Good.
Gerlof was no swimmer, and he had always managed to avoid ending up in the water when he was at sea. Nor had one of his ships ever run aground, not in thirty years. He had lost one ship in a fire, of course, and he had been forced to sell his last ship, Nore, at a ridiculously low price, when the lorries had outdone him in commercial terms. But run aground? Never.
Now it was time to let the wind take over. With the last of his strength, he picked up the oars and threw them overboard in the direction of the shore. First one, then the other. Perhaps someone else would find a use for them.
As far as he was concerned, the wind was in charge now. It would carry him out into the middle of the Sound – or however far the boat stayed afloat. He looked up at the deep blue sky. In the west, high above the thin, dark strip that formed the mainland, he could see a paler shape, getting bigger all the time. A plane. Gerlof followed it with his eyes, thinking that he had sailed the Baltic for several decades, but he had never been on a plane.
So many islanders had left Öland and travelled west to the USA, south to the ports of Germany and as far afield as Africa or Australia – or east, like Aron Fredh. But Gerlof had always stuck to familiar territory, the Baltic Sea. He was too attached to his wife and children to set off for the Equator. Staying in the Baltic was a way of maintaining contact with Öland, because every Baltic port was directly connected to every other port.
And now he was at sea for the very last time.
He looked down; there were already rivulets of water in the bottom of the boat. There were cracks in the hull; the timbers were not yet sealed. If the gig was left lying in the water for long enough, the planks would swell and the tiny gaps would disappear, but Gerlof didn’t have that sort of time.
And if John had been on board he would have sat in the stern with a bailer, but there was no one there.
The gig slowly drifted away from the shore, carried by the wind.
Gerlof relaxed. He thought about death – about that summer’s day some seventy years earlier when he had dug Edvard Kloss’s grave up in Marnäs churchyard and heard the sound of knocking from inside the coffin. Three hard blows in quick succession, then three more. Clear as a bell, from down below.
He had wondered about it ever since, but had never come up with a satisfactory explanation. And if there wasn’t one, it meant that the farmer’s spirit had caused the knocking, from beyond the grave.
In which case, there must be life after death, and Gerlof’s adventure wasn’t over. Perhaps he would soon meet up with friends and relatives. His wife Ella, his friend John, his grandson Jens. All those who had gone before him.
The water was now covering the bottom of the boat. Gerlof slid off his seat and sat down on the planks. His best trousers got wet, but that didn’t matter. He shuffled along and lay down on his back, his breathing calm and even. What would be would be, as the saying went.
As Gerlof felt the cold water through his trousers, another memory came into his mind from that terrible funeral when he was just fifteen.
The chilled bottles of beer.
He remembered Bengtsson, the gravedigger, offering him a beer. It must have been the first one Gerlof had ever drunk. The bottles had been covered in condensation, and the beer inside had been at least as cold as the water that was now seeping into the boat.
But how could the beer have been so cold on such a hot, sunny summer’s day? This was well before the time of refrigerators. People cut blocks of ice in the winter and saved them in earth cellars on the island, but there were no fridges or freezers. If you wanted something cold in the summer, you had to bury it with some old ice.
Had the gravedigger had a little cellar of his own for the bottles? A wooden box he had buried, or perhaps an empty tar barrel? An old drainpipe somewhere in the churchyard, the opening hidden under a piece of turf?
Gerlof recalled that Bengtsson had been standing slightly behind everyone else when the knocking began. So the gravedigger could have lifted his spade or his boot when all the others were looking at the coffin and banged on the top of the pipe. Three sharp blows with the spade or the heel of his boot. That would have sounded like knocking from inside a coffin. Like the sound of an uneasy spirit.
Gerlof remembered the dirty looks Bengtsson had given the Kloss brothers that day. How much had he really disliked the two wealthy farmers? Had he decided to play a trick on them, pretend that their brother had come back to haunt them? If so, it had been a nasty trick that had got completely out of hand.
Was that what had happened? Gerlof had no one to discuss it with, because everyone else who had been there was dead. But perhaps the hole in the ground was still there, a few metres from the grave?
Perhaps – but Gerlof couldn’t go and start looking for it now. It was too late. He was lying in a leaky rowing boat on his way out into Kalmar Sound.
There was nothing he could do.
Drowning was a pleasant death. That’s what he had always heard from old sea captains, although of course you couldn’t ask anyone who had actually been through it. But Gerlof thought it was probably true. You closed your eyes and slowly slipped away towards the great darkness, not as a seaman but as a passenger on the ferry across the River Styx …
He opened his eyes. Something was wrong. His body was attuned to the movements of the sea, and he could feel that something had happened. He sat up, his back soaking wet, and looked over the gunwale.
It was the wind – it had turned, without any warning. And the ripples had grown into little waves, which were gently but firmly nudging Swallow along. Gerlof’s boat was on its way back to the shore.
A change of destination, he thought. Stenvik, not the Styx.
He let out a long breath and looked up at the vast brightness of the sky. The gulls were circling way up high, their wings outstretched as they drifted on the winds, using each gust and screaming at one another.
It was easy to imagine these were exactly the same gulls that had welcomed him with their loud screams over eighty years ago, when he came down to the shore for the very first time.
Gerlof smiled at them.
The birds were survivors, just like him.
