Autumn has arrived and the wind is driving angry waves against the quay in Tunnhamn and tearing at the few leaves left on the birch trees. Dead yellow leaves skip across the ferry quay, a discarded paper bag sails up in the air, the rope on the flagpole slaps the pole with sharp tap-tap-taps. The sky is a churning mass of dirty grey. Far out over the waters of Norrfjärden a flock of scoters is flying south in formation. They have the wind behind them as they disappear out of sight behind the headland at Gråharukläppen.
The only people taking the ferry Arkipelag to cross Norrfjärden now are either islanders or faces we are familiar with. And then, of course, there’s us – the reader and the scribe.
We bump into Ghita Saarinen in the cafeteria of the Arkipelag. She has taken leave of absence from the local radio station and is working for a newly established human rights organisation that documents illegal abductions, disappearances and other injustices. It also attempts to bring the guilty parties to book. At the start of the week she returned from another journey down south where, with the help of local human rights activists, she was investigating a series of inexplicable disappearances that have taken place in recent years. She intends to spend the autumn preparing a detailed report on the basis of the information she has uncovered.
That was as much as we were able to find out before the Arkipelag reached Tunnhamn and Ghita had to hurry down to her car.
She drives up to the Old Police House in Storby. Most weekends now her small white Nissan Micra may be seen parked there alongside Riggert von Haartman’s four-wheel-drive Volvo.
We continue our trip round Fagerö, a happy little island. To live there was tantamount to winning the lottery. Well, that’s what the Fagerö islanders thought anyway.
Judit’s girl is still missing without trace. It seems unlikely that we shall ever discover what happened to her.
It was hard for Judit and she grieved.
In late summer she got into the habit of making occasional visits to the American Bar. Not, however, to seek comfort in alcohol. She used to arrive early, immediately after Kangarn had opened up and while the American Bar was still more or less empty. She would feed the jukebox and listen to the records, the old hits from the sixties. Kangarn used to stand her a cup of coffee – that was all she would take and she never stayed long.
The last time Judit came to the American Bar she played Neil Diamond’s “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon”: “They never get tired of putting me down…” Judit played the record twice, and then a third time. Then she rose from the table next to the jukebox, which is where she had been sitting, and left.
No one knows what she was thinking.
On the fourth Sunday in August, a sunny but quite cool day with long feathery cirrus clouds sketched on a pale blue sky, Pastor Lökström returned to the pulpit in Fagerö church for the first time since that unfortunate Sunday before midsummer.
The morning service had been more solemn than usual and the church was full because the bishop was undertaking his parish visitation and was serving at the altar as well as giving a sermon. The bishop’s sermon took as its text the words of 1 Timothy 6:12, where St Paul says: “Fight the good fight of the faith, lay hold on the life eternal, whereunto thou wast called.”
Pastor Lökström did not make an appearance in the church until after the offertory hymn. Then the door of the sacristy opened and he emerged and went up into the pulpit.
His entrance came as a surprise to everyone since as far as anyone knew he was still on sick leave. Lökström looked very pale and the people sitting right at the front thought they could see tears in his eyes.
From the small crow’s nest of the pulpit Lökström had a glimpse of the blue sea. He saw the votive ship hanging on a cable from the ceiling, he saw the organ loft and the whitewashed vault of the transept, and down below he saw the faces in the pews turned up to him, wondering and confused.
His wife was sitting in the front row, her head bent.
He wiped his hand across his eyes, took a firmer grip on the edge of the pulpit and swallowed. His throat was as dry and coarse as sackcloth.
“Dear friends …”
He had to start again.
“Dear friends, I have a confession to make.”
His decision had by no means been an easy one. He had paced around the manse night after sleepless night. He had tried to pray, he had wept his eyes dry and, in despair, even screamed at God. The bishop had cut short his holiday in order to talk to him and counsel his soul.
Meditation had been of no help, nor had prayer, nor the words of the bishop.
Pastor Lökström began: “Before the bishop, before the dean and other members of the cathedral chapter, and before you all I wish to state that when Death came to haunt our island I failed you. I …”
His voice broke again and he gulped for air several times.
“Before you all I admit that I was frightened by all the dead strangers washed ashore on our island. I denied these people … in my great fear I denied them the sympathy to which they had the right. The words I spoke over them were empty sounds, nothing more than empty sounds.”
He swallowed hard again.
“In medieval pictures depicting the ravages of the plague we often see the dead greeting the living with the words: ‘As you are now so once were we. As we are now so shall you be.’ In the presence of death all humankind is equal. Death is our common fate irrespective of where we originate, of what colour we are, of which language we speak. All of us have the right to be treated as equals whether we are dead or alive. But in my fear and horror I saw the dead who came among us as different.”
Pastor Lökström looked out over the congregation.
“I failed these strangers and I failed you. I was unable to give you the comfort and help you had the right to demand of one who calls himself your shepherd. And I failed myself. I have no faith left.”
He reached round behind his neck and unfastened his white clerical collar.
“I have decided to resign my post and to leave the congregation. And I ask for your forgiveness.”
He came down from the pulpit and, with the eyes of the congregation on him from all sides, slowly walked the length of the aisle and out through the porch. The silence in the church was such that the creak of the hinges and the rattle of the iron latch rang through the church as he closed the door behind him.
At the beginning of September Jarl Enros, skipper of the Kaleva, died in the University Hospital following a heart attack. His funeral was attended by everyone on Fagerö.
Abrahamsson placed two wreaths on the grave, one from himself and his wife and one from Fagerö Shipping. He bowed his head and stood for a time with his big wrinkled hands folded on his stomach as he contemplated the flowers and the wreaths lying on the grave. The ribbons on the wreaths fluttered in the wind.
