The Darkest Room

by Johan Theorin

  “Where are you from?”

  “Stockholm.”

  “Like the royal family, then,” said Nyberg. He looked at Joakim. “Are you going to do what the King does, and just stay here when it’s warm and sunny?”

  “No, we’re here all year round.”

  Katrine had come into the hall and stood next to Joakim. He glanced at her, she gave a brief nod, and they invited the reporter in. Nyberg shambled over the threshold, taking his time.

  They chose to sit in the kitchen; with its new equipment and polished wooden floor, it was the room they had done the most work on.

  When they were working in there in August, Katrine and the man laying the floor had found something interesting: a little hiding place under the floorboards, a box made of flat pieces of limestone. Inside lay a silver spoon and a child’s shoe that had gone moldy. It was a house offering, the fitter had told her. It was meant to ensure many children and plenty of food for the inhabitants of the manor house.

  Joakim made coffee and Nyberg settled down at the rectangular oak table. He opened his notebook once again.

  “How did this all come about, then?”

  “Well… we like wooden houses,” said Joakim.

  “We love them,” said Katrine.

  “But wasn’t that a big step… buying Eel Point and moving here from Stockholm?”

  “Not such a big step,” said Katrine. “We had a house in Bromma, but we wanted to swap it for a house here. We started looking last year.”

  “And why northern Öland?”

  Joakim answered this time:

  “Katrine is from Öland, kind of… Her family used to live here.”

  Katrine glanced at him briefly and he knew what she was

  thinking: if anybody was going to talk about her background, then it would be her. And she was rarely prepared to do so.

  “Oh yes, whereabouts?”

  “Various places,” said Katrine without looking at the reporter. “They moved about quite a bit.”

  Joakim could have added that his wife was the daughter of Mirja Rambe and the granddaughter of Torun Rambe-that might have got Nyberg to write a much longer article-but he kept quiet. Katrine and her mother were barely speaking to each other.

  “Me, I’m a concrete kid,” he said instead. “I grew up in an eight-story apartment block in Jakobsberg, and it was just so ugly, with all the traffic and asphalt. So I really wanted to move out to the country.”

  At first Livia sat quietly on Joakim’s knee, but she soon got tired of all the chat and ran off to her room. Gabriel, who was sitting with Katrine, jumped down and followed her.

  Joakim listened to the little plastic sandals, pattering off across the floor with such energy, and repeated the same refrain he’d chanted to friends and neighbors in Stockholm over the past few months:

  “We know this is a fantastic place for kids too. Meadows and forests, clean air and fresh water. No colds. No cars churning out fumes… This is a good place for all of us.”

  Bengt Nyberg had written these pearls of wisdom in his notebook. Then they went for a walk around the ground floor of the house, through the renovated rooms and all the areas that still had tattered wallpaper, patched-up ceilings, and dirty floors.

  “The tiled stoves are great,” said Joakim, pointing. “And the wooden floors are incredibly well preserved…We just need to give them a scrub from time to time.”

  His enthusiasm for the manor might have been infectious, because after a while Nyberg stopped interviewing him and started to look around with interest. He insisted on seeing the

  rest of the place as well-even though Joakim would have preferred not to be reminded of how much they hadn’t yet touched.

  “There isn’t actually anything else to see,” said Joakim. “Just a lot of empty rooms.”

  “Just a quick look,” said Nyberg.

  In the end Joakim nodded and opened the door leading to the upper floor.

  Katrine and the reporter followed him up the crooked wooden staircase to an upstairs corridor. It was gloomy up here despite the fact that there was a row of windows facing the sea, but the panes were covered with pieces of chipboard that let in only narrow strips of daylight.

  The howling of the wind could be heard clearly in the dark rooms.

  “The air certainly circulates up here,” said Katrine with a wry smile. “The advantage is that the house has stayed dry-there’s very little damage because of damp.”

