The Darkest Room

by Johan Theorin

  The family gathered at half past six in the kitchen. Joakim wanted to make a quick getaway to Stockholm, and had finished his cup of tea almost before Katrine and the children had sat down. As he placed his cup in the dishwasher, he saw an orange strip of light from the sun, which was still hidden by the sea, and higher up in the sky the V-shaped formation of a flock of birds, bobbing slightly as they flew out over the Baltic.

  Geese or cranes? It was still too dark to see them clearly, and he wasn’t very good at identifying birds in flight.

  “Can you see those birds out there?” he said over his shoulder. “They’re doing just what we’ve done… moving south.”

  Nobody answered. Katrine and Livia were munching their sandwiches; Gabriel was drinking concentrated baby rice out of his bottle.

  The two lighthouses down by the water rose up toward the sky like two fairy-tale castles, the south tower regularly flashing its red glow. From the panes of glass at the top of the north tower came a fainter white light that didn’t flash.

  This was slightly odd, because the northern lighthouse hadn’t shown a light before. Joakim leaned closer to the window. The white glow might have been a reflection of the sunrise, but it appeared to be coming from inside the tower.

  “Are there more birds moving south, Daddy?” said Livia behind him.

  “No.”

  Joakim stopped looking at the lighthouses. He went back to the breakfast table to clean up.

  The migrating birds had a long journey ahead of them, just like Joakim. He would be driving some two hundred and seventy miles today, to pick up the last of their possessions

  from the house in Bromma. He would stay the night with his mother, Ingrid, in Jakobsberg, then drive back to Öland the next day.

  This was his last trip to the capital, at least for this year.

  Gabriel seemed bright and cheerful, but Livia looked as if she was in a bad mood. She had got up with Katrine’s help, but was still sleepy and quiet. She was holding her sandwich in one hand, elbows on the table, staring down into her glass of milk.

  “Eat up now, Livia.”

  “Mmm.”

  She certainly wasn’t a morning person, but when she got to nursery school she usually cheered up. She had changed to an older playgroup the previous week, and seemed happy there.

  “So what are you going to do at nursery school today?”

  “It’s not a nursery school, Daddy.” She looked up at him with a truculent expression. “Gabriel goes to nursery school. I go to school.”

  “Preschool,” said Joakim. “Isn’t that right?”

  “School,” said Livia.

  “Okay… so what are you going to do today?”

  “Don’t know,” said Livia, staring down at the table again.

  “Are you going to play with a new friend?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Okay, but drink up your milk now. We’re off into Marnäs soon… to school.”

  “Mmm.”

  By twenty past seven the sun was on its way up over the horizon. Its yellow beams were feeling their way cautiously across the calm sea, without giving any warmth. It would be a sunny but cold day-the thermometer on the wall of the house was showing plus three degrees.

  Joakim was out in the courtyard scraping frost from the

  windows of the Volvo. Then he opened the back door for the children.

  Livia settled herself in her child seat with Foreman in her arms. Joakim fastened Gabriel into the smaller seat beside her. Then he got into the driver’s seat.

  “Wasn’t Mom going to wave us off?” he asked.

  “She’s gone to the bathroom,” said Livia. “She’s gone to do a big one. She likes to sit there for a while when she does a big one.”

  Livia had quickly cheered up after breakfast and become more talkative. Once she got to playgroup, she would have tons of energy.

  Joakim leaned back in his seat and looked at Livia’s little red two-wheeler and Gabriel’s three-wheeler, standing out in the courtyard. He noticed the bikes weren’t locked. This wasn’t the big city.

  Katrine came out a couple of minutes later, turned off the light in the hallway, and locked the door behind her. She was wearing a bright red winter jacket with a hood and blue sweatpants. In Stockholm she had usually dressed in black, but here on Öland she had begun to go for roomier and slightly more colorful clothes.

