Page 150 of The Living and the Dead

He threw Killian’s Christmas present at the wall. The small package fell to the floor.

Then Killian died, and Sander lost his true north. That was how it felt, as if the very structure of his life had fallen to pieces. In the cover of darkness, he went back to retrieve the present late on Christmas Day, to have one last thing to remember his friend by. The package was just where they’d left it, as if it had been waiting for him.

In that moment, Sander found the money in the bag from the carpentry shop. Jakob’s money. It was in the hatch he and Killian had built in the floor. The beer bunker.

Alone in the deserted cabin, a switch flipped inside him. Everything was already ruined, and he was going to go away. That was the fate he pictured. He wanted to wipe the slate even cleaner. Take off without leaving anything behind.

As though moral order must also be restored.

Suddenly he could see himself very clearly, as if he were looking at another person. Memory can create its own distance, a sort of separation in the soul. The light of the flash made him look colder than he felt.

The Söderströms’ house symbolized everything he hated about Skavböke. Everything he wanted to get away from, everything that had hurt him and the people he loved. Killian, Felicia, Jakob, everyone. It wasn’t death beaming like a dark sun over the village in that long-ago winter, but the dark cruelty of the Söderström family.

His hands, as they lit the dynamite, were steady and sure as a tailor’s. His head was quiet and still.

Sander remembered a barking dog coming after him, jaws snapping at him. He wriggled out of his flannel and ran on. The shirt fell to the ground somewhere out there in the mud.

Then came the landslide.

He did it to free himself from this place, from what had once been. Instead, he became even more tightly bound to all ofit.

He could have shared all of this with Jakob, and maybe it would have been true. But he didn’t. Instead, he just said:

“See you around, Jakob. I hope.”

And he began to walk to his car, which wasn’t far down the gravel road; he walked into the darkness and the slowly expanding dawn.

116

A memory, that was all Killian was now, once more, one of many.

That summer, Sander combed through every memory, one by one, as if he’d lost something and each memory was a box to search inside. No matter how hard he tried, he came right back around, in a vicious circle, to Isidor Enoksson’s words: As high as heaven is over the earth, so great is His mercy to those who fear Him.

—

Mercy. Could itbe?

Or maybe the operative word in that proverb, in Sander’s case, wasfear.

Was this a sign too?

All Sander had done was reunite with his friend after such a long time, and like a storm all the fear and brutality came crashing right backin.

—

One Friday evening in late August, he stepped onto the lawn at home on Backavägen. The house was quiet, the kids were asleep and Olivia was on the phone with a colleague, talking about a meeting scheduled for the next day. The sky was overcast. The day had been stuffy and humid and he’d had to suffer through the last few lessons of the weekwith a headache and very little patience. His back pain was starting to return.

Sander’s face had hardened with the years, just as Siri had suspected long ago that it would. When he peered into the mirror, he sometimes felt he was looking at a face that wasn’t his. Now it was starting to soften again.

Or maybe he was seeing it as it really was for the first time.

Another sign: he’d stopped having the dream.

The lawn had lost its color. Southern Sweden was suffering a drought, and on Backavägen they respected the watering restrictions. The news ran reports about forest fires in the nearby counties of Småland and Västergötland. He thought of those fires, picturing flames eating at trees and biting the ground, making all living things flee.

All living things flee. Yes, maybe for a while. But not forever.

Sooner or later, you have to turn back.