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Now the tour continues down the road past the church of Ljuder. Not too fast, it is a winding road with many small crests. It seems as though it was built for horse-drawn wagons rather than cars and indeed it was. One who drives too fast here will surely miss the crossroads at Åkerby, also known as Åkerby Junction.
Moberg writes, "Every time they came to a gate on the road Robert jumped down to open it. Before they reached Åkerby Junction he had opened five. He counted them carefully , he was to be gateboy, he must count all the gates on the road to America."
But what of this issue of Korpamoen and Expressen?
Here, the driver must be very careful with the accelerator. Soon, quite soon, a simple road sign will appear on the right. It reads Korpamoen and points left onto a gravel road, a narrow road between stonewalls and enclosed fields nestled into the dense woods. Korpamoen does not actually exist except in the novel. Korpamoen is an invention of the author inspired by the contemporary gray- or red-painted huddled poor cottages of Småland. And in 1958, Bo Strömstedt, who later became the editor-in-chief of Expressen, interviewed Vilhelm Moberg in Switzerland. They discussed Korpamoen, just as Karl Oskar in the novel, with a map before them of the parish of Ljuder. Now where exactly was Moberg's Korpamoen located?
There was indeed a small farm which Moberg often passed in his insatiable desire to read on his way to the library in Åkerby. There it is. The farm. There.
That farm was shown on the map in one issue of Expressen in 1958. Yngve Wirkander managed to buy the last copy available besides the ones in the archives. He has clipped out the map and the article, preserved it in plastic and carries it with him. He calls the map, "Kalle's map", Kalle being Karl Gottfrid Moberg, Vilhelm Moberg's father. On the map one sees precisely where Korpamoen lies. And right there is where it is still located, enclosed by a low rustic fence. One little yet complete plot, home for a family which could make ends meet by the daily work from the nearby farms. It is inconceivable that once a family of nine lived here. There is a manmade well behind the house, but drinking water had to be fetched from a freshwater spring out in the woods about one hundred meters away. A long time ago, quite close by, there was a commercial route to Kalmar. Today, one can see the stones of the path hidden in the grass. Also near this little field cottage stands an Astrakhan apple tree, it is chopped down now but a bit of the trunk remains. Each spring another Astrakhan blooms, says Wirkander and points one out, they were rather common in this part of the province. And there is the freestanding cellar where Karl Oskar's and Kristina's starving little daughter ate the porridge which caused her death. The piece of land which belonged to the small farm is heartbreakingly little, but nowadays it still is not so isolated that one cannot hear the sounds of cars on the roads.
Inside the cottage, one sees the open hearth, the low folding table, the simple ladles and plates made of wood, and the rag rugs on the floor. How big can it be in total? Twenty square meters in all, maybe thirty. The association which maintains the small farm purchased the adjoining field which now serves as a parking area. When the association members meet here, they sit on the rib-backed wooden bench.
It is relatively easy to think to oneself that this is indeed Korpamoen. Easy to imagine that it was on this porch that Karl Oskar's elderly parents stood and watched their sons, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren depart knowing full well that they would never meet again,
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