by Lars Sund
The inspector held his whisky glass between two fingers and rotated it as if he was a wine taster.
“We gave up performing autopsies,” he continued, “and just carried out an external examination to confirm that they had probably drowned. The regional administration ordered us to bury them all as soon as possible – just get them into the ground in anonymous common graves. And the media lost interest and went home.”
“I wanted to continue reporting on it, but my boss said no.”
“You know all about it, then.”
“After the tsunami disaster they came up with the resources to send experts out to Thailand to identify and deal with those who died,” the woman beside him said heatedly. “And they flew them home at state expense. The tsunami dominated the news for I don’t know how long. And now we have a hundred or more unidentified corpses coming ashore in the islands of the archipelago. You’d think they’d be prepared to devote substantial resources to finding out what happened, who they are and where they come from. But no one really seems bothered. To all intents and purposes the media gave up reporting on it after a week. We have to ask ourselves why? What on earth is the difference between these people and the victims of the tsunami?”
She stopped talking and looked at Riggert von Haartman.
He raised his glass and took a drink, pulling a face at the same time.
“I’m sure a smart radio reporter like you can work that one out,” he said in a low, bitter voice.
She had been sitting on the steps waiting for him when he came home. It could have been a scene from a romantic comedy, from the very end of the film. She was sitting there with her arms around her knees and her chin resting on her arms. Her fair hair was cut short, her legs were bare and white and her knees as knobbly as a girl’s.
Seeing the woman sitting there on his steps sparked a memory in von Haartman’s mind. His heart dropped and his mouth opened to form a familiar name. It all happened at once and his foot slipped off the clutch pedal so that the car jumped and stalled.
Then he saw that it wasn’t Elisabeth.
Of course it wasn’t Elisabeth.
The woman on the steps stood up, gripping the handrail for support. The strap of her shoulder bag slipped down her arm and she slid it back up with her free hand. She was wearing a short skirt and a washed-out denim jacket. She had a Chinese character tattooed in blue on her left ankle and her hair was unbrushed. He recognised her eventually: Ghita Saarinen, reporter with the local radio.
She smiled, unsure, embarrassed.
If he had been wearing both his uniforms, the outer and the inner, everything would perhaps have been different. As it was, he was wearing a tracksuit and the tread of his trainers was still clogged with earth and sawdust from the running track behind the sports field. He stepped out of the car. He had to take a deep breath and fill his lungs full of air in order to stand erect and get a grip on himself.
She walked over to him and said she was sorry to intrude, but she wasn’t here as a journalist, she wasn’t trying to interview him, she just wanted to talk. She spoke just a little too quickly and was breathing a little too heavily. She was shorter than he was and turned her face up to him as the words tumbled out of her mouth. She had big green plastic earrings and they swung back and forth in time with the nervous movements of her head.
Later, when Riggert von Haartman examined his own behaviour, he would ask himself why he had agreed to talk to her and why he – a man who didn’t usually have much time for journalists – had told her so much about his work and about the bodies. Initially he blamed it on tiredness: God alone knows how tired he was and he didn’t have the energy to refuse her. The part of his being that functioned as interrogator shook its head when, to his own surprise, he admitted that he liked talking to her. The interrogator gave an ironic smile.
So he had asked her in and since it was a mild evening they had gone out on to the veranda at the rear of the house and sat in the garden chairs. The veranda had a sea view over Aspskärsfjärden. The water was grey and mottled like a sheet of corrugated iron and there was a compact dark-blue bank of cloud building up on the horizon. It looked like a distant mountain range. He wondered whether he should offer her something to drink – coffee, tea, beer perhaps. But then she produced a bottle of Johnnie Walker from her shoulder bag and placed it on the table.
Their conversation was halting at first. Both of them were afraid of putting a foot wrong so they tested out the ground. She was the one who did most of the talking at this stage, but it was not as forced as before. She talked about Fagerö and said she had always thought there was something special about the place. Something quite unique. People here work to a different time scheme – the past still exists and sort of telescopes with the present. It never allows itself to be forgotten. And she said that she had family ties here, too, her grandmother having been born at Niskans on the island of Lemlot. “When I was little I spent a couple of weeks here every summer. That was before my parents divorced and Mum remarried. I remember how happy I used to be to come out here.”
She stopped speaking and they watched the growing bank of clouds on the horizon. She sipped her whisky, hit a fly that landed on her leg. The slap of her hand on the bare skin sounded … well, naked. That was the word he used when he was interrogating himself later.
“Why do you want to talk to me?” he asked eventually.
“Because …” She chewed her lip. “I think … I think you are a man who carries a great deal of sympathy within him.”
“What makes you think that?” he asked in a low voice.
“I don’t really know how to explain it. There are times when I can sort of see into people’s hearts. I probably take after my grandmother, who was reputed to have the second sight. You have a lot of sorrow within you and it shows. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to get personal.”
He shook his head. “But I still don’t understand what it is you want from me.”
“Perhaps you can give me something.”
“But what? Ideas for an article?”
“No, no … not directly anyway. But you can maybe give me some pointers.”
