The Öland Bridge stood tall and firm, spanning the sound, resting on broad concrete pillars, completely unaffected by the sharp gusts of wind that tore at the car. It was wide and completely straight, apart from an arched section close to the mainland, which allowed taller ships to pass beneath the road. The arch was a viewing point, and she could see the flat shape of the island. It extended along the horizon, from north to south.
She could see the alvar, the grassy plain that covered large parts of Öland. Dark, low clouds drifted by, like long airships above the landscape.
Both tourists and residents loved to go walking and bird-watching out there, but Julia didn’t like the alvar. It was too big — and there was nowhere to take shelter if the vast sky above came tumbling down.
After the bridge she drove north, toward Borgholm. The road was almost dead straight for several kilometers along the west coast, and she met few cars now that the tourist season was over. Julia kept her eyes fixed firmly on the road ahead in order to avoid looking out across the desolate alvar and the great expanse of water on the other side, and she tried not to think about a little sandal with a mended strap.
It didn’t mean anything, it didn’t have to mean anything.
The journey up to Borgholm from the bridge took almost half an hour. When she arrived, there was just one crossroads with a set of traffic lights, and she decided to turn left, down to the little town by the water.
She stopped at a cake shop at the edge of Storgatan, thus avoiding the harbor, the square, and the church; the church behind which she and her parents had lived when Gerlof had his own cargo boat and wanted to live near the harbor. Her childhood was in Borgholm. Julia had no desire to see herself running along the streets around the square like a pale ghost, a nine-year-old girl with her whole life ahead of her. She didn’t want to meet any young men, striding toward her along the street and making her think of Jens. She had enough reminders of that kind in Gothenburg.
The bell above the cake shop door tinkled.
“Afternoon.”
The girl behind the counter was blonde and pretty, and looked extremely bored. She listened to Julia with a vacant expression as she asked for two cinnamon pastries and a couple of strawberry cream cakes for herself and Gerlof.
This girl could have been her thirty years earlier, but of course Julia had moved away from the island when she was just eighteen, and had lived and worked in both Kalmar and Gothenburg before the age of twenty-two. In Gothenburg she had met Michael and gotten pregnant with Jens after just a few weeks, and much of her restlessness had disappeared then and never returned — not even after their separation.
“There aren’t many people here now,” she remarked as the girl lifted the cakes out of the glass display counter. “In the autumn, I mean.”
“No,” said the girl, without smiling.
“Do you like living here?” asked Julia.
The girl shook her head briefly. “Sometimes. But there’s nothing to do. Borgholm only comes to life in the summer.”
“Who says that?”
“Everybody,” said the girl. “People from Stockholm, anyway.” She fastened the box of cakes and handed it over. “I’m moving to Kalmar soon,” she said. “Will that be all?”
Julia nodded. She could have said that she too had worked in Borgholm as a teenager, in a café down by the harbor, and that she too had been bored, waiting for life to begin. Then all of a sudden she wanted to talk about Jens, about her sorrow and the hope that had made her come back. A little sandal in an envelope.
She said nothing. A fan was humming away; otherwise the cake shop was silent.
“Are you a tourist?” the girl asked.
“Yes... no,” said Julia. “I’m going up to Stenvik for a few days. My family has a cottage there.”
“It’s like Norrland up there now,” said the girl as she handed Julia her change. “Practically all the houses are empty. You never see a soul up there.”
It was half past three in the afternoon by the time Julia emerged from the cake shop and looked along the street. Borgholm was virtually deserted. There were a dozen or so people around, one or two cars, not much else. The huge ruined castle looked down from the hill above the town, its windows dark, empty holes.
A cold wind was sweeping along the streets as Julia walked back to the car. It was almost eerily silent.
She passed a big notice board covered in a patchwork of posters, all stuck on top of one other: American action films at the cinema in Borgholm, rock concerts in the ruined castle, and various evening classes. The posters had faded in the sun, and their corners had been chewed to pieces by the wind.
This was the first time Julia had visited the island as an adult so late in the year. During the low season, when Öland slowed down. She walked back to the car.
I’m coming now, Jens.
North of the town the dry, grassy plain of the alvar continued on both sides of the road. The road headed slowly inland from the coast, pointing straight into the flat landscape, where round, lichen-covered gray stones had been lifted from the fields and used to build long, low walls. The walls formed a gigantic pattern right across the alvar.
Julia had a slight feeling of agoraphobia out here beneath the vast sky, and longed for a glass of red wine — a longing which grew stronger as she got closer to Stenvik. At home she was trying to stop drinking every day, and she never drank when she was driving, but out here in this desolate place the bottles of wine in her bag seemed like the only interesting company she had. She wanted to lock herself in somewhere and devote all her attention to them until they were empty.
On the way north she met only two vehicles, a bus and a tractor. She drove past yellow signs bearing the names of small villages along the road, names she remembered from all those earlier journeys. She could recite them by heart, like a nursery rhyme. They were places she had only driven past for years. For her mother and father there had been only Stenvik every summer, and the holiday cottage they had built there at the end of the 1940s — many years before the tourists had discovered the village. Autumn, winter, and spring in Borgholm, but the summer had always been Stenvik for Julia. Before she went up to Marnäs to see Gerlof, she wanted to see the village again. There were bad memories up there, but many good ones too. The memory of long, hot summer days.
She saw the yellow sign from some distance away: Stenvik 1, and beneath it the word CAMPSITE crossed out with black tape. She braked and turned onto the village road, away from the alvar and down toward the sound.
After five hundred yards the first little cluster of summer cottages appeared; they were all closed up, with white blinds pulled down at the windows. Then the kiosk, where the villagers gathered in summer. Its front had been cleared of notices and adverts and pennants, and there were shutters at its windows. Next to the kiosk was a sign pointing south toward the campsite and a mini-golf course. The campsite was run by a friend of Gerlof’s, she remembered.
The road led toward the water, curved to the right along the rocky ridge above the shore, and led northward, where more closed-up cottages lined the eastern side of the road. On the other side was the shore, covered in stones and pebbles; small waves ruffled the surface of the water out in the sound.
Julia drove slowly past the old windmill, standing up above the water on its sturdy wooden base. The mill had stood there abandoned for as long as Julia could remember, but now it had turned gray and lost almost all of its red color, and all that remained of its sails was a cross of cracked wooden slats.
About a hundred yards past the windmill lay the Davidsson family’s boathouse. It looked well cared for, with red wooden walls, white windows, and tar-black roof. Someone had painted it recently. Lena and Richard?