by Lars Sund
One of the windows of the meeting room is open and the wind fills and empties the curtains like the regular breathing of a large animal. The wind also carries the dull hum of machinery from down by the harbour.
The noise is coming from the compressors in the refrigerated containers brought in and placed alongside the large marquee being used as a temporary mortuary.
“Would someone please close the window,” K-D Mattsson suddenly snaps. Under K-D’s experienced chairmanship, the meetings of the council usually proceed at a very brisk pace.
“Item No. 10: Sale of the vacant school in Söder Karlby,” K-D Mattsson reads from the agenda. Oh, how he loves sitting here with the chairman’s gavel in his hand! “As we can see from the report there has only been one offer and that is from the artist Veli Mäki from the mainland. According to the district clerk of works the offer is below the market value of the school building and he advises us to reject it. What is the view of the council?”
K-D leaves a brief pause.
“In the absence of alternative opinions I declare the discussion closed. The council agrees unanimously with the recommendation that Mäki’s offer be rejected.”
He brings his gavel down with a bang.
“The next item, No. 109: The appointment of a temporary bookkeeper in the council offices …”
The meeting room remains silent.
“Gösta?” K-D says.
Berg looks up like a schoolboy caught daydreaming when the teacher asks him a question.
“We are at Item 109, the question of temporary cover for Lisbeth in the council offices. We are waiting for your opinion.”
“Ah … mm … right.” The chief executive skims through his papers and clears his throat. “Sorry … I must have … ah, here it is.”
“Thank you,” K-D says drily. The chief executive’s cheeks are bright red.
And so the meeting limped its way through the agenda. In so far as there was any discussion, it was stilted. Not that there was anything unusual about that, although even Abrahamsson from Busö, who could usually be relied on to demand the floor quite frequently, seemed to have been struck dumb. Pettersson wriggled so restlessly on his chair that it creaked. At one moment Hildegard Lundström was staring out through the window, at the next she was studying her hands, which she had placed on the table in front of her, left hand on top of right. K-D was becoming more and more irritated and rapped the table harder with his gavel each time. The secretary dropped her pen, smiled in apology and bent down to pick it up.
They were dealing with the costings which the technical subcommittee had worked out for the replacement of refrigerators and extractor fans in the school kitchen when Ingvald Sommarström from Lemlot burst into tears.
Tears poured down his weather-beaten cheeks, which were already patterned with the blue and red of broken blood vessels. He sat absolutely motionless as the tears ran down. He bent his head and put his hand over his face. His mouth opened and he began to whimper quietly.
Dreams
Now the strangers from the sea began to visit the people of Fagerö in their dreams at night.
The nights of early summer are short, short and light. Hardly has the sun sunk red and heavy below the western sea than it raises its glowing crown above the horizon in the east. Short, too, are the islanders’ hours of rest at this time of year. No sooner have they settled their heads comfortably on the pillow and shut their eyes than the first arrows of sunlight slip through a crack in the bedroom curtains and prick them back to wakefulness. Somewhere in the room an aerobatic fly is diving and buzzing. Outside the window a chorus of passerines heralds the day: willow warblers, chaffinches, flycatchers, larks. A cuckoo calls in the clump of trees behind Östergrannas. The gulls are screaming down by the shore. The islanders lie in bed and listen. It’s five o’clock. It will soon be time to rise, put on the coffee and go out to the byre, but there is no hurry yet. They think: it’s strange, isn’t it, that you can feel fully rested and alert even though you’ve had less sleep than usual. Oh well, you can always make up for it come winter. What you really should do is run out on the grass in your nightclothes, barefoot so you can feel the cool moisture of the dew between your toes, and listen to the birds and take deep breaths of the morning air. Hurry now! Take advantage of the early summer light! Darkness will return here all too soon.
That is how it used to feel. But not now. The dreams are to blame.
In Tunnhamn the generators powering the refrigerated containers are working ceaselessly.
