“Are we late?” he asked.
It had taken far too long to get into his suit.
“Not much,” said Marie. “A bit, but that’s my fault... Good thing the church is nearby.”
“I don’t think we’ll get a detention,” said Gerlof, and Marie laughed politely.
He was pleased about that — not all the helpers at the Marnäs home realized it was the duty of the young to laugh at the wit of the old.
They rolled along toward the church, and Gerlof leaned forward slightly in an attempt to protect his face from the biting wind blowing in off Kalmar Sound. He could tell it was a strong, steady southwesterly, which would have made it possible to sail a ketch close-hauled straight up the Swedish coast, all the way up north to Stockholm — but he had no desire to be out at sea on a day like this. The wind would have been whipping the waves up over the gunwale, and the cold would have covered the thwarts with ice. After more than thirty years ashore, Gerlof still felt like a seaman, and no sailor wants to go to sea in the winter.
The bell started to toll as they passed the bus stop by the church and turned in along the track. The sound was desolate and long drawn out, echoing over the flat countryside, and it made Marie walk faster.
Gerlof was in no hurry to get to the funeral — he regarded it mostly as a ritual for other mourners. He himself had said his goodbyes to Ernst the week before, down at the quarry. The sense of loss he felt for his friend had mingled with his sorrow over Ella, and that would remain with him for as long as he lived. And at the same time he had an unpleasant feeling that Ernst wasn’t resting in peace; his old friend was waiting impatiently for Gerlof to put together all the pieces of the puzzle he’d left behind.
There were at least a dozen cars parked in the narrow space in front of the church. Gerlof looked for Julia’s red Ford, but couldn’t see it. But he noticed that Astrid Linder’s Volvo was there, and decided she’d given Julia a lift from Stenvik. If his daughter was at the funeral at all.
The whitewashed church rose up against the gray sky. For almost a thousand years Christians had stood in the same place. This was the third church, built in the nineteenth century when the medieval church became too small and in need of too many repairs.
They entered the churchyard and rolled quickly up the wide stone path, before Marie slowed and pulled the wheelchair backward over the low step and in through the open door of the church.
Gerlof took off his hat as soon as they entered the porch. It was dark and empty, but the body of the church inside was full of people dressed in black. There was a faint hum of conversation in the air; the service hadn’t started yet.
Many lowered heads turned discreetly to look at Gerlof as he was wheeled up the left aisle. He realized how feeble and wretched he must look to people, and of course they were right. He was feeble and wretched, but his mind was clear — that was the most important thing.
Some people only went to funerals to see who looked as though they might be the next one to end up in a coffin. You keep looking, thought Gerlof, this is as good as it gets.
He would be up and walking, soon.
A slender white hand appeared from one of the pews at the front and waved to him. It was Astrid Linder, wearing a black hat with a veil. There was an empty seat beside her in the fourth row, and she didn’t seem to notice that Gerlof was in a wheelchair.
Marie stopped, and with her help Gerlof heaved himself out of the chair and into the pew next to Astrid.
“You haven’t missed a thing,” Astrid whispered in his ear. “It’s been so boring.”
Gerlof merely nodded, after glancing at the seat on the other side of Astrid and noticing that Julia wasn’t there.
Marie moved to the back of the church and at the same time the conversation died beneath the vault of the nave as the cantor began to play the traditional funeral psalm. Gerlof had heard the melancholy hymn at more funerals than he cared to recall. He relaxed to the music and looked discreetly around.
The congregation filling the church was on the elderly side. Of a hundred or so people, only a few were under fifty.
Ernst’s murderer was there, hidden among the mourners — Gerlof was certain of it.
Beside Astrid sat her brother Carl, Marnäs’s last stationmaster, who had changed careers and become an ironmonger when the station closed in the mid-1960s. He was retired nowadays. It was Carl’s older colleague Axel Månsson who had waved off Nils Kant’s train that summer’s day just after the war, but Carl had been there too. He was an errand boy at the station at the time, and had told Gerlof how he saw Margit, the ticket clerk, telephone the police in Marnäs and tell them in a whisper that the wanted man, young Kant, had just bought a ticket to Borgholm. Carl had also seen District Superintendent Henriksson hurry over from Marnäs a few minutes later, lumbering across the platform with his big belly to catch up with the suspected double murderer.
Carl was perhaps the last living person on Öland who had seen the adult Nils Kant at close quarters, but when Gerlof once asked him what Kant looked like, Carl had just shaken his head — he had a bad memory for faces.
Further along the pew sat several more Marnäs pensioners: Bert Lindgren, the former chairman of the local community hall, who had been away at sea for several years in the fifties and sixties, traveling all over the world, and next to him Olof Håkansson the eel fisherman, then Karl Lundstedt, an army colonel who had moved to his summer home in Långvik when he retired.
It wasn’t unusual for pensioners to move to Marnäs, but at the same time Gerlof knew that what northern Öland needed wasn’t more old folk but young workers and more jobs.
The organ fell silent. Pastor Åke Högström, who had been in Marnäs for a decade, positioned himself in front of the white wooden coffin adorned with roses. He had a large brown leather-covered Bible in his hands, and his expression was serious as he looked at the congregation through his round spectacles.
“We are gathered here today to bid farewell to our friend Ernst Adolfsson...” The pastor paused, adjusted his spectacles, then began his funeral oration with an important question: “For who among men knows the thoughts of a man, except the man’s own spirit within him?”
Saint Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, chapter two, Gerlof noted.
“We human beings know so little about each other,” proclaimed the pastor, “and only God knows everything. He sees all our faults and shortcomings, and yet He still wants to grant us all eternal peace...”
From somewhere toward the back of the church came the sound of a hacking cough.
Gerlof closed his eyes and listened, his mind at peace, and only nodded off once. When the congregation sang hymn 113, the one about the rose, he joined in as best he could. Then came prayers led by the pastor, more quotations from the Bible and psalms, then the beautiful song “Where Roses Never Die.”
Although he had already said goodbye to Ernst down at his house by the quarry, Gerlof still felt a growing knot of dark sorrow in his breast when he saw six serious-faced men stand up during the final piece of organ music, ready to step forward and carry the coffin out. Among them were his friends Gösta Engström from Borgholm, and Bernard Kollberg, who for several decades had run the store in the village of Solby, south of Stenvik, and had often delivered things to Ernst. The remaining bearers came from among Ernst’s family in Småland.
Gerlof would have liked to get to his feet and shoulder Ernst’s coffin himself, but instead he had to stay in his seat until everybody else started to get up. Marie came along with the wheelchair.
“I think I can walk now,” he said to her, but of course he couldn’t.