Stallo

by Stefan Spjut

  Her stick-thin fingers rested on the briefcase but she could not bring herself to open it. Instead she began to toy with the handle and the lock.

  ‘Sven was given this briefcase by Nordenskiöld,’ she said absently. ‘His boss at the radio station. It comes from the railway, Statens Järnvägar, of course, but Nordenskiöld insisted the initials stood for Sven Jerring. It was impossible to prove otherwise, he said. He thought that in a metaphorical sense Sven was a lot like the railway. You know, in the way he brought the country together.’

  She unclipped both fastenings, lifted the lid, reached inside and pulled out a thick wad of newspaper articles that rippled as she placed them on the table. Susso leaned forwards to see. She carefully moved a strip of paper and carried on looking through the pile until she came to a black and white photograph of a boy’s face. Magnus’s face.

  ‘The police spent the entire summer searching for him,’ Barbro said. ‘With helicopters and orienteers and defence volunteers and goodness knows what else. They used all available resources. Sven and I watched it on the television news, and at first he didn’t seem to react in any particular way. He read the daily papers and asked me to buy the evening papers as well, so naturally I realised he was interested in the story. But later, when he made his own enquiries, talking on the phone to journalists who had been there and so on, I started to think he was going too far. It was an unhealthy interest. I noticed that it affected him very deeply, that it was taking over. And it was actually here, in front of this roller blind, that I suddenly became aware just how deeply it touched him. How it was based on more than compassion.’

  She sighed and rearranged her collar.

  ‘He was ill. He’d been having problems with the circulation in his left foot for years. He had recorded his final episode of Children’s Letterbox, and having to end the programme that he had devoted so much of his life to, well, that marked the end of more than just his career, of course. And when the autumn came and the papers had stopped writing about Magnus Brodin, he was in such a low frame of mind that all he wanted to do was sit by the window and look out at the park. When I asked him what was wrong, or what he was thinking about, he wouldn’t even answer. He just sat here, staring out into the darkness. He was being tormented by something inside him, something I knew nothing about, and it was only when I parked his wheelchair in front of the roller blind one day that I realised it was connected to something that had happened a long time ago. When he woke up he was facing the image of Vadstena Castle. He flew into a rage, and it was especially awful because he so rarely got angry. Prickly, at the very most. But on this occasion he was irate. I asked him if he wanted to talk about what was upsetting him, but he absolutely refused. After that I left him in peace.

  ‘It was the beginning of March when he said he wanted to go to Gränna. Not to Vadstena? No, Gränna. So we took the car. And as we drew closer to his old home he became dizzy and started complaining, saying he had to rest for a few minutes. We stopped at Brahehus Castle. For a good hour he sat in the ruins with his spiked walking stick between his legs and his fur hat on his head, looking out over the ice down below while I tried to protect him from tourists who recognised Uncle Sven and wanted to say hello. It was quite cold and there were strong gusts of wind blowing up from the lake. I was afraid he would catch a chill.’

  Barbro smiled at the memory and sat quietly for a moment. Through the open balcony door came the sound of traffic on Valhallavägen, rushing faintly like rapids in the distance. The wind had picked up and the chestnut trees were moving restlessly.

  ‘When Sven saw Vättern again,’ Barbro continued, ‘the lake of his childhood, the vast lake of his youth, it was as if something opened up inside him, because once we were back in the car and on our way towards Gränna he began to talk. He asked me what I knew about Per Brahe, and I answered that I knew a little, that Per Brahe was a nobleman who built Brahehus … but then he interrupted me. “Not that Per Brahe,” he said, “I mean the steamer, the one that sank.” “Oh yes,” I said. “I know John Bauer drowned.” Then he nodded and looked out of the window with a sorrowful expression on his face. “His wife drowned too,” he said. “And his son, who was only three years old.” “Yes, it was awful,” I said. “You know,” he said, “it was all my fault. Not that the ship sank, but that the Bauer family were on board at the time.”

  ‘I found that difficult to believe but I did not interrupt him because I wanted to know what had caused his depression all winter. I wanted to hear what he had to say.’

