Authors Note.
I hope I placed this under the right section and I would like to let the reader know that this is a slow starting story.
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After going through a horrible divorce where I lost my house, my car and the right to see my son for more than once a month, I decided to look into my ancestry. I'm over six feet tall with broad shoulders. My hair is blonde and I have blue eyes. My last name is Kallberg, first name Hans. They are both Swedish names and my family came over in the mid nineteenth century. Originally they were farmers in the province of Dalarna. By car it takes about four hours from Stockholm to Mora which is one of the larger towns in the area. My family came from a small village called Ek, or Oak in English.
After spending a few months on the internet and hundred of phone calls I finally tracked down one of my family members who still lived. He was a man in his mid eighties and named Karl. His English was passable, both spoken and written. He invited me over for a couple of weeks during the summer and told me that the family farm still stood, even though no one had lived there for at least twenty years. He came by as often as his old body would let him, which was once a month to make sure no one had broken in or lived there illegally.
When I arrived in Mora he was at the bus station waiting for me. I had come by bus from Stockholm and he had driven down in an old yellow Volvo. It was in mid June and the weather was very pleasant. While we drove back to Ek he told me a bit about the area and the history. I knew most of it from reading on the internet, but I let the old man talk. It felt like he was a lonely man and liked the company I gave him.
Ek turned out to be a hamlet and not a village. There was a small church made of wood, a school, two grocery stores, one of them was also the post office and the other functioned as the alcohol shop. When I asked Karl about that he explained that in Sweden you can only buy low alcohol beer in a grocery shop, and if you want wine or spirits you had to go to a government owned shop and buy it. Since Ek was so small there was no such place, but you could order the bottles from Mora and the grocery store served as the place to make the order and pick up your bottles. I was thirsty so I asked him to stop so I could buy a drink.
From outside it had looked tiny, but the shop was bigger than I had thought and was filled with all kinds of things, not only food. You could buy books, fishing gear, some clothes and so on. It looked like and old General Store from the Wild West. I located a cooler and took out a bottle of water, but when I got to the counter to pay there was no one there. I waited a minute, then called out. "Hello?"
I heard a voice who spoke a few words which I didn't understand, so I waited. Then I heard footsteps and then a head with blonde hair walked up to me behind a shelf. The head belonged to a young woman, who smiled at me and said something in Swedish.
"Sorry, I only speak English," I said.
"Oh, has the tourist season already begun," she said with a smile.
"I guess. I'm here because my family was originally from this area."
She rang up my water and asked. "What's your last name?"
"Kallberg,"
She put my bottle in a bag and handed it over to me. "There is a Karl Kallberg, I see him sometimes out by the old farm. I have to bicycle past it on my way to and from work."
"He is the one who picked me up."
"He is such a nice man. I hope I'll see you again."
I hope so too, I thought to myself. She was an outstanding example of the female sex. She was wearing jeans that sat perfect on her. On top she had a simple white blouse with a wide neck. Her face was angular with a small nose. Her eyes were blue like mine and her blonde hair was long and slightly curly. What had most attractive part was the fact that she was not wearing a bra. I could clearly see her nipples touch the fabric of her blouse.
"What do you think?"
I drank some of my water and said. "About what?"
Karl smiled and gave me a sideways look. We were driving on an overgrown dirt track between tall pines and leaf trees. "About Annie, of course."
"The girl in the shop?"
"That's the one."
I played it cool. "She was very polite."
"Mm, she usually is."
The way he had said it made me wonder what he was after. "Why do you ask?"
The track was really bad and when we hit a pothole I spilled some water on my pants and shirt.
"Nothing, she is just, how do you say, special."
"She didn't seem retarded."
Karl looked confused, and I guessed he didn't understand the word, so I gestured to my head.
"No, no, her head is fine. Her heart is not."
I was too tired from the long flight to get into a complicated medical discussion with Karl so I drank my water in silence. We drove on for another fifteen minutes until the track ended in an open space about the size of a baseball field. I sat up straight. The area was covered in grass and surrounded by trees on three sides. On the opposite side from where we were was a big two story building painted red with white corners and windows.
"Wow, it's big," I said.
"You had a big family. Sometimes up to fifteen people would live here. Only the main building remains, the others have rotten away over the years."
He put the car in gear and drove across the open space and parked in front of a set of wide stairs leading up to the main door. We got out and I followed him up the stairs.
When Karl opened the door my first reaction came from the smell, or better, the lack of it. I had assumed the place would stink of mildew and rot, but it smelled fresh and dry. The second thing I noticed was that it was clean. The wood floor was polished; the walls were covered in wallpaper, old, but in very good shape. There was no dust in the corners or any other dirt.
"Who cleans it?"
"Annie."
I was surprised. "Why would she do that?"
"Come, I will tell you, but first, we make coffee."
I wasn't a big coffee drinker and I asked if there was any tea. He looked at me like if I was insane, and said. "You are in Sweden, we drink coffee."
I followed him inside and found myself in a large living room, with windows on two sides and in front of us was a staircase leading up and a door. Karl pointed at the stairs. "Eight bedrooms, and three bathrooms on the second floor."
He opened the door and when we walked through I found myself in a big kitchen. The fridge looked like something from the eighties and so did the stove. There was an antique wood stove against the short wall.
