A Happy Little Island

By Lars Sund and Peter Graves

In the beginning the page was blank and without form, and the scribe sat in front of it, a world forming inside his head. The world grew large, spilling out of him and on to the page. The scribe shaped the world into an island. He named it Fagerö, and populated it with an assortment of likely and plausibly unlikely characters, and saw that it was good for his purposes.

The people of Fagerö were often divided against each other but united in their appreciation of their happy little island. Then the dead bodies began to arrive: hordes of them, washing ashore with no identification and no one to claim them.

The island was changing, and the small-town quirkiness becoming less restrained. And the bodies kept arriving, forcing Fagerö’s inhabitants to confront the unhappy truth that, even on their remote island, the world’s horrors and injustices could not be ignored.

This was prescient at the time of writing and is sadly relevant in 2016, the year of this English translation.

A Happy Little Island is an elaborate tale told with style and intelligence. The number and variety of Sund’s Dramatis Personae make Fagerö the perfect stage for an encounter between common humanity and the insularity and fear of change that affect all cultures.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vagabond Voices
• Release date: Nov 9, 2016
• ISBN: 9781908251756

Book preview

I

The First Human Being

To:policedepartment@countycouncil

From:[e-mail]

Subject:unidentified body

At 12.51 today emergency services alerted the police that the body of an unknown male was in a boathouse at Tunnhamn on Fagerö. The inspector and Senior Constable Skogster proceeded there immediately and confirmed the accuracy of the report.

The body is that of a young man aged 25-30, height 176 cm, weight c. 70 kg, slender build, narrow face, sandy-coloured hair, blue eyes. No further particular distinguishing features. A small scar on the left side of the neck was noted but not considered relevant to the man’s death.

The deceased was wearing a white T-shirt and white underpants but no trousers. The deceased was not carrying any documents that enabled identification. According to preliminary reports the body was discovered on the small island called Skogsskär c. 10 nautical miles south-east of Fagerö. Those who found the body have not yet made themselves known but it is expected they will be traced and questioned in the course of the evening.

Kangarn’s boys were the ones who found him.

Look, there’s their boat coming across the firth at top speed. Heading straight down towards Skogsskär, which points to the crew being familiar with these difficult waters. You have to keep the stunted pine on the skerry lined up with the cairn on the island of Kårdiskan in order to avoid the reefs which some malevolent power has placed in the middle of the firth. Their boat, a Big Buster with a forty horsepower outboard, came into Kangarn’s hands a couple of years ago as part of a business deal – details are hazy. The boys have the use of the vessel most of the time since Kangarn is a very busy man who rarely has time to go out in a boat.

You can hear the powerful throb of the Evinrude motor echoing over the firth. The propeller cuts a long frothy wound of white foam in the sea. Every now and again the boat’s aluminium hull hits the groundswell with a dull thud and water splashes up around the blunt stem.

St Erik is half-reclining at the steering pulpit, one hand on the wheel, one foot resting on the rail, a lighted cigarette in his mouth. The wind snatches the smoke from his lips when he breathes out and it ruffles his dirty blond hair, which is the colour of the reed thatch on an old boathouse. In the bows his twin brother St Olof is doubling up as lookout and marksman. He has binoculars hanging round his neck and a Sauer & Sohn drilling gun on his knee: the rifle barrel is loaded for seals, the two shotgun barrels for scoter and eider. The fact that the grey seal is a protected species and the spring hunting season for seabirds is over is of no great concern to St Olof. If the opportunity presents itself he will shoot, whatever the hunting laws may stipulate.

So there, dear reader, you have them – Kangarn’s boys.

On the Gunnarsholmar islands and in neighbouring parts of the archipelago they are called St Erik and St Olof. There is more than a hint of ill-concealed irony in the names, for sanctity and Christian virtue are not exactly traits that characterise Kangarn’s boys. When their names come up in conversation among respectable people, tongues are sharp with condemnation. The general feeling is that St Erik and St Olof will sooner or later end up in a penal institution atoning for their sins.

A couple of empty beer bottles are rolling around the bottom of the boat. There is a box in which three gleaming silver salmon with bloody gills are lying on top of a dozen or so flounders from which the seawater is still dripping. It’s a fine catch, no doubt about that, but it does beg a few questions. Neither Kangarn nor his sons own the fishing rights to waters out by Skogsskär – nor anywhere else as far as people are aware.

