The Darkest Room

by Johan Theorin

  Then she takes the sheep shears, places the point against one of the planks of wood, and begins to carve today’s date: December 7, 1916. And a name.

  The shouts from the shore fall silent.

  Everything is quite still, and up in the loft Alma drops the shears. She clasps her hands together by the wall and prays to God.

  Everything is silent at Eel Point.

  Then comes the explosion.

  It is as if the air all around the manor house is compressed, and at the same time the thundering roar from the shore rolls inland. The blast wave comes a second later; it cracks several windowpanes in the barn and deafens Alma. She closes her eyes, sinks back into the hay.

  The mine has exploded too soon. Alma knows it.

  When the blast wave has passed, she gets to her feet in the hayloft.

  After a few frozen seconds the cows begin to bellow down in the barn. Then comes the sound of loud voices from the meadow by the shore. They are getting closer to the house very quickly.

  Alma hurries down the steps.

  Both lighthouses are still standing, she sees; they haven’t been touched. But the mine is gone; all that is left is gray, murky water where it lay. And there is no sign of the lighthouse keepers’ boat.

  Alma sees the other women coming: Ragnhild and Eivor,

  the wives of the lighthouse keepers. They stare at her, their expression numb.

  “The master?” asks Alma.

  Ragnhild shakes her head stiffly, and now Alma can see that her pinafore is wet with blood.

  “My Albert… was standing in the prow.”

  Her knees give way. Alma rushes toward her along the stone path and catches her as she falls.

  14

  Livia slept peacefully that Sunday night. Joakim woke up as dawn was breaking after three hours of dreamless sleep. He could never sleep any longer than that at a stretch these days, and he woke with his head pounding with exhaustion.

  In the morning he drove the children to Marnäs as usual, and when he got home the house was silent and empty. He carried on wallpapering the bedrooms at the southern end of the house.

  At around one o’clock he heard the muted sound of a car engine approaching Eel Point. He looked out.

  A large wine-red Mercedes was driving up the gravel track at high speed. Joakim recognized it; he had seen it leaving the church in Marnäs, one of the first cars to depart after the funeral.

  Katrine’s mother had come to visit.

  Even though the car was big, the woman who was driving

  it seemed even bigger somehow. She struggled to get out of the car, as if she were stuck between the steering wheel and the driver’s seat. But eventually she was standing in front of the house, dressed in skin-tight jeans, pointed boots, and a leather jacket covered in buckles. A woman of about fifty-five, wearing red lipstick and thick black eyeliner and mascara.

  She adjusted her pink silk scarf and looked over at the house with a forbidding expression. Then she lit a cigarette.

  Mirja Rambe, his mother-in-law from Kalmar. She hadn’t been in touch at all since the funeral.

  Joakim took a deep breath, let the air out slowly, then went through the house to open the kitchen door.

  “Hello, Joakim,” she said, blowing smoke out of the corner of her mouth.

  “Hi there, Mirja.”

  “I’m glad you’re home. How are you?”

  “Not so great.”

  “I can understand that… this sort of thing makes you feel like shit.”

  That was all the sympathy he got from her. Mirja dropped her cigarette on the gravel and moved toward the kitchen door; he stepped aside and she swept past in a miasma of tobacco and perfume.

  In the kitchen she stopped and looked around. Joakim knew it was completely different from when she had lived in the house more than thirty years ago-but when she made no comment on all the work they had put in, he felt compelled to ask:

  “Katrine redid most of this room last summer. What do you think?”

  “It’s good,” said Mirja. “When Torun and I rented one of the rooms in the outbuilding, there were single men living in here, in the main house. It just looked like shit. Dirt everywhere.”

  “Did they work in the lighthouses?” asked Joakim.

  “The lighthouse keepers were gone by then,” said Mirja tersely. “These were just drifters.”

  She shook herself, as if she wanted to change the subject, and asked, “So where are my little grandchildren, then?”