  “Well, that’s a good thing…” Nyberg contemplated the buckled cork flooring, the stained and tattered wallpaper, and the veils of cobwebs hanging from the cornices. “But you do seem to have plenty left to do.”

  “Yes, we know.”

  “We can’t wait,” said Joakim.

  “I’m sure it’ll be fantastic when it’s finished…” said Nyberg, then asked, “So what do you actually know about this house?”

  “You mean its history?” said Joakim. “Not much, but the real estate agent told us some things. It was built in the middle of the nineteenth century, at the same time as the lighthouses. But there have been quite a lot of alterations… the glass veranda at the front looks as if it was added around 1910.”

  Then he looked inquiringly at Katrine to see if she wanted to add anything-perhaps what it had been like when her mother and grandmother were tenants here-but she didn’t meet his eye.

  “We know that the lighthouse masters and keepers lived in the house with their families and servants,” was all she said, “so there has been plenty of coming and going in these rooms.”

  Nyberg nodded, looking around the dirty upper floor.

  “I don’t think many people have lived here over the past twenty years,” he said. “Four or five years ago it was used for refugees, families who had fled from the wars in the Balkans. But that didn’t last long. It’s a bit of a shame it’s stood empty… It’s such a magnificent place.”

  They started back down the stairs. Even the dirtiest rooms on the ground floor suddenly seemed light and warm compared with those upstairs.

  “Does it have a name?” Katrine asked, looking at the reporter. “Do you know if it has a name?”

  “What?” said Nyberg.

  “This house,” said Katrine. “Everybody always says Eel Point, but I mean, that’s the name of the place, not the house.”

  “Yes, Eel Point by Eel Shallows, where the eels gather in the summer…” said Nyberg, as if he were reciting a poem. “No, I don’t think the house itself has a name.”

  “Houses often have a nickname,” said Joakim. “We called our place in Bromma the Apple House.”

  “This doesn’t have a name, at least not that I’ve heard.” Nyberg stepped down from the bottom stair and added, “On the other hand, there are plenty of stories about this place.”

  “Stories?”

  “I’ve heard a few… They say the wind increases off Eel Point when someone sneezes in the manor house.”

  Both Katrine and Joakim laughed out loud.

  “We’d better make sure we dust often, then,” said Katrine.

  “And then, of course, there are some old ghost stories as well,” said Nyberg.

  Silence fell.

  “Ghost stories?” said Joakim. “The agent should have told us.”

  He was just about to smile and shake his head, but Katrine got there first:

  “I did hear a few stories when I was over at the Carlssons’ having coffee… our neighbors. But they told me not to believe them.”

  “We haven’t really got much time for ghosts,” said Joakim.

  Nyberg nodded and took a few steps toward the hall.

  “No, but when a house is empty for a while, people start talking,” he said. “Shall we go outside and take a few pictures while it’s still light?”

  Bengt Nyberg ended his visit by walking across the grass and the stone paths in the inner courtyard and quickly inspecting both wings of the house-on one side the enormous barn, with the ground-floor walls made of lim
estone and the upper story of timber painted red, and across the courtyard the smaller, whitewashed outhouse.

  “I assume you’re going to renovate this as well?” said Nyberg after peeping into the outhouse through a dusty window.

  “Of course,” said Joakim. “We’re taking one building at a time.”

  “And then you can rent it out to summer visitors!”

  “Maybe. We’ve thought about opening a bed-and-breakfast, in a few years.”

  “A lot of people here on the island have had the same idea,” said Nyberg.

  Finally the reporter took a couple of dozen pictures of the Westin family on the yellowing grassy slope below the house.

  Katrine and Joakim stood beside each other, squinting into the cold wind and the two lighthouses out at sea. Joakim straightened his back as the camera started clicking, and thought about the fact that their neighbors’ house in Stockholm had merited a spread of three double pages in the glossy monthly Beautiful Homes the previous year. The Westin family had to make do with an article in the local paper.

  Gabriel was perched on Joakim’s shoulders, dressed in a green padded jacket that was slightly too big. Livia was standing between her parents, her white crocheted hat pulled well down over her forehead. She was looking suspiciously into the camera.