St Erik throttles back, turns to starboard and lets the Buster glide in close beneath the steep southern shore of Skogsskär, where the water is deep and there are no rocks. The cliffs of the skerry roll past like the backdrop of a revolving stage. The herring gulls utter harsh excited screams as they fly up in alarm. Out of habit St Erik’s eyes sweep along the water’s edge. You can never be sure what the sea decides to deliver up: timber washed overboard from the deck-load of some vessel, or boxes, cans, buoys or nets that have come adrift. The summer before, St Erik and St Olof salvaged a drum of petrol that was still half-full.

All of a sudden St Erik heaves himself up from the steering pulpit and shades his eyes with his hand.

Hey, Olli! Looks like there’s a bloody seal over there by the skerry. Good one, too, he calls to his brother in a low voice, just loud enough to be heard above the throb of the outboard.

St Olof, who is just about to fire off a shot at the circling gulls, lowers his gun.

Where do you mean?

Over there by the cliff.

St Erik points; St Olof raises his binoculars and searches.

That’s not a seal, St Olof says.

What the fuck is it, then?

St Erik puts the outboard motor into neutral and lets the boat drift close into shore. He judges the distance skilfully and at just the right moment gives the propeller a couple of turns in reverse and brings the boat to a halt with its prow just a couple of metres from whatever it is in the water. He puts the outboard in neutral again, clambers over the thwarts to his brother and leans over the rail.

St Olof is right. It isn’t a seal.

It takes a few moments for their brains to process what their eyes are seeing.

The keel of the boat thuds against a rock at the water’s edge.

For fuck’s sake! It’s a body! St Olof rasps and it sounds as if his mouth is lined with sandpaper.

Fucking hell!

Jesus Christ!

They fall silent. Their eyes meet. Each of them notices the cold light of fear in the other’s eyes. They look away simultaneously.

A moment later St Olof says to his brother: Bloody hell, Erkki …

Then stops short.

His mouth still sounds as if it’s lined with sandpaper but now of a slightly finer grade. St Olof is staring into the distance, right out to the open horizon. He can’t find a fixed point out there; his eyes flit helplessly across the empty sea but are constantly drawn back to what is closest, however much he tries to prevent them. He has another try and this time he manages to get a firmer grip on his words: Oh fuck, Erkki … what do you think we should do?

St Erik doesn’t answer. He supports himself with his hands on the rail and stares at the body down in the shallows. The body is resting face down, legs slightly apart. It seems to be a man or a boy, dressed in a white T-shirt and blue jeans, but his feet are bare.

What if it’s someone from here? St Olof rasps in his sandpaper voice.

St Erik still doesn’t answer. He is breathing deeply.

Shall we turn him over … see if he’s got a wallet on him?

St Erik shakes his head. Still says nothing. The hull of the boat thumps against a rock again. The powerful outboard motor, still in neutral, makes a dull throb. The circling gulls scream, their shadows gliding across the surface of the water.

Bloody cool jeans, he’s got, St Erik mutters to himself without taking his eyes off the blue jeans.

Kangarn’s boys took him to Fagerö. He arrived in Tunnhamn wrapped in an old tarpaulin they happened to have lying in the boat and he was welcomed there by common gulls, those shrill white mourners of the rocky shore. Ever since the old days Tunnhamn has had a special place for such cold and silent guests from the sea. It was a small windowless shed, grey, leaky and crooked, which stood a little to one side among nettles and hogweed and cow parsley. It was surrounded by dead boats and rusting engine blocks and the skeletons of worn-out fish traps, and old floats and split oars and broken cans and oil drums and all the rest of the rubbish that had accumulated there over the years.

That’s where Kangarn’s boys took him and they swore the whole way because he was much heavier than seemed reasonable, as though some unseen power was trying to pull him down into the ground. They laid him on the floor of the shed and threw the tarpaulin over him – it landed squint so that his bare legs stuck out from under it. In the half-darkness of the shed they were as white as candle wax.

Then Kangarn’s boys suddenly realised how overcrowded the shed had become now that the body was lying there and they hurried out into the fresh air. But once they were outside they just stood there, their strong arms hanging loose like the fenders on the side of a boat. They didn’t know what to do with themselves. Properly speaking they should have reported their find to the police immediately, but neither of them was very keen on that idea. St Erik and St Olof wanted as little to do with the authorities as possible. Perhaps they thought they had already done enough by bringing the body to Fagerö – after all, they could easily have left him in the sea. That, in fact, had been their first thought – just leave him and push off.

Something had changed their minds, however, though it wasn’t easy to say what.

