“Load up!” yells Lass-Jan.
In the morning people chatted and laughed with each other when they began unloading, there was almost a party atmosphere, but the stone has mercilessly subdued them with its silent weight and its hard edges. Now people are carrying it doggedly, with their backs bent, their footsteps dragging, and their clothes powdered with white limestone dust.
Nils has nothing against the silence; he never speaks to anyone anyway unless he has to. But from time to time he looks over at Maja Nyman on the jetty.
“She’s full!” shouts Lass-Jan when the blocks of stone are piled a yard high in the boat Nils is sitting in, and the seawater is almost lapping at the gunwale.
Two loaders climb down and sit on the piles of stone, looking down on a little nine-year-old boy who’s there to bail out. The boy sneaks a terrified glance at Nils before he picks up his wooden pail and begins to scoop the water from the bottom of the boat, which is not watertight.
Nils pushes hard with his feet and heaves on the oar. The boat glides slowly off toward the cargo ship, where the other rowboat has just been emptied.
Back and forth with the oar, back and forth without a break. Nils’s hands ache, and the muscles in his arms and back are screaming in pain. He longs to hear the roar of German bombers right now.
The boat finally hits the hull of the ship with a dull thud. Both loaders move quickly to the stern, bend down, take hold, and begin lifting the stone blocks over Wind ’s gunwale.
“Let’s put our backs into it!” yells Lass-Jan from the deck, standing there in his stained shirt with his fat belly sticking out.
The stones are lifted over the gunwale and carried over to the open hatch, then they slide down into the hold along a broad plank.
Nils is supposed to help with the unloading. He lifts a few slabs up to the ship, then hesitates just a fraction too long with a thick block on the edge, and drops it back into the boat. It lands on the toes of his left foot, and it bloody hurts.
In a fit of blind rage he picks the block up again and heaves it over the gunwale without even looking where it lands.
“Bugger this!” he mutters to the sea and the sky, sitting down at his oar.
He undoes his shoe, feels his aching toes, and rubs them gently with his fingers. They might be broken.
Around him the last of the blocks are unloaded from the boat, and the loaders jump over the gunwale to finish sorting them out down in the hold.
Johan Almqvist follows them. Nils stays in the boat with the little boy who was bailing.
“Kant!” Lass-Jan is up above him, leaning over the gunwale. “Get up here and give us a hand!”
“I’m injured,” says Nils, surprised at how calm he sounds, when in fact an entire squadron of bombers is screaming into action like furious bees inside his head. Equally calmly, he places his hand on his oar. “I’ve broken my toes.”
“Get up.”
Nils gets up. It doesn’t actually hurt all that much, and Lass-Jan shakes his head at him.
“Get up here and start loading, Kant.”
Nils shakes his head again, his hand closing around the oar. The bombs are falling now, whistling through the air inside him.
He undoes the oarlock and lifts the oar a fraction.
He swings it slowly backwards.
“Broken his toes...” Another of the loaders, a stubby broad-shouldered lad whose name Nils can’t remember, is leaning over the gunwale next to Lass-Jan. “Better run off home to Mummy, then!” he says scornfully.
“I’ll take care of this,” says the foreman, turning his head toward the loader.
This is a mistake. Lass-Jan never sees Nils’s oar come swinging through the air.
The broad blade of the oar hits the back of his head. Lass-Jan utters a long, drawn-out “Hooooh,” and his knees give way.
“I own you!” yells Nils.
He balances with one foot on the side of the boat, and swings the oar again. This time he hits the foreman across the back, and watches him fall over the gunwale like a sack of flour.
“Bloody hell!” shouts someone on board the cargo ship, then there’s a loud splash as Lass-Jan falls backwards into the water between the rowboat and the hull of the cargo ship.
Shouts echo from the shore, but Nils takes no notice of them. He’s going to kill Lass-Jan! He raises the oar, smashes it down into the water, and hits Lass-Jan’s outstretched hands. The fingers shatter with a dry crack, his head jerks backwards, and he disappears beneath the surface of the water.
Nils brings the oar down again. Lass-Jan’s body sinks in an eddy of swirling white bubbles. Nils raises the oar with the intention of continuing to hit him.
Something whizzes past Nils’s ear and hits his left hand; the fingers crunch even before the pain almost numbs his hand. Nils wobbles and is no longer able to hold the oar; he drops it into the boat.
He closes his eyes tightly, then looks up. The loader who was making fun of him is standing up by the gunwale with a long boathook in his hand. His eyes are fixed on Nils, terrified but resolute.
The loader draws the boathook back toward him and lifts it again, but by this time Nils has managed to push off from the hull of the ship with his oar, and is on his way back to the shore. He leaves the loaders on the ship and Lass-Jan on his way to the bottom of the sea, and fixes the portside oar back in the oarlock.
Then he rows straight for the shore, the broken fingers of his left hand throbbing and aching. The little boy who does the bailing is crouching in the prow like a trembling figurehead.
“Get him out of there!” someone shouts behind him.
He hears the sound of splashing and shouting from the cargo ship across the water as Lass-Jan’s limp body is hauled over Wind ’s gunwale. The foreman is lifted to safety, the water is forced out of his body, and he is shaken back to life. He’s been lucky — he can’t swim. Nils is one of the few in the village who can.
Nils has his gaze fixed much further away, on the straight line of the horizon. The sun has found gaps in the cloud cover over there, and is shining down on the water, making it gleam like a floor made of silver.
Everything feels fine now, despite the pain in his left hand. Nils has shown everybody who owns Stenvik. Soon he will own the whole of northern Öland, and will defend it with his life if the Germans come.
The bottom of the boat scrapes against the rocks, and Nils picks up the oar and jumps out. He’s ready, but no one attacks him.
The loaders are standing over on the jetty as if they’ve been turned to stone, women and men and children. They gaze at him mutely with terrified eyes. Maja Nyman looks as if she’s about to burst into tears.
“Go to hell!” Nils Kant roars at the lot of them, and flings the oar down in front of him on the pebbles.
Then he turns to run back to the village, home to his mother Vera in the big yellow house.
But neither she nor anyone else knows what Nils knows: he is meant for greater things, greater than Stenvik, as great as the war. One day he will be known and talked about all over Öland. He can feel it.
4
Gerlof Davidsson was waiting for his daughter in his room at the residential home for senior citizens.
Today’s edition of the local newspaper, Ölands-Posten, lay in front of him on the desk, and he was reading about an eighty-one-year-old man suffering from senile dementia who had vanished outside Kastlösa in southern Öland. The man had simply left his little cottage the day before and disappeared without a trace; the police and volunteers were now searching for him out on the alvar — they’d even had a helicopter out looking for him. But it had been a cold night, and it wasn’t at all certain he’d be found alive.