‘My father inherited it from his father,’ Sonja explained. ‘They both collected postcards, although neither of them received very many over the years. We used to send them to Dad … Our postcards from Majorca are at the back.’
Gerlof slowly leafed through the album. He liked postcards; as a ship’s captain, he had sent many to his daughters from various harbours around Sweden.
The Spanish cards at the back were in bright colours, with blue seas and a yellow sun. As he moved towards the front of the album, the cards were older, more faded and less exotic. They featured views of ‘Gefle Esplanade’ or ‘Halmstad – Grand Hotel’.
But one of them was different, and Gerlof stopped and read the words on the front: ‘Swedish-American Line SS Kastelholm – Carte Postale’. Beneath the text was a picture of a magnificent steamship of the type he had sometimes encountered while sailing the Baltic.
‘This could be it,’ he said, carefully removing the postcard.
There was a short message on the back, written in pencil in a sprawling hand:
Thank you for everything, Uncle Roland. We have arrived at the docks and will soon be going on board. This is a picture of the ship that will take us from Sweden to America, but we will be coming back.
Look after Mother and Greta. Goodbye.
Love from Aron
It was obviously a card from an emigrant, presumably sent from Gothenburg, but it revealed very little, apart from the fact that Aron could spell. The date was unclear, but Gerlof thought he could make out ‘1931’ over the stamp.
He put down the card. ‘Aron says they’re coming back.’
‘Yes, but they never did. And, as I said, we didn’t hear from them again. I used to visit Greta Fredh from time to time, and occasionally I would ask if she’d had a letter from her stepfather or her brother, but she never had … not a word.’
Unless of course she was lying, Gerlof thought. Out loud, he said, ‘We often heard stories about the emigrants who were successful and could send home plenty of dollars, but all those who ended up in the gutter just disappeared.’
Sonja nodded, looking a little upset. ‘I just hope they had a better life in the USA, because the place they lived in at Rödtorp was just dreadful – little more than a grey shack. And, of course, Sven never had any money. He was a semi-invalid; his foot had been crushed.’
‘So how did he make a living?’
‘He did a bit of everything, as people who didn’t have a farm of their own had to do back in those days. He worked as a miller’s labourer, and went around the flour mills in the area.’
John glanced discreetly at his watch – it would soon be time for his evening rounds at the campsite – so Gerlof put down his cup.
‘Thank you for the coffee; it was nice to talk to you. Could I possibly borrow the postcards for a few days?’
‘We’ll be in Majorca for two weeks, so you might as well hang on to them until we’re back,’ Sonja said.
Gerlof had one more question, but it wasn’t about Aron. It was about the sound of knocking from inside a coffin. However, he didn’t really know what he wanted to ask Sonja. It was her father who had heard the sound, along with Gerlof, and now Roland was lying in the churchyard, too.
In the end, he said, ‘In that case, we’ll head home and let you get on with your packing.’
Jonas
Kristoffer wanted to hang out, so Jonas was back in the Davidssons’ garden. When he walked through the gate, he saw that Gerlof was sitting on his chair with his straw hat perched on his head, just as he should be.
The garden was quite small, but Jonas preferred being here to being at Villa Kloss. He could relax here.
But Gerlof’s voice was sharper this evening. He sounded more like a sea captain. ‘Good evening, Jonas. Come over here for a moment.’
Jonas slowly walked over to join him. Gerlof leaned forward, using his stick for support, and fixed him with a penetrating gaze. ‘Peter Mayer,’ he said. ‘You remember that name?’
Jonas’s heart gave an extra thump. Then he nodded. Gerlof looked so serious.
‘And have you mentioned it to anyone else, Jonas?’
Jonas didn’t know what to say. He wanted to sit down and tell Gerlof everything, absolutely everything, about the trip to Marnäs and Uncle Kent and Peter Mayer running across the field towards the road. And about the shouts and the screech of tyres.
