‘Yes. And I’ve got money now.’
‘Tomorrow evening,’ Wall said.
The Homecomer put the phone down. He thought about the bunker not far from Villa Kloss, then about a man he had once met, a man who had made rocks fly through the air.
The New Country, April 1932
‘We have to be prepared to make sacrifices,’ Sven says. ‘You do understand that, don’t you?’
Aron looks at his sore hands and says nothing. Sven’s hands are in just as bad a state as his own. The skin is cracked, the nails are coming away from the flesh, there are cuts along almost every finger. They’re actually quite lucky, because some of the other workers have already lost a couple of fingers. It’s the mud and the rocks that destroy the hands, the sticky mud that hides beneath the grass, keeping the rocks firmly in place. The workers stab at the ground with their spades, trying to gain some leverage, but the clay and the rocks refuse to give way.
Life in the new country consists only of sleep and work.
Every night they sleep in a kind of hut with twenty other men, or perhaps more, on beds that are not beds. Sven’s is made up of three empty boxes, while Aron’s slightly shorter one is a few planks of wood balanced on two sawhorses.
Every day is full of digging, from morning till night. Sven, Aron and the other immigrants are building a canal through the forests, or perhaps a wide ditch. Aron doesn’t really know which, he just keeps digging. There are poles in the ground to show where they have to dig, a straight line leading towards the mountains on the horizon, and Aron doesn’t think about the eventual goal. He just keeps toiling away with his spade, but over and over again it gets stuck in the unforgiving ground. He tugs, he pulls, he sobs. He digs and digs.
Winter turns to spring, and they carry on digging.
One day when the snow has melted, the work suddenly gets easier. An energetic man in a black cap arrives from the direction of the railway, pushing a cart containing some wooden boxes. He greets the workers with a cheery wave, and when he hears that some of them are Swedish he raises his hat to them.
‘Ruotsi!’ he says, using the Finnish name for Sweden before continuing in Swedish. ‘I come from Esbo in Finland, but I became a mining engineer and wanted to get out and see the world. This is a fantastic country, isn’t it?’
Sven nods, but Aron just stands there.
The man looks around. ‘Any stubborn rocks you want to get rid of?’
‘Definitely,’ Sven says.
There are always huge rocks. Some of the older workers point out several waiting up ahead.
‘Excellent, in that case allow me to demonstrate a little magic trick!’ the man from Esbo says, lifting the first wooden box off the cart.
Aron helps him to carry the rest, and watches as he takes fat sticks wrapped in oiled paper out of the boxes.
‘Ammonal!’ he shouts, gathering the men around the nearest rock. He picks up the sticks. ‘These are my boys, and they’re going to work together... Put them on the opposite side of the rock from the direction you want it to go in, bury them deep in the ground so they have something to kick against and press the detonator against the fuse. But slowly! You have to treat these boys as tenderly as if they were your very own cock!’
The men burst into raucous laughter, then fall silent. They all watch with tense anticipation as the man borrows a pickaxe and makes a row of holes for the dynamite underneath the rock. He shows them in which direction to point the sticks, and how to pack them tightly in order to achieve the best possible effect.
Then the man lights a metre length of black fuse wire and, when it begins to spark and crackle, he makes everyone move back. A long way back.
The ground shakes. A cloud of smoke and fire erupts, and the rock is hurled in the air. It’s like magic! The men cheer and the man raises his cap once more.
‘Ammonal! Dynamite is the future!’
The man from Esbo teaches them how to blow up rocks, but he soon moves on, and it’s back to the spades. Aron almost wishes he had never met the mining engineer, never found out that something called dynamite even existed. He doesn’t want to know that there are balls of fire that can move mountains, when all he has is a spade.
As the days grow warmer, the mud dries out and digging becomes easier. But then the mosquitoes arrive; the air is filled with them in early summer. Clouds of mosquitoes sweep in across the forest, whining around Aron’s ears, crawling up inside his sleeves, or biting right through the fabric of his shirt. His face swells up, his skin itches and throbs from all the bites. The mosquitoes get in his eyes and his nose, even in his mouth, where they taste sweet, like blood.
Sven makes them each a hat of birch bark to protect them from both the mosquitoes and the sun. And then he picks up his spade and carries on digging.
‘We mustn’t give up,’ he says. ‘After all, this is what we wanted, isn’t it?’
Aron doesn’t say anything.
He never wanted to dig in the new country; he wanted to be a sheriff.
When they are given soup during their short break in the middle of the day, hundreds of mosquitoes land on the warm liquid, at first swimming and then slowly, helplessly, sinking. Aron crushes them with his spoon and shovels the lot down. He chews ferociously, with his eyes shut; he wants to murder the mosquitoes. Murder every last one.
Jonas
Jonas was back at Villa Kloss. He wasn’t going to think right now, at least not about Peter Mayer. He was going to work.
He fetched the sander and plugged it into the socket on Uncle Kent’s decking. Then he switched it on and carried on sanding, one plank at a time. Slow and steady, just as his father had taught him. Every scrap of grey had to be removed from the wood, leaving it pale and fresh. Only then would he be able to start brushing in the oil.
Jonas worked on his knees, his forehead shiny with sweat. The sun was burning down and he really didn’t want to think about it — but that name kept echoing through his mind. Peter. Peter Mayer. Mayer. Peter. He knew he couldn’t talk to anyone, but the name Gerlof had given him just wouldn’t go away. The man on the ship, the man who had killed people with an axe.
Peter Mayer. Sold the tickets for The Lion King. Lives in Marnäs.
‘How’s it going, Jonas?’ His father had slid open the glass door and was looking down at him. ‘Are you getting on OK?’
Jonas nodded.
‘Are you enjoying yourself?’
Jonas didn’t know what to say. He tried to smile, but his father must have seen something in his expression. He stepped outside.
‘Are you missing Mum?’
‘A bit... But it’s all right.’
Jonas carried on sanding.
‘So what is it, then?’ his father said.
Jonas switched off the machine. After a few seconds he said, ‘Stuff’s been happening.’
‘Stuff? What are you talking about?’
‘Something happened... on Monday evening.’
‘Monday? When you were at the cinema?’
Jonas should have kept quiet, but he felt a kind of pressure in his chest when his father stared at him.
‘I didn’t go to the cinema,’ he said eventually. ‘I stayed at home.’
His father came and stood beside him. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘I went down to the shore and took the dinghy out. And something happened.’
The thing that had happened was too big to keep inside, and he ended up telling his father about everything he had seen out in the Sound. He spoke slowly at first, then faster and faster. He told him about the ship, about the living dead, about the man who had chased him. The man who might be called Peter Mayer.