The Darkest Room

by Johan Theorin

  “Mmm.”

  She mumbled something in her sleep and gradually relaxed. Her breathing was calmer now; she had placed her arm around her mother’s sweater and buried her face in the thick wool. Her sheep from Gotland was lying on the other side of the pillow, but she ignored it.

  Livia was asleep again.

  The danger had passed and Joakim knew that next morning she wouldn’t even remember that she had been awake.

  He breathed out and sat down on the edge of her bed, his head drooping.

  A darkened room, a bed, the blinds pulled down.

  He wanted to fall asleep, to sleep as deeply as Livia and forget himself. He just couldn’t think anymore; he had no strength left.

  And yet he couldn’t sleep.

  He thought about the laundry basket, about Katrine’s clothes, and after a couple of minutes he got up and went back into the bathroom. To the laundry basket.

  The thing he was looking for was almost right at the bottom: Katrine’s nightgown, white with a red heart on the front. He took it out of the basket.

  Out in the corridor he stopped and listened outside both the children’s rooms, but all remained silent.

  Joakim went into his room, put the light on, and remade the double bed. He shook and smoothed the sheets, plumped up the pillows, and folded back the coverlet. Then he got back in, closed his eyes, and breathed in the smell of Katrine.

  He reached out and touched the soft fabric.

  Morning again. Joakim woke to the stubborn beep of the alarm clock-which meant that he must have slept.

  Katrine is dead, he said to himself.

  He could hear Gabriel and Livia starting to move about in their beds-and then he heard one of them padding barefoot over the wooden floor to the bathroom-and he realized that he could smell the scent of his wife. His hands were holding on to something thin and soft.

  The nightgown.

  In the darkness he stared at it with something close to embarrassment. He remembered what he had done in the bathroom during the night, and quickly pulled up the coverlet to hide it.

  Joakim got up, took a shower, and got dressed, then dressed the children and settled them at the breakfast table.

  He glanced at them to see if they were watching him, but they were both concentrating on their plates.

  The darkness and the cold in the mornings seemed to make Livia more lively. When Gabriel had left the kitchen to go to the bathroom, she looked at her father.

  “When is Mommy coming back?”

  Joakim closed his eyes. He was standing at the counter with his back to her, warming his hands on his coffee mug.

  The question hung there in the air. He couldn’t bear it, but Livia had asked the same question every morning and evening since Katrine’s death.

  “I don’t really know,” he replied slowly. “I don’t know when Mommy’s coming back.”

  “But when?” said Livia more loudly.

  She was waiting for his answer.

  Joakim didn’t speak, but eventually he turned around. The right time to tell her would never come. He looked at Livia.

  “Actually… I don’t think Mommy will be coming back,” he said. “She’s gone, Livia.”

  Livia stared at him.

  “No,” she said firmly and decisively. “She has not.”

  “Livia, Mommy isn’t coming-”

  “She is too!” screamed Livia across the table. “She is coming back! End of story!”

  Then she went back to eating her sandwich. Joakim lowered his eyes and drank his coffee; he was beaten.

  He drove the children into Marnäs at around eight in the mornings, away from the silence of Eel Point.

  The sound of joyous laughter and screams met them as they walked into Gabriel’s nursery school. Joakim had no strength whatsoever. He just gave his son a tired hug as they said goodbye. Gabriel quickly turned away and ran off toward the cheerful voices of his friends in the soft playroom.

  But the children’s energy would disappear with time,

  Joakim thought; they would grow old and their faces would become gray and sunken. Behind those bright faces lay pale skulls with empty eye sockets.

  He shook his head to push the thought away.

  “Bye, Daddy,” said Livia when he left her in the cloakroom at preschool. “Is Mommy coming home tonight?”

  It was as if she hadn’t heard what he had said at the breakfast table.

  “No, not tonight,” he said. “But I’ll come and pick you up.”

  “Early?”

  Livia always wanted to be picked up early-but when Joakim did turn up early, she never wanted to leave her friends to go home.

