Page 113 of The Living and the Dead

“So you stopped off in old Skavböke after all?” his father said as he stepped into the front hall.

“As it turns out.”

“Because of this terrible situation with Filip?”

“Yes.” He closed the door behind him to keep the heat out. “Mostly that.”

His father nodded and tapped his cane on the floor.

“It’s so terrible,” his mother said, shaking her head.

“Yes, almost like before,” said his dad. “Let’s talk about something else instead.”

They talked about something else instead. But eventually, conversation petered out.

“You’ve always said it was your fault,” said his mom. “Killian. But it wasn’t—no one else thought it was. What do you have to feel guilty about?”

There it was again. Like a shadow behind him in the forest, a figure following him, moving from tree to tree. Hands preparing to grab or attack.

“I survived, Killian didn’t. I got to get married, have a job, house, kids, everything. I got a whole life. He got nothing.”

“But that’s not your fault.”

Old words writhed inside Sander, echoing and banging and crawling to the surface from a deep, dark place inside him.

I guess maybe I should just leave right now.

Sander had thrown the present at the wall. He could still hear the thud.

Because what else can you do, Killian? When you come to me, and I don’t help you, what do you do? Just run away. Go ahead, because you never could solve anything on your own. Don’t just stand there like a fucking idiot,leave,for Christ’s sake!

His words had driven Killian off and caused his death, and Sander couldn’t even be punished for what he’d done. In some ways, it would have been easier if he could have faced judgment, first judgment and then sentencing, and then a period of suffering inflicted upon him from the outside. Then, perhaps, penance. That way he could have moved on. Mercy?

His mother asked after Olivia and the kids. Maybe they were the mercy, in the middle of all this: his children.

“What luck,” she liked to say, “that you stayed. Otherwise we never would have had such a close relationship with our grandchildren.”

She was right. And that probably wasn’t such a small thing, either.

That you stayed. Yes, in some sense he had; in some ways not. It was half an hour from Skavböke to Halmstad, a little more from Skavböke to Snöstorp. Sander had left and had also stayed, an ambivalent state that might have left more of a mark on him than he wanted to acknowledge. When his parents saw the kids it was always at their place in Snöstorp, never out here in Skavböke. The kids had asked, of course, why they never went to see Grandma and Grandpa Eriksson. They visited their other set of grandparents almost every week. Sander had always come up with excuses, explanations: it’s so faraway, it’s more fun here, Grandma and Grandpa like to get out of the house. He could make up a lot of reasons, but one day he would run out, and the kids were getting older. He wouldn’t be able to rely on this evasiveness for much longer.

—

When he left Skavböke that afternoon, the fields were shimmering and the sun warmed the ground.

The late-afternoon light was tender; a great, kindhearted hand warming everything it touched, and since it was said to be God’s hand, it reached every last corner, made the world shine.

He parked his car by the cemetery in Oskarström and found himself lingering behind the wheel for a moment, but eventually he got out and stood at the edge of the parking lot to gaze down at the spot where his friend was buried.

It probably looked like he was getting ready. As if he would take a step forward any moment now, start walking down there. But Sander didn’t move.

There was a slight breeze up here. It was pleasant. He told himself that was why he was staying put.

He thought of Sten Persson’s funeral, his dream about Killian that was stronger than Sander and had dragged him here. Maybe that’s so: everything alive is drawn toward death, and Sander was drawn to Skavböke, to Killian.

He gazed at the headstones and wondered which of them belonged to his friend. Something shifted in his chest. His eyes fell on the trees, the paths, the fields. Almost everything was the same here. The map of his childhood.

A sprinkler moved rhythmically back and forth. Its jets billowed over the green grass like a fan. He returned to the car. Behind him, the dead tried to penetrate the veil, as they always did; they wanted to come through, but no one noticed.