But what would happen then? Yesterday, Casper had actually let him have a ride on the back of the moped, and Jonas knew he couldn’t tell on Uncle Kent. So he shook his head.
‘No. No one.’
‘Do you know why I’m asking you about Peter Mayer?’
‘No,’ Jonas said quickly.
Perhaps rather too quickly. Gerlof waved away a fly, keeping his eyes fixed on the boy. ‘You seem a little tense, Jonas. Is everything all right?’
‘Not really.’
‘What’s the matter?’
Jonas took a deep breath. He had to say something about his fears, so he decided to reveal one of them. ‘The cairn. It’s haunted.’
‘Oh?’ Gerlof didn’t sound in the least bit afraid.
‘I’ve seen the ghost. It actually came out of the cairn.’
‘Did it?’ Gerlof smiled at him. ‘I heard there was a dragon living in there. Twelve metres long from nose to tail, and bright green.’
Jonas didn’t smile back. He was too old for fairy tales, and knew that dragons didn’t exist. There were other things to be frightened of, but not dragons.
Gerlof’s smile disappeared. He leaned more heavily on his stick and got to his feet. ‘Come with me, Jonas. We’re going for a little walk.’
He set off slowly but resolutely, with Jonas close behind.
At the far end of the garden a small path led through the undergrowth and into a meadow. They followed the path for some thirty metres, then Gerlof stopped.
‘Look over there, Jonas.’
Jonas turned his head and saw a square tower of sun-bleached wood in a clearing not far away. He knew what it was – a windmill. There was another one behind the restaurant, but that one was red and looked almost new. This one was derelict, with unpainted walls and wind-damaged sails.
‘You mean the windmill?’
‘No. Over there.’
Gerlof was pointing to the right of the windmill with his stick. Jonas looked, and saw a pile of round stones lying half hidden in the long grass.
‘You see that? Those stones are the cairn … The real cairn, which was raised over some dead chieftain back in the Bronze Age.’
‘The real cairn?’
‘Yes. Your ancestors Edvard, Sigfrid and Gilbert Kloss dug out the cairn in the twenties. They thought there was ancient treasure under the stones. I don’t know if they found anything, but while they were digging they decided the cairn would look better on the ridge, in front of their land … More “National Romantic”.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It’s something that was fashionable in those days … People liked to worship ancient monuments. So the brothers fetched an ox cart and transported several loads of boulders to the ridge and shifted half the cairn.’
Jonas didn’t say anything, he just listened.
‘So the new cairn opposite Villa Kloss isn’t a grave,’ Gerlof went on. ‘Haven’t you noticed the old bunker set into the rock?’
‘I’ve seen the door,’ Jonas said. ‘It’s down in the dip.’
‘Exactly. But do you think the army engineers would have been allowed to build a bunker under the cairn, if it was a real ancient monument?’
Jonas shook his head.
‘They wouldn’t,’ Gerlof stressed. ‘But because it’s not a real cairn, it was fine.’ He glanced over at the stones again, and added, ‘If there’s anyone who ought to be afraid of the ghost, it’s me … When I was little, I was told that if you walked past here, invisible arms would reach out and grab you, and squeeze the air out of your lungs.’
‘Are y
ou scared?’ Jonas said quietly.
Gerlof shook his head. ‘I think there’s an explanation for most things that seem frightening. In the old days, people used to hear ghosts screaming out on the alvar at night, but it was just hungry fox cubs, sitting in their dens and calling for food.’
Jonas felt a bit better now. Gerlof had an answer for everything.
They walked back to the garden. Jonas checked the legs of his trousers to make sure he hadn’t picked up any ticks from the grass, but he couldn’t see any.
Gerlof sat down and closed his eyes, as if the conversation was over. But Jonas hadn’t finished. ‘I’ve seen someone standing by the cairn. Several times.’
Gerlof opened his eyes. ‘I believe you, Jonas. But that was a real person. A tourist, perhaps.’
