by Lars Sund
Over by the police car Juslin gave his superior a questioning look, but Ludi just shook his head.
The leader of the gang hesitated for a moment. Then he turned on his heel, turned his back on the crowd, beckoned to his troops and led them back the way they had come. A couple of them were propping up Axmar, who seemed to have been struck by partial paralysis. None of the people outside the American Bar made a move to prevent their departure.
Slowly and hesitantly Judit went up the steps to her girl. She stood in front of the girl for a moment without saying anything. The girl took a little step forward, laid her face on Judit’s breast and began to cry. After a while Judit put one arm around the girl’s back and the other under her knees. Very gently she picked the girl up and holding her close walked down to their boat.
A Short Chapter of Quiet Rain
A shower of rain drifted in from the sea. There are many different kinds of rain, each with its own scent, its own rhythm and its own sound. This shower was quiet rain, composed of small scattered drops falling almost silently.
A sad little shower smelling of the sea.
It moistened the leaves of the downy birch trees that surrounded the Fagerö graveyard. The moisture ran down the spine of the leaves and collected in small trembling drops at the point of the leaves before falling to the earth, which welcomed and absorbed the wetness.
The earth thrown up over the new graves was dampened by the rain. Each of the graves was marked with a wooden cross, new and white – it was Kangarn and his sons who had made the crosses. The crosses were numbered and Judit’s girl was walking alone along the row of graves, reading the numbers. She was humming to herself: perhaps it was another of the old songs of the sixties which no one knows how or where she learnt.
The girl moved slowly along the row of graves. She was carrying a plastic bag with a logo of a plump, jolly-looking seal cub and the words FAGERÖ STORE.
She stopped in front of a cross marked with the number 72 and went down on her knees. From her bag she carefully lifted a clump of cowslips and, using a trowel, planted them in front of the cross. She was singing quietly to herself and, although it was impossible to distinguish the words, the tune sounded like “Angel of the Morning”, which Marianne Faithfull had sung twenty years or more before the girl was born.
Once she had finished planting the cowslips she walked over to the tap, filled one of the watering cans hanging there and watered the flowers.
She stood for a long time looking at the grave numbered 72. Small drops of rain gathered on her fair hair and soaked into the shoulders of her windcheater. The girl looked out over the pinewoods down below Tjörkbrant’n graveyard, out to the sea, the grey sea. The swifts were flying low over the ground and now and again one would pass so close that she could hear a whisper from its wing feathers.
The girl finally picked up her plastic bag and returned the watering can to the stand by the tap. She walked out of the graveyard, closing the gate quietly behind her.
This is the last time we see her.
VI
The Story of Kangarn, Who Began Life in a Ditch
The old motor schooner Kaleva is rubbing her fenders against the concrete quay in Nordkap harbour where – once upon a time – the intention was that large vessels would load the ore from the Fagerö mine. While the Kaleva dozes at her mooring, the small waves in the harbour basin lap and splash gently at her waterline. She is not in the least concerned that her cargo is changing hands in the American Bar.
The only solution that Abrahamsson from Busö, the ship’s owner, could come up with was to sail her himself from the mainland harbour in which she had been lying fully laden for more than a week. Once back on Fagerö at least, Abrahamsson does not have to pay harbour dues. No one really knows how, but news of the Kaleva’s imminent arrival reached Kangarn, who is always notably well informed, and he did not let the grass grow under his feet. No sooner had the Kaleva passed the Finngrundet shoals and got out into the waters of Nyhamnsfjärden than Abrahamsson heard Kangarn’s ringing voice on his mobile. Without beating about the bush Kangarn made him an offer for the whole of the Kaleva’s cargo of sawn timber.
So the Kaleva is now lying by the quay in Kangarn’s private harbour and Abrahamsson is sitting at a table in the American Bar with Kangarn and the two of them are celebrating their deal with a cup of coffee. It’s early afternoon and the American Bar is still almost deserted apart from a couple of families with children eating pizza out on the terrace. Elis from Nagelskär is sitting all alone with a beer at one of the plastic tables and staring dreamily up at the fluffy, creamy-white cumulus clouds, which are so still they look as if they have been pasted on the blue sky. He has hardly touched his beer. Abrahamsson sticks a cigarette into his beard, lights it and blows out two streams of smoke through his nostrils.
“Well now,” Abrahamsson says through the smoke. “It was a stroke of luck that you wanted the timber. Saves me having to find a buyer elsewhere.”
“I hear your crew was refusing to sail south again,” Kangarn says.
“And I can’t really blame them. Judging by what Jalle said, it must have been bloody dreadful.”
“And how is Jalle?”
“In pretty poor shape – it was a major heart attack. They’re talking about doing a bypass operation, but he needs to build up his strength first.”
Abrahamsson puffs on his cigarette thoughtfully. “I don’t think Jalle is likely to go back to sea. And I’m beginning to wonder if it isn’t time to send the Kaleva to the breaker’s yard. She’s cheap to run, there is that about her, but with a bigger vessel I’d be able to multiply the volume of cargo.”