  “Sure,” he said. “I’ll come early.”

  He nodded, and Livia ran off to join the other children. At the same time a gray-haired woman looked out of the cloakroom.

  “Hi there, Joakim,” she said, her expression sympathetic.

  “Hi there.”

  He recognized her; it was Marianne, the head of the preschool unit.

  “How’s it going?”

  “Not so good,” said Joakim.

  He had to be at the funeral director’s office in Borgholm in twenty minutes, and moved toward the door. But Marianne took a step toward him.

  “I understand,” she said. “We all do.”

  “Does she talk?” said Joakim, nodding toward the other rooms.

  “Livia? Yes, she-”

  “I mean, does she talk about her mother?”

  “Not much. And nor do we. Or rather, what I mean is…” Marianne stopped for a second or two, then went on: “If it’s okay with you, the staff are no different with Livia now than they were before. She’s just like all the other children in the class.”

  Joakim nodded.

  “If you didn’t already know…I was the one who found her in the water,” said Marianne.

  “Right.”

  Joakim had no questions, but she carried on talking anyway, as if she needed to tell him:

  “There was just Livia and Gabriel left here that day… it was after five, and still no one had come to pick them up. And there was no answer when I telephoned. So I put them in my car and drove out to Eel Point. The children ran into the house, the door wasn’t locked… but the place was silent and empty. I went out looking, and then I saw something red down in the water, by the lighthouses. A red jacket.”

  Joakim was listening and at the same time wondering what Marianne’s head looked like beneath the thin skin. A fairly narrow cranium, he thought, with high white cheekbones.

  She went on: “I saw the jacket, and then I saw a pair of pants… and then I realized there was someone floating out there. So I rang the emergency number, then I ran down to the water. But I could see it was… too late. It just seems so strange… I mean, I’d been talking to her the day before.”

  Marianne lowered her eyes and fell silent.

  “And there was no one else there?” said Joakim.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The children weren’t there. They didn’t see Katrine.”

  “No, they were still in the house. Then I took them over to the neighbors. They didn’t see anything.”

  “Good.”

  “Children live in the present, they adapt,” said Marianne. “They… they forget.”

  As Joakim walked back out to the car, he knew one thing for certain: he didn’t want Livia to forget Katrine.

  And he mustn’t forget her either. To forget Katrine would be unforgivable.

  The light in the northern lighthouse at Eel Point went out this year. As far as I know, it has never been lit since.

  But Ragnar Davidsson told me that a light can still be seen in the tower sometimes-the night before someone is going to die.

  Perhaps it is an old fire that sometimes flares up in the lighthouse. The memory of a terrible accident.

  – MIRJA RAMBE

  WINTER 1884

  Two hours after sunset, the light in the northern lighthouse at Eel P
oint goes out.

  It is the sixteenth of December, 1884. The storm that has swept in across the island during the afternoon has reached its peak, and the thunderous roar of the wind and the crashing waves brushes aside any other sound in the area around the lighthouses.

  Mats Bengtsson, the lighthouse keeper, is on his way out into the storm, heading for the southern lighthouse; it is only because he is outside looking toward the shore that he can see through the thickly falling snow that something has happened. The southern lighthouse is flashing as usual, but there is no light in the northern tower-it has gone out, just as if someone has blown out a candle.

  Bengtsson just stares. Then he turns back and runs across the inner courtyard, up the steps to the manor house. He tears open the porch door.

  “The light is gone!” he yells into the house. “The northern light is out!”

  Bengtsson hears someone reply from the kitchen, perhaps his own wife, Lisa, but he doesn’t linger in the warmth. He goes back outside into the blizzard.

  Down in the meadow by the shore, blasted by the snow, he has to lean forward like a cripple; it feels as if the arctic wind is blowing straight through him.

  Up in the tower the assistant keeper, Jan Klackman, is on watch alone; his shift began at four o’clock. Klackman is Bengtsson’s best friend. Bengtsson knows that he might need help to get the light going again, whatever has happened.