  “Livia and Gabriel are at school. In Marnäs.”

  “Already?”

  “Well, it’s preschool. Livia’s doing activities for six-year-olds.”

  Mirja nodded, but without smiling. “New names…” she said. “Same dog kennel.”

  “Preschool isn’t a dog kennel,” said Joakim. “They love it.”

  “I’m sure they do,” said Mirja. “In my day it was called little school. Same old crap… day after day.”

  Suddenly she turned around again. “Speaking of animals…”

  She went back outside.

  Joakim stayed in the kitchen, wondering how long Mirja was intending to stay. The house felt much smaller when his mother-in-law was there, as if there weren’t enough air.

  He heard a car door slam, and she came back into the kitchen with a bag in each hand. She held up one of them, a gray box with a handle.

  “It was free, I got it from my neighbor,” she said. “I had to buy all the bits and pieces.”

  Joakim realized that the box was a cat basket, and it wasn’t empty.

  “Are you joking?” he said.

  Mirja shook her head and opened the basket. A fully grown gray tom cat with black stripes jumped out and stretched on the wooden floor. He looked mistrustfully at Joakim.

  “This is Rasputin,” said Mirja. “He’ll live like a Russian monk here, won’t he?”

  She opened a big bag and took out several tins of cat food, a dish, and a tray with some cat litter.

  “We can’t have him here,” said Joakim.

  “Of course you can,” said Mirja. “He’ll liven things up.”

  Rasputin rubbed up against Joakim’s legs and went out into the hallway. When Mirja opened the outside door, he shot off.

  “He’s gone looking for rats,” she said.

  “I haven’t seen a single rat here,” said Joakim.

  “That’s because they’re smarter than you.” Mirja took an apple out of the bowl on the kitchen table and went on: “So when are you coming to Kalmar to visit me?”

  “I didn’t know we were invited.”

  “Of course you are.” She bit into the apple. “Come whenever you like.”

  “Katrine never got an invitation, as far as I know,” said Joakim.

  “Katrine wouldn’t have come anyway,” said Mirja. “But we called each other sometimes.”

  “Once a year,” Joakim corrected her. “She called you at Christmas, but she always closed the door when she was on the phone to you.”

  Mirja shook her head. “I talked to her just a month ago.”

  “What about?”

  “Nothing special… my latest exhibition in Kalmar. And my new boyfriend, Ulf.”

  “The two of you talked about you, in other words.”

  “And about her.”

  “So what did she say?”

  “She felt lonely here,” said Mirja. “She said she didn’t miss Stockholm… but she did miss you.”

  “I had to carry on working there for a while,” he said.

  He could of course have resigned from his teaching post earlier. He could have done a whole lot of things differently, but that wasn’t something he wanted to discuss with Mirja.

  She wandered further into the house, but stopped at the Rambe painting outside Joakim’s bedroom.

  “I gave this to Katrine for her twentieth birthday,” she said. “Something to remember her grandmother by.”

  “She really liked it.”

  “It shou
ldn’t be hanging here,” said Mirja. “The last picture by Torun that was sold at auction went for three hundred thousand kronor.”

  “Really? But nobody knows we’ve got it here.”

  Mirja stared intently at the picture, following the gray-black lines of the oil paint with her eyes.

  “There are no horizontal lines at all, that’s why it’s so difficult to look at,” she said. “This is the way you paint if you’ve been out in the blizzard.”

  “And Torun had?”

  “Yes. It was our first winter here. They had issued a warning about snowstorms, but Torun went off to the peat bog anyway. She liked walking inland and then sitting down to paint.”

  “We were there yesterday,” said Joakim. “It’s lovely by the bog.”

  “Not when the blizzard comes,” said Mirja. “Torun’s easel blew away before she had time to take it down, and suddenly she could see only a few yards in front of her. The sun disappeared. There was nothing but snow, everywhere.”

  “But she survived?”

