Julia had a picture in her memory of Gerlof, sitting there mending his long nets on a stool in front of the boathouse in the summer, while she and Lena and their cousins ran about on the shore down below, the sharp smell of tar in their nostrils.
But Gerlof had been down at the boathouse cleaning his flounder nets. That day.
Now there was no one at the boathouse. Dry grass quivered in the wind. A wooden skiff, painted green, lay on its side in the grass beside the house — it was Gerlof’s old boat, and its hull was so dried out that Julia could see strips of daylight between the upper planks.
She switched off the engine, but didn’t get out of the car. Neither her shoes nor her clothes were suitable for the Öland autumn wind; besides, she could see an iron bar with a large padlock across the boathouse door. The blinds were pulled right down inside the small windows, as they were in the cottages in the rest of the village.
Stenvik was empty. Scenery, it was all just scenery for a summer theater. A gloomy play, at least as far as Julia was concerned.
Okay. She would go and look at Gerlof’s house, the holiday cottage. Gerlof had built it himself on land the family had owned for years. She started the car and drove along the village road, which forked up ahead. She took the right-hand road, inland. There were groves of low-growing trees here, protecting the few houses that were occupied over the winter, but all the trees were leaning slightly away from the shore, bowed by the constant wind.
In a large garden stood a tall, yellow wooden house which looked as if it were about to fall to pieces behind the tall bushes. The paint was flaking off the walls, and the roof tiles were cracked and covered in moss. Julia couldn’t remember who it had belonged to, but had no recollection of the place ever having looked smart and well cared for.
Among the trees a narrow track led off the road, a strip of knee-high yellow grass growing down the middle. Julia pulled in and switched off the engine. Then she put on her coat and got out into the chilly air.
The wind was soughing in the dry leaves on the trees, and behind that was the more muted sound of the waves on the shore. But apart from that, there was no sound: no birds, no voices, no traffic.
The girl in the cake shop had been right: this was just like the mountains of Norrland.
The track leading to Gerlof’s cottage ended at a low iron gate set in a stone wall. Julia opened the gate and it gave a faint squeak. She went into the garden.
I’m here now, Jens.
The little house, painted brown with white eaves, didn’t look quite so closed up as many of the other cottages in Stenvik. But if Gerlof had still been here, he would never have let the grass grow so tall, or allowed yellow pine needles and leaves to litter the garden.
They had been a hardworking couple, Gerlof and Julia’s mother. Ella, who had remained a housewife all her life, had sometimes seemed like a visitor from the nineteenth century, from an age of poverty when there was neither the time nor the energy for laughter and dreams on the island, and every scrap of kitchen paper had to be dried and used several times. Ella had been small and silent and had a dogged determination about her; the kitchen was her empire. Julia and Lena had had a pat on the cheek from their mother occasionally, but never a hug. And of course Gerlof had been away at sea most of the time while she was growing up.
Nothing was moving in the garden. When Julia was little, there had been a water pump in the middle of the lawn, a yard high, painted green, with a big spout and a pretty curved handle, but it was gone now. All there was in its place was a concrete cover over the well.
To the east of the cottage was a stone wall, and beyond it the grassy alvar began. It ran all the way to the horizon in the east. If the trees hadn’t been in the way, Julia would have been able to see Marnäs church sticking up like a black arrow over there; she had been christened in that church when she was just a few months old.
Julia turned her back on the alvar and walked toward the cottage. She went around a trellis covered in vines that had grown wild, and climbed up the pink limestone steps that had seemed so enormous when she was a child. The steps led up to a little veranda with a closed wooden door.
Julia pushed down the handle, but the door was locked. As expected.
This was both the beginning and the end of her journey.
It was remarkable that the cottage was still here, thought Julia, because so much had happened out in the world since Jens had disappeared. New countries had come into being, others had ceased to exist. In Stenvik, the village was now virtually empty of visitors for most of the year — but the house that Jens had left that day was still there.
Julia sat down on the steps and let out a sigh.
I’m tired, Jens.
She looked at a little collection of stones that Gerlof had piled in front of the house. On the top lay an uneven, grayish black stone that he maintained had fallen from the sky as a burning lump and had made a crater over in the quarry sometime toward the end of the nineteenth century, when Gerlof’s own father and grandfather were working there. This ancient visitor from outer space was spattered with bird dirt.
Jens had walked past the stone from space that day. He’d put on his little sandals, left the house where his grandmother lay sleeping, gone down these steps and out into the garden. That was the only thing that was absolutely definite. Where he had gone after that, and why, nobody knew.
When she got home from the mainland that evening, she’d expected Jens to come racing out of the house. Instead, two policemen were waiting for her, along with a weeping Ella and a stony-faced Gerlof.
Julia wanted to get out a bottle of red wine right now. To sit there on the steps drinking steadily, losing herself in dreams until darkness came — but she quashed the impulse.
Scenery. This empty garden felt just as much like a stage set as the rest of the village, but the play had ended many years ago, everyone had gone home, and Julia felt a crippling sense of loneliness.
She remained there on the steps for several minutes, sitting perfectly still, until a new sound combined with the rushing of the sea. An engine.
It was a car, a tired old car, chugging slowly along the village road.
The sound didn’t go away. It continued, grew closer, and then the engine was switched off very close to the garden.
Julia got up, leaned forward, and glimpsed a round, dumpy car through the trees. An old Volvo PV.
The gate by the road squeaked as someone opened it. Julia straightened her coat, ran her fingers automatically through her pale hair, and waited.
The footsteps approaching through the dead leaves were short and heavy.
The old man who appeared without saying a word, standing at the bottom of the steps and looking sternly up at Julia, was also short and heavy. He reminded her of her father, but she couldn’t say why; perhaps it was the cap, the baggy trousers, and the ivory-colored woolen sweater that made him look like a real boat captain. But he was shorter than Gerlof and the cane he was leaning on suggested that he hadn’t sailed for a long time. His hands were heavily marked with old and new abrasions.
Julia vaguely remembered meeting this man many years earlier. He was one of Stenvik’s permanent residents. How many were left?
“Hello there,” she said, forcing her lips into a smile.
“Good day to you.”
The man nodded back at her. He took off his cap and Julia could see the strands of gray hair combed in thin lines across his bald head.
“I just called to have a look at the place,” she said.
“Yes... It needs somebody to keep an eye on it from time to time,” he said in the strongest Öland accent Julia had ever heard, a harsh, low dialect. “That’s what he wants.”