The Survivors Read online

  Also by Alex Schulman

  Hurry to Love

  To Be with Her

  Forget Me

  Burn All My Letters

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  English translation copyright © 2021 by Rachel Willson-Broyles

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in Sweden as Överlevarna by Albert Bonniers Förlag, Stockholm, in 2020. Copyright © 2020 by Alex Schulman.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Cover photograph by Albert Rösch / EyeEm / Getty Images

  Cover design by Emily Mahon

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Schulman, Alex, [date] author. | Willson-Broyles, Rachel, translator.

  Title: The survivors : a novel / Alex Schulman ; translated from the Swedish by Rachel Willson-Broyles.

  Other titles: Överlevarna. English

  Description: First edition. | New York : Doubleday, [2021] | Identifiers: lccn 2020055315 (print) | lccn 2020055316 (ebook) | isbn 9780385547567 (hardcover) | isbn 9780385547574 (ebook) | isbn 9780385548045 (open market)

  Classification: lcc pt9877.29.c58 o9413 2021 (print) | lcc pt9877.29.C58 (ebook) | ddc 839.73/8—dc23

  lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020055315

  lc ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020055316

  Ebook ISBN 9780385547574

  ep_prh_5.8.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Alex Schulman

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part 1: The Cottage

  Chapter 1: 11:59 P.M.

  Chapter 2: The Swim Race

  Chapter 3: 10:00 P.M.

  Chapter 4: The Pillar of Smoke

  Chapter 5: 8:00 P.M.

  Chapter 6: Kings of the Birch

  Chapter 7: 6:00 P.M.

  Chapter 8: The Root Cellar

  Chapter 9: 4:00 P.M.

  Chapter 10: The Ghost Hand

  Chapter 11: 2:00 P.M.

  Chapter 12: The Arc of Light

  Chapter 13: 12:00 NOON

  Part 2: Beyond the Gravel Road

  Chapter 14: 10:00 A.M.

  Chapter 15: The Graduation Party

  Chapter 16: 8:00 A.M.

  Chapter 17: The Escapees

  Chapter 18: 6:00 A.M.

  Chapter 19: The Birthday Present

  Chapter 20: 4:00 A.M.

  Chapter 21: The Gravel Road

  Chapter 22: 2:00 A.M.

  Chapter 23: The Current

  Chapter 24: 12:00 MIDNIGHT

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Reading Group Guide

  For Calle and Niklas

  1

  The Cottage

  | 1 |

  11:59 P.M.

  A police car slowly plows through the blue foliage, down the narrow tractor path that leads to the property. There is the cottage, lonely on the point of land, in the June night that will never be entirely dark. It’s a simple red wooden house, its proportions odd, a little taller than it should be. The white trim is flaking, and the siding on the south-facing wall has faded in the sun. The roofing tiles have grown together, the roof like the skin of a prehistoric creature. The air is still and it’s a little chilly now; fog is collecting near the bottoms of the windowpanes. A single bright yellow light glows from one of the upstairs windows.

  Down the slope is the lake, still and gleaming, edged with birches right down to the shore. And the sauna where the boys sat with their father on summer nights, staggering into the water afterward on the sharp rocks, walking in a line, balancing with their arms extended as if they had been crucified. “The water’s nice!” their father shouted once he had thrown himself in, and his cry sang out across the lake, and the silence that followed existed nowhere but here, a place so far from everything else, a silence that sometimes frightened Benjamin but sometimes made him feel that everything was listening.

  Farther along the shore is a boathouse; its lumber is decaying and the whole structure has started to lean toward the water. And above that is the barn, beams drilled with millions of termite holes and traces of seventy-year-old animal dung on the cement floor. Between the barn and the house is the small lawn where the boys used to play soccer. The ground slopes there; whoever plays with his back to the lake has an uphill battle.

  This is the stage, this is how it looks, a few small buildings on a patch of grass with the forest behind it and the water in front. An inaccessible place, as lonely now as it was in years past. If you were to stand at the far end of the point and gaze out, you wouldn’t see a hint of human life anywhere. Every rare once in a while they could hear a car passing on the gravel road across the lake, the distant sound of an engine in low gear; on dry summer days they could see the cloud of dust that rose from the forest soon after. But they never saw anyone; they were alone in this place they never left and where no one ever visited. Once they saw a hunter. The boys were playing in the forest and suddenly, there he was. A green-clad man with white hair, twenty yards away, slipping silently through the fir trees. As he passed, he looked blankly at the boys and brought his index finger to his lips and then he kept walking in among the trees until he was gone. There was never any explanation—he was like a mysterious meteor that passed close by but crossed the sky without making contact. The boys never talked about it afterward, and Benjamin sometimes wondered if it really happened.

