“Who lives in all those houses?” he asks.
“Summer residents,” replies Fritiof tersely. “They earn their money in Stockholm and buy cottages here on Öland. They drive across the bridge and lie in the sun on vacation, then they drive back fast to earn some more money. They don’t want to be here in the winter... it’s too cold and miserable.”
It sounds as if he sympathizes with them.
Nils says nothing. Fritiof seems to be quite right about these summer residents, because virtually every car he sees is driving in the opposite direction, traveling away from the island. The summer is over, it’s autumn.
The ruined castle is still there, at least, and it looks just as it always has, with its empty eye sockets on the hill above Borgholm.
Once they’ve driven past the castle, they’re almost down in the town, and the fog is beginning to fill the air. Fritiof slows down and pulls into a small parking lot just on the edge of the town, within sight of the ruined castle. He stops the car with no explanation.
“Okay” is all he says. “I told you we’d be having company.”
He opens the car door and waves.
Nils looks around. Someone is walking slowly along the road: a man who looks as if he were in his fifties. He’s wearing a gray woolen sweater, gabardine trousers, and shiny leather shoes that look expensive, and he nods to Fritiof.
“You’re late.”
The man is wearing a hat, pulled down low over his forehead. He isn’t carrying anything except a half-smoked cigarette. He takes one last drag and looks warily around before coming over to the car.
“Nils, I think you should get in the back now,” says Fritiof quietly. “It’ll be safer when we get to Stenvik.”
Then he gets out of the car. There’s a telephone kiosk at the far end of the parking lot, and Nils watches Fritiof walk quickly over to it. He pushes in some coins, dials a number, and speaks very briefly into the receiver.
Nils also gets out of the car, and the expensively dressed man tosses his cigarette aside, grinds it out with his right foot, and merely looks at him without saying hello. He gets into the front seat.
Nils doesn’t get into the back seat right away. He walks along the road, enjoying being back and being able to move about freely on the island once again.
His island.
Suddenly a couple of cars drive past on the main road. Nils sees pale faces staring back at him from behind the windshields. He follows them with his eyes, until they disappear in the fog.
“Come on!” shouts Fritiof behind him in an irritated voice.
He’s back at the car.
Nils walks back reluctantly, opens the back door, and hears the man in the front seat asking quietly: “Did it go okay, Gunnar?”
Then he looks quickly around at Nils, nervous and guilty, as if he’s let the cat out of the bag.
The man who has called himself Fritiof all this time also turns around and smiles.
“It doesn’t matter, we might as well all introduce ourselves properly now,” he says. “I’m Gunnar, and this is Martin. And Nils Kant is with us in the back seat. But we all trust each other here, don’t we?”
Nils nods briefly and closes the door. “Of course.”
So Fritiof is called Gunnar. And Nils knows he’s met him somewhere, but he still can’t remember where.
“Let’s head for Stenvik, then,” says Gunnar, firmly.
The car pulls out onto the road again, past Borgholm and northward. The landscape is becoming more and more familiar to Nils, but the fog from the sound is growing thicker, smearing and then erasing the horizon.
The air is becoming grayer and grayer. Gunnar knew it was going to be foggy, he was counting on it, and that’s why Nils was allowed to come home on this particular day. What else has he worked out so carefully? Nils wonders.
North of Köpingsvik, Gunnar switches on the fog lights and increases his speed. Nils can see the yellow signs rushing by. The familiar names of Öland villages. But it’s the landscape that he can’t tear his eyes away from: the fields, the grass growing wild, the stone walls that start by the road and disappear off into the fog.
And the alvar, his very own alvar. The alvar extends in all directions; with its heavy, muted colors and its endless sky, it’s just as big and beautiful as he remembered.
Nils is home again.
No one in the car speaks, and after a quarter of an hour Nils sees the sign he’s been waiting for. STENVIK. Beneath it is a big arrow with the word CAMPSITE on it.
The road down to the village is tarmac now, and Stenvik has acquired a campsite. When did that happen?
The car drives past the turning for Stenvik before slowing down.
“We’ll take the northern entry road,” says Gunnar. “There’s less traffic there, and we won’t have to drive through the village.”
A few minutes later he turns the car onto the northern route into the village, beside a milk stand, empty and abandoned by the roadside. Last time Nils saw the milk stand, it was full of milk churns from the farms along the road; now it’s spotted with white lichen, and looks as if it’s about to fall to pieces.
The whole of Öland has changed in twenty-five years, but this northern road down into Stenvik is almost exactly as he remembers it: narrow and twisting, and still graveled. It’s completely deserted, with grass-filled ditches on both sides and the alvar beyond them.
Gunnar allows the Volvo to move slowly forward, and after a few hundred yards he stops completely. He turns to look at Nils, and beside him Martin turns around, too.
Gunnar is looking steadily at him, Nils notices. Martin’s gaze wavers.
“Okay,” says Gunnar seriously, “we’ve brought you to Stenvik. And now you’re going to dig up your treasure by the cairn. Right?”
“I want to see my mother first,” says Nils, gazing steadily at Gunnar.
“Vera isn’t going anywhere, Nils,” he says. “She can wait awhile longer. It’s best that way, because it’s better if it’s really dark before we go down to the village. Don’t you think so?”
“We’ll split the stones between us,” says Nils quickly.
“Of course. But we’ve got to get them up first.”
Nils looks at him for a few seconds longer, and then he looks out of the side window. The fog is dense now, and soon it will be twilight.
He nods. He’ll give Gunnar and Martin half of the gemstones, then they’ll be quits.
“We’ll need something to dig with,” he says quietly.
“Sure. There are shovels and a pick in the trunk,” says Gunnar. “We’ve thought of everything. Don’t worry.”
But Nils doesn’t relax. He’s on his own against two strange men now, just as the man from Småland was on his own on the Caribbean beach in the darkness. The difference is that the man from Småland trusted his new friends — Nils doesn’t.
Gunnar doesn’t park by the road; he brakes by a narrow opening in the stone wall and turns the wheel. The car leaves the village road.
Slowly they move out onto the flat, grassy plain of the alvar.
Nils turns his head, but all he can see through the back window is fog. The road leading down to his home village has completely disappeared.
30
Gerlof sat in silence in the passenger seat beside Gunnar Ljunger, his back rigid as they headed out into the wilderness south of Marnäs. The conversation he had tried to start had foundered, because Ljunger didn’t answer him. All Gerlof could do was to go along with him, trying to unbutton his overcoat and struggle out of it, because the heat inside the car was positively tropical. Perhaps there was some way to regulate the air vents on the passenger side himself, but he didn’t know how. Everything seemed to be controlled electronically, and if Gunnar knew he was increasingly uncomfortable, he made no attempt to help him.