by Chris Power
On our last day together Guillaume and the others showed me a large cave you could swim into, just around from the little bay that had briefly been our kingdom. The cave’s entrance was a shallow arch. At high tide, Guillaume said, it was all underwater. Inside, in the half-darkness, our cries merged into a ringing echo. The cave’s entrance was a burning eye. Ripples in the water glided in golden ribbons across the stone above our heads.
My friends – I still thought they were my friends – showed me a ledge at the back of the cave where you could sit and hang your legs in the water. Guillaume pulled himself onto it and hauled me up beside him. The others stayed in the water. Guillaume showed me a passageway leading back into the rock. He told me that beyond this passageway lay another cave the others hadn’t seen, one he wanted to share only with me. Gesturing towards the narrow crack in the rock, he said I should go first. I eagerly complied, but after just a couple of steps I had to turn my body sideways, and after only a little more progress squeezing myself through the passage I was stuck fast. I couldn’t even turn my head to ask for help, so I shouted back to Guillaume. I heard him laugh at me. There was the splash of a body returning to the water, and someone shouted, ‘Bye, English!’ There was more laughter, then only the sound of water sloshing in the empty cave.
I was helpless. For a long time I did nothing but cry. Eventually, desperate, I began wrenching my body forward and back against the rock. I felt my skin tearing, but still I wasn’t free. I remember feeling each pump of my heart, how it seemed to squeeze against the rock. I believed what Guillaume had said about the cave being underwater at high tide. I was convinced I was going to drown. I could see my corpse stuck there, its hair waving in the water. Lying in the burial chamber, returned to that narrow space between those pinning walls, I felt the certainty of nearing death.
I opened my eyes and saw the capstone above me. I was very cold. I heard the crashing of waves from the beach below. I scrambled between capstone and sand, digging my heels into the ground to help lever myself out, but I couldn’t move. I felt as though the life was being crushed out of me. I closed my eyes and tried to breathe, and felt a scatter of rain on my face. I looked down at the entrance to the dolmen and saw a pair of legs – my legs – emerging from it, lying completely still. There was a dark figure, very tall and thin. Its back was towards me, but I was certain it saw me. It looked like a column of rags, its tatters whipped by the wind. The water pounded the shore. The figure turned, but there was no front or back to it – it was blank on all sides. I felt something cold and empty press against me. Guillaume, a boy still, slid from the dolmen’s mouth and leapt into the turf, which parted around him like water. The earth warped and surged: the green land and the grey sea and the silver sky became a ribbon of light whipping around me and I was trapped again, wedged tightly, stripping off my skin as I tore myself free.
I found myself beside my car. I had no memory of leaving the dolmen. No idea how much time had passed. The sun was sinking. My head felt like it would split open with the pain. I stood up, stumbled to the undergrowth fringing the car park and vomited. It lasted a long time, until there was nothing left but a thick bile that burned my throat. Shadows were spreading across the car park. In the next field stood a tree black with crows.
I drove through the darkness to Simrishamn, packed my things and checked out. The streets were as silent as they had been since I arrived. I drove straight to Malmö and booked into a hotel in the centre of the city. I walked the busiest streets. I ate dinner at the most crowded bar I could find. Only when it closed and I had no other choice did I go back to my hotel. In the shower the water ran grey with sand. I sat on the bed with BBC News blaring from the TV. Even with the lights on, even with the room’s comforting ugly modernity all around me, I struggled to stay calm. I told myself I was exhausted. I had been anxious about presenting my paper, a paper I had worked on for months, and it had been misunderstood. I needed rest. I needed sleep.
I woke feeling wet rock pressed against my face. I heard the moan of the sea on the beach below. It grew louder. I woke again to the chatter of the TV and the room’s burning brightness. I lay in bed rubbing my chest, which ached the way it had ached in France after I finally wrenched myself free. I told my mother I fell while climbing. If she knew I was lying she didn’t care enough to get the truth out of me. I never spoke about it, and eventually I forgot it had ever happened.
Back in London I kept myself busy preparing my lectures, answering emails, paying bills: all tasks that bore me away from that strange episode. But the dolmen was always there, looming like a door I didn’t want to open, and when my fingers found this acorn it was as if they turned the key in the lock. Now when I close my eyes I see the chamber, waiting to be filled. When I fall asleep, I feel the rock encase me. There are moments in life when we grasp what it is to die. If we’re lucky we forget them, but my luck has run out.
RUN
On the long drive from Gothenburg to the farmhouse, Gunilla told David it was haunted. The owner had said so when she called to confirm the booking. ‘He didn’t believe it before,’ she said, ‘but people keep telling him things have gone missing, or been moved around with no explanation.’
‘Poltergeist,’ David said, doom-laden. ‘Or the cleaner.’ Rain crackled against the windscreen.
‘He thought I’d be excited,’ Gunilla said, tapping the heel of her hand against the steering wheel in time with a song on the radio. ‘But who wants to share a house with someone – something – that messes with their stuff?’
‘No one likes change,’ David said.
‘So you say. Always.’