The strangers rose from the sea where they had been drifting. They rose from the shore and the skerries where wind and waves had driven them. And they stepped out of the containers in which they had been laid.
In the brief darkness of the summer night the strangers walked on Fagerö and visited the living.
It wasn’t difficult for the strangers to intrude into the islanders’ dreams: we are defenceless when we sleep, defenceless and at the mercy of the whims and images of our subconscious, unable to defend ourselves against the scenes that are played on the screen of our dreams. The strangers meant no harm to the living. All they wanted, perhaps, was to take a look inside the minds of the islanders on whose shores they had landed through no choice of their own.
They stepped into the dreams of the Fagerö people and, in most cases, stood politely just inside the door as people used to do in the old days when visiting someone’s house. The seawater ran off them and gathered in puddles around their feet. They pulled their coats and blouses tighter around themselves as if they were cold, and those who had no clothes tried to cover themselves with their hands. Many of them had savage cuts and wounds. They turned to face the islanders with pecked and empty eye sockets. They gaped in silence.
Mikaela dreamt that Jenni’s crying woke her at night. She rose and went over to the bed. There lay a stranger, a little child without eyes. She ran through to Viktor and Sara’s room. There, too, the beds were occupied by strange children.
K-D Mattsson dreamt that a man with a tousled white beard and a black suit walked into his kitchen, bowed and said: “Wie Sie sind, waren wir auch einmals.” The man bowed again and then stood waiting.
Abrahamsson from Busö dreamt he was steering his Bayliner across a flat, calm nocturnal sea. The water was full of bodies as far as the eye could see. Hands reached up to the boat, trying to take hold of the rails. He gave it full throttle but the boat could make no headway. He turned round and the boat towed bodies behind it. They bobbed in his foaming wake like a long raft of logs.
Elna dreamt she heard knocking at her bedroom window. She got out of bed and drew back the curtain. The yard was full of strangers, silent and waiting.
Deaconess Hildegaard Lökström dreamt that she opened her fridge. In it was a naked old woman, who looked up at her. In the Rev. Lökström’s voice the woman said, “May the Lord turn his face towards you and give you peace!”
All of them dreamt their own dreams. But the dreams had one thing in common, which was the sorrow they left behind when the dreams were over and the islanders woke. A heavy, bitter sorrow.
It was the bitter sorrow of flight. But the people of Fagerö did not recognise it.
How could they possibly have done so?
Beda Gustavsson PhD
In the midst of all this the first summer visitors arrived on Fagerö.
They were the vanguard of the Alfthan family from the capital. You know who I mean – the people who bought Klås a couple of years ago after Vega Holmlund died. They renovated the dilapidated farm as a summer place. The party was led by Beda Gustavsson PhD, sister-in-law of Alfthan the sheriff-depute, and consisted of Rabbe and Ulrika, the children of the family, and a terrified budgerigar that was cowering on the bottom of its cage with ruffled feathers.
Elis from Nagelskär brought the summer visitors over to Tunnhamn in his water taxi. They had any number of suitcases, rucksacks and packages with them since Beda Gustavsson and the children were intending, as alway
s, to stay until the middle of August. The sheriff-depute and his wife would come out for midsummer.
Lenni’s taxi had been booked to drive Beda Gustavsson and the children from Tunnhamn to Klås, but there was no sign of it as yet.
There was a warm wind blowing in Tunnhamn and the air tasted of saltwater and rotting bladder wrack. The shutters on the harbour kiosk were still screwed shut and the plastic furniture for the outdoor café hadn’t yet been set out on the terrace. There was a slip of paper with a mobile number taped to the pump at the marine service station in case anyone was in need of fuel. A solitary Pellinge-built double-ender with a blue cover stretched over the cockpit was tied up at the visitors’ moorings. Two fishing boats were grinding their fenders against the quay, the poles of their dhan buoys sticking up behind the wheelhouse like arrows in a quiver. The black marker flags on top of the poles fluttered in the breeze. A lesser black-backed gull was standing motionless as a weathercock on top of a lamp post by the ferry mooring.
