by Lars Sund
“End of discussion, Ghita! My decision stands! Goodbye.”
She is left standing in the car park, mobile in hand with the screen displaying the icon for Call Ended. She closes her phone slowly and leans on the car door. She looks up at the sky. The sky is blue and cloudless.
Eleanor Rigby
The girl who lives with Judit was not waiting on the landing stage when Judit came back to Aspskär. That was unusual. As a rule when Judit pulled alongside the girl would run to meet her like an eager puppy, her ponytail swinging from side to side as she ran.
Judit was looking after the Västergård place for Siv and Valdemar while they were away for a couple of days, so every morning and evening she took the boat over to Fagerö to milk and tend the cows. It was a job she liked. When she arrived in Tunnhamn yesterday afternoon she was met by a strange sight. Kangarn’s tractor and trailer were in the harbour yard and Kangarn and his sons were busy unloading wooden boxes from the trailer. They were just simple rectangular boxes a couple of metres long and made of unplaned planks. Judit could smell the scent of the spruce resin and freshly cut timber right over by the quayside. Kangarn and his boys were carrying the boxes behind the screen of polythene that cut off the far end of the harbour yard.
Judit moored her boat. She fetched her utility moped from Gottfrid’s shed and rode away from Tunnhamn.
Kangarn’s strange activity in Tunnhamn will be made clear all in good time, but for the moment our narrative is dealing with Judit and what happened on her return to Aspskär the following day after she had done the morning milking of the Västergård cows and let them out to grass. There was no sign of the girl, not on the landing stage, not in her room, not in the toilet or anywhere else in the house. Judit went and searched the boathouse and the empty cattle shed and the sauna, but the girl wasn’t in any of those places either.
Judit shouted “Anna! Anna!” That was the girl’s name.
She listened for an answer but all she heard was the gulls and the murmur of the sea and the heavy thud of the waves on the rocks over on the seaward side.
The sharp red beak of fear began to hack at her breast.
Her eyes scanned the farmyard in a wild panic. She had to take a deep breath and force herself to think calmly and practically, to go through all the possibilities. There were not very many. The dinghy was still in the harbour and, anyway, there was no way the girl would go out to sea on her own. And she is familiar with all the cliffs and crevices on Aspskär, apart from which she is as sure-footed as a goat. She knows about being careful near water. She is hiding from me, she is playing a trick on me, or that’s what Judit tried to convince herself.
She ran up to the hillock behind the house. It was the highest point on Aspskär. Her heart was pounding and fear was tearing at her. Where had all this biting terror suddenly come from?
Up on the hillock she spied all round and shouted for the girl.
Aspskär is not a large island and Judit soon found the girl.
She was out on the southernmost point, in a place she didn’t usually go. Most of the southern end of Aspskär was a jumble of boulders and steep rocks. It was the land of the razorbill and the birds stood there on their ledges like surly old men in black tailcoats and starched white shirts. They were paying no attention at all to the girl; it was as if they recognised she was no threat to them.
She was sitting on a flat rock almost at the water’s edge and she had a bundle on her lap. She had wrapped the bundle in a shawl, a Russian shawl with a printed pattern of roses and long red fringes. The shawl had belonged to her mother and she had it with her when Judit brought her here.
The razorbills became nervous at Judit’s approach. Their grunts and growls became louder and they sounded rather offended. The girl paid no attention to Judit. She was bent forward over the bundle she was holding on her lap and she was rocking backwards and forwards slightly. And humming almost inaudibly.
She’s found a doll on the shore, Judit thought, a doll washed up, one with a white porcelain head. Now she’s playing with it, even though she is too old to be playing with dolls. But, then, she is a bit childish. I mustn’t be angry with her.
That’s what Judit thought. But even while she was thinking it she realised she was mistaken.
It wasn’t a doll the girl had on her lap.
Judit must have called out.
The razorbills shot up from the rocks like black and white missiles. With wings whirring they fled out over the waves. The girl looked up and said almost angrily:
“You’re frightening the birds, you are.”
Judit gasped for breath and shuddered. There was a pain in her throat and she leant on a rock for support. It took all her strength to behave like the ordinary Judit.
“Where did you find … that?” Judit asked at last, once she was sure her voice would not break.
“She was in the water. When you’d gone, I heard the gulls making a fuss out on the point so I came to look.”
Judit crouched down in front of the girl. She moistened her lips. The girl was gently rocking the body of the small child in her shawl and there was an unfathomable look in her widened eyes. A delicate little hand poked out between the folds of the shawl. Small fingers, tiny little nails.
“Anna, you do understand … don’t you … what that is?”
“Why wouldn’t I understand?” the girl snapped. Judith was taken aback. She had never heard the girl speak like that before. “It’s a dead baby.”
“Shh! Don’t say that … it sounds so dreadful.”
“How old do you think she was? Not even a year old, I’m sure.”
“Anna, listen now …”
“Who can have done this to her? Why did a tiny little baby have to die and be thrown in the sea like that? She should have had the whole of her life before her. Can you tell me why, Judit?”
“Now just you listen to me or I’ll thump you one!” Judit shouted.
