The Voices Beyond: (Oland Quartet Series 4)

by Johan Theorin

  The Homecomer looked out of the window.

  He saw the campsite with its rows of tents and chalets, but he was thinking about a prison camp.

  The New Country, December 1935

  Life is work. The sleep of exhaustion and hard work; nothing else.

  Aron and Sven are trapped. They are prisoners by night and slaves by day; they are never free. They labour with axes and saws along with Matti, a tall, thin Finn, and Grisha, a short, stocky Ukrainian. They fell fir trees from morning till night and drag the logs down to the river. There are no horses yet – while they are waiting for the horses to arrive, the men have to act as beasts of burden.

  Where are they? Somewhere in the north of the Soviet Union, that’s all they know. This is where they were sent, after brief questioning and instant verdicts.

  Documents were produced, stamped, copied. Aron could read Russian well enough by now to realize that he and Sven had been convicted of sabotage and sentenced to eight years in a labour camp.

  What is sabotage? They have no idea.

  But the punishment is work: even more work.

  After a few days in a crowded cell near the court, they were transported by night to a train, where they were pushed into a wagon lined with wire cages full of prisoners. They were given a little soup, and the train began to move.

  They travelled for hours, perhaps days. The cold got more and more intense. There were no windows in the wagon, just cracks in the walls, but they presumed they were heading north.

  There was no toilet either, just a hole in the floor which soon froze over. After that, the prisoners just had to squat down in the darkest corner. After a while, there was a stinking pile there, growing bigger with every visit.

  From time to time, the train stopped and more prisoners were hustled into the cages. They were guarded by young men in uniform, soldiers with rifles and sub-machine guns. Aron looked at them, remembering how it had felt to hold his very own gun when he was a little boy.

  ‘Have you seen the knives attached to the barrels?’ he whispered to Sven.

  ‘Those aren’t knives,’ Sven said wearily. ‘They’re called bayonets.’

  Aron was amazed. ‘So they can use their guns to shoot someone, and stab them as well?’

  Sven didn’t reply, he just leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes. Aron sat alone by the wire mesh, staring at the guns.

  Eventually, the train stopped, and this time it didn’t move off again. When the doors opened, it was twilight. The prisoners were brought out on to a snow-covered platform; they were lined up and marched off. Straight into the forest.

  Aron’s first sight of the camp was a bundle of clothes powdered with snow in a great big pile by the side of the track. Then he saw a blackened hand sticking out of the pile like a claw and realized he was looking at a heap of dead bodies.

  ‘They don’t bury people here,’ he said.

  Sven didn’t respond, but another prisoner behind them mumbled something in Norwegian; he said the ground was frozen solid.

  Everything was frozen here.

  The second thing Aron saw was a fence covered in ice, with shadows sitting or lying by some of the posts – enormous chained dogs. Further away, there was a watchtower, three storeys high, overlooking a row of low huts.

  They were taken into one of the huts; the place was already packed. Aron glanced out through a cracked window at a white world. Beyond the fence and the snowdrifts there was dense coniferous forest, and far away on the horizon he could see high mountains.

  Trees.

  Mountains.

  Aron has seen more trees and more mountains this winter than in his whole life. There were no mountains on Öland, and hardly any trees; here in the new country, huge trees reach up to the sky everywhere you turn.

  The landscape outside the camp is utterly desolate, and bitterly cold. The snow has settled early. The white days in the forest beyond the fence become routine, but every other week they are allowed a bath.

  They learn that the camp is only a couple of years old; the prisoners built it themselves. There was nothing there but an empty field when the first prison colonies arrived after a long march. They dug holes in the ground to sleep in, then built small shelters, and finally proper huts.

  About fifty prisoners from ten different countries live in Sven and Aron’s hut. When they are not working, they all gather round the stove, which is nothing more than a rusty barrel that gives off hardly any heat. They eat dry bread and thin meat soup, and two or three men squash together in each bed.

  Aron hears the wind howling outside the hut and thinks about the storms on Öland, but these are distant childhood memories; he feels like an adult now. He is seventeen years old.