  She waved to them and gave the red-painted wooden wall next to the door a friendly pat. Lack of sleep had smudged dark shadows beneath her eyes, but she still smiled toward the car.

  Their manor house. Joakim waved at Katrine and smiled back.

  “Okay, let’s go,” said Livia from the back seat.

  “Go! Go!” yelled Gabriel, waving goodbye to the house.

  Joakim started the engine and the headlights came on, illuminating the house. A thin layer of glittering frost covered the ground, an early sign of winter. He would soon have to change over to studded tires.

  Livia quickly pulled on her headphones so that she could listen to the adventures of Bamse the bear-she had been

  given a tape recorder of her own, and had quickly learned how the buttons worked. When there were songs on the tape, she let Gabriel listen too.

  The route to the main coastal highway was a gravel-covered track running between a small, dense deciduous wood and a ditch running along the bottom of an old stone wall. The track was narrow and twisting, and Joakim kept his speed down, gripping the wheel firmly. He hadn’t gotten to know all the bends yet.

  Out by the main highway their new metal mailbox was hanging on a post. Joakim slowed down and looked to see if there was any sign of lights from other cars. But everything was dark and silent in both directions. Just as deserted as the opposite side of the road, where a yellowish-brown bog extended into the distance.

  They didn’t meet any other cars on their way into Marnäs through the little village of Rörby, and there weren’t many people out and about when they drove into town. A fish van drove past them and a couple of schoolchildren aged about ten were running toward the school, their rucksacks bumping on their backs.

  Joakim turned onto the main street and headed for the empty square. A few hundred yards further on was the Marnäs school, and next door, in an enclosed yard with slides and sandboxes and a few trees, was Livia and Gabriel’s preschool. It was a low wooden building with a warm yellow light shining from the big windows.

  Several parents were dropping off their children on the sidewalk in front of the school, and Joakim stopped at the end of the row of vehicles without switching off the engine.

  Some of the other parents smiled and nodded at him-after the previous day’s article in Ölands-Posten many people in Marnäs now knew who he was.

  “Watch out for the cars,” said Joakim. “Stay on the sidewalk.”

  “Bye!” said Livia, opening the car door and maneuvering

  herself out of the child seat. It wasn’t a protracted farewell;

  she was used to him being away.

  Gabriel said nothing; when Joakim helped him out of the seat, he just charged away.

  “Bye then!” Joakim called after them. “See you tomorrow!” By the time the doors closed, Livia was already several yards away, with Gabriel right behind her. Joakim put the car in gear and swung across the road, back toward Eel Point.

  Joakim parked next to Katrine’s car in front of the house and got out to pick up his overnight bag and say goodbye.

  “Hello?” he called out in the porch. “Katrine?”

  No reply. The house was completely silent.

  He went into the bedroom, picked up his case, and went outside again.

  Out on the gravel he stopped:

  “Katrine?”

  There was silence for a few moments, then he heard a muted scraping from the inner courtyard.

  Joakim turned his head. It was the sound of the big black wooden barn door being opened. Katrine stepped out of the darkness and waved to him.

&nb
sp; “Hi there!”

  He waved back and she came over.

  “What were you doing?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Are you leaving now?”

  Joakim nodded.

  “Drive carefully.”

  Katrine leaned over and quickly pressed her mouth against his-a warm kiss in the cold. He breathed in the scent of her skin and her hair for one last time.

  “Say hi to Stockholm from me,” she said, giving him a long look. “When you get home, I’ll tell you about the loft.”

  “The loft?” said Joakim.

  “The hayloft in the barn,” said Katrine.

  “What about it?”

  “I’ll show you tomorrow,” she said. He looked at her.

  “Okay…I’ll call you from Mom’s tonight.” He opened the car door. “Don’t forget to pick up our little lambs.”

  At twenty past eight he pulled into the gas station by the turning for Borgholm to pick up the rented trailer. It was already booked and paid for, so all he had to do was hook it up and set off.