The girl fell silent. She stared straight at Judit. There was an utterly new look in her big gleaming eyes and she no longer avoided eye contact. Judit suddenly realised the girl was no longer afraid.
Judit lowered her raised hand, slowly, like a flag being lowered for the night. She was still crouching in front of the girl and the girl said in a calm voice, “I just wanted to sit here and hold her for a little while, that’s all. She’s all alone and she’s so small. We don’t know what she’s called and her mother is far, far away. Perhaps her mother’s dead, too. The only thing we can do for her is to give her one last cuddle. Someone has to care, don’t they? Don’t you think so, too? Don’t you?”
“Yes, but you can’t … you just can’t … it might be dangerous, there might be germs …” Judit fell silent and looked down at the pebbles. White fragments of shell and a blue-black strand of dried seaweed lay between the stones. Judit swallowed hard. It was her own shame she was attempting to swallow.
The girl shook her head slowly.
“Why are you so afraid? Almost all of you are so afraid of death that you don’t dare talk about it out loud. Of course I know that you went out in the boat and towed away that corpse that had drifted ashore on the skerry. And you shouldn’t have done it.”
Judit stared stolidly down at the pebbles, the pieces of shell and the strand of dried weed.
“You must help me now,” the girl said.
The girl picked flowers. She picked buttercups, crow garlic and wood cranesbill. She took some ox-eye daisies from the bed in front of the house. She wound the flowers into a wreath with which she carefully covered the child’s bare white skull. And then, in her delicate light voice Judit’s girl sang to the small dead child: “All the lonely people Where do they all come from?”
She sang it all. She sang the proper tune. She pronounced the English words as they should be pronounced. Judit listened in wonder. She knew the Beatles’ song “Eleanor Rigby”, of course she did, even though she wasn’t very musical. But how had Anna learnt to sing it? That was something s
he thought she would never know.
The girl carried the dead child to the boat. Judit cast off, started the engine and they set off for Tunnhamn. The girl sat on the stern thwart with the child in her arms the whole way. Tenderly and carefully she wrapped the shawl tighter around the child’s head as if to shelter her from the wind.
“Perhaps we shall find your mother,” the girl whispered comfortingly.
When they reached Tunnhamn the girl carried the child to the area cordoned off with builder’s polythene. She was met at the entrance by Hildegaard Lökström the deaconess, head of the volunteers from the community and from the Red Cross who were taking charge of the bodies when the police had finished their examination. The deaconess was dressed in plastic protective overalls, rubber gloves and a face mask. She held out her gloved hands to take the baby.
“No,” the girl said.
And Judit’s girl with the baby in her arms stepped in through the opening in the polythene screens.
Turning Points
The earth travels around the sun in a slightly elliptical orbit at an average distance of 149,670,000 kilometres and it completes one orbit in a little more than 365 days. On four occasions during the 365 days the earth passes the extreme points of its orbit. One of those turning points – the summer solstice – was approaching.
This narrative, too, has reached one of its turning points.
The movements of the heavenly bodies may easily be calculated and predicted using Newton’s universal law of gravitation. Narratives, on the other hand, often tend to be unreliable and unpredictable. The forces at work in a narrative are only rarely in balance: there are times when the narrative turns in on itself and times when it is hurled far out beyond the path planned for it in advance.
The shipping forecast on the radio says that the area of high pressure which has not moved over recent days is beginning to weaken and a low-pressure front is moving in from the west. The forecast for this evening: wind southerly 2 to 4, visibility good or very good. Tonight: wind becoming westerly 5 to 6, increasing cloud, risk of showers later.
“Just typical, isn’t it – the weather always gets worse for midsummer?” Beda Gustavsson sighs and puts down the book she is reading – a paperback with the title Nobel’s Last Will. The cover picture is of a blond woman wearing glasses with pink lenses.
“I like crime stories,” Beda Gustavsson thinks, stretching her short round body on the sunlounger. “People say that crime fiction these days offers a realistic depiction of society. That strikes me as pretty stupid. Fairy tales for adults more like. Of course the authors try to make the events credible and the settings recognisable, and they usually manage it – or those with enough skill do. But when it comes to it, we all know that what goes on in the world of crime fiction has very little to do with the real world.”
Beda Gustavsson is wearing a broad-brimmed hat, the ribbon of which is decorated with a fabric flower unlikely to be found in any of the floras that fill her bookcases. The neckline of her white swimsuit reveals a little of the cleavage between her breasts and the skin is just a touch dry and etched with fine wrinkles. Pale brown liver spots are dotted here and there like outlying skerries on a sea chart. In spite of the sun cream her shoulders are beginning to go red.
“It’s the same with Fagerö. Fagerö isn’t really …. how can I put it? … really real. Everyone knows that you’re not likely to see a motor schooner sailing in our waters these days. Everyone knows that district governors were abolished in this country years ago. But the main thing is that we carry on believing that a governor or a motor schooner might possibly still exist.”
The family pennant is flapping from side to side at the top of the flagpole like the tail of a grazing horse. We can hear the sounds of the sea, we can hear the birds. And today, even in the yard here at Klås, we can hear the sound of the refrigeration units in Tunnhamn. In fact, it seems that the sound of the units can be heard all over the island.
