And if John had been on board he would have sat in the stern with a bailer, but there was no one there.
The gig slowly drifted away from the shore, carried by the wind.
Gerlof relaxed. He thought about death — about that summer’s day some seventy years earlier when he had dug Edvard Kloss’s grave up in Marnäs churchyard and heard the sound of knocking from inside the coffin. Three hard blows in quick succession, then three more. Clear as a bell, from down below.
He had wondered about it ever since, but had never come up with a satisfactory explanation. And if there wasn’t one, it meant that the farmer’s spirit had caused the knocking, from beyond the grave.
In which case, there must be life after death, and Gerlof’s adventure wasn’t over. Perhaps he would soon meet up with friends and relatives. His wife Ella, his friend John, his grandson Jens. All those who had gone before him.
The water was now covering the bottom of the boat. Gerlof slid off his seat and sat down on the planks. His best trousers got wet, but that didn’t matter. He shuffled along and lay down on his back, his breathing calm and even. What would be would be, as the saying went.
As Gerlof felt the cold water through his trousers, another memory came into his mind from that terrible funeral when he was just fifteen.
The chilled bottles of beer.
He remembered Bengtsson, the gravedigger, offering him a beer. It must have been the first one Gerlof had ever drunk. The bottles had been covered in condensation, and the beer inside had been at least as cold as the water that was now seeping into the boat.
But how could the beer have been so cold on such a hot, sunny summer’s day? This was well before the time of refrigerators. People cut blocks of ice in the winter and saved them in earth cellars on the island, but there were no fridges or freezers. If you wanted something cold in the summer, you had to bury it with some old ice.
Had the gravedigger had a little cellar of his own for the bottles? A wooden box he had buried, or perhaps an empty tar barrel? An old drainpipe somewhere in the churchyard, the opening hidden under a piece of turf?
Gerlof recalled that Bengtsson had been standing slightly behind everyone else when the knocking began. So the gravedigger could have lifted his spade or his boot when all the others were looking at the coffin and banged on the top of the pipe. Three sharp blows with the spade or the heel of his boot. That would have sounded like knocking from inside a coffin. Like the sound of an uneasy spirit.
Gerlof remembered the dirty looks Bengtsson had given the Kloss brothers that day. How much had he really disliked the two wealthy farmers? Had he decided to play a trick on them, pretend that their brother had come back to haunt them? If so, it had been a nasty trick that had got completely out of hand.
Was that what had happened? Gerlof had no one to discuss it with, because everyone else who had been there was dead. But perhaps the hole in the ground was still there, a few metres from the grave?
Perhaps — but Gerlof couldn’t go and start looking for it now. It was too late. He was lying in a leaky rowing boat on his way out into Kalmar Sound.
There was nothing he could do.
Drowning was a pleasant death. That’s what he had always heard from old sea captains, although of course you couldn’t ask anyone who had actually been through it. But Gerlof thought it was probably true. You closed your eyes and slowly slipped away towards the great darkness, not as a seaman but as a passenger on the ferry across the River Styx...
He opened his eyes. Something was wrong. His body was attuned to the movements of the sea, and he could feel that something had happened. He sat up, his back soaking wet, and looked over the gunwale.
It was the wind — it had turned, without any warning. And the ripples had grown into little waves, which were gently but firmly nudging Swallow along. Gerlof’s boat was on its way back to the shore.
A change of destination, he thought. Stenvik, not the Styx.
He let out a long breath and looked up at the vast brightness of the sky. The gulls were circling way up high, their wings outstretched as they drifted on the winds, using each gust and screaming at one another.
It was easy to imagine these were exactly the same gulls that had welcomed him with their loud screams over eighty years ago, when he came down to the shore for the very first time.
Gerlof smiled at them.
The birds were survivors, just like him.
Afterword
Parts of this novel are about what is usually known as the Great Terror, when Josef Stalin started a secret war against his own people in the 1930s. This involved mass arrests and arbitrary executions and the establishment of a huge number of labour camps known as gulag right across the Soviet Union. The Terror affected both Soviet citizens and immigrants who had come from the West in the belief that the Soviet Union was the workers’ paradise. At least one of them was from Öland, according to Tvingade till tystnad, Kaa Eneberg’s book about Swedish emigrants to Russia. This unknown emigrant provided the inspiration for Aron Fredh.
The rocket disaster at a test site to the east of the Aral Sea in October 1960 and the NKVD massacre of Polish prisoners of war in April 1941 are actual events. Aron’s story was also inspired by various facts and anecdotes in books such as Alfred Badlund’s memoir Som arbetare i Sovjet, Julian Better’s Jag var barn i Gulag, Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror, Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, Donald Rayfield’s Stalin and His Hangmen, Owen Matthews’ Stalin’s Children, Svetlana Alexievich’s Second-hand Time, Harald Welzer’s Perpetrators and Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History. I found facts about emigrants from Öland to North America in Amerika tur och retur by Ulf Wickbom and Walter Frylestam, and in Amerika, dröm eller mardröm by Anders Johansson, as well as through the stories told by my own family on the island.
Thanks to Ulrica Fransson, Hans Gerlofsson, Cherstin Juhlin, Caroline Karlsson, Ing-Mari and Jim Samuelsson, and Ture Sjöberg. And to Åsa Selling and Katarina Ehnmark Lundquist.
Finally, I would like to thank some of the authors who have written about Öland before me and pointed out interesting routes around the island: Tomas Arvidsson, Thekla Engström, Margit Friberg, Carl von Linné (who, unfortunately, was in a bit of a hurry when he travelled through northern Öland), Thorsten Jansson, Anders Johansson, Barbro Lindgren, Åke Lundqvist, Anders Nilson, Rolf Nilsson, Per Planhammar, Ragnhild Oxhagen, Anna Rydstedt, Niklas Törnlund and Magnus Utvik. And the island’s two lyrical stars, Lennart Sjögren and Erik Johan Stagnelius.
Johan Theorin