“You’re going to have to explain yourself a bit better.”
“These dead bodies. We’re all finding it hard to come to terms with it. But what’s it like for you, what’s it really like? What are your thoughts about it? I was wondering …”
And he had answered her. Reluctantly at first he had tried to tell her what he had felt and what he had thought during the past weeks. It came as a relief to him, as if some dam within him opened as he spoke. The bank of clouds out over the sea grew until it covered almost half the sky. They sat beside one another on the veranda as darkness fell. The bottle of whisky was half-empty and she was the one who had drunk most of it.
She said: “Even if no more bodies come ashore the questions still remain. Why? And what was it that happened?”
“We may well never get an answer.”
“I’ll be on holiday after midsummer. I’m thinking of going south and digging around for what information I can find.”
“You’re not being serious, are you?”
“I most certainly am.”
“What do you think a solitary reporter can find out … in a foreign country and everything?”
“I don’t know. But I’ve got a couple of contacts down there. Journalists I got to know when we had a job exchange between their radio and ours a couple of years ago. I’ll start with them. And I picked up a bit of the language while I was there. I’ll have to see what I can find out. It’s very strange, isn’t it, that no one anywhere seems to want to acknowledge all these dead people. And good God, we are talking about over a hundred people. I may well achieve nothing, but at least I’ll be able to say I tried.”
He shook his head.
“It’s almost certainly pointless. The foreign ministry made enquiries and …”
“I’d like us to stay in contact while I’m down there,” she cont
inued, paying no attention to his objections. “I’d feel better that way. It would give me someone to discuss things with. Would you let me have an email address I could use?”
He remained silent for a while. A nightingale wheeted and chooked in the bramble bush down by the shore. The birdsong drowned out the drone of the generator over at Tunnhamn.
“I’ll give you my mobile number as well,” Riggert von Haartman said.
Midsummer Bonfires
The islanders of Fagerö celebrate midsummer as they have done since heathen times. They decorate their porches with greenery. They hoist the flag and let it stay hoisted all night. They eat the fruits of the earth and the sea: herring and gravlax and new potatoes and strawberries and cream. They drink snaps and beer and boxed wine (modern habits and customs have reached the islands). They light their midsummer bonfires on the shore and watch how the gleam of the fire is mirrored in the calm water, and the smoke rises up into the light night sky. They dance on the quay in Tunnhamn with Fride and Axmar providing the music and, as always, Axmar is drunk and consequently handles his bow with all the virtuosity of a Paganini.
Now and again a fight or two breaks out or a married couple quarrels and the angry wife marches off homewards. Someone throws up round the back of Gottfrid’s boathouse. The police occasionally catch a drunk driver – bad luck for someone, but that, too, is part of the traditional midsummer celebration. Young girls go out into the meadows and pick nine flowers, which they plait into a wreath to place under their pillows to bring them dreams of their husbands to be. Girls who want to know how long it will be until they marry slip out alone to the pigsty and count how often the pig grunts: that will tell them how many years they have to wait.
The sailing types have arrived and moored in the various marinas, where they celebrate midsummer in the cockpit of their boats. Storby Camping and Cabins is full and the celebrations there are noisy. Summer guests join the people of Fagerö at the dance on the quay in Tunnhamn. Abrahamsson dances with Mrs Abrahamsson and Elis from Nagelskär asks the younger ladies from the mainland to dance. Mikaela and Stig are out for a walk with the pram and just to be on the safe side Mikaela has put life jackets on the twins. And, as usual, Backas Isaksson is wearing his armband and acting as steward.
The buzz of mosquitoes and the nervous peeping of a common sandpiper can be heard. From the sedge at Flaken comes the call of a corncrake, its rasping sound reminiscent of the rhythmic creaking of the steel springs of an old-fashioned bed. A thin white veil of mist rises from the meadows and in the gloom the cows lying out there look like blocks of brown stone. The drone of an outboard motor dies away over the flat shining waters of Aspskärsfjärden. Light is already showing on the eastern horizon.
This is how the Fagerö islanders traditionally celebrate midsummer.
The dance on the quay in Tunnhamn was cancelled this year. The big tent and the refrigerated containers are still parked in the screened-off section of the harbour yard. There are ninety-four nameless men, women and children lying in the three freshly dug mass graves up on Tjörkbrant’n. The earth that covers the most recent grave is still damp.
“Best not to think about it,” is what Mikaela says, and she speaks for many of the people of Fagerö.
The oystercatchers of rumour were on the wing. The day before midsummer’s eve Elna phoned Mikaela and the moment Elna said “Hello” Mikaela could hear from her voice that she had news.
“Have you heard that Mrs Councillor has left K-D?”
“No-o, you don’t say!”
And Elna told her eagerly, breathlessly, the words chasing one another along the telephone line between her mouth and Mikaela’s attentive ear. In actual fact Elna did not really know that much and as usual she spun her yarn enthusiastically around what meagre facts she had, weaving a dramatic tale out of a few scanty threads and making something out of nothing.