Short, broad in the beam and generous in the bosom, Beda Gustavsson stood on the quay directing the disembarkation and unloading of the baggage with shouts and gestures. She was wearing a windcheater, shorts, stout canvas boots and a green forage cap.
“Careful with that case – it’s a portable computer!”
“Rabbe! No farther than that! You’ll fall in before we can say Jack Robinson!”
“Take your rucksack, Ulrike. And Pipsan’s cage!”
Ulrike obediently took the cage when it was passed to her. The girl looked as dejected and miserable as the bird – the swell out on Norrfjärden hadn’t been kind to her.
“Come along! Cheer up, Ulli,” Beda Gustavsson said with an encouraging smile. “And see that you don’t forget your spinning rod, Rabbe. RABBE!”
The boy, a slight, fair-skinned, eight-year-old, was dressed in baggy camouflage trousers, a blue jacket with Detroit Tigers on the back and his cap back-to-front. He pulled out the earpiece of his MP3 player on one side.
“Did you hear what I said to you, Rabbe?”
“Yes, but … Look, Aunty, over there. A police car!” Rabbe pointed to a car that was parked untidily alongside an anonymous white Ford Transit away at the north end of the harbour area where thick, white builder’s polythene had been used to screen off a section from public view. “What’s the police car doing here, do you think? And what’s making that humming noise?”
“How on earth am I supposed to know?” Beda Gustavsson said, putting her hand on Rabbe’s shoulder and steering him towards the baggage on the quay at the same time as moving so that she blocked his view of the harbour yard. “Collect your things now and wait there by Ulli. Our taxi will be here any minute now.”
Elis from Nagelskär heaved the last rucksack up on to the quay. “That’ll be the last ’un, then.”
“Thanks. Now let me pay you for the trip. How much is it?” And she took her wallet from the pocket of her windcheater.
“That’ll be thirty-eight euros sixty cents,” Elis said. He glanced quickly in the direction of the north end of the yard and looked away again very rapidly.
Beda Gustavsson carefully counted out the required sum and passed the money down to Elis in the boat.
“May I trouble you for a receipt?”
Elis raised his eyebrows. It was rare for his customers to ask for a receipt and that was the way he liked it. But he quickly gathered his thoughts, nodded and dived into the wheelhouse smiling to himself. He was back in no time at all clutching a carefully drawn-up receipt in his own hand.
E. Sommarström Water Taxi
Fagerö 050-55 98 564
Route: Örsund – Fagerö
Passenger (1/Female)€27.00
Baggage (Considerable)€10.00
Parrott (1)€01.60
Total€38.60
Beda Gustavsson studied the receipt. Then she studied Nagelskär Elis. Her bosom heaved.
“You have omitted to charge for the children,” she stated.
“Under twelves travel free,” Elis answered. Since he was down in the boat and Beda Gustavsson was up on the quay it was inevitable that his gaze rested on her muscular calves.
“I see, so that’s it. Thank you.” She folded the receipt and put it in her wallet. “I should point out, however, that the bird is a budgerigar not a parrot and that parrot is spelt with just one t.”
Elis had no answer to that, so he just glared at her. He wiped his hand across his mouth, turned round and, to Rabbe’s delight, fired a globule of spit in an elegant arc over the rail before stepping into the wheelhouse. He revved up the diesel engine and backed out from the quay in a cloud of blue exhaust smoke. He pointed the bows out towards the open waters of Norrfjärden and increased the revs while muttering to himself, “I’ve seen some women in my time. I’ve heard some women in my time. I had a wife myself until she went and died. But I’m buggered if I ever expected to come across a bloody woman like that one!”