  Barbro smoothed her blouse before she continued:

  ‘In the autumn of 1918 Sven was working at the Vadstena Läns newspaper. He was twenty-three and had recently returned from Petrograd, where he had a post with the Swedish consulate. He had watched as the Bolsheviks seized control of the city with extreme brutality. He began to work for the Vadstena Läns by writing stories about his experiences in Russia. Those articles were highly regarded and soon his pen name, Crayon, was appearing more and more often in the paper.

  ‘One day he had an unexpected visitor. It was none other than Esther Bauer, the wife of John Bauer, the dearly loved illustrator of folk tales. She walked into the editorial offices holding her son’s hand and asked to speak to Crayon in private. She had something dreadful that she wanted him to put in the newspaper. Naturally, Sven was curious.

  ‘Her story began in the summer of 1904, when John was working on illustrations for a book called Lapland – the Great Swedish Land of the Future. He was living with the Sami people and was allowed to travel with them as if he were one of their own. One day, when they were on their way to a fell lake to fish, they saw a group of timber huts in the distance which attracted John’s interest. He wanted to take a closer look, but the Laps refused, so John had to go alone. The people living there were walking around in strange fur clothes – wolf pelts and bear skins with the animals’ heads still attached. Some of them were enormous and others were more like dwarves, you could say. They had a tame bear which walked among the huts like a dog. John had never seen anything like it and was absolutely mesmerised.’

  Susso, who had been leafing through the newspaper cuttings on the table, looked up and caught her mother’s eye, and she heard the sofa creak as Torbjörn shifted position and leaned forwards.

  ‘There was a squirrel,’ Barbro continued. ‘They kept it as a pet and John took a liking to it because it was unusually sociable, and when one of the giants said he could have it, he took it gladly. When he returned to the Sami the first thing he did was show them the squirrel, but they did not share his delight and one of them, an old woman, even tried to beat it to death. They told John he had been among the stallo people and that the little animal was one of them and not to be trusted. They said that if John wanted to stay with them, he would have to get rid of the squirrel, but he was not prepared to do that so he left for home the following day.’

  ‘Are you saying there were stallo around as late as the beginning of the twentieth century?’ Susso said. ‘It must have just been something they said, something the Sami people told him to scare him. Or maybe they were joking.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Barbro, ‘that could have been the case. But he could find no other name for them. And fourteen years later, in the autumn of 1918, they came to his home on Björkudden.’

  ‘Who did?’ Susso asked. ‘The stallo?’

  Barbro nodded slowly.

  ‘They turned up late one evening,’ she said. ‘And they were really very strange. One of them was gigantic. His head hit the ceiling, so he had to stoop, and the ceiling of the ground floor was two metres and seventy-five centimetres high. The second was a dwarf, hardly a metre tall. The third man was normal height, which, under the circumstances, looked quite amusing. He did all the talking while the other two, who were wearing floor-length capes with hoods to hide their hideous faces, stood quietly in the background. Esther assumed they belonged to a theatre where John had worked as a set designer, but when she asked if they we
re actors, they did not answer. They just stared at her in silence. John told her to take Bengt up to the studio, which she did, and when she came back down a moment later, John was sitting on a chair, his face completely ashen, with Humpe the squirrel on his lap. That was the name he had given it. He wouldn’t say anything at first, but eventually he told her that the men had come to settle a debt. Esther and John had been in financial difficulty for some time, so she received that news with a sigh and asked how much money they wanted. And then John said it wasn’t money they were interested in, but the boy. He told her about his meeting with the stallo and how they had given him the squirrel. In exchange they now demanded to adopt John’s child. Naturally Esther was beside herself and asked John if they couldn’t just give back the squirrel, but John only shook his head and said that was completely out of the question as far as the stallo were concerned. They wanted the boy, and if he was not given to them, they would take him.’