“I really shouldn’t have told you to keep quiet about the corpses you saw on that voyage, Jalle,” Abrahamsson muttered.
It was as if the motor schooner Kaleva understood that her skipper was gone forever. Something happened to her and she went into decline, suddenly becoming a worn-out old boat that no longer wanted to go anywhere.
Abrahamsson, with a heavy heart, decided it was finally time to let her go to the breaker’s yard and a tug came to fetch her from the quayside.
But the Kaleva still had her pride intact and she had no desire to die on some slipway on the mainland. She wanted to end her days out here. A sudden storm took them all by surprise and with the seas running high the Kaleva broke free from the tug. Before the crew of the tug managed to fix a new towline the Kaleva had run on to rocks off the island of Stora Pungö. Her hull was breached and she went down in eight metres of water, which left only the top of her mainmast above the surface.
Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the M/aux Kaleva committed hara-kiri on her final voyage.
Fagerö Salmon AB was declared bankrupt at a court hearing on 18 September. The creditors’ petition revealed that the debts amounted to €1,141,920.70. The business was put on the market by the Southern Archipelago Cooperative Bank.
A rumour was soon doing the rounds on Fagerö that Kangarn was interested in buying the fish farm. It has not as yet been possible to confirm that rumour.
Even before the decision of the bankruptcy court was made public K-D Mattsson announced that he was standing down from all his activities in local politics.
The door of the American Bar is ajar, the windows facing the summer terrace have been covered with translucent builder’s polythene that is rustling in the wind, and there are tarpaulins over a part of the roof where the felt is torn.
The polythene has been pulled aside from one of the windows and St Olof is passing out blackened pieces of tongue-and-groove panelling to St Erik who then throws them down into a container below the terrace. The container is already almost full of charred boards, soot-damaged furnishings, ruined kitchen fittings and the twisted and burnt remains of a Wurlitzer 1300 Americana jukebox. Though everything is now cold, you can still smell the acrid stench of fire and smoke. Kangarn’s boys are working in dogged silence.
The fire broke out in the early hours of the morning, several hours after the American Bar closed. Fortunately the fire alarm woke Kangarn and until the fire brigade arrived he and his boys fought the fire with foam extinguishers and prevented the place being completely gutted. In spite of that, however, smoke and water damage means that major renovation work is necessary before Kangarn can open the bar again.
Police technicians have not excluded the possibility of arson, but no one has yet been arrested on suspicion.
The islanders of Fagerö are unanimous in their view that no one from here could be the guilty party.
One evening in autumn a team of workmen with lorries and a mechanical digger arrive at the cemetery at Tjörkbrant’n. They set up floodlights and the driver of the digger starts shifting earth with his shovel. The work proceeds swiftly because the soil is still loose. The final covering is shovelled away by hand. Men in overalls and boots then climb down into the graves and attach chains to the coffins, which are lifted out by the hydraulic cranes on the lorries.
Just for a moment the earth-covered coffins hang in the cold light of the lamps and sway on their chains until the crane driver swings them in over the load surface of the lorry and carefully lowers them.
Janne the Post drives his round from Söder Karlby to Storby every day. The post has to be delivered irrespective of what’s going on in the world. The metal lids clunk shut behind him as he deftly drops letters and newspapers into the mailboxes all the way along Ållskogsvägen, Lassfolsvägen, Kyrkvägen and Tunnhamnsvägen. He is punctual and letters and papers never end up in the wrong box. He drives on the wrong side of the road, of course, so that he can reach the boxes from the driver’s seat of his orange Lada, but everyone on Fagerö knows that he does that and, so far anyway, Janne hasn’t been involved in an accident.
Mikaela is on the ferry Arkipelag to Örsund. There are not that many people in the cafeteria on the upper deck at this time of year. The waters of Norrfjärden are unsettled today and the Arkipelag is pitching in the choppy sea. Mikaela is on her way to the central hospital to visit her father. She pours herself a mug of coffee at the cafeteria counter, picks up a plate and stretches to take a Danish pastry but stops herself. Sighing she puts down the plate and the cake tongs and pays for her coffee. She puts two sweeteners in her coffee and tries not to think how lovely it feels to sink your teeth into a fresh Danish and taste how sweet the cream in the middle can be.
Fride is going round with a leaf blower outside the community centre. Dead yellow birch leaves whirl away in front of the snout of the blower. The motor whines as Fride blows the leaves into small piles which he’ll deal with in a moment. Skogster drives past in the milk tanker and Fride raises his arm in greeting. Skogster returns his greeting.
Elna Isaksson, proprietor of the South-west Archipelago Bookkeeping Agency, takes her eyes from the page of calculations on the computer screen, pushes her glasses up on her forehead and massages the base of her nose with her thumb and index finger. She sits like that for a while, staring out of the window with her glasses up on her forehead, a thin woman with a narrow face and grey hair, dressed in a trouser suit. The noise of a leaf blower can be heard from outside. She remembers she has forgotten to fetch the post – Janne went past a long time ago. She remembers she must ring Mikaela that evening and find out how her dad is. Mikaela has told her he has been given chemotherapy.
That’s life, Elna thinks. That’s the way things are going.
She turns back to the computer screen. She wants to finish Pettersson’s accounts before allowing herself an afternoon cup of coffee.
On the third Saturday in September over at Klås the customary autumn party is being held. Beda Gustavsson’s birthday is being celebrated at the same time. It’s her forty-eighth. Torches have been lighted along the shoreline and along the quay and the flames are reflected in the black water. The whole house is lit up. They eat a buffet out on the veranda, and they drink and sing drinking songs. All very jolly. The voices and the laughter carry far in the quiet warm autumn evening.