David smiled and looked away to his right, where a long avenue of trees led to a large house painted white and yellow. Somehow it seemed to crouch on the land as if, after they had driven on, it might stand and stride away.
‘Hey,’ he said suddenly. ‘Maybe the farm was the site of a wartime atrocity, and—’
‘Enough.’ Gunilla made a wall of her hand in the space between them. ‘Ghosts I can take, but not more of your Nazis.’
At a rest stop they switched places. Gunilla fell asleep, and as the fields rolled past David wondered if this landscape had looked so different seventy years ago. It wasn’t only because he was reading a book about Stalingrad. Being anywhere on the Continent made him think of the war. When he ate lunch in an old town square, or crossed a railway line or passed any industrial plant, he thought of Nazis. Tram systems made him think of Nazis. Bicycles made him think of Nazis. Alpine passes and quiet forests – especially quiet forests – made him think of Nazis. He could never shake his amazement that an ordinary crossroads had been a battlefield; that a park had once been stacked with bodies; that a town hall had served as headquarters for a battalion, or even a division. All these places that had been one thing had suddenly become another, and both were as real as the wheel in his hands.
When they got to the farmhouse, a long, narrow, rectangular structure screened from the road by a tall hedge and trees, David said it was so big that even if it were haunted they would never encounter its ghost. The sun was setting, and through the patio doors, a couple of miles to the east, the buildings of a neighbouring village, Simrishamn, stood coated in red light. Beyond them, hidden from view, was the sea.
*
They had taken the house for a week. Gunilla’s mother and stepfather were supposed to be here too, but the fighting had begun as soon as they arrived in Gothenburg. David had been looking forward to meeting Gunilla’s family; in the year he had known her she had spoken of them so rarely and haltingly that he was delighted when she suggested the trip. But at her parents’ house David spent most of the time sitting on a bench at the bottom of the garden smoking cigarettes and reading about Stalingrad. The voices of Gunilla and her mother came through the window like volleys of small-arms fire.
He only knew fragments about Gunilla. She never really knew her father; her first memory was falling into a bed of marigolds, aged two, and she
had loved the smell of them ever since; expensive restaurants maddened her; stepping into a hot bath made her melancholy; wearing sunglasses, she insisted, muddied her hearing. When David asked for more she called him needy. He had never known anyone as independent as her. When she left a room it might be for five minutes, or three hours, or forever.
After listening to them argue for almost an hour, David went inside. He wanted to convince Gunilla to leave, but the look both women gave him made him retreat to the garden without speaking. He already knew Gunilla went for it when she fought, and now he realised where she got it from. They had argued seriously several times, but only once did he actually think it was over, that she had left him. She walked out of the flat and didn’t come back for two days. When she returned she didn’t say where she had been. Sitting beside her on the couch that night, eating a takeaway and drinking wine, he tried to make a joke of it: ‘For a minute there I thought you weren’t coming back.’
‘For a minute there I wasn’t,’ she said, not taking her eyes off the TV.
At some point, when it had grown dark and the voices had shifted from shouting to what sounded like a quieter, more wounding intensity, Per, Gunilla’s stepfather, came and sat beside David on the bench. Per spoke basic English and David knew no Swedish. David nodded and Per smiled. The windows of the house were open, and planks of yellow light ran across the lawn towards them like a bridge across a gulf.
David waved a cigarette in the direction of the house. ‘Quite angry,’ he said.
Per looked at the house, a half-smile on his lips and his arms folded tightly across his broad chest. ‘Not happy,’ he said. They sat and listened to the shouting, and the sound of a train surging through the night. A few minutes later Per stood and stretched. He clapped his hands against his stomach. He looked at David and smiled, then shrugged. ‘It has happened before,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow you will be gone.’ He walked across the garden to the house.
*
The village where they were staying was strung along a single, gently twisting road that David thought probably used to see a handful of vehicles each day, but was now used by a steady stream of cars joining the nearby motorway. They took a walk to explore, and visited the church that stood on a low hill at one end of the village. At the perimeter of the churchyard stood a line of pollarded ash trees. They had been so severely pruned that they might have been plucked from the ground and thrust back in upside down, their shrivelled roots grasping at the air. Beyond the trees low hedges of box marked off family plots, squares of raked earth sprouting obelisks and headstones. The church walls were a dazzling white, its roof red tile. Peering through the plain panes of glass in the tall windows, David admired the spare Lutheran interior: rows of simple wooden pews faced an unadorned altar. It made Anglican churches look showy, let alone the Catholic glitz he had known as a child.
They walked around the church and made their way to the far end of the graveyard, stopping occasionally to inspect a headstone. At the point where the graveyard ended and a field began they found a bench and a low stone table. They unpacked sandwiches and a thermos of coffee.
‘It feels strange to have a picnic in a graveyard,’ David said.
‘In the midst of death we are in life,’ said Gunilla.
David began to correct her but her look told him she meant what she had said. They drank their coffee. ‘You haven’t told me what you and your mum were fighting about,’ David said.
Gunilla looked away over the field. She was silent for a while. ‘The same things we always fight about.’ She sounded very tired.