  Barbro sighed deeply before she went on:

  ‘John contacted the police but they practically laughed in his face, and so Esther had come to Sven, hoping he would be able to help them by writing something in the newspaper. She thought if it was brought into the open, if everyone knew that there was an isolated group of people in the Lapland wilderness who were about to kidnap the son of the famous artist John Bauer, then the police would take the family seriously and the stallo would not dare to carry out their threat. But of course Sven did not write a word about it. He was convinced that John Bauer had corrupted his wife, poisoned her with his fantasies about trolls, and that she, a woman of taste and considerable artistic talent herself, had more or less lost her mind in that isolated house on Björkudden.’

  ‘Yes,’ Gudrun said. ‘It sounds like it. Stallo …’

  ‘Only a few days later they were dead,’ Barbro said. ‘Swallowed up by the waters of Vättern. Esther, John and the little boy Bengt, who they called Putte. Along with twenty-two other people. It was a horrible business at a horrible time. The war was over and the old world lay in ruins. Spanish flu was raging, following invisibly in the footsteps of the war, and would not be stopped by peace treaties or boundaries. Sweden had kept out of the battles, but the country had not avoided emotional scars. They were like a rot, hidden and inaccessible. By the time the war ended no one knew how many people had lost their lives, but it was thought to be a considerable number. And the shortage of bread – that was certainly not unknown in this country. Not to mention the lack of coffee!’

  ‘Speaking of coffee,’ Gudrun said, stretching, ‘shall we make some?’

  ‘Shortly,’ Barbro said, nodding. ‘On the first of October, in the final stages of the war, a train came off the track in Getå. It was caused by a landslip and there were forty-two casualties. And only a couple of months later there was the terrible accident on Lake Vättern. Bauer, the guardian of everything the war would not be allowed to destroy. How could he, the man with the enchanted pen who had revealed the hidden recesses of the Swedish forests and fulfilled the longing for myths that was beating in the heart of the population – how could he, of all people, have drowned by pure chance? At that very time. And on Vättern, of all places, the country’s oldest and most impenetrable lake? How could that have happened?’

  ‘Yes. Good Lord,’ Gudrun said.

  ‘Gustaf Cederström,’ Barbro said. ‘Have you heard of him? He is best known for his painting of the funeral procession of Karl XII, and he was Bauer’s tutor at the Konstakademi. He came up with an answer to that question. Let me see if I can find it here.’

  She moved her spectacles to the tip of her nose and searched among the articles.

  ‘Here,’ she said, holding up a cutting. ‘It’s an obituary, published in Gammalt och Nytt, and this is what he writes: “Bauer’s life was full and spent alongside the enchanted lake which became the grave of his happiness. The many legends that surround Vättern, and its ever-changing mystical nature, left a profound impression. Perhaps in some way his rich imagination is a gift to the lake, and indeed we see in the legends how trolls reclaim their gifts. This dreadful year, has not the lake taken back what it once gave?”’

  Barbro put down the obituary, straightened her glasses and carried on with her story:

  ‘After the ship sank, Sven felt terrible and blamed himself to an extent that those around him thought was unreasonable. Everyone was talking about the Per Brahe, so he was given countless opportunities to pass on the strange tale told to him by Esther Bauer, but he never made it public. It was all behind closed doors, so to speak, and he did eventually manage to put the dreadful story behind him, exactly as he had done with Petrograd. He left the newspaper and went back to his studies in Uppsala. But everything surfaced again. Literally. In 1922 the Per Brahe was successfully salvaged. By then Sven was employed by the newspaper Östgöta-Bladet, and it was his job to cover the story. He was stationed in Hästholmen and sent daily reports, and when the steamer’s bilges were pumped he was one of the first to go aboard. In the hold, directly below the ladder, he found a body undiscovered by the divers, understandably so because the corpse did not resemble a body. It looked more like a heap of mud, which is what it was, chemically speaking. It brought back memories of Petrograd and he felt faint and unsteady and left the ship. They were difficult days for him.

  ‘By the end of August the salvage operation was completed and the deceased were laid to rest in Västra Tollstad’s cemetery. Now there was talk of a shipwreck auction: sewing machines, cast-iron stoves, irons, bicycles, gold rings, clocks and brooches. Knick-knacks. The whole lot was going to be put up for sale. According to unconfirmed sources they had even found brand-new motorcycles from the Huskvarna munitions factory among the wreckage. But of course they had not. It was a dream. A dream of treasure on the lake bed! Sven was part of the newspaper’s editorial team and he refused to write about it. He had had enough.