Afterword
Parts of this novel are about what is usually known as the Great Terror, when Josef Stalin started a secret war against his own people in the 1930s. This involved mass arrests and arbitrary executions and the establishment of a huge number of labour camps known as gulag right across the Soviet Union. The Terror affected both Soviet citizens and immigrants who had come from the West in the belief that the Soviet Union was the workers’ paradise. At least one of them was from Öland, according to Tvingade till tystnad, Kaa Eneberg’s book about Swedish emigrants to Russia. This unknown emigrant provided the inspiration for Aron Fredh.
The rocket disaster at a test site to the east of the Aral Sea in October 1960 and the NKVD massacre of Polish prisoners of war in April 1941 are actual events. Aron’s story was also inspired by various facts and anecdotes in books such as Alfred Badlund’s memoir Som arbetare i Sovjet, Julian Better’s Jag var barn i Gulag, Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror, Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, Donald Rayfield’s Stalin and His Hangmen, Owen Matthews’ Stalin’s Children, Svetlana Alexievich’s Second-hand Time, Harald Welzer’s Perpetrators and Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History. I found facts about emigrants from Öland to North America in Amerika tur och retur by Ulf Wickbom and Walter Frylestam, and in Amerika, dröm eller mardröm by Anders Johansson, as well as through the stories told by my own family on the island.
Thanks to Ulrica Fransson, Hans Gerlofsson, Cherstin Juhlin, Caroline Karlsson, Ing-Mari and Jim Samuelsson, and Ture Sjöberg. And to Åsa Selling and Katarina Ehnmark Lundquist.
Finally, I would like to thank some of the authors who have written about Öland before me and pointed out interesting routes around the island: Tomas Arvidsson, Thekla Engström, Margit Friberg, Carl von Linné (who, unfortunately, was in a b
it of a hurry when he travelled through northern Öland), Thorsten Jansson, Anders Johansson, Barbro Lindgren, Åke Lundqvist, Anders Nilson, Rolf Nilsson, Per Planhammar, Ragnhild Oxhagen, Anna Rydstedt, Niklas Törnlund and Magnus Utvik. And the island’s two lyrical stars, Lennart Sjögren and Erik Johan Stagnelius.
Johan Theorin
About the Author
Throughout his life, Johan Theorin has been a regular visitor to the Baltic island of Öland. His mother’s family – sailors, fishermen and farmers – have lived there for centuries, nurturing the island’s rich legacy of strange tales and folklore.
Johan’s first novel, Echoes from the Dead, was voted Best First Crime Novel by the Swedish Academy of Crime in 2007, was a Top Ten bestseller, and has been sold all over the world. His second novel, The Darkest Room, was voted the Best Swedish Crime Novel of 2008, won the prestigious Glass Key Award for best Nordic Crime Novel and the CWA International Dagger in 2010.
A journalist by profession, Johan lives in Gothenburg, Sweden.
Also by Johan Theorin
Echoes from the Dead
The Darkest Room
The Quarry
The Asylum
TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS
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Transworld is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Doubleday
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Johan Theorin 2013
English translation copyright © Marlaine Delargy 2015
Johan Theorin has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Poem here from Harry Martinson: ‘Midsommardrömmen’, Gräsen i Thule, 1958
Poem here from Lennart Sjögren: ‘Jag säger inte att livet är gott’, Sent, tidigt, 2001
Poem here from Dan Andersson: ‘En gång i min ungdom’, Efterlämnade dikter, 1922
All poetry translations are the translator’s own.
Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781446463482
ISBN 9780857520067
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
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Table of Contents
About the Book
Contents
Title Page
Prologue
Summer 1930
Early Summer
Gerlof
The Homecomer
The New Country, May 1931
Jonas
Gerlof
Lisa
Gerlof
Lisa
The Homecomer
The New Country, June 1931
Jonas
Lisa
The Homecomer
Jonas
Lisa
Gerlof
Jonas
The Homecomer
The New Country, June 1931
Gerlof
Jonas
Gerlof
The Homecomer
The New Country, July 1931
Gerlof
Lisa
Gerlof
The Homecomer
The New Country, July 1931
Jonas
Gerlof
Jonas
Gerlof
The Homecomer
The New Country, April 1932
Jonas
Lisa
Jonas
Gerlof
The Homecomer
The New Country, November 1933
Jonas
Gerlof
Jonas
Gerlof
High Summer
The New Country, October 1934
The Homecomer
Gerlof
Jonas
The Homecomer
The New Country, May 1935
Gerlof
The Homecomer
The New Country, December 1935
Gerlof
The Homecomer
The New Country, February 1936
Lisa
Jonas
Gerlof
The Homecomer
The New Country, March 1936
Lisa
Gerlof
Jonas
The Homecomer
The New Country, July 1936
Gerlof
Lisa
Gerlof
The Homecomer
The New Country, November 1936
Gerlof
Lisa
Gerlof
Lisa
Jonas
The Homecomer
The New Country, May 1937
Gerlof
Jonas
Lisa
The Homecomer
The New Country, February 1938
Jonas
Lisa
Gerlof
The Homecomer
The New Country, 1940–45
Gerlof
Jonas
The Homecomer
The New Country, October 1957
Lisa
Gerlof
Jonas
The Homecomer
The New Country, 1960–80
Gerlof
Lisa
The Homecomer
Lisa
The Homecomer
Gerlof
Lisa
The New Country, April 1998
Lisa
The Homecomer
Jonas
Gerlof
The Homecomer
The New Country, April 1998
The Homecomer
Jonas
Gerlof
The Homecomer
Gerlof
The Homecomer
Late Summer
Gerlof
Jonas
Epilogue
Afterword
About the Author
Also by Johan Theorin
Copyright
The Voices Beyond: (Oland Quartet Series 4) Page 42