Poor old Kaleva! If only she knew what was being said about her in the American Bar.
“I might charter her from you,” Kangarn suggests. “We’ve been thinking of the possibility of doing trips round the islands for tourists. Food and drink on board and so on – that seems to be what people want, doesn’t it?”
“Mm …” Abrahamsson says. “Sounds like a good idea to me. But I don’t think the maritime safety board would license the Kaleva for passenger traffic. I can keep an eye out for a more suitable vessel if you like.”
Abrahamsson stubs out his cigarette, smoke still hanging around his large head. He drinks the last of his coffee and sits turning the empty cup on the saucer. He has sold the timber, shaken hands on the deal with Kangarn and now he really ought to be off, but he just doesn’t have the energy. He feels weighed down with weariness.
“What is it you want the timber for, if you don’t mind me asking?” he says.
“We’re intending to put up a services building down by the harbour – showers, sauna, toilets. And a little shop.”
“Aha, I see,” Abrahamsson says. And he thinks, “A real go-getter, Kangarn. Nothing gets in his way.”
“We should really have had it up and running for the midsummer tourists, but well, you know …”
Abrahamsson nods, picks up his cigarette packet, taps it on the edge of the table so that a cigarette sticks out, raises the packet to his mouth and draws out the cigarette with his lips.
“You were building coffins instead?”
Kangarn shrugs his shoulders and looks down into his cup.
Then Abrahamsson says, “You and your boys making those coffins – and making them free of charge – people are still talking about that.”
Once again Kangarn shrugs his shoulders, this time dismissively.
“Well, the deaconess – Mrs Lökström – asked for help and I had a stock of suitable wood, so I thought I’d do what I could,” he says.
“A good deed, that’s for sure, but I can’t quite see why you in particular …”
Kangarn shrugs for a third time.
“I was simply doing what I felt I had to.”
“How do you mean?”
“These people … all these dead people … I could easily have been one of them,” Kangarn says quietly.
Abrahamsson from Bus�
� stares at him through the coils of cigarette smoke. He doesn’t understand.
The people of Fagerö don’t know much about Kangarn. They aren’t actually sure of his real name: he is just Kangarn, just that, a stranger, an incomer, accepted out of necessity.
He represents the Other.
The islanders have always believed that Kangarn came from the north, from the mainland, from some smoky shack up in a landscape of endless blue forests and melancholy lakes. And Kangarn has let the islanders believe that. But in fact he comes from the opposite direction. There were no endless blue forests and open lakes where he grew up: there was smoke and there was soot.
Kangarn never knew his parents. He was a child without history. In recompense, however, he was surrounded by quite enough history in the world into which he happened to be born. His was the century of the great wars, a century in which good map-makers were rarely unemployed since borders were constantly being revised, with great tracts of land changing hands and necessitating new maps and atlases – among many other things. When new borders were drawn and new owners took over, people sometimes had to move – they might, for instance, speak the wrong language or not fit in with the new order in some way. Fortunately there was a well-developed railway network and there were also large numbers of ox-carts available, which have the advantage that they can be used to transport people as long as the people in question are not too demanding about comfort. There were also plenty of skilled carpenters to erect barracks for the people who were moved, and there was plenty of barbed wire to fence the camps.
Kangarn was probably born behind the barbed wire of one of those refugee camps just after the biggest war of the warlike century had come to an end.
The camp was not far from a major city in which a middle-aged woman – a cook by trade – lived with her husband. They too had been affected when the great wheel of history rolled over them and they had been forced to leave their home on the coast up north and migrate south until they eventually ended up in this city among strangers who spoke a different language and had different customs. But they had avoided the barbed wire and they had found somewhere to live, cramped and decrepit as it was. And the woman had found work and with what she earned she was able to support herself and her husband, who was an invalid.
She should really have been satisfied, but there was one thing missing: she and her husband had no children and that was a great sorrow to her.
She had prayed to the god she no longer really believed in, “Let me become pregnant with child, dear Heavenly Father, Thou who art all-powerful.” But God had failed to answer her prayer and it would soon be too late, for she was just a worn-out cook and no longer a young woman. Perhaps, she thought sometimes, it could well be my own fault for not believing strongly enough, and then she would pray more devoutly and try to become a better believer. There were even times when she gave God a reminder: “Please God, there’s not much time left!”
One particular Sunday she had said this to God before setting out for a morning walk. Walks were one of the few pleasures she could afford. It was spring and the larks that had survived the war were singing above the fields and the flowers of the coltsfoot were as bright as miniature yellow suns along the sides of the ditch. She was intending to pick a small bunch of them on her way home to put on the kitchen table for her and her husband. The refugee camp close to the city was in the final stages of being emptied and the last buses were just being driven away. There was nothing left but a flock of rooks scavenging for food on the rubbish heaps with their coarse grey beaks.
