The Shapeshifters

by Stefan Spjut

  ‘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 Geta. 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. Knickknacks. 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, bu
t 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.’

  ‘So he didn’t write anything about it?’ Gudrun asked.

  ‘Not a word,’ answered Barbro. ‘He buried it under a layer of concrete inside him. But that summer, when he heard a little boy had been abducted in Dalarna, a crack appeared in the concrete, and the crack widened when he spoke about it to someone he worked with at the radio station. Earlier that day the colleague had discovered that the missing boy’s mother had said that a giant had taken her child. Her account of what had happened was dismissed out of hand as a fantasy brought about by shock and triggered by medication abuse, but the circumstances were made more complicated by the fact that the police found huge footprints in the vicinity. There was no doubt that a larger than average man had been outside the cabin, but they could not establish the extent of his involvement in the kidnapping.

  ‘Sven phoned Magnus’s mother, Mona Brodin. She reluctantly agreed to talk about the giant. It had happened in the evening, so she had not been able to see him clearly. She estimated the giant to be between two and a half to three metres tall. He had not spoken. All he did was pick up the boy and disappear into the darkness of the forest. She had followed, but of course she had not been able to catch up with him.

  ‘Between two and a half to three metres! That was the exact height of the kitchen ceiling in John Bauer’s house in Småland. This indicated to Sven that there could be a connection between the mysterious disappearance of Magnus Brodin and Esther Bauer’s harrowing story. After he had spoken with Mona Brodin and thought about everything she had said, he realised that he had the chance to do something about his betrayal of the Bauer family —because to him it did feel like a betrayal. Bengt Bauer was gone for ever but he might be able to help Magnus Brodin—save him, in fact. Except he did not know how.

  ‘If Magnus Brodin had been carried off by the stallo people, then Sven was obliged to discreetly point the police in the right direction. But Lapland is a vast region and Esther had never told him precisely where John had been when he found the stallo. And even if she had, it was doubtful it would have been of any help after so much time had passed. He made a few tentative phone calls to a couple of police officers he knew personally but they led nowhere, and eventually he began to doubt that there was anything he could do, and perhaps because it was a way of helping him endure this feeling of powerlessness he started questioning the truth of Esther Bauer’s story again, and whether it was so far removed from reality that any further investigation was futile.

  ‘But then there was the squirrel. The squirrel’s eyes had begun to shine inside him. Two small black lamps that came on when he lay in bed at night. They would not leave him in peace. That is why we travelled down to Gränna.

  ‘Of course, it was difficult for me to believe what he told me in the car that day, but I knew we did not have much time left together. I could hardly turn the car around and have his head examined. I didn’t have the heart for it.

  ‘We arrived at the place where Sven said he had seen the squirrel in 1922 and stood there for a while, but no squirrel appeared. Large areas of Björkudden were surprisingly unchanged, Sven said. The facade of the beautiful house was the same shade of red. We met the present owner of Björkudden, Fredrik Dahllöf, who you spoke to, and his daughter, a girl of about six or seven. Naturally Dahllöf was astonished when Uncle Sven stepped into his kitchen out of the blue, and he was no less bewildered when Sven asked about a special squirrel that had belonged to John Bauer. He thought it was some kind of joke. But Sven repeated his question and emphasised how vitally important it was that he told him everything he knew. To underline the gravity Sven explained that the squirrel was connected to the kidnapping of Magnus Brodin. Dahllöf knew about Magnus Brodin, he had read about him in the papers, but he had never heard anything about a squirrel. And what a squirrel from the turn of the century had to do with the kidnapped boy he really could not fathom. That was obvious from his expression.

  ‘Sven started to walk around the room, scanning the walls, and it wasn’t long before Dahllöf became curious and wanted to know what he was looking for. So Sven told him everything. He pointed his stick at the ceiling, and when he asked if it was two metres and seventy-five centimetres high, Dahllöf nodded in confirmation. Sven explained his suspicion: that Magnus Brodin had been stolen by the same person who in 1918 had come to Björkudden to take the three-year-old Bengt Bauer.’

  Barbro placed her hands together and studied them. The nails were cut short and coated with clear varnish.