  He wakes up, kills a few bedbugs, then gets up. If there is any wood left he pushes a few sticks into the iron stove, lights it and hears Sven and the other men slowly begin to move around.

  Almost every morning someone goes to wake some lie-a-bed but finds a cold body that will never move again.

  Death picks his way among the bunks, and Aron quickly gets used to the sight of blue lips and frozen eyes, a stiff body being carried out of the hut. No one has the energy to wash the corpse, so it joins the rest, like a log on a woodpile.

  Time to get to work.

  The brigade marches out into the forest at seven o’clock every morning, then the men are divided into smaller groups. They are accompanied by a foreman, but Sven and Aron hardly ever see him. The groups are sent off with an axe and a two-man saw to fell trees then drag the logs down to the river.

  The logs float away, but there is no escape for the prisoners. There is nothing around them but endless forests and snow, with rumours of bears and wolves.

  And there is no point in going on strike, or trying to cheat the system. The logs on the riverbank are counted at the end of each day, and any group that fails to fulfil its quota receives reduced food rations. Less food means death, sooner or later.

  So they chop and haul and drag, and they are always, always cold. The work helps to keep their arms and legs warm, but their hands are ice cold. Sven has managed to buy boots and gloves with hardly any holes in them for himself and Aron; other prisoners have to make do with bits of cloth wrapped around their fingers and toes.

  Matti the Finn has no gloves, no protection at all for his hands. His reserves of fat are beginning to run out; he is so cold that he no longer even shakes. Aron can see that the fingers on his left hand are white and covered in ice; they have turned into a solid lump. Matti is trying to work, but he is moving as if he is in a trance.

  ‘Have a rest, Matti,’ Sven says. ‘When we get back this evening you can thaw out.’

  Matti leans on a pine tree but becomes more and more confused. He starts speaking Finnish, and after a while they can hear him singing quietly to himself.

  The others keep on working. They have to meet their quota.

  But in the twilight Matti is suddenly nowhere to be seen. Aron, Grisha and Sven have chopped down a tree; when they look up, they see only meandering footprints in the snow. Sven follows the trail, but loses it in the darkness. They shout for Matti in all directions, but there is no reply.

  They search and search, until the whistles summoning them to gather for the march back to the camp echo through the trees. They have to leave, without Matti.

  The foreman yells and swears when the prisoners have been counted and it becomes clear that one is missing, but there is nothing he can do except lead the column back to the camp.

  That night, the temperature outside is minus eighteen degrees. Aron listens to the wind and thinks about the endless forest. About Matti.

  The next morning, the brigade marches off once more; the men are divided into groups and head for their work stations. Thin snowflakes are falling, but the forest is silent. They pick up their saws.

  But then they hear someone singing loudly among the trees. The language is Finnish, and they recognize the voice.

  ‘Ma
tti!’ Sven shouts.

  He stumbles away, and Aron follows him.

  The sound of the song leads them to Matti. Eventually, they find him at the bottom of a tall pine tree, slumped in the snow, holding his fists up in front of him; they are two clumps of ice. Small, thin mushrooms are sticking up out of the snow all around him in a wide semicircle.

  ‘Matti?’

  Sven rushes forward and gives his comrade a shake, but there is no response.

  Matti is no longer listening; his eyes are frozen shut, and he is singing at the top of his voice.

  Slowly, Aron walks over to the pine tree. He looks at the strange semicircle in the snow; he can’t understand how mushrooms can grow in the middle of winter.

  Suddenly he realizes what the mushrooms are.

  They are fingers.

  The Finn has snapped off his frozen fingers and arranged them in front of him in the snow.

  Matti goes on singing, bellowing with his eyes tight shut.

  Aron stares silently at the fingers. Ten of them, pointing accusingly up at the sky.

  Matti is taken to the sick bay for a speedy amputation of his hands and feet, but it doesn’t help. He dies the same night.

