Page 49 of The Living and the Dead

“Why didn’t you drive in the first place, though?” Sander asked. “You’ve got a bunch of cars.”

“Dad thought we should walk,” Filip said, and then, to Killian: “We have to park a ways away, so we can walk the last stretch.”

“Not while carrying dynamite,” Mikael said grimly.

Filip snapped at him: “He’s going to say it was my fault, that it was my idea to take the car. Because he thinks I’m the lazy one. Don’t you get it?”

Mikael didn’t respond. Filip heaved a loud sigh and gazed out the window. After a moment, he yanked his headphones from his coat pocket and put them on. The music, fast and harsh, leaked into the rest of the car.

They inched down the county road. Sander tried to meet Mikael’s gaze in the rearview mirror.

“Is it always like that?” he asked. “With your dad, I mean. Like the time we were sitting on the log to pick off the wild boar.”

“He means well. He’s preparing us to take over the farm. It’s been in our family for so long, all the way back to my great-great-grandfather. But times are hard now. He doesn’t want it to fail. So whenIfail…”

“But you’re not a failure!”

“That’s not how he sees it.”

“Why does he want you two to haul a crate of dynamite through the whole village, though? It’s so dangerous!”

Mikael shrugged. “To toughen us up, I guess. He does this stuff sometimes. And it’s notthatdangerous.”

Killian swerved slightly toward the center line to avoid a pothole the size of a serving platter, deeper than a bucket. Sander’s father had called in to report it, but no one had come out yet. That was how it went out here. Things in town were important; Skavböke wasn’t. No surprise there.

Filip had to listen to rants about how he wasn’t more like Mikael; Mikael had to hear that he was useless. That he needed to be tougher. Which meant nothing could be good enough, everything was a vicious cycle of disappointment, and maybe that wasn’t much of a surprise either. It was like a pothole in the road. It just was.

They could see a glimpse of the Grenbergs’ house on the other side of a field. Mikael’s eyes followed it, like he was searching for something, almost longingly, but he didn’t say anything.

“Do you even want to take over the farm?” Sander asked.

Mikael laughed. “It’s better than nothing, at least.”

“Is that the alternative? Nothing?”

“Yeah. Isn’t it?” He gazed dejectedly at the road again and placed a hand on Killian’s shoulder. “You can stop over here, and we’ll walk the last bit, like Filip said. That probably is the best plan after all.”

36

Christmas in Skavböke was usually a very special time for Sander. The comforting peace of the holiday arrived gently, tenderly, like a wave of calm over the countryside on the afternoon of December twenty-third. Cars returned home and fell silent; the last school day of the year was over, and everything lit up. It brought a remarkable sense of belonging, to know that everyone else in the village, and maybe the whole country, was doing exactly the same thing and feeling the same way as he did.

But something happened when they lost Mikael. Death extended its rays like a dark sun and Sander had started to think strange thoughts.

Almost nothing was more important than words, in his view; words not only described the world but shaped it, created it, and therefore they could also changeit.

But words weren’t enough. He was beginning to understand that now.

The wordfearmust have been invented by someone who didn’t know what it was to be afraid;rageby someone who had never been angry. It’s the same with the wordlove. It’s just something you can use to fill an empty space in your mouth, a silent maw that needs to be plugged. Sander, as it would turn out, was not the only one who felt this way; it was as if the whole village had begun to lose faith.

He wondered what caused all of this, why it happened at all and why it was happening to him in particular, at this particular moment in time, but he couldn’t come up with any explanation.

Maybe that was why he finally said it out loud, at the dinner table:

“I’m going to apply to Stockholm University for this fall. My grades are good enough.”

They were shocked into silence, both his dad and mom. But he didn’t wait for them to catch up. Instead he told them about the department head from Juridicum, Magnus Ardelius, and as he spoke it felt more and more unnatural, almost cruel. Mean. As though his longing to get away was a violation of an agreement he hadn’t previously been aware of, but which was now becoming painfully clear.

“I think that’s wonderful,” his father said at last, his voice subdued. “That’s great news, in the midst of all this awful stuff. Isn’t it, Eva?”