“As for K-D, he’s beside himself! He’s sitting there at Västergrannas with no idea where to turn!” Elna said. “He hasn’t heard a word from her since she left!”
“Mercy me,” Mikaela sighed obligingly.
“And what’s more, there’s a rumour going round that K-D will soon have to declare the salmon farm bankrupt,” Elna continued. “They say it’s just a matter of time.”
Mikaela sighed again.
“And Abrahamsson is having problems with the Kaleva, you know. She’s still in harbour over on the mainland – loaded and everything. The crew has refused to sail south. Apparently their return voyage last time was unbelievably awful. The sea was full of corpses and they had to sail right through them. Abrahamsson went over to the mainland to try to reason with Jalle Enros. It seems that the conversation was very loud indeed. And then Jalle collapsed just like that – his heart gave out.”
“Lord Jesus!” Mikaela whispered. “Jalle … what about Jalle?”
“He was taken to hospital. He’s in intensive care now, connected to tubes and cables and you name it. You can’t help wondering why all this is happening just now …”
Midsummer’s eve was overcast and windy. Just as forecast.
“There’s no such thing as bad weather, just unsuitable clothing!” Beda Gustavsson said briskly to the children after studying the clouds rolling in from the sea. “And your mum and dad will soon be here.”
The Arkipelag arrived in Tunnhamn at ten past one, just a little late, opened her bow visor wide and spewed out vehicles and people. Most of the passengers were summer visitors and weekenders from the mainland. Sheriff-Depute Alfthan in his blue BMW 300i, Disa Hammarström’s sister in a Skoda Felicia packed with children and luggage, tourists in motor caravans, and some cyclists with panniers and colourful helmets disembarked. A gang of youths – some fifteen of them – lugged an astonishing number of crates of beer ashore from the Arkipelag, the beer constituting the greater part of their luggage. They celebrated their successful landing on Fagerö by emptying a bottle of beer each and hurling the empties into the sea before picking up their crates and marching off along the road to Storby.
Birger, who had shut his store for the holiday and was on his way to partake of snaps and midsummer herring, bumped into the youths outside the community centre. They spread out across the road almost to the white line and they were bawling, laughing and shouting raucously in their rough young voices.
Birger swerved, tooted and pressed the electric window button to close the driver’s side window and shut out the racket. “Bloody louts!” he thought. “You should stay on the mainland.”
A couple of the boys greeted him with a middle finger salute.
Not long after five o’clock – 17.13 according to Ludi’s note in the telephone log – Pettersson rang the police from the Storby campsite to complain about some troublesome youths.
“Are they fighting?” Ludi asked.
“No, no, not yet,” Pettersson said. “At the moment they’re just swilling beer and shouting and yelling. But I thought you should know.”
“I see. Thanks – we’ll drop by later if we can manage it.”
“That would certainly be good.”
Ludi put down the receiver and sighed. He stared around the empty office: desks, the square heads of computer screens, shelves filled with files, noticeboards, the electric clock on the wall, the strip lighting on the ceiling, white light. A wall built of frosted glass panels separated the office from the reception area. There was the smell of authority: a mixture of ink pads, static electricity, paper and cleaning materials. The strip lighting made a hum and there was a quiet tick from the electric clock every time the minute hand jumped from one black mark on the clock face to the next. We can see him sitting there, Senior Constable Skogster, staring vacantly into space. He is wearing a short-sleeved, light-blue uniform shirt with the sword badge of the police force on his shoulder. In the harsh fluorescent light the heavy toll taken by the last few weeks is clearly visible on his face: his skin has a dull grey tinge and there are heavy bags under his eyes from sleepless nights
. A muscle in his left eyelid has a constant twitch and the furrows at the corners of his mouth have deepened. He has lost at least five or six kilos. Senior Constable Ludvig Ragnar Skogster is fifty-six years old and has served on Fagerö ever since completing his national service and going through the police training course over thirty years ago. He has had to deal with corpses during these thirty years – drownings, accidental deaths, suicides. Not many admittedly, but enough for him to think he knows how a policeman should approach death: calmly, matter-of-factly, not getting involved.
For thirty years Ludi has considered himself capable of keeping death at a distance. He has been able to rely on himself.
Now we see him sitting there holding a stapler – and he is really gripping it. There is the light of anxiety in his eyes. Anxiety has a dark gleam all of its own. He raises the stapler and for one moment it looks as if he is intending to hurl it through the glass in the door to the reception. He is breathing heavily.
From a framed official photograph on the wall the president of the republic watches him. The minute hand on the clock clicks on to the next black mark.
The sea and the sky were painted grey on grey, with splashes of dirty white foam along the backs of the waves. Part of the horizon was blotted out by a distant shower of rain. The breakers were pounding heavily and rhythmically on the rocks along the Tunnhamn shore.
“So here we are again – midsummer’s eve on Fagerö,” the voice of Riggert von Haartman can be heard saying through the open window of his living quarters in the Old Police House. “People are lighting their bonfires, eating, drinking and dancing … no, not dancing, the dance has been cancelled this year, hasn’t it.”