  ‘But then something happened. An unusual find was made on the shore at Medhamra, just north of Vadstena: John Bauer’s tailcoat had washed ashore. They knew it was his tail coat because his savings book was in one of the pockets. Naturally the name Bauer came up for discussion again and so Sven told the editor about his remarkable meeting with Esther Bauer four years earlier. The following day, when he walked into the office, his editor came up to him with a copy of the magazine Idun. I’ve got that copy here somewhere …’

  Barbro rummaged in the briefcase and brought out a magazine that she laid on the table. It was dated 10 October 1915. The headline read: ‘AT HOME WITH THE STORYTELLER OF BJÖRKUDDEN’, and underneath were three pictures framed in entwined stems.

  Susso, Gudrun and Torbjörn bent over the table to get a closer look. ‘THE ARTIST IN HIS STUDIO’ was written above the first picture of John, who was standing behind a table laden with paper and drawing tools. He was holding a pen and smiling into the camera.

  In the second photo, which had the caption ‘THE ARTIST AND HIS WIFE’, John was standing next to Esther, who was wearing a white dress and a white lace hat. John was holding his pipe with the shaft pointing towards his stiff shirt collar.

  In the third and largest photograph, which completely dominated the page, John was standing in profile, his head turned towards a fir tree, his pipe between his teeth and his hair combed over his forehead. His right hand was tugging gently at the foot of a small figure sitting on a branch level with the crown of the artist’s head.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Susso, wrinkling her brow. ‘Is that supposed to be the squirrel?’

  ‘That is exactly what Sven wanted to know,’ answered Barbro thoughtfully, as she tapped the flimsy paper. ‘He and the editor agreed that it was probably a trick of photography, but trick or not, that little object aroused Sven’s interest. Now, having seen that photograph, he was determined to write something about it. He would write with a light touch, creating an appendix to the idyllic photo reportage in Idun. From the right perspective it could be rewritten as a heart-warming story. The fact that Esther
Bauer had believed that trolls from Lapland wanted to get their claws on her child was also a scoop, of course, but he held back from writing about that because he didn’t want to bring shame on the family after they had died so tragically. But the squirrel – that was entirely different! He could write about that unhindered. He wanted to know what had happened to it. If John had not taken it with him onto the vessel, it could still be alive, perhaps even at Björkudden. Sven asked his father, who was the district vet, if he knew how long a Swedish squirrel could live. His guess was five or six years, up to fifteen in captivity. If Bauer had been given the squirrel in 1904, it couldn’t possibly still be alive. But who knew? A couple of days later he took his bicycle and pedalled down to Gränna. It had already started to get dark when he arrived at the Bauers’ old house on the promontory. There was no one home. In fact, the door was barred and the curtains closed. Sven walked around the house a few times and peered in through the windows, but he could see nothing. He caught sight of a boat on the lake and shouted from the shore to the man sitting in it, an old man, and asked if he knew the whereabouts of the house’s owner and whether there had been a tame squirrel on their land. But the man knew nothing, so Sven left. And that was when it happened.’

  After Barbro said this she fell silent.

  ‘What happened?’ Susso asked impatiently.

  ‘As Sven was standing under a fir tree something hit the brim of his hat and he saw a pine cone fall to the path beside his feet. He stood still and a second cone landed beside the first. Baffled, he turned his gaze upwards. Thick, heavy branches hung down, and he could not see anything. He turned round and looked along the path because he thought he had heard footsteps behind him, but there was no one there, so he looked up into the branches again and there was the squirrel, sitting on a spruce twig. Its coat was grey and its black eyes looked at him searchingly. Sven was paralysed. All he could do was stare at the bedraggled animal. It was sitting so close he would have been able to touch it if he’d had the courage to reach out his hand. But he didn’t. It was immediately apparent that this squirrel was no ordinary squirrel. Sven bolted and without looking back leapt onto his bicycle, and it would be almost sixty years before he summoned up the courage to return.’