informed that anyone was to move in. Naturally enough, Ludi concluded that things weren’t as they should be. Suspecting that this might be a case of illegal entry – nothing short of a gross misdemeanour – Ludi set off for Miners’ Place without delay in order to investigate and evict Kangarn, his woman and the children.
The eviction never did take place.
The thing was that Kangarn was able to show Ludi, to the latter’s utter astonishment, documents and certificates of registration, all duly and properly stamped and witnessed, that proved him to be the owner of the whole damn lot – lock, stock and barrel, and down to the last full stop. In other words, Kangarn owned the mine itself, all the lifts and hoists, the machine halls, workers’ housing and electricity generators.
When it came to this last item on Kangarn’s list of acquisitions Ludi could only remove his uniform cap and scratch his head in concern. What worried him was that the mining company, in addition to generating the power necessary for its own needs, had agreed to supply electricity to the whole of Fagerö, a convenience which the island had lacked until then. When the mine closed and the company was declared bankrupt Fagerö District Council had managed to negotiate an agreement with the receivers to keep the generator running so that the population could continue to operate their recently acquired fridges, electric stoves and TV sets and be spared a return to paraffin lamps. This contract had now been taken over by Kangarn. As the owner of a five megawatt diesel-powered generator and all the transformers, converters, power lines and other equipment necessary to generate and distribute electricity, Kangarn assured Ludi that power would continue to flow along the lines as it had before and that Ludi could continue in his part-time post as engineer and supervisor of the electricity system.
Kangarn had no plans to reopen the Fagerö mine. Instead, he intended to convert the workman’s quarters at Miners’ Place into a holiday village. Once it became known that he also wanted to open a pub with sea views and a full spirits licence there was opposition to his proposal from a number of quarters.
As was only to be expected, the Fagerö District Temperance Committee was against the idea, as was the inspector of police. At the local council level K-D Mattsson strongly opposed Kangarn’s application for a licence to sell alcohol, stressing that the applicant was not a local man and no one knew anything about his moral suitability. At its monthly meeting the Fagerö-Lemlot branch of the Women’s Institute (chairwoman: Mrs Saga Mattsson) approved a motion expressing great concern about the consequences of increased access to alcoholic substances among young people in particular. Joel Lökström, the rural dean and father of our current assistant pastor, preached a sermon in which he reminded us that Jesus did indeed turn water into wine at the famous wedding at Cana but, as he quickly went on to say, the apostle Luke tells us that Jesus Christ himself was a total abstainer. The dean then quoted Our Lord’s call for abstinence from wine and strong drink in Numbers 6:3, and also Sirach 19:2, where it states that wine and women make wise men foolish.
Kangarn, of course, also had his supporters, particularly among the ranks of the common people. Islanders in general have never been known to turn up their noses at a drink or two, and many of them welcomed a pub on Fagerö to obviate the need to resort to the mainland whenever they felt the need to wet their whistles. Birger from the store, Pettersson and a number of other representatives of local commerce took the view that an establishment with a licence would encourage more visitors to come to Fagerö and thus have a beneficial effect on the development of tourism. Privately they also received a level of support from Abrahamsson from Busö, who was a shipowner, businessman and member of the district council.
The debate was a stormy one, so much so that doors slammed and roofs rocked as they always did when the people of Fagerö were settling important issues. Kangarn himself was smart enough to avoid saying anything. He waited calmly for the council to deal with the question. That would be decisive, for without council support he stood no chance of getting a licence.
The eagerly awaited council meeting took place one dark November evening. Public interest was so great that extra chairs had to be set out in the council chamber. At a group meeting before the council convened, K-D Mattsson stated that he was sure the noes would have it by a substantial margin.
“He shouldn’t try to sell the fleece before the sheep is sheared,” Abrahamsson from Busö muttered.
After a number of routine issues had been dealt with in due order, the council reached Item 11 on the agenda.
Karl-Gunnar Blomster, chairman of the council, boat-builder and future manufacturer of coffins, introduced the item: “It is proposed that Fagerö District Council approach the National Alcohol Monopoly with a view to expressing the council’s support for Viktor Asker Kangarn’s application for a licence Class A for the sale of beers, wines and spirits or, alternatively, Class B for the sale of beers and wines, at the said applicant’s restaurant (the American Bar) on Fagerö.” The chairman then declared the meeting open for discussion.
K-D Mattsson raised his hand and rose to approach the platform. At that point all the lights in the village hall went out.
Confusion ruled. The people of Fagerö had become accustomed to the blessings of electric lighting and this was the first blackout they had experienced. Dismayed voices could be heard as councillors and members of the public bumped into one another in the dark. Fride, the caretaker, was dispatched to check the fuse box and he reported back that all the fuses were in order but, he added, the whole of Storby was in darkness, which suggested that there was a more widespread power cut.
Calling for order in the darkness Abrahamsson proposed that they take a break.
The meeting was adjourned, at which point Abrahamsson, K-D and the majority group on the council shut themselves in the hall to discuss things by candlelight while the opposition – which consisted solely of Ingvald Hindström from Lemlot – was pushed out into the corridor along with the general public. What was said during the discussions in the hall has never emerged since no minutes were taken, but some of the people out i
n the corridor claim to have heard raised voices behind the closed doors. Occasional phrases such as “unheard-of” and “blackmail, pure and simple” are said to have been heard.
The discussion lasted the best part of an hour.
When they had finished, Abrahamsson from Busö emerged from the hall and, without saying a word, disappeared into the office, where he made a brief telephone call.
The council meeting was then reconvened by the flickering light of the candles and with shadows dancing on the ceiling.
A grim-faced K-D Mattsson took the floor – in fact, he was more than grim-faced, his face was red and blotchy with suppressed rage and he gripped the lectern so forcefully that his knuckles went white.
“Following consultations in the majority group we have decided to bring forward a new proposal with regard to the issue of serving alcoholic beverages in the American Bar,” K-D said in a hoarse voice. “The new proposal is as follows: ‘The district of Fagerö is in favour of granting full alcohol rights to the restaurant known as the American Bar.’ Over and out!”
“Are there any further proposals?” the chairman enquired. “If not, I declare the discussion at an end. We shall now proceed to the vote.”
Shortly after the vote was taken the lights came back on.
The jukebox in the American Bar – so the story goes, anyway – was washed ashore undamaged, fully loaded with records and still in its box, after the steamer Park Victory ran aground on the island of Estrevlarna. At some risk to his life Kangarn salvaged it from the roaring breakers and now, on the Saturday night following the ill-fated funeral, the rhythmic thump of electric guitars accompanied Roy Orbison’s voice as he sang “Pretty Woman”.
“I stayed sober at the funeral but I’m beyond that now!” Axmar admitted as he poured a large quantity of beer down his sinful throat. The outside door opened and in walked Abrahamsson from Busö, who eased his cap, nodded to Kangarn behind the counter and then nodded to the men sitting around one of the old brown-stained wooden herring barrels that served as tables in the American Bar. Abrahamsson is a huge man with an enormous belly, the lower half of his face covered by a bushy white beard. His everyday outfit tends to be that of a wildfowler – a shaggy fleece, a windproof jacket with broad reflective strips on the sleeves and a green peaked cap.