  It’s two hours past dusk. The police car comes tentatively down the tractor path. The driver’s anxious gaze is fixed just ahead of the hood, trying to see what sorts of things he’s running down as he descends the hill, and even when he leans across the wheel and looks up he can’t see the treetops. The evergreens that tower over the house are incredible. They were enormous even when the boys were small, but now they stretch a hundred to even a hundred and fifty feet into the air. The children’s father was always proud of the fertile ground here, as if it were his doing. He stuck radish sprouts in the earth in early June and after just a few weeks he dragged the children to the garden to show them the rows of red dots rising out of the soil. But the fertile ground around the cottage can’t be trusted; here and there the earth is completely dead. The apple tree Dad gave to Mom on her birthday still stands where he planted it once upon a time, but it never grows and it gives no fruit. In certain spots the soil is free of rocks, black and heavy. In others, the bedrock is just beneath the grass. Dad, when he was putting up a fence for the chickens, when he dragged the poker through the earth: sometimes it followed gentle and dull through the rain-heavy grass, sometimes it sang out just below the ground and he gave a shout, his hands vibrating with the resistance of the rock.

  * * *

  —

  The police officer climbs out of the car. His practiced movements as he quickly turns down the volume, muffling the strange chattering of the device on his shoulder. He’s a big man. The dinged, matte-black tools hanging at his waist make him look grounded somehow—thei
r weight pulls him down to the crust of the earth.

  Blue lights across the tall trees.

  There’s something about those lights, the mountains going blue across the lake and the blue lights of the police car—like an oil painting.

  The policeman strides toward the house and stops. He’s suddenly unsure of himself and takes a moment to observe the scene. The three men are sitting side by side on the stone steps that lead up to the front door of the cottage. They’re crying, holding each other. They’re wearing suits and ties. Next to them, on the grass, is an urn. He makes eye contact with one of the men, who stands. The other two remain seated, still in each other’s arms. They’re wet and badly beaten up, and he understands why an ambulance has been summoned.

  “My name is Benjamin. I’m the one who called.”

  The officer searches his pockets for a notepad. He doesn’t yet know that this story can’t be written up on a blank page or two, that he’s stepping in at the end of a tale that’s spanned decades, a tale of three brothers who were torn away from this place long ago and now have been forced to return, that everything here is interconnected, that nothing stands alone nor can be explained on its own. The weight of what’s taking place right now is enormous, but, of course, most of it has already happened. What’s playing out here on these stone steps, the tears of three brothers, their swollen faces and all the blood, is only the last ripple on the water, the one farthest out, the one with the most distance from the point of impact.

  | 2 |

  The Swim Race

  Each evening Benjamin stood at the water’s edge with his net and his bucket, just up the shore from the little embankment where his mother and father sat. They followed the evening sun, shifting table and chairs by a few feet whenever they landed in the shade, moving slowly as the evening went on. Under the table sat Molly, the dog, watching in surprise as her roof disappeared, then following the outfit on its journey along the shore. Now his parents were at the final stop, watching the sun sink slowly behind the treetops across the lake. They always sat next to each other, shoulder to shoulder, because both of them wanted to gaze out at the water. White plastic chairs drilled down into the tall grass, a small, tilted wooden table where the smudged beer glasses glinted in the evening sun. A cutting board with the butt of a winter salami, mortadella, and radishes. A cooler bag in the grass between them to keep the vodka cold. Each time Dad took a shot he said a quick “Hey” and raised the glass toward nothing and drank. Dad cut the salami so the table shook, beer sloshing, and Mom was immediately annoyed—she made a face as she held her glass in the air until he was done. His father never noticed any of this, but Benjamin did. He made note of every shift of theirs; he always kept a distance that allowed them peace and quiet even as he could still follow their conversation, keep an eye on the atmosphere and their moods. He heard their friendly murmurs, utensils against porcelain, the sound of one of them lighting a cigarette, a stream of sounds that suggested that everything was fine between them.

  Benjamin walked along the shore with his net. Gazing down at the dark water, now and again he happened to glance directly at the reflection of the sun, and his eyes hurt as if they had burst. He balanced on the large rocks, inspecting the bottom for tadpoles, those strange creatures, tiny and black, sluggish swimming commas. He scooped some up in the net and took them captive in his red bucket. This was a tradition. He collected tadpoles near his parents as a façade, and when the sun went down and his parents stood to head back to the house again, he returned the tadpoles to the water and wandered up with Mom and Dad. Then he started all over again the next night. One time he forgot the tadpoles in the bucket. When he discovered them the next afternoon, they were all dead, obliterated in the sun’s heat. Terror-stricken that Dad would find out, he dumped the contents into the lake, and although he knew that Dad was up in the cottage resting, it was as if his eyes were burning holes into the back of Benjamin’s neck.