  The manor house at Eel Point rose up behind them like a fortress made of wood and stone, silently watching.

  Afterward, when Nyberg had left, the whole family went down to the shore. The wind was colder than it had been, and the sun was already low in the sky, just above the roof of the house behind them. The smell of seaweed that had been washed ashore was in the air.

  Walking down to the water at Eel Point felt like arriving at the end of the world, the end of a long journey away from everyone. Joakim liked that feeling.

  Northeastern Öland seemed to consist of a vast sky above a small strip of yellowish-brown land. The tiny islands looked like grass-covered reefs out in the water. The island’s flat coastline, with its deep inlets and narrow points, slipped almost imperceptibly into the water and became a shallow, even seabed of sand and mud, which gradually sank deeper, down into the Baltic Sea.

  A hundred yards or so away from them, the white towers of the lighthouses rose up toward the dark blue sky.

  Eel Point’s twin lighthouses. Joakim thought the islands on which they were standing looked as if they were somehow man-made, as if someone had made two piles of stone and gravel out in the water and bound them together with bigger rocks and concrete. Fifty yards to the north of them a breakwater ran out from the shore-a slightly curved jetty made of large blocks of stone, doubtless constructed in order to protect the lighthouses from the winter storms.

  Livia had Foreman under her arm, and she suddenly set off toward the wide jetty leading out to the lighthouses.

  “Me too! Me too!” shouted Gabriel, but Joakim held him tightly by the hand.

  “We’ll go together,” he said.

  The jetty split in two a dozen or so yards out into the water, like a big letter Y with two narrower arms leading out to the islands where the lighthouses stood. Katrine shouted:

  “Don’t run, Livia! Be careful of the water!”

  Livia stopped, pointed to the southern lighthouse, and shouted in a voice that was only just audible above the wind, “That one’s mine!”

  “Mine too!” shouted Gabriel behind her.

  “End of story!” shouted Livia.

  That was her new favorite expression this fall, something she had learned in preschool. Katrine hurried over to her and nodded toward the northern lighthouse.

  “In that case, this one’s mine!”

  “Okay, then I’ll take care of the house,” said Joakim. “It’ll be as easy as pie, if you all just pitch in and help a little bit.”

  “We will,” said Livia. “End of story!”

  Livia laughed and nodded, but of course for Joakim it was no joke. But he was still looking forward to all the work that was waiting during the course of the winter. He and Katrine were both going to try to find a teaching post on the island, but they would renovate the manor house together in the evenings and on weekends. She had already started, after all.

  He stopped in the grass by the shore and took a long look at the buildings behind them.

  Isolated and private location, as it had said in the ad.

  Joakim still found it difficult to get used to the size of the main house; with its white gables and red wooden walls, it rose up at the top of the sloping grassy plain. Two beautiful chimneys sat on top of the tiled roof like towers, black as soot. A warm yellow light glowed in the kitchen window and on the veranda; the rest of the house was pitch black.

  So many families who had lived there, toiling away at the walls, doorways, and floors over the years-master lighthouse

  keepers and lighthouse keepers and lighthouse assistants and whatever they were called. They had all left their mark on the manor house.

  Remember, when you take over an old house, the house takes you over at the same time, Joakim had read in a book about renovating wooden houses. For him and Katrine this was not the case-they had had no problem leaving the house in Bromma, after all-but over the years they had met a number of families who looked after their houses like children.

  “Shall we go out to the lighthouses?” asked Katrine.

  “Yes!” shouted Livia. “End of story!”

  “The stones could be slippery,” said Joakim.

  He didn’t want Livia and Gabriel to lose their respect for the sea and go down to the water alone. Livia could swim only a few yards, and Gabriel couldn’t swim at all.

  But Katrine and Livia had already set off along the stone jetty, hand in hand. Joakim picked Gabriel up, held him in the crook of his right arm, and followed them dubiously out onto the uneven blocks of stone.