“I’m not going to be able to put up with this racket much longer. It just goes on day and night,” Mrs Councillor said to her husband K-D Mattsson in the kitchen at Västergrannas. Then all of a sudden she cut herself short, even though it was obvious she had more on the tip of her tongue. She closed the kitchen window hard so that the latch made a clatter.
Money has been spent on a thorough renovation of the kitchen at Västergrannas. They have kept the chimney breast and stripped back to the beams and the original wooden floor. A modern electric stove with a ceramic hob and fan oven has been installed alongside the old Högfors cast-iron stove. The gateleg table is new but in reproduction rustic style. The chairs and the wooden hoop back bench were auction bargains which Mrs Councillor stripped and scraped with her own hands. The doors of the fridge, freezer and dishwasher are all of brushed steel. An octagonal American clock is ticking away on the wall above the bench – Mrs Councillor’s grandfather brought it back to Fagerö with him. Pelargoniums, busy Lizzies and fuchsias are flowering in the windows. The fitted kitchen cupboards all have oak doors.
There was a good smell of freshly brewed morning coffee.
A black cat with a white blaze was lying on the old log bin beside the stove. The cat, her eyes narrow slits the same colour as ripe haws, was lazily but vigilantly watching K-D Mattsson, who was sitting at the kitchen table reading the national newspaper. Janne the Post had just been so newspapers and a couple of letters were lying on the table. K-D turned a page, the paper making a familiar rustle. The wall clock ticked away.
“Is there anything special in today’s paper?” Mrs Councillor asked, sitting down at the table again.
“No, just the same old misery.”
She held up the glass coffee pot.
“Do you want a top-up – there’s a drop left.”
“Not for me.”
Mrs Councillor was moving the pot over her own coffee cup, but she stopped and just sat there looking at the coffee pot as if she had suddenly forgotten how to pour coffee.
“God in Heaven … I can’t take much more …” she heard herself whisper, as if the words were being forced out of her.
The cat, which had been licking one of her front paws with her pink tongue, stopped and raised her head. A fly was buzzing around somewhere.
“Did you say something?” K-D’s voice said with no trace of interest from behind the paper.
The front page of the paper was taken up with a large advertisement for a car. There was a picture of a crossover SUV with a metallic finish and a headline:
HONDA
The Power of Dreams
She stared at the picture. She read “HONDA The Power of Dreams” once. She read “HONDA The Power of Dreams” again, her right hand gripping the handle of the coffee pot so hard that her knuckles stood out, the skin stretched, yellowish-white, bloodless.
The cat looked at her with its yellow eyes.
Mrs Councillor felt as if she had a hard rubber ball in her breast, swelling, burning, choking her. She opened her mouth, expecting to hear herself scream.
K-D’s newspaper rustled. The fly buzzed.
Mrs Councillor did not scream. She carefully placed the coffee pot on the cork table mat, looked down into her empty cup, then looked up again and looked around her kitchen.
She rose from the table, not bothering about the cups and the plate and the breadcrumbs lying on the striped green linen runner. She put on her shoes, picked up her handbag and went out.
It was not until she was driving off the ferry Arkipelag in Örsund that she remembered she had forgotten to tell K-D that the bank had phoned earlier that morning about the instalment due on the loan. Again. Well, she thought, that’s as may be, and she continued driving north.
“Perhaps the worst is over,” Inspector Riggert von Haartman said. “We haven’t found any further bodies for several days even though the coastguards, fire service and ourselves have been out searching. But, to be on the safe side, we’ll stay on the alert over midsummer. Recently though, to put it b
luntly, it’s been bloody awful. The corpses have been in the sea for two or three weeks and they are in worse and worse condition. Dealing with them really gets to you.”
“I can imagine that.”
“If you’ll forgive me saying so, you can’t. I honestly don’t think that anyone who hasn’t seen it for themselves can know what it’s like. You have to try to put up a barrier, try to forget that they used to be human beings just to get the job done.”
“But how do you manage it?”
“Well, of course the police have to examine the bodies and document what there is to document. And we’ve certainly been offered emergency assistance, counselling and so on.”
The inspector fell silent. He was sitting in a garden chair, his left foot up on his right knee, his hand gripping the ankle. In his other hand he was holding a glass of whisky, resting it on his right thigh.
“The worst thing is …” the inspector said, more to himself than to the woman in the chair alongside him. He stopped there, looked down into his glass and seemed to be chewing the words that were in his mouth. “Up to today’s date ninety-four bodies have come ashore here on the Gunnarsholmar islands and ten or so have been found elsewhere. Initially, of course, everything was thrown at it. We organised a central store for the bodies in Tunnhamn and I requisitioned reinforcements that included crime technicians and forensic pathologists. We were working twenty-four hours a day when things were at their worst. And the press came in droves, even the foreign press.”
“I know,” the woman said. “I tried to get an interview with you on air.”
“Then, as the days passed and we were still finding bodies, there was a directive recalling the medics and technicians. The head office was complaining of staff shortages and holiday cover. So we were told to manage with what resources we had.”