Johan Theorin - The Darkest Room

“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.

He put his ear close to the wall and listened, but heard no whispering.

Then he picked up a nail that was lying on the floor and

carefully carved the name katrine westin and her dates into one of the lower planks.

When he had finished, he stepped back to look at the whole wall.

The memory of Katrine was preserved here now. It felt good.

The children loved Rasputin, of course. Gabriel patted him and Livia gave him a saucer of milk. They didn’t want to be separated from the cat for a minute, but the evening after Mirja Rambe’s visit, the family was invited, without the cat, to visit their neighbors at the farm to the south. The older children weren’t at home, but seven-year-old Andreas joined them at the dinner table before he and the Westin children went into the kitchen for some ice cream.