The woman turned to go back to the city, but first she stopped and stepped down into the ditch to pick coltsfoot. They were growing unusually big and showy. Then she heard a feeble noise coming from the reeds in the ditch not far away. At first she couldn’t work out what it was, for it wasn’t the kind of noise you expect to hear in a ditch outside a recently evacuated displaced persons camp.
It was the sound of a crying baby.
In spite of everything God had heard the prayers of a tired middle-aged cook.
It never did become clear how Kangarn had come to be there among the reeds in the ditch, lying in a small basket just like Moses long before. Was it an accident or was there some other reason? It caused the woman who found him great distress: on the one hand she was desperate to keep the child that God had manifestly sent her, on the other hand she knew there must be a mother who had lost her child when the camp was being evacuated. The woman was a good and honourable woman, and with an ache in her heart she reported her discovery of the child to the appropriate authorities.
But the god to whom the woman had prayed so passionately even though she didn’t really believe in him seemed to have decided that the foundling should be hers.
After some time the authorities announced that their enquiries had been unsuccessful and it had proved impossible to trace the child’s parents. Moreover, there being no reports of a child going missing at the time of the emptying of the camp, the case was simply filed away.
The woman and her husband applied for and were granted guardianship of the child, at which the woman put her hands together and prayed: “Dear Lord, now, at last, I must believe that You exist.”
The city in which Kangarn grew up revolved around steel – the smelting, alloying and hardening of it. The fiery glow of blast furnaces and coking plants lit the night sky and innumerable chimneys spewed black smoke and soot which settled everywhere and penetrated into the smallest crevices. The soot even entered the souls of the people who lived and worked in the city.
Kangarn had a good childhood in this dirty city. His foster parents loved him deeply and his mother, the cook, could produce amazingly good food from the simplest ingredients. He played out in the yard with the other boys and spoke two languages, one when he was out playing and the other at home with his parents.
His mother taught him the art of cooking and from her, too, came his longing to go to sea, for she often told him about the coastal district up in the north, which was where she was born. She told him of the long white sandy beaches and the heathlands and the scented forests of pine trees and the islands that sometimes seemed to rise from the surface of the water and hover in the heat haze. And she told him about the sea. Her stories of the sea were the most beautiful stories she told and, of course, he would ask her if they could go to the sea. And then his mother’s worn face would change, would sort of close down. The light that shone in her eyes would die away and she would sigh and shake her head.
“No,” was all she said.
Kangarn would start crying – all because of the sea.
He decided that one day he would see the sea for himself, with his own eyes. He wanted to know whether it really was as beautiful and as mighty as his mother claimed. Not that he doubted her, but still.
Some of the people who lived in that city of steel did not like the people who had moved down from the north. It may be, though it’s impossible to know for sure, that these citizens’ dislike was a result of them having an unusually thick layer of soot on their souls.
“These incomers from the north – they speak a different language!” one popular member of the city council proclaimed loudly. “They take our work and they take our houses. And they take our women! Are we going to permit this to happen? Send the rabble back to where they came from!”
His words were greeted with rejoicing: people cheered and people waved flags.
It has to be said that not all the citizens joined in the rejoicing. Some turned away and were ashamed. There were even some who went so far as to raise their voices in protest: they may perhaps be criticised for not raising their voices loudly enough while there was still time.
Words are the mother of deeds. People began shouting words of abuse at the incomers from the north and soon other things were being thrown as well. The incomers tried to grin and bear it, to pay no attention to the persecution. They tried to make themselves acceptable, to assimilate as far as possible.
> After all, they had little choice.
Kangarn started school and soon learnt what it meant to be Other. He had to learn to fight. His build was quite small, but he was quick on his feet and he hit hard. He gave as good as he took.
His mother often wept during these years and Kangarn would do his best to comfort her. He would put his cheek against hers and feel the dampness of her tears.
“Don’t cry, Mum,” he would whisper. “Everything will be fine in the end. I promise you.”
He tried as hard as he could to sound convincing.
Bad times came to the city of steel. Cuts in production were announced, blast furnaces closed, hot rolling mills came to a stop. The men who had worked with the steel, smelting it, alloying it, hardening it, looked at their unemployed hands with a mixture of amazement and helpless fury.
There was a small local pub on the corner of the street where Kangarn and his parents lived and during this depression it became a popular resort for unemployed steelworkers. Next door to the pub an incomer from the north ran a small grocery store where Kangarn’s mother did her shopping: the prices were reasonable and the shop was clean. One day in February two men came staggering out of the pub on the corner while the owner of the shop was shovelling snow off the pavement with a coal shovel. The two drunks began yelling insults at the shopkeeper. They began to jostle him. He tried to defend himself and one of the men struck him so that he fell backwards on the pavement. Then the other man aimed a kick at the recumbent shopkeeper.
Kangarn happened to be passing on the other side of the street. He was seventeen years old and had just completed the training course that qualified him as a cook. He was now looking for work.
When Kangarn saw the drunks attacking the shopkeeper, he ran across the street. Without stopping to think he grabbed the coal shovel that was lying on the pavement and brought it down on the head of the man kicking the shopkeeper.