  ‘We went back out to the car,’ she continued, ‘and I was about to turn the key in the ignition when we heard a small thud on the roof. I jumped and leaned forwards, wondering what could have landed so heavily. A bird? A pine cone? But then something started moving above us, tiny footsteps on the metal. I opened the door and got out. And there was the squirrel, right under my very nose. It was sitting on the roof, watching me, and I saw straight away that something was wrong with it. It looked ill. It was so thin and its fur was patchy and matted.

  ‘Sven was sure this was the same squirrel that he had seen in 1922. It hadn’t aged a day, he said. And when he reached out his hand and rested it on the car roof, his palm cupped like a bowl, the squirrel approached him. With a gentle movement he picked up the little animal in his large hand and pressed it to his chest, and after sitting down in the back seat he said it was Humpe, Bauer’s squirrel, although I thought surely he knew it couldn’t be. “What do you know about it?” he said, stroking the little animal’s coat. “Squirrels don’t live that long,” I answered. “They live for fifteen years at the most. You know that’s what your father said.” “But between you and me,” Sven said, “this is no squirrel. At least, not only a squirrel.” “If you say so,” I said. And then we drove home.’

  ‘So he took it home with him?’ Susso asked.

  Barbro nodded.

  ‘He kept it in his room.’

  ‘Here?’ Susso asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Barbro replied. ‘At first I was against it, naturally, because in all honesty there is not much difference between a squirrel and a rat, but when I noticed how happy the squirrel made him, I relented. He often called me to come and look when it was doing something amusing or unexpected. It was as if it had breathed new life into Sven, and he seemed to have forgotten all about Magnus Brodin, which was just as well, I thought. But then one day Sven was suddenly taken ill. When the ambulance arrived and they put him on the stretcher, he clung onto my hand and made me promise to look after the squirrel.’

  Barbro looked down at the swirling pattern on the Persian rug. It was so big that the parquet flooring was visible only as a thin frieze bordering the skirting boards.

  ‘He was dead by the time we reached the hospital,’ she said. ‘I had to come home, to this empty flat. Which was not entirely empty. It was several days before I gathered enough strength to open the door to his room. In some way I hoped it had all been imagination, that the animal would not be there. But there it sat, of course, right in the middle of the bed, looking at me. I closed the door but I remembered my promise, so I put a bowl of water and some seeds in the room. And I thought: it can’t be happy in there, surely it will die soon. Every time I opened the door, I hoped it would be lying dead in a corner.’

  There was a creak as Barbro moved in the chair.

  ‘After a few months had passed and it had still not died I went into the room and opened the window. I didn’t think that was breaking my promise to Sven. If the squ
irrel wanted to go willingly, then I thought it should be allowed to do so. Later that day, when I looked into the room, it had gone. There are large trees outside, so I expect it jumped onto one of them.’

  Quickly she stroked a curl of hair from her forehead.

  ‘It was an enormous relief, I can tell you.’

  Barbro stood up and looked at Gudrun.

  ‘Shall we have that coffee now?’

  While Barbro was in the kitchen, Susso and Gudrun sat looking through the cuttings. Torbjörn had got up from the sofa to take a closer look at the roller blind. He ran his fingers over the surface. Then he sank back down onto the sofa again, watching Susso, who had lifted the briefcase onto her lap so she could look at it more closely. She slid open the locks one at a time and lifted the lid.

  She found a crumpled plastic bag with a small grey revolver inside it. It looked like a piece of scrap metal. The handle was made of dark wood, almost black with a greasy shine. Scattered around the gun in the bag’s many creases were cartridges, ten at least. She held up the bag so that first Torbjörn and then Gudrun could see what it contained.

  ‘That’s Sven’s pistol,’ Barbro said, walking in carrying a silver tray that rattled with small white porcelain cups. ‘You see, when he was in Petrograd, which was practically a war zone, he asked his father to send him a gun so he would be able to protect himself. His father sent that little pistol by courier. And do you know who gave it to him? The author Verner von Heidenstam. Sven’s father looked after Heidenstam’s horses out at Naddö, so they were as good as friends.’