  At the beginning of winter a rope was attached to a line of iron posts to show the way from the house down to the lighthouses, and Bengtsson clings to it with both hands, like a lifeline. He fights his way down to the shore, straight into the wind, and makes his way out onto the jetty leading to the lighthouses. Out here there is a chain he can hold on to, but the stones are as slippery as soap and covered in ice.

  When he finally reaches the little island where the northern lighthouse stands, he looks up at the dark tower. Despite the fact that the lamp has gone out, he can see a faint yellow glow from the large panes of glass at the top of the tower.

  Something is burning up there, or glowing.

  The paraffin. The new fuel that has replaced coal-the paraffin must have caught fire.

  Bengtsson manages to open the steel door leading into the tower, and goes inside. The door slams shut behind him. Everything is still but not silent, because the storm is still roaring outside.

  He hurries up the stone staircase that runs along the wall in a spiral.

  Bengtsson begins to pant. There are 164 steps-he has run up them innumerable times and counted them. On the way up he can feel the storm shaking the thick walls the whole time. The lighthouse seems to be swaying in the blizzard.

  Halfway up the stairs an acrid stench hits his nostrils.

  The stench of burned meat.

  “Jan?” shouts Bengtsson. “Jan!”

  Twenty steps further up he sees the body. It is lying with

  its head pointing down the steep staircase, like a rag that has been cast aside. The black uniform is still burning.

  Somehow Klackman has lost his balance up in the lighthouse, and ended up with the burning paraffin all over him.

  Bengtsson takes the final steps toward him, takes off his coat and begins to put out the fire.

  Someone is coming up the steps behind him and Bengtsson calls out, without looking around, “He’s burning!”

  And he carries on smothering the fire on Klackman’s body, to get rid of the burning paraffin.

  “Here!”

  He feels a hand on his shoulder. It is assistant keeper Westerberg; he has a rope with him and quickly loops it under Klackman’s arms.

  “Now we can lift him!”

  Westerberg and Bengtsson quickly start carrying Klackman’s smoking body down the spiral staircase.

  At the bottom it is possible to breathe almost normally again. But is Klackman breathing? Westerberg has brought a lantern, which is standing on the floor, and in its glow Bengtsson can see how badly burned his friend is. Several of his fingers are blackened, and the flames have reached his hair and face.

  “We have to get him outside,” says Bengtsson.

  They push open the door of the lighthouse and stagger out into the storm, with Klackman between them. Bengtsson breathes in the fresh, ice-cold air. The snowstorm has begun to subside, but the waves are still high.

  Their strength gives out when they reach the shore. Westerberg lets go of Klackman’s legs and sinks to his knees in the snow, panting. Bengtsson also lets go, but leans over his face.

  “Jan? Can you hear me? Jan?”

  It is too late to do anything. Klackman’s badly burned body lies there motionless on the ground; his soul has departed.

  Bengtsson hears cries and anxious voices approaching and looks up. He sees master lighthouse keeper Jonsson and

  the other four keepers hurrying through the wind. Following behind them are the women from the house. Bengtsson sees that one of them is Klackman’s wife, Anne-Marie.

  His head feels completely empty. He must say something to her, but what do you say when the worst has happened?

  “No!”

  A woman comes running. She is beside herself with grief and bends over Klackman, shaking him in desperation.

  But it is not Anne-Marie Klackman-it is Bengtsson’s wife, Lisa, who is lying there weeping beside the lifeless body.

  Mats Bengtsson realizes that nothing is as he thought.

  He meets his wife’s eyes as she gets up. Lisa has come to her senses now and realizes what she has done, but Bengtsson nods.

  “He was my friend,” is all he says, as he turns his gaze toward the dark tower of the lighthouse.

  7

  “S’o you think everything was better in the old days, Gerlof?” said Maja Nyman.

  Gerlof lowered his cup onto the coffee table in the home at Marnäs and pondered his reply for a few seconds, as he always did.