  “Mom!”

  * * *

  —

  Benjamin looked up at the house and saw his little brother coming down the hill. You could spot his impatience from here. This was no place for the restless. Especially not this year—upon their arrival a week earlier, their parents had decided that they wouldn’t watch TV all summer. The children were apprised of this in solemn tones, and Pierre especially didn’t take it well when Dad pulled out the plug of the TV and ceremoniously placed the end on top of the appliance, like after a public execution where the body is left hanging as a warning, so that everyone was reminded of what happened to technology that was a threat to the family’s decision to spend the summer out-of-doors.

  Pierre had his comic books, which he slowly read out loud to himself, mumbling on his belly in the grass in the evenings. But eventually he would get bored and make his way down to his parents, and Benjamin knew that Mom and Dad’s reactions could vary; sometimes you were allowed to crawl onto Mom’s lap and she would scratch your back gently. Other times, their parents grew annoyed and the moment was lost.

  “I don’t have anything to do,” Pierre said.

  “Don’t you want to catch tadpoles with Benjamin?” Mom asked.

  “No,” he replied. He stood behind Mom’s chair and squinted at the setting sun.

  “Well, what about Nils, can’t the two of you do something?”

  “Like what?”

  Silence. There they sat, Mom and Dad, weary somehow, collapsed in their plastic chairs, heavy with alcohol. They gazed out at the lake. It was like they were trying to think of something to say, activities to suggest, but no words came out.

  “Hey,” Dad muttered, throwing back a shot, and then he grimaced and clapped his hands sharply three times. “Okay then,” he called out. “I want to see all my boys down here in bathing suits in two minutes!”

  Benjamin looked up, took a few steps away from the edge of the water. Dropped his net in the grass.

  “Boys!” Dad called. “Assemble!”

  Nils was listening to his Walkman in the hammock that was strung between the two birches up by the house. While Benjamin paid careful attention to the sounds of their family, Nils shut them out. Benjamin was always trying to get closer to his parents; Nils wanted to get away. He would be in a different room, not joining in. At bedtime, the brothers could sometimes hear their parents arguing through the thin plywood wall. Benjamin registered each word, assessed the conversation to see what damage it would bring. Sometimes they shouted inconceivable cruelties at each other, said such harsh things that it felt irreparable. Benjamin would lie awake for hours, replaying the argument in his mind. But Nils seemed genuinely undisturbed. “Madhouse,” he mumbled as the argument gained strength; then he turned over and fell asleep. He didn’t care, kept to himself during the day, not making much of a stir—except for sudden outbursts of rage that flared up and faded again. “Fuck!” they might hear from the hammock as Nils began to lurch and wave his hands hysterically to shoo away a wasp that had come too close.

  “Crazy fucking lunatics!” he roared, smacking at the air a few times. Then calm settled once more.

  “Nils!” Dad called. “Assembly on the shore!”

  “He can’t hear you,” Mom said. “He’s listening to music.”

  Dad shouted louder. No reaction from the hammock. Mom sighed, stood up, and hurried over to Nils, flapping her arms in front of his face. He took off his headphones. “Dad wants you,” she said.

  Assembly on the shore. It was a golden moment. Dad with that special look in his eye that the brothers loved, a sparkle that promised fun and games, and always that same serious note in his voice when he was about to present a new competition, grave solemnity with a smile hiding at the corner of his mouth. Ceremonious and formal, as if there was much at stake.

  “The rules are simple,” he said, towering in front of the three brothers where they stood, skinny legs sticking out of their bathing trunks.
“On my signal, my boys will leap into the water, swim around the buoy out there, and return to land. And the first one back wins.”

  The boys lined up.

  “Everyone understand?” he said. “This is it—the moment we find out which brother is the fastest!”

  Benjamin slapped his skinny thighs as he’d seen athletes do before crucial competitions on TV.

  “Hold on,” Dad said, taking off his watch. “I’ll time you.”

  Dad’s big thumbs poked at the tiny buttons of the digital watch, and he mumbled “Dammit” to himself when he couldn’t get it to work. He glanced up.

  “On your marks.”

  A scuffle between Benjamin and Pierre for the best starting position.

  “No, stop it,” Dad said. “None of that.”

  “Then let’s just forget it,” said Mom. She was still at the table, refilling her glass.

  The brothers were seven, nine, and thirteen, and when they played soccer or cards together these days, sometimes their fights were so bad that Benjamin felt like something between them was breaking. The stakes were even higher when Dad pitted the brothers against each other, when he made it so clear that he wanted to find out which of his sons was best at something.

  “On your marks…get set…go!”

  Benjamin dashed for the lake with his two brothers close on his heels. Into the water. He heard shouts behind him, Mom and Dad cheering from the shore.

  “Bravo!”