Johan Theorin - The Darkest Room

Henrik shook his head. “That’s something else,” he said. “I’m not sleeping well.”

“I expect that’ll be your conscience,” said Tommy. “But the old guy will be okay, they’ll patch him up.”

“Who the fuck knocked him down?” hissed Henrik. “Don’t you remember?”

“It was you,” said Tommy. “You kicked him.”

“Me? But I was behind you in the hallway!”

“You stood on the old guy’s hand and broke it, Henrik. If they find us, you’re going down.”

“For fuck’s sake, we’re all going down!” Henrik glanced toward the door and lowered his voice again. “I can’t talk any more now.”

“You want money,” said Tommy. “Don’t you?”

“I’ve got money,” said Henrik. “I’ve got a job during the day, for fuck’s sake!”

“But you need more,” said Tommy, nodding toward the other room. “They’re expensive to run.”

Henrik sighed. “It’s not the fucking money that’s the problem, it’s all the stolen stuff in the boathouse. We need to get it sold.”

“We’ll sell it,” said Tommy. “But first we’re going to do one more trip… the last trip to the north. To the manor house.”

“What manor house?”

“The one with all the paintings… the one Aleister told us about.”

“Eel Point,” said Henrik quietly.

“That’s the one. When shall we go?”

“Wait a minute…I was there last summer. I went just about everywhere, but I didn’t see any fucking paintings. And besides…”

“What?”

Henrik didn’t say any more. He remembered the echoing rooms and corridors at Eel Point. He had enjoyed working for Katrine Westin, the woman who lived there with her two small children. But the place itself had felt forbidding even in August, despite the fact that the Westin family had given it a thorough cleaning and started a massive renovation project. What would it be like there now, in December?

“Nothing,” he said. “But I didn’t see any paintings at Eel Point.”

“They’re probably hidden, then,” said Tommy.

There was a faint knocking sound.

Henrik jumped, then realized it was just an ordinary knock at the kitchen door. He went over and opened it.

Camilla was standing outside. She didn’t look pleased.

“Will you be done soon? Otherwise I’m going home, Henrik.”

“We’re done,” he said.

Camilla was small and slender, much shorter than the men. Tommy smiled sweetly down at her and held out his hand.

“Hi there… Tommy,” he said, in a quiet, polite voice Henrik had never heard before.

“Camilla.”

They shook hands so vigorously, the buckles on Tommy’s jacket jingled. Then he nodded at Henrik and moved toward the door.

“Okay, so that’s agreed then,” he said to Henrik. “I’ll call you.”

Henrik locked the front door behind Tommy, then went and joined Camilla on the sofa. They sat in silence and finished watching the film they’d started before the brothers turned up.

“Do you think I should stay, Henrik?” she asked half an hour later, when it was almost eleven o’clock.

“If you want to,” he said. “That would be good.”

After midnight they were lying next to each other in the little bedroom, and for Henrik it was like being taken six months back in time. As if everything was as it should be. It was just fantastic that Camilla had come back, and the only thing that was bothering him now was the persistent Serelius brothers.

And the knocking.

Henrik was listening for it, but all he could hear was the sound of Camilla’s soft breathing. She had fallen asleep with no problem.

Silence. No noises inside the walls.

He didn’t want to think about the knocking now. Or about the visit from the Serelius brothers. Or about the manor house at Eel Point.

Camilla had come back, but Henrik didn’t dare to discuss with her exactly what their relationship was. They weren’t living together, anyway. Early the next morning he got up and went off to work in Marnäs.

She was still in the apartment then, but when he got home it was empty. There was no reply when he rang her.

That night he lay alone in his bed again, and when he had turned out the light the noises started in the hallway. There was a knocking sound inside the walls, quiet but persistent.

Henrik raised his head from the pillow.

“Shut the fuck up!” he yelled out into the room.

The knocking paused briefly, then resumed.

The last year of the fifties-that’s when my own story begins. The story of Mirja at the manor house at Eel Point, and of Torun and her paintings of the blizzard .

I was sixteen years old and fatherless when I arrived at the lighthouse station. But I had Torun. She had taught me something all girls ought to learn: never to be dependent on men .

– MIRJA RAMBE

The two men my artistic mother, Torun, hated most were Stalin and Hitler. She was born a couple of years before the First World War and grew up on Bondegatan in Stockholm, but she was restless and wanted to venture out into the world. She loved painting, and at the beginning of the 1930s she went to art school in Gothenburg first of all, and then on to Paris, where, according to Torun, people constantly mistook her for Greta Garbo. Her paintings attracted a certain amount of attention, but she wanted to get back to Sweden when the war broke out, and traveled back via Copenhagen. There she met a Danish artist and managed to fit in a quick romance before Hitler’s soldiers suddenly appeared on the streets.

When she got home to Sweden, Torun discovered that she was pregnant. According to her, she wrote several letters to the father-to-be, my Danish daddy. It might be true. However, he never got in touch.

I was born in the winter of 1941, when fear covered the world. At that time Torun was living in Stockholm, where all the lights had been turned off and everything was rationed. She kept on moving to different rooms for unmarried mothers, poky little holes rented out by disapproving old ladies, and supported herself by cleaning for the rich folk of Östermalm.

She had neither the time nor the money to be able to paint.

It can’t have been easy. I know it wasn’t easy.

When I first heard the dead whispering in the barn at Eel Point, I wasn’t afraid. I’d experienced far worse in Stockholm.

One summer after the war, when I am seven or eight years old, I start to have problems peeing. It’s terribly painful. Torun says I’ve been swimming too much, and takes me to a doctor with a beard on one of Stockholm’s widest streets. He’s nice, my mother says. He charges next to nothing to see children.

The doctor is very friendly when he says hello. He is old, he must be at least fifty, and his coat is all creased. He smells of booze.

I have to go in and lie down on my back in a special room in his surgery, which also stinks of booze, and the doctor closes the door behind us.

“Unbutton your skirt,” he says. “Pull it up and just relax.”

I am alone with the doctor, and he is very thorough. But at last he is satisfied.

“If you tell anyone about this, they’ll put you away in an institution,” he says, patting me on the head.

He buttons up his coat. Then he gives me a shiny one-krona coin and we go back to Torun in the waiting room-I stagger along, my legs trembling, and I feel even more ill than I did before, but the doctor says there isn’t anything serious wrong with me. I am a good girl, and he will prescribe some suitable medicine.

My mother is furious when I refuse to take the doctor’s tablets.

At the beginning of the 1950s, Torun takes me to Öland. It is one of her ideas. I don’t think she had any connection