  The traffic was heavier after Borgholm, and Joakim ended up in the middle of a long line of cars-most were presumably commuters who lived on the island but worked in Kalmar, on the mainland. They maintained a leisurely country speed.

  The road curved to the west, and when the ground disappeared beneath it, he was up on the bridge. He liked driving across it, over the span between island and mainland, high above the water in the sound. This morning it was difficult to see the surface of the water down below; it was still too dark. By the time he came off the bridge and joined the coast road toward Stockholm, the sun was rising higher above the Baltic. Joakim could feel its warmth through the side window.

  He switched on a radio station playing rock music, put his foot down and headed north at speed, past the small communities along the coast. It was a winding road, beautiful even on a cold, overcast day. It passed through dense pine forests and airy groves of deciduous trees by the water, past inlets and streams that headed out to sea and disappeared.

  The road continued to curve gradually westward, and left the coast to head in toward Norrköping. Just outside the town Joakim stopped for a couple of sandwiches in an empty hotel restaurant. He had a choice of seven different bottled mineral waters in the chilled display case-Swedish, Norwegian, Italian,

  and French; he realized he was back in civilization, but chose water from the faucet.

  After he’d eaten, he carried on, first toward Södertälje and then into Stockholm. He reached the tall apartment blocks in the southwest suburbs of the city at around half past one, and his Volvo and trailer became just one of a multitude of vehicles, large and small, heading for the city center in lane upon lane, past long rows of storage depots, apartment blocks, and stations used by the commuter trains.

  Stockholm looked beautiful from a distance, a big city on the Baltic, built on a series of large and small islands, but Joakim felt no real pleasure at being back in the city of his childhood. All he could think of were the crowds and the queues and the struggle to get in first. There was a constant lack of space here; too few places to live, not enough places to park, a shortage of daycare places-even a shortage of burial plots. Joakim had read in the paper that people were being encouraged to cremate their dead nowadays, so that they would take up less space in the churchyard.

  He was already missing Eel Point.

  The freeway split repeatedly into a boundless labyrinth of bridges and intersections. Joakim chose one of the exits, turned off, and entered the network of the city, with its traffic lights and noise and dug-up streets. At one intersection he sat there trapped between a bus and a garbage truck and watched a woman shoving a child in a buggy across the street. The child was asking something, but the woman was just staring straight ahead with a sullen expression.

  Joakim had a couple of things to do in the capital. The first was to call in at a small gallery in Östermalm to pick up a landscape painting, an inheritance he didn’t really want to be responsible for.

  The owner wasn’t in, but his elderly mother was there and recognized Joakim. When he had given her his receipt, she went off to unlock a security door and bring out the Rambe painting. It was in a flat wooden box, fastened with screws.

  “We looked at it yesterday before we packed it,” said the woman. “Incomparable.”

  “Yes, we’ve missed it,” said Joakim, although that wasn’t strictly true.

  “Are there any of the others left on Öland?”

  “I don’t know. The royal family has one, I think, but it’s hardly likely to be hanging in some drawing room at Solliden.”

  With the painting safe in the trunk Joakim drove west toward Bromma. It was half past two and the rush-hour traffic hadn’t yet begun to snarl up. It took him just about quarter of an hour to get out of the city and turn off toward the area where the Apple House lay.

  The sight of his old home awoke a greater sense of nostalgia within him than Stockholm had done. The house was only a few hundred yards from the water, in a big garden surrounded by a fence and thick lilac hedges. There were five other big houses on the same street, but only one of them was visible through the trees.

  The Apple House was a tall, airy wooden house that had been built for the director of a bank at the beginning of the twentieth century. But before Joakim and Katrine bought the house, it had been lived in for many years by a collective of New Age individuals, young relatives of the owner who had allowed people to rent rooms and had clearly been more interested in meditating than in painting or general maintenance.