‘But he was like you … really, really old. And he just disappeared.’
‘What did he look like?’
‘He had grey hair and a white beard. He was dressed in dark clothes. Just like the man in the wheelhouse.’
Gerlof peered up at him. ‘Are you all right, Jonas?’
The boy shook his head.
‘I know you have horrible memories,’ Gerlof said. ‘You’ve had a terrible experience. Something dreadful happened to me one summer, when I was fifteen years old. I saw a man have a heart attack and die right in front of me. But everything passes – that’s the only consolation. We get older, and happy memories push away the horrible ones.’
Jonas wondered when he would find those happy memories.
Gerlof
Gerlof’s grandsons and Jonas Kloss had cycled off to the sweet shop, and Gerlof had gone indoors to avoid the mosquitoes’ evening assembly.
He gathered up some empty glasses the boys had left on the coffee table, then flopped down in the armchair next to the telephone. He was very tired.
He was getting nowhere. Not with Peter Mayer’s death, at any rate.
And the elderly American? What could he do to track him down? He picked up his notebook, licked his finger and started to leaf through the pages. He read through what he had written during his lunch with the Swedish-Americans, and over coffee with the gravedigger’s daughter, paying close attention to every detail.
Speculation about Sven and Aron Fredh from Rödtorp. A question jotted down: ‘Whereabouts in the USA did Aron end up?’ But the line below was blank because, apart from the postcard before their departure, Sonja and her father had never heard from their relatives again.
‘I just hope they had a better life in the USA,’ Sonja had said. ‘The place they lived in at Rödtorp was just dreadful – little more than a grey shack …’
He thought for a little while, then called Sonja. She answered quickly, but sounded stressed.
‘You obviously haven’t left yet,’ Gerlof said.
‘No, the bus to the airport leaves in a couple of hours.’
He got straight down to business.
‘Sonja, I’ve been thinking about something you said when we came over for coffee … You said the Fredh family lived in a grey shack on the coast, at a place called Rödtorp.’
‘That’s right. Astrid Fredh had been given the tenancy of the croft by the Kloss family. It was deep in the forest, where the Ölandic Resort is now.’ Sonja paused, then added, ‘The Kloss family knocked it down, and I don’t suppose anyone remembers the name these days. All the old names are disappearing, one by one …’
‘You’re right,’ Gerlof agreed. ‘But why was the place called “Rödtorp”, which suggests it was red, if it was actually grey?’
Sonja responded with a dry laugh. ‘It had nothing to do with the colour of the paint. It was the way Sven used to talk when he was working in the mills that led people to come up with that name.’
‘And what did he talk about?’
‘How can I put it …? He was an agitator. He used to go on at length about the blessings of socialism. That was what Sven believed in … He had become a committed socialist during his military service in Kalmar during the First World War. When he came to Öland and became a farmhand and worked in the flour mills, he became even more passionate about his views. Some say he became a communist in the end.’
‘So he talked about politics in the mills and on the farms?’
‘Yes, I think he liked to spell out chapter and verse, so to speak. But there was a lot more politics in the air in the thirties than there is now; there were both communist and Nazi summer rallies here on the island. There was trouble from time to time; they used to tear down each other’s flags. And the Kloss brothers wouldn’t tolerate any political talk. Sven quarrelled with them, too.’
Gerlof remembered – the political disputes had been a good reason to stay at sea, where the talk was of wind and weather and cargo rates.
‘Thanks for your help, Sonja. Enjoy your holiday.’
He hung up and went into the bedroom, where the gravedigger’s postcard album lay on the bookshelf. He sat down and found the black-and-white postcard from Aron Fredh. Read the brief message once more, then gazed at the picture on the front. The white ship, SS Kastelholm, at the quayside in Gothenburg. Sweden’s gateway to America.