At the time of writing Beda Gustavsson PhD is forty-seven years old and, as her title indicates, she is the holder of a higher degree: her dissertation in the field of systematic botany is entitled Recent Changes in the Flora of the South-West Archipelago and it treats the changes in the plant life of three of the Gunnarsholmar islands, one of which was still being grazed by sheep while the research was ongoing. For some twenty years or more Beda Gustavsson has been employed as a biology teacher at an upper secondary school in the capital. Her special interests include travel, gender issues, music and literature. She is an avid reader of crime fiction. She sits on the board of the Lergränd 7 Housing Association in the city and is also member of a number of societies including, among others, the Botanical Society, Zonta International and the Society for LGBT Rights. In political terms she defines herself as social liberal. She keeps fit by swimming and Nordic walking.
Beda Gustavsson is unmarried. Not having children of her own she often takes care of the son and daughter of Karin Alfthan, her younger sister. During her summer stay on Fagerö she is planning to complete the manuscript of a biology textbook she has been commissioned to produce for the upper years in comprehensive schools.
Given the short notice, these are the basic biographical facts it has been possible to ascertain about Beda Gustavsson, a character in this novel.
Having crossed the waters of Norrsundet, Beda Gustavsson PhD has stepped ashore into this narrative. Her epic role is as yet unclear. There’s no doubt that the simplest thing to do would be to write her out of the story immediately. That does not, however, seem to be a practicable choice.
“J’y suis et j’y reste – I am here and here I shall stay,” Beda Gustavsson states, quoting the well-known words of General MacMahon before the Malakoff redoubt during the Crimean War.
She surveys the living room at Klås with a look of satisfaction. Lenni’s taxi did eventually take her and the children there. Freshly washed rag rugs cover the freshly scrubbed floorboards, and freshly ironed summer curtains hang at the windows. Mrs Alfthan, as usual, engaged a cleaning company to come out and put Klås in order for the summer – part of the cost is tax-deductible, which is nice. The place has a good smell of environmentally friendly cleaning products produced by Lever, Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble and sundry other well-known brands. The Fagerö store has delivered groceries and the murmur of the sea and the sound of the birds can be heard through the open door of the glass veranda.
Only the sea and the birds can be heard here.
“Right, let’s hurry and unpack, and get everything organised, dear children!” Beda Gustavsson cries, cheerful and full of energy. “Then perhaps we shall have time to go down to the shore and see how cold the water is before we have supper!”
An Editorial Decision
“Hello, Ghita Saarinen here.”
“Hi, Jussi here. Patrick said you were on your way to Fagerö.”
“Yes, I am. I’m in the car park, about to get in the car …”
“Lucky I managed to get hold of y
ou on your mobile. We’re dropping your piece, Ghita.”
“What? Hang on a minute … what do you mean?”
“Like I said. We’re scrubbing the piece from Fagerö.”
“But … they’re burying more of them today.”
“You did a piece about funerals just the other day, didn’t you? That will have to be enough. We’ll make do with a brief note on this afternoon’s news.”
“But we decided at this morning’s meeting …”
“Pity I wasn’t at the meeting or I could have cancelled it at that stage. But I was in the middle of a telephone conference.”
“Good God, Jussi! This story is enormous! New bodies turning up all the time …”
“You seem to be missing the point, Ghita. We’re just regurgitating the same thing day after day. More bodies, none of them identified, the police refusing to comment blah, blah, blah. We’re not adding anything new, for Christ’s sake! Our audience loses interest quickly these days. They reckon they’ve heard all this before and switch over to one of the commercial channels. Things aren’t like they used to be. We’ve got all this bloody competition nowadays and we need to adapt to that fact.”
“We’ll have to come up with some new angles then. I want to dig a bit deeper into this business. We can’t just let it go.”
“I can’t be bothered just now, Ghita. I never said we should let it go. But you know as well as I do that local radio doesn’t have the resources for investigative journalism. And to be honest I think you’ve become too involved in it all, emotionally I mean. Time for someone else to take over.”
“What, what Jussi! Are you telling me someone has warned us off? Told us to cool it? Have they, by any chance?”