The Darkest Room

WINTER 1943

The alarm is raised at the air-monitoring station at Eel Point the day after the great blizzard has passed by-a sixteen-year-old girl is missing.

“Lost in the blizzard,” says the director of the station, Stovey, when the seven men gather in the kitchen in the morning, wearing the gray uniform of the crown. Stovey’s real name is Bengtsson, but he has acquired his new name because he prefers to sit indoors next to the iron stove when there’s a cold wind outside. And there is almost always a cold wind outside in the winter at Eel Point.

“I shouldn’t think there’s much hope,” he goes on. “But we’d better search anyway.”

Stovey himself stays inside to coordinate the search-everyone else sets off in the snow. Eskil Nilsson and Ludvig Rucker, who is nineteen years old and the youngest at the station, are sent off to the west to search in the area around the peat bog, Offermossen.

It is only fifteen degrees below zero and there is just a light breeze today-considerably milder than previous winters during the war, when the thermometer has sometimes dropped to somewhere between minus thirty and minus forty.

Apart from the blizzard the previous night, it has been a quiet winter at Eel Point. The German Messerschmitts have more or less stopped appearing along the coast, and after Stalingrad it is the Soviet Union’s supremacy over the Baltic that Sweden fears most.

One of Eskil’s older brothers has been sent over to Gotland to live in a tent all the year round. Eel Point is in radio contact with southern Gotland-if the Soviet fleet attacks, they will be the first to know.

Ludvig quickly lights a cigarette when they get outside, and starts plowing through the snowdrifts in his boots. Ludvig smokes like a chimney, but never offers anyone else a cigarette. Eskil wonders where he gets hold of all his supplies.

Most things have been rationed at the manor for a long time. They can get fish from the sea and milk from the two cows at the manor, but there is a severe shortage of fuel, eggs, potatoes, cloth, and real coffee. Worst of all is the tobacco rationing, which is now down to three cigarettes a day.

But Ludvig seems able to get hold of tobacco with no problem, either in the mail or from someone in the villages around Eel Point. How can he afford it? The conscripts’ pay is just one krona per day.

When they have gone a few hundred yards, Eskil stops and looks for the main highway. He can’t see it-the blizzard has made it magically disappear. Bundles of fir branches had been pushed into the ground to mark out the route for the sledge teams, but they must have blown away during the night.

“I wonder where she came from?” says Eskil, clambering over a snowdrift.

“She came from Malmtorp, outside Rörby,” says Ludvig.

“Are you sure?”

“I know her name too,” says Ludvig. “Greta Friberg.”

“Greta? How do you know that?”

Ludvig merely smiles and takes out a fresh cigarette.

Now Eskil can see the western watchtower. A rope has

been fixed up to lead the way there from the highway. The tower is built of wood, insulated with pine branches and camouflaged with gray-green sheets of fabric. The snow has been driven up into an almost vertical wall against the eastern side by the blizzard.

The other air-monitoring watchtower at Eel Point is the southern lighthouse, which was converted to electricity just before the war broke out; it has heating and is a very comfortable place to sit and watch for foreign aircraft. But he knows that Ludvig prefers to be alone here out on the peat bog.

Of course Eskil suspects that he is not always alone in the watchtower. The Rörby boys hate Ludvig, and Eskil thinks he knows why. The girls from Rörby like him too much.

Ludvig goes over to the tower. He sweeps the snow from the steps with his glove, climbs up, and disappears for a minute or so. Then he comes back down again.

“Here,” he says, handing over a bottle to Eskil.

It’s schnapps. The alcohol content is high; it hasn’t frozen, and Eskil unscrews the cork and takes a warming gulp. Then he looks at the bottle, which is less than half full.

“Were you drinking in the tower yesterday?” he asks.

“Last night,” says Ludvig.

“So you walked home in the blizzard?”

Ludvig nods. “More like crawling, really. You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face… good job the rope was there.”

He puts the bottle back in the tower, then they plow on northward through the snow, toward Rörby.

Fifteen minutes later they find the girl’s body.

In the middle of a vast expanse of snow north of Offermossen, something that could be the slender stump of a birch tree is sticking up. Eskil peers at it and moves closer.

Suddenly he sees that it is a little hand.

Greta Friberg had almost reached Rörby when the snow caught her. Her rigid face is staring up at the sky when they scrape away the snow, and even her eyes are covered in ice crystals.

Eskil can’t stop looking at her. He falls to his knees in silence.

Ludvig stands behind him, smoking.

“Is this her?” says Eskil quietly.

Ludvig knocks the ash off his cigarette and leans over for a quick look.

“Yes, that’s Greta.”

“She was with you, wasn’t she?” says Eskil. “Yesterday, up in the tower.”

“Maybe,” says Ludvig, and adds, “I’d better varnish the truth a bit for Stovey about all this.”

Eskil gets to his feet. “Don’t lie to me, Ludvig,” he says.

Ludvig shrugs his shoulders and stubs out his cigarette. “She wanted to go home. She was freezing cold, and she was terrified of getting stuck in the tower with me all night. So she went her way in the blizzard and I went mine.”

Eskil looks at him, then at the body in the snow. “We have to fetch help. She can’t stay here.”

“We’ll use the tow sled,” says Ludvig. “We can put her on that. We’ll go and fetch it.”

He turns and heads toward Eel Point. Eskil walks slowly backward so that he won’t be turning his back on the dead girl too quickly, then catches up with Ludvig.

They plow along silently in the snow, side by side.

“Are you going to carve her name up in the barn?” he asks. “Like we did with Werner?”

Werner was a seventeen-year-old who had been called up for military service; he fell into the water from a boat and drowned off the point in the summer of 1942. Greta’s name should be carved next to his up in the hayloft, in Eskil’s opinion. But Ludvig shakes his head.

“I hardly knew her.”

“But…”

“It was her own fault,” says Ludvig. “She should have stayed with me in the tower. I’d have warmed her up.”

Eskil says nothing.

“But there are plenty of girls in the villages,” Ludvig goes on, looking across the far side of Offermossen. “That’s the best thing about girls, they never run out.”

Eskil nods, but he can’t think about girls right now. He can only think of the dead.