At last St Erik – he was used to taking command since he was precisely twenty-three minutes older than St Olof – began walking towards the harbour with his brother in tow. It was a relief to get away from that shed. Down at the harbour each of them lit a cigarette and both remained silent for a long while. A light breeze ruffled the surface of the water in the harbour basin into little waves that resembled fish scales and slapped constantly against the underside of the landing stages. The air carried the sweet smell of tarred timber warmed by the sun, of seawater salt and the sharp iodine of rotting bladderwrack washed ashore. Swallows were flying in and out of the open doorway of Backas Isaksson’s boathouse, their twittering echoing between the walls. A wagtail on the ferry mooring flipped its long tail feathers, gulls shrieked and farther inland a willow warbler played his little flute while a flycatcher chirped his simple stanza. The sun coated the sea with a glimmering sheen so bright you had to screw up your eyes to look into it.

When you squint into the sun’s reflection on the sea and hear the sounds of the waves and the calls of the birds you can feel the tight iron band of fear around your chest easing – for a moment anyway. Because you are afraid, aren’t you, but you can’t admit it either to yourself or to your brother. You can’t admit it even to him, even though you are twins. It is no ordinary fear that tightens the iron band around your chest, not the corrosive childhood fear of the dark and of sea trolls and of Kangarn’s hard fists. Nor is it the sharp stab of panic that pierces your ribcage when the foaming white breakers on the Estrevlarna rocks rear up without warning in front of the boat; nor is it any other kind of ordinary fear. This is true primal terror, a terror that penetrates to a man’s bowels, that kicks his feet from under him and makes it impossible to flee. For it comes from within.

Primal terror – the realisation that you are doomed to extinction. The world holds no greater terror.

And you stand there squinting into the sun shining on the sea as the iron band tightens round your chest once more. Pictures are constantly flashing through your head: at one moment they are images of a stiff wet face, at the next of two white legs. You have no words to clothe your fear, but you must say something, anything at all. If you don’t you will be crushed as if you were a gull’s egg trampled by a boot – the shell splits and the yellow and the white run out. With difficulty you inhale, drag in air. And you say the first words that come to mind:

Fuck, Erkii. Who do you think it was?

You say that, or something like that. It’s not important. Words are just condensed air. The important thing is to hear your own voice.

St Erik didn’t bother to answer. He was squatting on his heels, forearms resting on his knees, which is how he often sat when he was thinking hard about something. He spat and carefully studied the gob of saliva as it slid viscously along the smooth surface of a black pebble. But St Olof can still hear his own voice. His mouth said:

Do you think he was from the mainland? Or from the south? That seems likely given where we found him …

Shut your gob, for fuck’s sake! St Erik shouted, harsh and shrill. St Olof jumped back as if he had been splashed with hot engine oil.

What the hell! I just thought …

You think too fucking much!

Welcome and Unwelcome

Kangarn’s boys must have told someone about the guest they had placed in that slightly out-of-the-way shed. An anonymous telephone call was made to the emergency services, which then contacted the Storby police station. The rumours – big, black and white, and noisy as oystercatchers – flew out to all thirty-two points of the compass. The birds of rumour winged their way over the whole of Fagerö and flew on over the other inhabited islands in the Gunnarsholmar archipelago – Lemlot, Busö, Nagelskär and Aspskär. And from there to Hemsö, Stormskär, Klemetsö, Båklandet, Kökar and other islands familiar to us from books. The red-beaked birds were in a hurry. We are not talking about hours here: within little more than half an hour the whole archipelago knew that Kangarn’s boys had found a body out on Skogsskär.

A visitor from the open sea.

It was a long time since the last one.

Travellers to Fagerö and the rest of the Gunnarsholmar islands usually arrive from Örsund on the ferry Arkipelag or by Eli’s taxi boat or sometimes in their own boats. The passengers who come ashore in Tunnhamn from the Arkipelag tend to be familiar faces: Abrahamsson, who lives on Busö, on his way home from a business trip to the capital; K-D Mattsson returning from a meeting of the Archipelago Delegation; Olar’s Mikaela who has been to the dentist in Örsund with her daughter. Algot Skogster – the fellow who drives the milk lorry to the Örsund dairy twice a week – carefully eases his heavy truck down the ramp from the ferry to the quay. Then there’s Axmar, a bit unsteady on his feet, the muffled clink from his old green army rucksack hinting at what took him over to the mainland.