  Something turns to iron inside Aron that day. The softness is gone, and the suffering around him no longer affects him so deeply. He notices the sick and the dying in the camp but lowers his head and keeps on walking.

  Both he and Sven become more cautious in their dealings with other prisoners in the camp, but new groups are constantly arriving. And many of them are eager to talk.

  For a few weeks they work with an American, Max Hingley from Chicago, who came to the new country as a committed communist at the end of the twenties and ended up as a slave labourer on a canal-building project two years later. They work together in the forest every day, then suddenly Hingley is gone. The word is that he was taken from his hut during the night and sentenced by a troika the very next day. No one knows why.

  ‘I suppose they thought he was a spy,’ someone says.

  ‘A spy?’ Sven says. ‘But Hingley was a committed communist.’

  There seem to be new rules now. And new opinions to replace the views that are dead and gone.

  A young Soviet prisoner joins their brigade and is placed on its northern outpost, in the Swedes’ little group. He introduces himself as Vladimir Nikolajevitch Jegerov; he tells them that he is one year older than Aron and comes from Kiev in the Ukraine. He explains that he has such a long name because it is normal practice to take the father’s name as one’s middle name.

  ‘But call me Vlad,’ he says. ‘That’s easier for a foreigner.’

  ‘Call me Aron,’ Aron says in Russian.

  In a brigade full of silent men, Vlad is talkative. His mother was Russian and his father Ukrainian, but both are dead now. It was the great famine that took them, two years ago. Vladimir was sentenced to four years in a labour camp for hiding half a loaf. He misses Ukrainian bread, both white and black.

  ‘I also miss the stewed meat we used to have,’ he says. ‘And the apples, the apricots, the potatoes, the sugar, the cream, and those wonderful sweet cherries …’

  Aron listens open-mouthed. Dribbling. He had decided not to make any friends, but when Vlad talks about food, he could listen to him for ever.

  Vlad has learned to survive in the camp. He has made himself a pair of boots from birch bark, his padded jacket has no holes in it, and somehow he manages to hold on to his sheepskin hat in spite of all the thieves. He also has a stock of paper and his own pen, and he teaches Aron how to write in Russian.

  There are many new letters to get to grips with, and some letters that Aron recognizes don’t sound the same here, but slowly he learns the alphabet. He writes a Russian word in the way he thinks it would be written using Swedish letters, while Vlad writes it in Russian. Then they compare.

  After almost three years, Russian is the language of everyday life for Aron. He speaks Swedish only with Sven, and those occasions are becoming increasingly rare.

  Vlad has somehow managed to hide away a fresh onion, which he shares with Aron. While they are eating he says that he saw Max Hingley being taken away by men in grey uniforms. They were from the secret police, the GPU, and they came in the middle of the night.

  ‘It was because he was a foreigner.’

  Aron stiffens, clutching a piece of onion in his hand. ‘A foreigner?’

  ‘The secret police assume all foreigners are spies.’

  They munch on the onion in silence, and after a moment Aron says, ‘I’m not a spy.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Vlad smiles and leans forward. ‘You ought to become a Soviet citizen … you and Sven. You ought to get yourselves Russian passports, then you can travel freely when you’re released.’

  ‘We don’t want to become Soviet citizens,’ Aron says. ‘We want to go home.’

  Vlad nods. ‘But you have to get out of here first. Then you can go home.’

  ‘Yes, but how do we do that?’

  ‘You take passports from those who don’t need them.’

  At first, Aron doesn’t understand. ‘But surely everyone needs their passport?’

  Vlad shakes his head. ‘Not if they’re fitili.’

  Fitili means candle wicks. It is the word used to describe those who will soon be extinguished – the dying prisoners.

  Aron listens, and thinks things over.

  He talks to Sven that night, in the darkness between the bunks when the other prisoners have fallen asleep, when they are snoring and snuffling loudly.

  Aron whispers in Swedish, passing on Vlad’s warning and his advice.

  ‘He means … steal a Soviet passport?’ Sven whispers back when Aron has finished. ‘Turn thief in order to become a citizen? Is that what he said?’