His eyesight was better than his hearing, and he took a closer look at the picture. Not so much at the ship, but at the quayside and the surroundings. The background was blurred and unfamiliar; a grey morning mist hovered over the water, and the only other vessel in the harbour was a steamship on its way out to sea, with deciduous trees and stone buildings beyond. No derricks, which was a little strange, since his own recollection of Gothenburg in the thirties was of an entire forest of derricks …
Suddenly, he recognized the port with a strange sense of déjà vu, because all at once what had seemed so unfamiliar was very well-known; he had been there many times.
He picked up the phone again.
‘John, have you finished your evening rounds at the campsite?’
‘Yes. Anders has gone off to do some work on the gig; I thought I might give him a hand.’
‘I’ll come with you if you can pick me up,’ Gerlof said.
‘Of course.’
Gerlof rang off, then made another call. To the National Maritime Museum.
John arrived fifteen minutes later, but Gerlof couldn’t wait; he had something to tell his friend before they set off, and drew him on to the veranda.
‘I’ve found something out, John.’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘Sven Fredh, Aron’s stepfather, was a communist.’
John blinked, his expression vacant. The word ‘communist’ was no longer so loaded these days.
‘Don’t you understand?’ Gerlof went on. ‘Sven was a revolutionary; he was hardly likely to travel to America. Communists weren’t exactly popular there. Immigrants from Europe weren’t really welcome anyway after the Wall Street Crash, least of all troublemakers and “Bolsheviks”.’
‘No, but he could have kept quiet about his views when they got to immigration control in New York.’
‘They never got to New York,’ Gerlof said. He held out the postcard from Aron. ‘This isn’t Gothenburg docks. That’s Stockholm in the background.’
‘Stockholm?’
Gerlof nodded.
‘It’s not easy to recognize the ship’s surroundings, but this evening I suddenly realized it was Skeppsbron in Stockholm. And what was the destination of ships sailing from Skeppsbron in the thirties? Was it America?’
‘No,’ John said. ‘It was Finland. We used to go there sometimes before the war, and we saw them loading.’
‘Exactly, but there were also ships that went further … SS Kastelholm, for example.’
‘She went to America. It says so on the postcard.’
Gerlof shook his head.
‘The Kastelholm was owned by the Swedish-American Line, but they also had European routes. I rang the Maritime Museum in Stockholm just before you arrived, and one of the curators looked up the Kastelholm on their computer database. She sailed the Baltic in
the early thirties … all the way to Leningrad.’
John was listening, but looked puzzled.
‘Aron and Sven didn’t go to America,’ Gerlof continued. ‘They went in the opposite direction, to the country that no longer exists … the Soviet Union.’
John stared at him. He was beginning to understand.
‘So the new country wasn’t in the west … but in the east?’
‘Yes. For some Swedes that was the case … for those who dreamed of the revolution and a classless society.’
‘But what happened to them out there?’
‘I don’t know. Those were troubled times in the Soviet Union, and Stalin became increasingly paranoid, so anything could have happened … What do you think became of Aron?’
John didn’t say anything, so Gerlof went on. ‘He certainly didn’t end up working for Al Capone, at any rate.’
High Summer
I am not saying that life is good I would rather say that it is bad but I am not saying that either. I need only three tools: a set square, a pair of scissors and a knife so that I can measure and cut what can be measured and what can be cut.
The rest the night can measure And the creatures that emerge at that time of the day.
Lennart Sjögren
The New Country, October 1934
Aron’s boots leak; they are always wet. He is standing in the soft mud outside the row of grey huts that seem to cower beneath the fir trees. He is staring at Sven, who has finally told him the truth.
‘So we’re not in America?’
‘No.’
‘Then where are we?’ asks Aron, afraid of the answer.
‘We’re in a different country,’ Sven explains. ‘The ship brought us across the Baltic, to a city called Leningrad, and we have travelled north from the coast.’
Aron is aware of that; there is no sea here. Only forest. But there is a great deal he doesn’t understand.
The Voices Beyond: (Oland Quartet Series 4) Page 18