Johan Theorin - The Darkest Room

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 shouldn’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?”