  “She was on her way out onto the bog and stumbled into the water, but then the snow eased for a moment and she caught sight of the flashing light of the lighthouse.” Mirja looked at the painting and went on quietly: “It was just in the nick of time. She said that when she was squelching about on the bog, she could see the dead… those who were sacrificed during the Iron Age. They rose up out of the water and reached out for her.”

  Joakim was listening intently. He was beginning to understand where the atmosphere in Torun’s paintings came from.

  “She had problems with her eyesight after that,” Mirja went on. “That was when it started. And of course she went blind in the end.”

  “Because of the blizzard?”

  “Maybe…At any rate, she couldn’t open her eyes for

  several days. The blizzard lifted sand from the fields and mixed it with the snow… it was like having pins stuck in your eyes.”

  Mirja took a step away from the painting.

  “People don’t want dark paintings like this,” she said. “Here on Öland it has to be an open sky, blue sea, and great big fields full of yellow flowers, nothing else. Bright pictures in white frames.”

  “The kind of thing you produce,” said Joakim.

  “Absolutely.” Mirja nodded energetically, apparently not in the least annoyed. “Sunny summer paintings for the summer people.” She looked around. “But you don’t seem to have any Mirja Rambe paintings here. Or have you?”

  “No. Katrine has postcards of some of them somewhere.”

  “That’s good, postcards bring the money in too.”

  Joakim wanted to leave the vicinity of the bedrooms-it felt too private. He moved back in the direction of the kitchen.

  “How many of Torun’s paintings were there to start with?” he asked.

  “A lot. There must have been fifty.”

  “And now there are only six, is that right?”

  “Six, yes.” Mirja’s expression was grim. “The six that were saved.”

  “And people say-”

  Mirja interrupted crossly: “I know what people say… that her daughter destroyed them. A collection that would be worth several million today… they say I put them in the stove one cold winter and burned them so we wouldn’t freeze to death.”

  “Katrine said that wasn’t true,” said Joakim.

  “Oh yes?”

  “She said you were envious of Torun… and that you threw her paintings in the sea.”

  “Katrine was born the year after it happened, so she wasn’t there.” Mirja sighed. “I hear the gossip here on the

  island: Mirja Rambe is a difficult old woman… her boyfriends are too young for her, she’s an alcoholic… I suppose that’s what Katrine said as well?”

  Joakim shook his head, but he remembered how Mirja had staggered around at their wedding in Borgholm, trying to seduce his younger cousin.

  They were out on the veranda now. Mirja fastened her leather jacket.

  “Come with me,” she said. “I want to show you something.”

  Joakim followed her into the courtyard. He saw Rasputin slinking through the fence, heading down toward the sea.

  “This hasn’t changed much,” said Mirja as they walked over the uneven stones. “Just as many weeds.”

  She stopped, lit a fresh cigarette, then looked in through the dusty windows of the outbuilding.

  “Nobody home,” she said.

  “The agent called it the guesthouse,” said Joakim. “We’re going to fix it up in the spring… at least, that was the plan.”

  From the outside the whitewashed building looked like a rectangular single-story block with a tiled roof. Inside was a woodstove, a carpentry workshop, a laundry room with a floor damaged by damp, a sauna built in the 1970s, and two guest rooms, each with a shower. In the past families had stayed in the guest rooms in the summer, when it got too hot in the main house.

  Mirja looked at the building and shook her head.

  “We lived out here for three years, Torun and I. Among the mice and the dust bunnies. It was like living in a refrigerator in the winter.”

  Mirja turned her back on the outbuilding.

  “This is what I wanted to show you… over here.”

  She went over to the barn and pulled open the door leading into the vast darkness.

  Mirja stubbed out her cigarette and switched on the lights,

  and Joakim followed her over the stone floor. She pointed toward the loft.

  “It’s up there,” she said.

  Joakim hesitated for a few moments. Then he followed Mirja up the steep steps. Everything was just as untidy as the last time he’d been up in the loft.