‘Was it about your dad?’ He had walked out when Gunilla was a toddler, and David had heard enough to work out that she blamed her mother for it. She had never heard from him again. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ David said when Gunilla didn’t respond, ‘you don’t have to—’
‘No,’ Gunilla said. ‘Yes. Disagree, agree, strongly agree.’ She flicked at a fly on the table, dismissing the conversation with the same gesture. David slumped back sulkily. He told himself he didn’t care. Sometimes he felt that she would let him in, that he just needed to be patient. More and more often, though, it was like this.
They walked back through the graveyard at different speeds, looking at different things. David read the names on the gravestones and tried to work out what the other words meant. The people who had died young depressed him, and the people who died old depressed him. He looked at a sand-coloured stone that marked the grave of Fredrik Gustafsson, 1918–1972. What did he do during the war? David thought. It might never have troubled his life in this backwater. But where was his family? His was the only stone in the plot, and the only name on the stone. Perhaps the rest of his family were cremated, or he had no one, and had paid for the stone himself and told the mason what to carve. David turned away and kicked at the ground.
He caught up with Gunilla at the northern corner of the graveyard, staring into a neighbouring field. The field was fallow, the grass in it several feet tall. Crows shouted overhead, and one cried out from somewhere in the grass.
‘They’re so loud,’ David said when he was a few feet from Gunilla. She startled. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘didn’t mean to scare you.’
‘I thought you were here already; I thought you were standing right behind me.’ She looked at him, then back over her shoulder. She brushed a lock of hair behind her ear, and he saw that the skin on her arms had stippled. She laughed uncertainly and looked all around her again, but this time she was joking.
The day had grown hot. Back at the house Gunilla went inside and lay down. David tried to read his book, in which the slaughter was reaching numbing proportions, but he was too restless to concentrate. After moving to three different places around the farmhouse he gave up. He wandered through the garden and along the front of the house. The sun’s brute heat persecuted him. Two large, low barns flanked the gravelly, grassy square of the farmyard, and he poked his head into one of them. The air inside was dry and tarry, the barn empty apart from some rusty, rotting tools. David walked across the yard to the other barn, where he found large sacks hanging from hooks driven into the wall. A sign, in Swedish and English, explained what should be disposed of where for recycling. He walked back outside and went around the barn. Between its blank back wall and the tall, thick hedge that screened the property from the road stood a small grove of aspens. The space within the trees was shady and cool. A gust of wind, sudden and sharp, rattled their leaves. David lay down on the grass and watched the leaves divide the sky into shifting fractions of blue. The wind strengthened, and the leaves’ rattling thinned to a metallic hiss. He heard cars passing by on the other side of the hedge, waves of rushing sound that blended with the slower, more sibilant pulse of the wind. He closed his eyes and watched the sunlight flicker against his eyelids.
*
Gunilla slept the rest of the day and all through the evening. David got into bed around ten, and when he woke, just before seven, she was still lying silently beside him. He wondered if she had slept right through or had been up during the night. He showered and dressed. Eating a bowl of yoghurt and muesli on the patio, gazing at the smashed buildings on the cover of his book, he thought idly about the war.
Gunilla didn’t share his interest. Each time he got another history book or novel on the subject she shook her head with what, he had come to realise, was genuine disgust. Only early on, when he tried to explain his fascination to her, had she laughed with a kind of exasperated affection. One of the few things she had told him about her family was her grandfather, remembering his childhood, saying how clean and polite the German soldiers were.
Looking across the fields, David imagined the din of tracked vehicles clanking along the lanes. In the yard behind him a group of resistance fighters were shot, their bodies buried in the aspen grove. ‘Poltergeist, poltergeist,’ he said quietly, ‘who will avenge you?’ Maybe she’s right, he thought. Maybe I am childish. He closed his eyes and felt the pressure of the sun’s warmth.
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He started awake. The sun was higher in the sky. ‘Gunilla?’ he called. He looked across the open country towards Simrishamn, and at the grass-choked track leading away from the edge of the lawn. He went into the house and called her name again. His head felt heavy. How long had he been asleep? A bowl marked with white stripes of yoghurt sat in the sink. Gunilla’s phone lay on the worktop.
He walked through every room and found them all empty. He beat his palms against the tops of his thighs, telling himself everything was fine. He resisted an urge to check if her clothes were still in the wardrobe. ‘Gunilla!’ he called into the silence.
As he stepped outside again clouds began to slip across the sun, and a line of shadow raced across the fields towards him as he saw her, coming along the track to the house. A gust of wind made the tall grass around her thrash. For a moment it seemed she was caught in a wild green sea, and a dark wave was pushing her towards him. She had a bunch of wildflowers in her hand, and was using a tree branch as a stick. When she saw him watching her she raised the stick in greeting.
‘Ready for adventure?’ she said as she stepped onto the patio. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
*
They took a long walk through the countryside and found a cafe serving a cake buffet. ‘You can go back as many times as you like, you know,’ Gunilla said, looking at the pastries cantilevered on David’s plate.