The Return of the Dancing Master(56)

Molin’s life can be split down the middle, Lindman thought. There is a decisive watershed, before the fear and with the fear. It creeps up on him in the winter of 1943 when he tries to survive on the Eastern front. He’s twenty at the time. It could be the same fear that I’d detected in the forest near Boras. The same fear, more than forty years later.

Lindman read his way through the book. It was starting to grow dark. The chill seeped in through the broken windows. He took the book into the kitchen, closed the door, covered the windows with a blanket from the bedroom, and continued reading.

In April 1943, Molin writes for the first time that he wants to go home. He’s afraid of dying. The soldiers are engaged in a remorseless and depressing retreat, not only from an impossible war, but also from an ideology that has collapsed. The circumstances are horrendous. Occasionally, he writes about the corpses on all sides, body parts shot to pieces, the eyeless faces, the slit throats. He is constantly searching for a way out, but he can’t find one. On the other hand, he realizes what is not a solution. Later in the spring he is given execution duties. They are going to shoot a Norwegian and two Belgian deserters who had been captured. This is one of the longer diary entries.

May 19, 1943. Russia. Or possibly Polish territory. Was ordered by Captain Emmers to be part of an execution platoon. Two Belgians and the Norwegian Lauritzen were to be shot for desertion. They were hustled into a ditch, we stood on the road. Difficult to shoot downwards. Lauritzen was crying, tried to crawl away through the mud. Captain Emmers ordered him to be tied to a telegraph pole. The Belgians were silent. Lauritzen was screaming. I aimed for the hearts. They were deserters. Military law applies. Who wants to die? Afterwards we were all given a glass of brandy. It’s spring in Kalmar now. If I close my eyes I can see the sea. Will I ever make it home?



Lindman could feel the young man’s fear resonating from the text. He shoots deserters, considers it to be a fair sentence, is given a glass of brandy, and dreams of the Baltic Sea. But fear is creeping up on him all the time, forcing its way into his brain and giving him no peace. Lindman tried to imagine what it must have been like, lying in a trench somewhere on the Eastern front. Sheer hell, no doubt. In less than a year his naive enthusiasm had turned to terror. Nothing now about the new Europe: now it’s a question of survival. And hoping he’ll get back to Kalmar one day.

But it goes on until the spring of 1945. Molin has returned to Germany from Russia. He’s wounded. In the entry for October 19, 1944, Lindman finds the explanation for the bullet wounds found by the pathologists in Umeå. It is not exactly clear what had happened, but at some point in August 1944 he is shot. He survives by some kind of miracle, but the message that emerges from his diary notes is not one of gratitude. Lindman observes that something new is starting to happen to Molin. What characterizes the contents of his diary is no longer fear. Another emotion has crept in. Hate. He expresses his anger at what is happening, and speaks of the necessity to be “ruthless” and to have no hesitation in “allotting punishment.” Although he recognizes that the war is lost, he does not lose belief in the righteousness of the cause, the justification of the aims. Hitler may have let them down, but not as much as all those people who failed to understand that the war was a crusade against Bolshevism. These are the people Molin starts to hate in the course of 1944. This emerges very clearly from one of the letters he writes to Kalmar. It is dated January 1945, and as usual there is no sender’s address. He evidently had received a letter from his parents, anxious about his welfare. Lindman wondered why Molin hadn’t saved the letters he’d received, only the ones he’d sent. Perhaps the explanation was that his own letters were a sort of complement to the diary. It was always his own voice doing the talking, his own hand holding the pen.

Dear Mother and Father!





I’m sorry I haven’t written for so long, but we have been constantly on the move and are now not far from Berlin. You have no need to worry. The war is a sad tale of suffering and sacrifice, but I’ve come through comparatively unscathed and been very lucky. I’ve seen a lot of my former comrades killed, but I have never lost heart. I do wonder, however, why more young Swedes, and older ones for that matter, have not rallied to the German flag. Do people in my homeland fail to see what is at stake? Have they not realized that the Russians are going to subjugate everyone who fails to resist? Ah well, I shall not try you with my thoughts and my anger, but I am sure, dear Mother and Father, that you understand what I mean. You didn’t prevent me from enlisting, and you, Father, said that you would have done the same if you’d been younger and didn’t have a lame leg. I must close now, but at least you know I am still of this world and continuing the struggle. I often dream about Kalmar. How are Karin and Nils? How are Aunt Anna’s roses faring? I think about all sorts of things in quiet moments, but there are not so many of them.