  “You can’t get through here,” he said.

  “Sure you can,” said Mirja.

  She made her way without hesitation among all the suitcases, boxes, old pieces of furniture, and bits of rusty machinery. She found narrow passageways between all the trash and went all the way over to the wall on the far side of the loft. Then she stopped and pointed at the broad planks of wood.

  “Look… I found this thirty-five years ago.”

  Joakim moved closer. By the faint light from the window he could see that someone had carved letters into the bare wood of the wall: a series of names and dates, and sometimes a cross or a biblical reference:

  BELOVED CAROLINA 1884 was carved into a plank just below the ceiling. Beneath it came JAN, MUCH MISSED, GONE TO THE LORD 1884, and a little further down IN MEMORY OF ARTHUR CARLSSON, DROWNED JUNE 3, 1911, john 3:16.

  There were many more names on the wall, but Joakim stopped reading and turned to Mirja.

  “What is this?”

  “These are the people from the manor house who have died,” said Mirja. Her voice, which had been quite loud, was now much quieter, almost reverential. “Those who were close to them have carved their names. They were already here when I was young… but these are new.”

  She pointed to a couple of names close to the floor: it said ciki in thin letters in one place, and slavko in another.

  “They could be refugees,” said Joakim. “Eel Point was a camp some years ago.” He looked at Mirja. “But why did people carve them here?”

  “Well,” said Mirja. “Why do people put up gravestones?”

  Joakim thought about the granite block he had chosen for Katrine the previous week. It would be delivered before Christmas, the stonemason had promised. He looked at Mirja.

  “So that… they won’t forget,” he said.

  “Exactly,” said Mirja.

  “Did you talk to Katrine about this wall?”

  “Oh yes, way back in the summer. She was definitely interested… but I don’t know if she came up here.”

  “I think she did,” said Joakim.

  Mirja ran her fingers over the characters carved into the wood.

  “When I found these names as a teenager, I read them over and over again,” she said. “And then I began to wonder who they were.
Why they had lived here and why they died… It’s difficult to stop thinking about the dead, isn’t it?”

  Joakim looked at the wall and nodded silently.

  “And I used to hear them,” Mirja went on.

  “Who?”

  “The dead.” Mirja leaned closer to the wall. “If you just listen… you can hear them whispering.”

  Joakim kept quiet, but couldn’t hear a thing.

  “I wrote a book about Eel Point last summer,” said Mirja as they were on their way back through the loft.

  “I see,” said Joakim.

  “I gave it to Katrine when she moved in here.”

  “Did you? She never mentioned it.”

  Suddenly Mirja stopped; she seemed to be looking for something on the floor. She moved a broken box and looked down.

  Beneath the box two names had been carved into the floor, very close together, along with a year:

  MIRJA & MARKUS 1961

  “Mirja…” Joakim read, and looked at her. “So you carved this?”

  She nodded.

  “We didn’t want to carve our names into the wall, so we did it here instead.”

  “So who’s Markus?”

  “He was my boyfriend. Markus Landkvist.”

  Mirja didn’t say any more. She merely sighed and strode over the two names, back toward the steps.

  They said goodbye in front of the house. Mirja’s energy was almost gone by now. She took a last long look at the house.

  “I might come again,” she said.

  “You do that,” said Joakim.

  “And as I said, you must come to Kalmar with the children. I can find them some juice.”

  “Fine… and if the cat doesn’t settle, I’ll bring him with me.”

  Mirja smirked. “Just you try it.”

  Then she got into the Mercedes and started the engine.

  When Mirja had disappeared in the direction of the coast road, Joakim walked slowly back across the courtyard. He looked down toward the sea-where had the cat gone?

  The big door to the barn was still ajar; they hadn’t closed it properly behind them.

  Joakim was drawn toward it, and in the end he went back inside, into the darkness. The silence in here was like a cathedral.

  He climbed up the steps again and went over to the far side of the loft. He read all the names on the wall, one after another.