This Land is no Stranger Sarah Hollister (best biographies to read .txt) đź“–
- Author: Sarah Hollister
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“I would have Nordic Light silenced. Pour gasoline down its throat.” Here was the greatest of the grandees at the meeting, speaking directly to him!
“This is no favor,” the man replied. He did everything but click his heels and give a stiff-armed salute. “Rather it is an honor. And it is also my pleasure.”
The “big shots”—he liked the English phrase—left the operational details to him. The building below now was the agreed-upon target for the night. In the weeks before he had sent in scouts. The reds were foolishly lazy about security. The printing press on the ground floor stood surrounded by rolls and rolls of newsprint. A single match would burn brighter than any Nordic Light. On the second floor were offices, and on the third, a dormitory.
He recruited a pair of Finns, brothers, and a Swede. The brothers had fought in the Winter War against the Russians. The other was a rather unhinged individual whom the man had long admired. During his youth they had both participated in the silly juvenile gang battles that pitted the youths of one village against those from a neighboring one. Such fights were nothing. At most they resulted in bloody noses and blackened eyes. But this fellow always went the extra distance. He cracked skulls and broke bones.
The pale-eyed man fell easily in line with the opinions of his wealthy backers. In his ultra-correct political beliefs he could not be challenged. But deep down he held to a more elemental view. The attack on Nordic Light was simply a heightened version of the village bully boy battles he fought almost weekly during his adolescent years. The stakes might be higher, that was all. The excitement rising in his groin was the same.
He and his men waited without speaking. The Finns smoked. The man felt the night cold reach into his bones. He consulted his pocket watch. Three a.m. He touched the butt-end of the Browning. A thought passed through his mind. Herr Himmler was fond of a wry, outlandish statement, taken from a famous play about the heroic Albert Leo Schlageter. “When I hear the word culture, I reach for my pistol.”
Now the man caressing the Browning was himself Schlageter! He turned to the others. “Iväg!” he commanded curtly. Fly. His three berserkers peeled away and vanished into darkness. He would not see them again.
He stood alone. He was a dark lord, consumed with dreams of blood and fire. The sense of impending victory was palpable. His mouth had gone dry. He wondered if the same affliction affected other great warriors.
Seventeen minutes later by his watch, a soft pinpoint glow emerged from the town’s darkness. Here is the real light of the North, he thought. The flames below opened like the petals of a yellow rose. Soon the fire lit the whole wooden building, even as it ate the structure alive. He could hear the alarm bells. A curious quality of frigid air: while up close sounds could seem muffled, far off they carried eerily well. Human cries came to him, shouts, pleadings. Or perhaps those occurred only in the man’s imagination.
The volunteer brigade arrived too late. Against the fire’s beautiful radiance the man could pick out teams of rescuers rushing forward. The tiny figures threw their ladders against the side of the building. But the ladders were made of wood, and they burned, too.
31.
Leaving Sveg and the giant wooden bear sculpture behind, Brand and Hammar drove on, farther into the mountains, toward Västvall. She wondered if he was leading her straight back into trouble. The deserted, winter-bitten countryside seemed to afford no place for her. I’m lost, she thought, gazing out at the stunted pine woods.
Hammar directed her off the highway onto a smaller road, then off that onto a smaller one still. He had her pull up in front of a structure that appeared half buried in snow.
“What is this place?”
“A family summer house,” Hammar said.
“Whose family?”
“Mine,” he said. “Come along.”
From the outside the cottage appeared to be lovely, with a deep air of the rustic and picturesque. Brand felt a stab of awe at the beauty of the Swedish countryside. The building of dark wood posted itself in the throat of a small vale. Spread out below was a frozen lake, its empty surface surrounded by snow-flattened fields and dense forests of pine, birch and aspen.
Brand now realized that Hammar had to know the Västvall area very well indeed, since his family were practically neighbors of the Vosses. Not exactly close enough to borrow a cup of sugar, say, but in the same general vicinity. Why hadn’t he revealed the existence of the cottage to Brand?
“A härbre,” Hammar called the place. Formerly a barn to store grain, now repurposed and remodeled.
The aspens in the lakeside meadows bent in the cold wind, their bark silvery in the late afternoon light. Beyond the lake, the landscape seemed to roll out in an endless succession of hills and valleys.
Hammar had accomplished a minor miracle in rehabilitating the ancient wooden structure. Brand had not expected anything like it from Krister Hammar, the urbane attorney at law. The man was an onion. There were more layers to him than Brand had yet managed to peel away.
“We brought the old structure here from its original site, my dad and I, pulling it over the ice in winter with a horse-drawn sledge,” Hammar explained. “I was fourteen, it was…just before my father died. Inside the place smelled like dust, centuries of it. Back then I was contemptuous. I didn’t believe such a decrepit pile of logs was worth saving. I didn’t know why my father would bother. Now I feel differently.”
The härbre dated back to the 1700s. But the interior modifications came straight out of the 21st century. Here was the Sweden of today, encapsulated: a three-hundred year old structure that represented an ancient agricultural tradition,
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