  No one in the collective had shown any kind of staying power or respect for the house, and the neighbors in the houses around them had fought for many years to get rid of them. When Joakim and Katrine finally took it on, the house was dilapidated and the garden almost completely overgrown-but both of them had tackled the renovation of the Apple House with the same energy as they had devoted to their first shared apartment, on Rörstrandsgatan, where a crazy eighty-two-year-old had lived with her seven cats.

  Joakim had been working as a craft teacher and had devoted himself to the house in the evenings and on weekends; Katrine had still been working part-time as an art teacher, and had spent the rest of the time on the house.

  They had celebrated Livia’s second birthday along with Ethel and Ingrid in a chaotic mess of ripped-up floorboards, tins of paint, rolls of wallpaper, and various power tools-with only cold water because the hot water system had broken down that same weekend.

  By the time Livia turned three, however, they had been able to have a proper old-fashioned children’s party on newly stripped wooden floors, with walls that had been smoothed down and papered, and staircases and banisters that had been repaired and oiled. And when Gabriel celebrated his first birthday, the house had been more or less finished.

  These days the place looked like a turn-of-the-century house again, and could be handed over in good order, apart from the leaves in the garden and the lawn that needed mowing. It was waiting for its new owners, the Stenbergs, a couple in their thirties with no children, who both worked in the city center but wanted to live on the outskirts.

  Joakim pulled up by the gravel driveway and reversed so that the trailer ended up by the garage. Then he got out and took a look around.

  Everything was quiet. The only neighbors whose house was in sight were the Hesslins, Lisa and Michael, and they had become good friends with Katrine and Joakim-but there were no cars in their driveway this afternoon. They had repainted their house last summer, this time in yellow. When the magazine Beautiful Homes had done a feature about it the previous year, it had been white.

  Joakim turned to look over at the wooden gate and the gravel path leading to the Apple House.

  His thoughts turned involuntarily to Ethel. Almost a year had passed, but he could still remember her calling out.

  Beside the fence a narrow track led through a grove of trees. No one had seen Ethel walking down the track that
evening, but it was the shortest route down to the water.

  He started to walk up to the house, and looked up at the white façade. The luster was still there, and he remembered all those long brushstrokes when he had gone over it with linseed oil two summers ago.

  He unlocked the door, opened it up, and walked in. When he had closed the door behind him, he stopped again.

  He had cleaned up over the last few weeks in preparation for the move, and the floors still looked free of dust. All the furniture, rugs, and pictures from the hallway and the rooms were gone-but the memories remained. There were so many of them. For more than three years he and Katrine had put their souls into this house.

  You could have heard a pin drop in the rooms around Joakim, but inside his head he could hear all the hammering and sawing. He took off his shoes and moved into the hallway, where a faint smell of cleaning fluid still hung in the air.

  He wandered through the rooms, perhaps for the very last time. Upstairs he stopped in the doorway of one of the two guest bedrooms for a few seconds. A small room, with just one window. Plain white wallpaper and an empty floor. Ethel had slept here when she was living with them.

  Some of their things were still down in the cellar, those there hadn’t been room for on the moving van. Joakim went down the narrow, steep staircase and started gathering them together: an armchair, a few chairs, a couple of mattresses, a small ladder, and a dusty birdcage-a souvenir of William the budgerigar, who had died several years ago. They hadn’t managed to finish cleaning properly down here, but one of their vacuum cleaners was still there. He plugged it in and quickly vacuumed the painted cement floor, then wiped down the cupboards and ledges.

  The house was empty and clean.

  Then he collected up the cleaning equipment-the vacuum

  cleaner, buckets, cleaning fluid and cloths-and placed them at the foot of the cellar stairs.

  In the carpentry workshop on the left, many of his spare tools were still hanging. Joakim started packing them into a cardboard box. Hammers, files, pliers, drills, squares, screwdrivers. Modern screwdrivers might be better, but they weren’t as solid as the old-fashioned ones.