The Arkipelag brings in homecomers making nostalgic visits. And seamen who work week on, week off, on the car-ferry runs to overseas ports. And school pupils forced to go to the mainland if they want to progress to the upper secondary school or vocational college. And conscripts coming home on leave. And many other Fagerö people who need to cross the waters of Norrfjärden for whatever reason. Tunnhamn becomes crowded when the ferry comes in.

There are also summer tourists and sailing visitors from the north. They arrive after midsummer and disappear again at the end of July. The tourists are expected and are welcome. Their arrival provides the economy of the archipelago with a necessary life-giving injection. Pettersson at Östergrannas, who in addition to his farm runs Storby Camping and Cabins, will testify to that, as will Birger at the Fagerö General Store and Verna and Ing-Britt at the Eider Café, and other local business people.

Few visitors approach the Gunnarsholmar islands from the south, however. That’s where you encounter the open sea. The waters of the Kvigharufjärden and the Kallskärsfjärden are notoriously difficult to navigate and they are avoided by commercial shipping and yachtsmen alike; only sailors with expert local knowledge are to be found there. Many of the travellers from the south have come a long distance and few of them came voluntarily. They are often in a very poor condition when they arrive. The only decent thing to do when you come across travellers of that kind is to contact the police so that they can come and deal with the poor creatures.

Fortunately, such visitors from the south are rare nowadays. It must be ten years since the last ones came. That was an autumn of bad storms when the cargo ship Park Victory ran on to the rocks at Estrevlarna and sank. Many things floated ashore on the Gunnarsholmar islands when that happened.

If Antonio Vivaldi had served as a precentor in our part of the archipelago instead of teaching the violin in the Venice conservatory, it’s more than likely he would have called his best-known composition The Seven Seasons. Because out here in the outer archipelago we have three seasons in addition to the usual four. The late autumn freeze when the sea ice will neither bear nor break is a season all of its own, as is the spring thaw for the same reason. And as well as those two, Vivaldi would have needed to create a third extra movement in order to make an archipelago version of The Seasons, for there is a week or so around the time May is turning into June when the outer archipelago is subject to peculiar climatological conditions that can neither be called late spring nor early summer. It’s as if nature decides to take a short break after all the forceful budding and sprouting of spring, to give itself a pause to draw breath and gather strength before bursting forth in luxuriant green. The birch trees stand there with shaggy tufts of moss on their branches, the buds on the bird cherry are ready to open, the eider are relaxing in their down-lined nests after the effort of laying and are happy just to be keeping their eggs warm, and the flies, biding their time in the good heat of the dunghill, are in no hurry to fly out and plague both man and beast. Existence is hard and the archipelago allows little respite, which is why a seventh season is needed to give nature time to fill its lungs for the work of the growing season.

The people, too, seize this opportunity to recuperate after the long winter and the urgency of spring. In the old days it was good to live through this bright and airy season of the year. The spring fishery for large herring was for the most part over by this point, as was the wildfowling, though that was more for pleasure than practical purposes. Potatoes had been planted and the sheep taken out to the island grazings where they would live half-wild until well into autumn. The school children were set free from their winter-long incarceration behind desks and were allowed to run as free as the sheep.

It was a time when only the most essential jobs were done and everything else was put off until the morrow. People sat out on benches placed against the south wall of their boathouses, stretched out their legs and took deep gulps of fresh air to inflate their chests like bellows. And they smoked and contemplated life and made sure there was time to drink coffee. Women hung away winter clothes, aired the bedding, took out the inner windows, put up summer curtains, scrubbed floors, did the laundry, washed the mats, repotted plants and dealt with all the things necessary to set up the household for summer. They rushed back and forth like tree sparrows with newly hatched chicks in the nest, but they too took the time to stop and draw breath now and again. And, for all their haste, they might even be caught humming a tune.

Oh yes, it was good to be alive at that season, so bright, so airy, so filled with hope. And there was always someone who remembered to quote the words spoken by an old man long ago as he sat sunning himself by the boathouse wall one day in May: What a stroke of bloody luck that I didn’t go and shoot myself last winter.

Even though many things have changed now compared with the old days – and most of the people of Fagerö would agree with you on that – those weeks when May meets June are still a time when the people here on Fagerö slow down a little and put off until tomorrow whatever doesn’t actually have to be done today. They change their body clocks to summer time. They seize the chance to put the troubles of winter and stresses of spring behind them.

But then the black and white birds of rumour came flapping along, uttering their shrill cries.

They blocked out the sun. Their shadows moved over the shoreline of Fagerö, over the fields and over the houses, over