  Aron nods. ‘Take a passport. From a dying candle.’

  They stare at each other in the darkness, listening to the snores and snuffles.

  Gerlof

  The interview at Villa Kloss was over; everyone had begun to get to their feet. It took the longest for Gerlof, who was there in his capacity as an independent witness, but he was deliberately being slow. He had remained silent while Cecilia Sander was questioning Jonas, but had kept an eye on Kent Kloss the whole time. The owner of the Ölandic Resort was smiling now, as if he had won a tennis match.

  Gerlof wanted to wipe that smile off his face, so as he leaned on his stick for support he looked over at Kent and said quietly, as if he was just chatting, ‘By the way, I saw your dredger passing by Stenvik back in the spring … I presume it was on the way down to the Ölandic?’

  In fact, it was John who had seen the dredger out in the Sound, but Kloss didn’t know that.

  He nodded. ‘Yes, we had to clear some mud.’

  ‘From the bottom of the harbour?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Kloss wasn’t really listening; he glanced at his watch.

  ‘I know there’s a harbour at the resort,’ Gerlof went on. ‘It started off as a narrow steamboat jetty and was converted into a cargo dock after the war …’

  Kloss didn’t say anything; he was already moving away from the table. But Gerlof stuck out his walking stick, almost barring Kent’s way, and asked, ‘Do you use the cargo dock?’

  Kloss stopped and looked at him. ‘Well, you say cargo dock – it’s really just an old stone jetty that we’ve shored up with concrete.’

  ‘And you keep it in working order?’

  ‘Yes – as I said, we usually do some dredging in the spring; otherwise it just silts up.’

  ‘So what’s the depth by the jetty?’

  ‘A few metres … Three, maybe?’

  Gerlof waved his stick at the picture of the Ophelia, which was still lying on the table. ‘That’s deep enough,’ he said. ‘I should think the draught of that ship is around two metres. So she could easily have been moored at the Ölandic’s jetty.’

  Kent Kloss stared at him. Gerlof definitely had his atte
ntion now. He went on, ‘No one down in Borgholm seems to have seen her, and since the waters off this part of the coast are so shallow, there aren’t many other harbours. So was she in your cargo dock?’

  Kent Kloss didn’t say anything, but now Cecilia Sander was also beginning to show an interest. She had gathered up her papers, but suddenly she looked at Kent. ‘Was she your ship?’

  Kent Kloss turned to face her, and answered tersely, ‘The answer is no. Not really.’

  ‘You mean you don’t know?’

  ‘She wasn’t ours, I do know that … but it’s possible we might have been using her.’ Kloss lowered his gaze. ‘We had a ship in the dock at midsummer, but I don’t remember her name … She was delivering cargo; we’d rented part of the hold.’

  ‘For what?’ Cecilia Sander demanded.

  Kent looked down at his hands and studied his nails. ‘For … food supplies,’ he said eventually.

  ‘It was fish,’ Gerlof said. ‘Wasn’t it?’

  ‘Fish, exactly. They brought fish from the Baltic to our restaurants. They unloaded over the midsummer holiday, then they left.’

  ‘You must have had some contact with them?’

  ‘Not since then.’ Kent Kloss shrugged, but Gerlof thought it was an act, that he was making an effort to appear relaxed. ‘And it was our kitchen manager who dealt with the delivery. I didn’t even know what Captain Herberg looked like; all I have is the phone number of the company in Hamburg.’

  ‘And have you seen the ship’s log?’ Sander asked.

  ‘I’m sorry, I haven’t,’ Kent said.

  Sander jotted something down in her notebook. She nodded to herself, but didn’t seem entirely satisfied.

  Gerlof wasn’t satisfied either. A delivery of fish from overseas. Perhaps that sounded logical at this time of year, but was it that simple?

  He looked out of the window and saw Jonas on the decking, talking to a middle-aged man in a jacket. The man’s expression was serious and, occasionally, he glanced over towards the house. Jonas’s father, Niklas, Gerlof guessed.