  “Not everything. And not always. But a great deal was certainly… better planned,” he said eventually. “We had time to think before we did something. These days they don’t.”

  “Better planned?” said Maja. “Is that what you think?… Don’t you remember the shoemaker down in Stenvik? The one who was in the village when we were little?”

  “You mean Shoe-Paulsson?”

  “Arne Paulsson, that’s right,” said Maja. “The worst shoemaker in the world. He had never learned how to tell the difference between right shoes and left shoes, or else he thought it was unnecessary. So he just made one kind of shoe.”

  “So he did,” said Gerlof quietly, “I remember them.”

  “You remember the pain, if nothing else,” said Maja with a smile. “Paulsson’s wooden clogs managed to pinch and fit too loosely at the same time. And they always came off when you ran. Was that better?”

  Tilda was sitting at the table in the dining room at the home, listening in total fascination. She had almost forgotten her troubles at work.

  Conversations like these about the old days should be preserved, she thought, but the tape recorder was in the drawer of Gerlof’s desk.

  “No, no,” said Gerlof, picking up his coffee cup. “Perhaps people didn’t think ahead too much in the old days. But at least they thought.”

  Twenty minutes later Tilda and Gerlof were back in his room, and her tape recorder was up and running once again. The wall clock was ticking in the background as Gerlof began to talk about his early days as a teenage skipper on the Baltic.

  Life wasn’t dreary and uneventful at the home, Tilda realized-it was restful. She felt more and more contented in Gerlof’s little room, because there she could almost forget what had happened over the last few days. Everything that had gone wrong at Eel Point.

  Wrong name, wrong information about the deceased, wrong approach-a grieving husband who was refusing to speak to her and doubtless plenty of gossip among her colleagues in her first few days as a local police officer.

  And yet she wasn’t the only one who’d done something wrong.

 
She suddenly noticed that Gerlof had stopped chatting and was looking at her.

  “That’s the way it is,” he said. “Everything changes.”

  The cassette tape was turning in the machine on the table.

  “Yes, these are modern times,” said Tilda loudly. “And the

  old times… what do you think about when you remember the old times?”

  “Well… for me it’s shipping, of course,” said Gerlof, looking suspiciously at the tape recorder. “All the beautiful cargo ships slipping in and out of the harbor at Borgholm. The smell when you went aboard… wood tar and paint and fuel oil… stagnant bilgewater from the hold and frying food from the galley.”

  “So what was the best thing about those days?” said Tilda.

  “The calmness… and the silence. The fact that things could take their own time. When I sailed on the cargo ships, there were small engines on most of them, of course, but on those that had only sails there was nothing to be done when the wind dropped of an evening. You dropped anchor and waited for the wind to get up again next day. And nobody knew exactly where the cargo ships were, before the telephone and short-wave radio came in. One day they would just turn up off the coast again, on their way to their home harbor in full sail. And then the wives could relax, for this time.”

  Tilda nodded. Then she thought again about the information she’d gotten wrong the previous week, and asked, “What do you know about the manor house at Eel Point, Gerlof?”

  “Eel Point? Well, a little. It was on the wrong side of the island from Stenvik, but your grandfather was a neighbor, after all.”

  “Was he?”

  “More or less. His cottage was a mile or so further north. Ragnar used to fish for eels off the point, and he was a watchman for the lighthouses.”

  “Are there any special stories about the place?”

  “Well, the manor house does have something of a reputation,” said Gerlof. “They say that the foundations are made of granite from an old abandoned chapel, and that the timber in the house came from ships wrecked on the rocks. They were recycling even in those days.”

  “Why is there only a light in one tower?” said Tilda.

  “There was some kind of accident there, I think it was a fire… The twin lighthouses were built to distinguish Eel Point from other lighthouse locations around Öland, but in the end I suppose it got too expensive to have them both working every night. One was enough.” Gerlof thought for a while, then added, “And of course these days ships navigate with the help of satellites, so even that one is no longer necessary.”