The problem was that he had forgotten something — two things, in fact — which was why he was late. His daughters and grandchildren were waiting for him, but when he got to the bottom of the steps and was standing in the garden, he couldn’t hear any birds singing in the treetops.
The device. He wasn’t used to it yet.
‘I’ll go and get it,’ his daughter, Julia, said.
She was carrying a small folding chair for Gerlof, but she put it down and went back indoors. A minute later she reappeared and handed over the small plastic ear buds.
‘Do you mind if we go on ahead? The boys really want to be there from the start.’
Gerlof inserted the hearing aids and waved her away.
‘I’ll follow you.’
He had only his stick and the birdsong for company as he set off towards the maypole down at the far end of the inlet.
He was pleased to be able to hear the birds, even if he needed some help to do so.
In the spring and summer, Gerlof left his room at the residential home for senior citizens in Marnäs and spent as much time as possible in the cottage on the coast, where he had the sea and the wind and all the birds — the migrants who came back from Africa in the spring. Back home to Gerlof’s garden.
Sparrows and bullfinches gathered on the edge of the little limestone bird bath in the corner of the lawn. Gerlof would watch them dip down for a drink of water, then they would open their beaks to chirrup and sing.
The problem was that he could no longer hear their song.
His hearing problem was nothing new; it had been creeping up on him for a long time. Gerlof had stopped hearing the crickets when he was about sixty-five years old, the year after he retired. He had stood on the veranda listening in the evenings, but there was only silence out there in the darkness. At first he had thought that pollution had killed them off, but then a doctor had explained that the sound the crickets made was on such a high frequency that his old ears couldn’t pick it up.
Old ears? His ears were the same age as the rest of him. But he could cope with not being able to hear the crickets; they were fairly irritating, and he didn’t really miss them. And, in any case, it wasn’t the crickets that chirped all day long, it was the grasshoppers.
But Gerlof did want to hear the birdsong. Last spring it had seemed a little more muted than before, as if they were singing through an invisible blanket. And this year the garden had been silent. At that point Gerlof had realized that something was seriously wrong, and had contacted Dr Wahlberg, who had sent him to Kalmar for a hearing test.
Gerlof had been expecting a neatly dressed technician in a white coat, with a pen tucked behind one ear, but the man who greeted him was wearing jeans and had a ponytail.
‘Hi, I’m Ulrik. I’m an audiologist.’
‘An archaeologist?’
‘Audiologist. I’ll be producing an audiogram showing the level of your hearing.’
All these new words made Gerlof feel dizzy. He had had to sit in a little booth wearing headphones, and had been told to press a button when he heard a range of sounds. For long periods, things had been worryingly silent.
‘How does it look?’ he asked when Ulrik released him.
‘Not too good,’ came the reply. ‘I think it’s probably time for a little technical assistance.’
Technical assistance? Was Gerlof going to have something stuck in his ears? He remembered that his old grandfather — a notoriously mean man — had developed hearing problems in his nineties, and had made himself a metal ear trumpet out of an old snuff tin. Simple and completely free.
Today everything was made of plastic. Ulrik took a cast of Gerlof’s ear canal so that a suitable model could be made.
In the middle of May, Gerlof was able to try out the hearing aid in his own garden, when Ulrik came over to Öland with a small computer.
‘We don’t normally do home visits,’ he said, ‘but I love this island... The sun and the scenery...’
Gerlof was delighted and took him out on to the veranda to see the birds. An olive-green bird was sitting in the bath washing its wings.
‘A greenfinch,’ he said. ‘It sounds like a canary when it sings... if you can hear it.’
‘When we’ve finished, you’ll be able to hear it perfectly,’ Ulrik said, placing his computer on the table.
After a few minutes, Gerlof was sitting motionless on a chair on the veranda, with wires running from the computer to the buds in his ears, which fitted perfectly.
Ulrik gazed at the screen.
‘How’s that? Can you hear any whistling?’
Gerlof shook his head — very carefully, so that the wires wouldn’t come out. Then he closed his eyes and concentrated.
He listened. No, there was no whistling, but there was a faint sighing that he hadn’t heard for many years. It seemed to be coming from outside, and he realized that it was the breeze, blowing around the cottage.
And, through the breeze, he suddenly heard the pure, clear sound of birdsong. The greenfinch, warbling in the birdbath. And, somewhere over in the bushes, a whitethroat answered him.
Gerlof opened his eyes and blinked in surprise.
‘I can hear them,’ he said. ‘The birds.’
‘Good,’ Ulrik said. ‘In that case, we’re on the right track.’
Gerlof could hear the birds around him, but he couldn’t see them. It made him think about a mystery from his childhood, and he decided to ask the question while he had an expert on the spot.
‘Can a person hear noises even though they don’t exist?’
Ulrik looked confused.
‘What do you mean?’
‘If someone heard mysterious sounds, coming out of the ground, for example... could that be some kind of hallucination? Like an optical illusion, but to do with hearing instead?’
‘That’s a tricky question. I mean, sometimes we hear sounds that exist only in our heads, if someone has tinnitus, for example.’
‘This was nothing like that,’ Gerlof said. ‘It was knocking. Loud knocking from inside a coffin that had been lowered into the ground. I heard it when I was young, and so did several other people... Everyone who was there heard it.’
He looked at Ulrik, but the young man just shook his head.
‘I’m afraid I’m no expert on ghosts.’
As he approached the celebrations he could hear the buzz of a large crowd, like the sound of a rushing waterfall in the distance. There was an expectant hum; the dancing hadn’t started yet.
Gerlof knew there were a lot of people in the village at the moment, because the water pressure in his taps had dropped over the past few days. Water was less than plentiful on the island in hot weather, and in the summer many people had to share it.
His muscles ached as he hurried along the coast road, past the track leading down to the jetty. He could see a group of young people standing there, dressed in tiny trunks and bikinis. He thought back to the old days, when bathing suits were knitted and smelled of wool.
When Gerlof reached the long row of mailboxes and was about to turn inland towards the crowd surrounding the maypole, he noticed a man of about his own age standing there. He was tall, with white, wavy hair, and he was wearing a dark-brown jacket. He had an old Kodak camera around his neck.
Gerlof looked at the man, with a vague recollection of having seen him before.
The man returned his gaze, then held up the camera in front of him, almost like a shield, and snapped away in the direction of the mailboxes.