The boy nodded.
‘Good,’ Bengtsson said. ‘Go to the toolshed and get yourself a spade.’
The boy loped off.
‘Who’s he?’ Gerlof asked when he was out of earshot. ‘He’s not from round here, is he?’
‘Aron Fredh? No, he’s from the south, from Rödtorp... But he’s a kind of relative.’ Bengtsson put down the bottle behind a gravestone and looked wearily at Gerlof. ‘He’s a relative incognitus, if you know what I mean.’
Gerlof hadn’t a clue. He’d never heard of Rödtorp and he couldn’t speak any foreign languages, but he nodded anyway. He knew that Bengtsson only had a little girl, so perhaps the boy was one of his nephews?
Aron came back from the shed carrying a spade. He didn’t say a word, simply positioned himself next to Bengtsson and Gerlof and started digging. The earth was as dry as dust and free of stones, but Gerlof’s spade found the first body part after just a few minutes. It was a dark-brown human bone, possibly part of a thigh bone. Having worked as a gravedigger for a month, he was used to such discoveries, and simply placed the bone carefully to one side on the grass and covered it with a small pile of earth. Then he carried on digging.
They worked their way downwards for over an hour.
The sun disappeared and the air grew colder. As Gerlof shovelled away, an old story kept going through his mind:
Once upon a time there was a door-to-door salesman who called at a farm on the island of Öland. A little boy opened the door.
‘Is your daddy at home, son?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Is he far away?’
‘No, sir. He’s in the churchyard.’
‘What on earth is he doing there?’
‘I don’t think he’s doing anything. Daddy’s dead...’
When it was almost eleven o’clock, they heard the sound of whinnying echoing off the walls of the church. Gerlof looked up and saw two white horses trotting through the gates, surrounded by a cloud of buzzing flies. The horses were pulling a black carriage with a wooden cross on the top — a hearse. Erling Samuelsson, the priest, was sitting next to the coachman. He had conducted the funeral service at the dead man’s farm.
By this stage, the grave was deep enough, and Bengtsson helped the two boys out of the hole. Then he brushed the dirt off his clothes and went over to the mortuary.
The hearse had stopped there, some distance away from the church. The shiny, expensive wooden coffin containing the body of Edvard Kloss had been lifted down and placed on the grass. Most of the relatives who had made up the funeral procession turned around and went home once they reached the gate; there was only the interment left now.
Gerlof saw the two brothers standing on either side of the coffin. Sigfrid and Gilbert had nothing to say to one another today; they stood in silence in their black suits, and it seemed as if there were a grey cloud hanging between them.
However, they had no choice but to work together. The brothers were to carry the coffin over to the grave, along with Bengtsson and Gerlof.
‘Up we go,’ Bengtsson said.
Edvard Kloss had enjoyed his food and the good things in life, and the base of the coffin cut into Gerlof’s shoulder. He set off, taking short steps; he thought he could feel the heavy body moving around inside, as if it were shifting back and forth — or was it just his imagination?
Slowly, they moved towards the grave. Gerlof saw that Aron was now standing by some tall headstones over by the churchyard wall, as if he were hiding.
But he wasn’t alone. A man in his thirties was on the other side of the wall, talking quietly to Aron. He was simply dressed, a bit like a farmhand, and he seemed on edge. When he took a step to one side, Gerlof noticed that he had a slight limp.
‘Davidsson!’ Bengtsson said. ‘Give me a hand with this!’
He had laid out two ropes on the grass. The coffin was placed upon them, then lifted again and positioned above the black grave.
Slowly, slowly, it was lowered into the hole.
When it reached the bottom, the priest picked up a handful of earth from the pile the gravediggers had made. He threw it on to the lid of the coffin as he spoke over the body of Edvard Kloss:
‘Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. In the sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through Our Lord Jesus Christ...’
The priest threw three more handfuls of earth on to the coffin, committing the deceased to his final rest. When he had finished, Bengtsson and Gerlof picked up their spades.
Before Gerlof began to fill in the grave he glanced at the Kloss brothers. The older brother, Gilbert, was standing behind him as steady as a rock, his hands behind his back. Sigfrid was wandering up and down by the wall, looking a lot more anxious.
Gerlof and Bengtsson shovelled the earth back into the hole. When they had finished they would lay their spades on top in the form of a cross, as was the tradition.
After a little while they took a break. They straightened their backs, took a few steps away from the grave and let out a long breath. Gerlof turned his face up to the sun and closed his eyes.
He could hear something in the silence. A faint sound. He listened carefully.
Knocking. Then silence, then three more faint knocks.
The sound seemed to be coming from the ground.
Gerlof blinked and looked down into the grave.
He glanced over at Bengtsson, and could see from the other man’s tense expression that he had heard the same thing. And the Kloss brothers, who were standing further away, had gone white. Even further away, young Aron had also turned his head.
Gerlof wasn’t going mad — they had all heard the sound.
Time had stopped in the churchyard. There was no more knocking, but everyone seemed to be holding their breath.
Gilbert Kloss walked slowly to the edge of the grave, his mouth hanging open. He stared down at the coffin and said quietly, ‘We need to get him out of there.’
The priest stepped forward, rubbing his forehead nervously.
‘That’s not possible.’
‘Yes, it is,’ Gilbert said.
‘But I’ve just committed his body to the earth!’
Kloss didn’t speak, but his expression was determined. Eventually, another voice from behind said firmly, ‘Get him out.’
It was Sigfrid Kloss.
The priest sighed.
‘Oh, very well, you’d better bring him up. I’ll go and telephone Dr Blom.’
Daniel Blom was one of the two doctors in the parish.
Bengtsson put down his spade, sighed loudly and looked at Gerlof.
‘Will you go down, Davidsson? With Aron?’
Gerlof gazed down into the darkness of the grave. Did he want to go down there? No. But what if Edvard Kloss had woken up and was suffocating inside the coffin? If that was the case, they had to hurry.
He scrambled down into the hole and cautiously stepped on top of the lid, which was covered in soil. He remembered what he had read in his confirmation class, about Jesus’s encounter with Lazarus:
The man who had died came out, his hands and feet bound with linen strips, and his face wrapped with a cloth. Jesus said to them, ‘Unbind him, and let him go.’
Gerlof listened as hard as he could for any sound from inside the coffin, but there was nothing. However, he didn’t like being down there; the air was icy cold. At some point in the future he too would end up in a place like this. For all eternity. Unless Jesus came along and raised him from the dead.
A scraping noise behind him made him jump, but it was only the boy clambering down on to the lid of the coffin, clutching a spade. Aron Fredh from Rödtorp. Gerlof nodded to him in the darkness.