Then he bends over the bundle. The butter toffees are lying there in a pile, shining in the sun, and Nils picks one up and places it slowly in his mouth.
He hears an infuriated roar across the water, from the boulder, but takes no notice. He chews carefully, swallows, picks up another toffee.
The sound of splashing reaches him from out there. Nils looks up; his little brother has finally thrown himself off the boulder and into the water.
Nils is already beginning to dry off in the sun, and overcomes his first impulse, which is to go out to Axel. He picks up a third toffee from the cloth on the stone instead.
The splashing continues, and Nils watches. Axel can’t touch the bottom with his feet, of course, and he’s desperately trying to get back onto the boulder. But his hands keep slipping off.
Nils chews on the toffee. You have to get some speed up to get onto the boulder.
Axel has no speed, and turns to make his way back to the shore. He’s flapping his arms wildly, the water foaming all around him, but he isn’t moving forward. He’s looking at Nils with wide, terrified eyes.
Nils looks back at him, swallows the toffee, and picks up another one.
The splashing quickly grows fainter. His brother yells something, but Nils can’t hear what it is. Then the waves close over Axel’s head.
Now Nils takes a step toward the water.
Axel’s head pops up, but not as far out of the water as before. All Nils can actually see is wet hair. Then he sinks beneath the surface again. Air bubbles come up, but a little wave sweeps them away.
Nils is in a hurry now, he jumps into the water. His legs kick up foam and he’s fighting with his arms, his eyes fixed on the boulder. But there’s no sign of Axel.
Nils makes his way quickly to the boulder, and when he’s almost there he dives, but he’s not very good at keeping his eyes open underwater. He closes his eyes, feeling his way in the cold darkness, touches nothing with his hands, and comes up into the sunlight again. He grabs the boulder with his hands, coughs, and pulls himself up.
Nothing but water all around him, wherever he looks. The sunlight sparkling on the waves hides everything that exists beneath the surface.
Axel is gone.
Nils waits and waits in the wind, but nothing happens, and in the end, when he starts to feel cold, he dives in and swims slowly back to the shore. There’s nothing else he can do. He gets out of the water, breathes out, and leans on the big stone.
Nils stands there in the sun for a long time. He’s waiting for the sound of splashing, a familiar shout from Axel, but he hears nothing.
Everything is quiet.
There are four toffees left on Axel’s cloth, and Nils looks at them.
He thinks about the questions that will be waiting for him, from his mother and others, and thinks about what he’s going to say. Then he thinks about when his father died and how gloomy everything had been during the long drawn-out funeral up in Marnäs church. Everybody had been dressed in black, singing hymns about death.
Nils tries a sob. That sounds good. He’ll go up to his mother and sob and tell her Axel is still down on the shore. Axel wanted to stay, but Nils wanted to go home. And when everybody starts looking for Axel, he can think about the sad organ music at his father’s funeral and cry along with his mother.
Nils will go up to the house soon; he knows what he’s going to say and what he’s not going to say when he gets there.
But first of all he finishes off Axel’s toffees.
2
Gerlof Davidsson was sitting in his room at the residential home for senior citizens in Marnäs, watching the sun go down outside the window. The kitchen bell had just fallen silent after ringing for the first time, and it would soon be time for dinner. He would get up and walk to the dining room. His life wasn’t over.
If he’d still been living in the fishing village he came from, Stenvik, he could have sat by the shore watching the sun sink slowly into Kalmar Sound. But Marnäs was on the east coast, which meant that each evening he watched the sun disappear behind a grove of birch trees, between the residential home and Marnäs church in the west. At this time of year, in October, the branches of the birch trees were almost completely bare, and looked like slender arms reaching out toward the orange disc of the sinking sun.
The twilight hour had arrived — the time for bloodcurdling stories.
When he had been a child in Stenvik, this had been the time when the work in the fields and around the boathouses was over for the day. Everyone would gather in the cottages as the evening drew in, but the paraffin lamps wouldn’t be lit just yet. The older people would sit there in the twilight hour, discussing what had been achieved during the day and what had happened elsewhere in the village. And from time to time they would tell the children a story.
Gerlof always thought the scariest stories were the best. Tales of ghosts, dire warnings, trolls, and evil deeds in the Öland wilderness. Or tales of how ships were driven toward the shore along the stony coastline and smashed to pieces against the rocks.
The kitchen bell rang for the second time.
A boat captain who had been caught up in the storm and drifted too close to the shore would sooner or later hear the rocks on the seabed scraping against his keel, louder and louder, and that was the beginning of the end. Sometimes he might be skillful enough and fortunate enough to drop an anchor and slowly haul himself against the wind back into clear water again, but most boats couldn’t move once they’d gone aground. Usually the captains had to abandon their vessels quickly in order to save themselves and their crews, trying to make their way onto dry land through the crashing waves; then they would stand there on the shore, soaking wet and frozen to the marrow, watching the storm drive their boats harder and harder aground until the waves began to smash them to pieces.
A small cargo boat that had run aground was like a battered coffin.
The kitchen bell rang for the last time, and Gerlof grabbed the edge of the wooden desk and pulled himself up. He could feel Sjögren coming to life in his limbs. He could feel it, and it was painful. He considered the wheelchair standing at the foot of his bed, but he had never used it indoors, and he had no intention of doing so now. But he picked up his cane in his right hand, gripping it tightly as he made his way toward the hallway, where his outdoor clothes hung on their hangers and his shoes were neatly arranged. He stopped, leaned on the cane, then opened the door to the corridor. He went out and looked around.
He could hear shuffling steps along the corridor, and saw them coming along one after the other: his fellow residents. They came slowly, with the help of canes or walkers. The residents of the Marnäs senior center gathering to eat.
Some of them greeted each other quietly; others kept their eyes fixed on the floor the whole time.
So much knowledge moving along this corridor, thought Gerlof as he joined the tired stream on its way into the dining room.
“Good evening, lovely to see you all!” said Boel, who was in charge of their section, smiling among the food trolleys outside the kitchen.
Everybody sat down carefully in their usual places around the tables.
So much knowledge. Around Gerlof sat a shoemaker, a churchwarden, and a farmer, all with experience and knowledge that nobody was interested in anymore. And then there was Gerlof himself; he could still tie a bowline knot with his eyes closed in just a few seconds, to no purpose whatsoever.
“Could be a frost tonight, Gerlof,” said Maja Nyman.
“Yes, the wind’s coming from the north,” agreed Gerlof.
Maja was sitting next to him, tiny and wrinkled and skinny, but brighter than anyone else in there. She smiled at Gerlof, and he smiled back. She was one of the few who could pronounce his name correctly, Yairloff.