  They weren’t as slippery as he had thought, just rough and uneven. In some places the blocks had been eroded by the waves and had broken away from the concrete holding them together. There was only a slight wind today, but Joakim could sense the power of nature. Winter after winter of drift ice and waves and harsh storms on Eel Point-and still the lighthouses stood firm.

  “How tall are they?” wondered Katrine, looking toward the towers.

  “Well, I don’t have a ruler with me-but maybe sixty feet or so?” said Joakim.

  Livia tipped her head back to look up at the top of her lighthouse.

  “Why is there no light?”

  “I expect it’ll come on when it gets dark,” said Katrine.

  “Does that one never come on?” asked Joakim, leaning back to look up at the north tower.

  “I don’t think so,” said Katrine. “It hasn’t done since we’ve been here.”

  When they reached the point where the breakwater divided, Livia chose the left path, toward her mother’s lighthouse.

  “Careful, Livia,” said Joakim, looking down into the black water below the stone track.

  It might only be five or six feet deep, but he still didn’t like the shadows and the chill down there. He was a decent swimmer, but he had never been the type to leap eagerly into the waves in summer, not even on really hot days.

  Katrine had reached the island and walked over to the water’s edge. She looked in both directions along the coastline. To the north, only empty beaches and clumps of trees were visible; to the south, meadows and in the distance a few small boathouses.

  “Not a soul in sight,” she said. “I thought we might see a few neighboring houses, at least.”

  “There are too many little islands and headlands in the way,” said Joakim. He pointed to the north shore with his free hand. “Look over there. Have you seen that?”

  It was the wreck of a ship, lying on the stony strip of shore half a mile or so away-so old that all that was left was a battered hull made of sun-bleached planks of wood. Long ago the ship had drifted toward the shore in a winter storm; it had been hurled high up onto the shore, where it had remain
ed. The wreck lay to starboard among the stones, and Joakim thought the framework sticking up looked like a giant’s rib cage.

  “The wreck, yes,” said Katrine.

  “Didn’t they see the beams from the lighthouses?” said Joakim.

  “I think the lighthouses just don’t help sometimes… not in a storm,” said Katrine. “Livia and I went over to the wreck a few weeks ago. We were looking for some nice pieces of wood, but everything had been taken.”

  The entrance to the lighthouse was a stone archway some three feet deep, leading to a sturdy door of thick steel, very rusty and with only a few traces of the original white color. There was no keyhole, just a crossbar with a rusty padlock, and when Joakim got hold of the side of the door and pulled, it didn’t move an inch.

  “I saw a bunch of old keys in one of the kitchen cupboards,” he said. “We’ll have to try them out sometime.”

  “Otherwise we can contact the Maritime Board,” said Katrine.

  Joakim nodded and took a step away from the door. The lighthouses weren’t part of the deal, after all.

  “Don’t the lighthouses belong to us, Mommy?” said Livia as they made their way back to the shore.

  She sounded disappointed.

  “Well, yes,” said Katrine. “Kind of. But we don’t have to look after them, do we, Kim?”

  She smiled at Joakim, and he nodded.

  “The house will be quite enough.”

  Katrine had turned over in the double bed while Joakim was with Livia, and as he crept beneath the covers she reached out for him in her sleep. He breathed in the scent of her, and closed his eyes.

  All of this, only this.

  It felt as if they had drawn a line under life in the city. Stockholm had shrunk to a gray mark on the horizon, and the memories of searching for Ethel had faded away.

  Peace.

  Then he heard the faint whimpering from Livia’s room again, and held his breath.

  “Mom-mee?”

  Her drawn-out cries echoing through the house were louder this time. Joakim breathed out with a tired sigh.

  Beside him Katrine raised her head and listened.

  “What?” she said groggily.

  “Mom-mee?” Livia called again.

  Katrine sat up. Unlike Joakim, she could go from deep sleep to wide awake in a couple of seconds.