The Darkest Room

WINTER 1960

My mother, Torun, continues to paint, although her sight never recovers after her experience out in the snowstorm. She can only just see where she’s going by this stage, and she is no longer able to read.

Her glasses don’t help much. In Borgholm we find a kind of big halogen lamp that stands on a sort of tripod. It shines with a dazzling white light, making our two dark rooms in the outbuilding at Eel Point look like a film studio. In the middle of this brilliant sunshine my mother sits painting, using the darkest tones she is able to mix.

Torun’s spatula and brushes rasp across the taut canvas like stressed-out mice. My mother is painting the blizzard in which she got lost the previous winter, and she has her face so close to the canvas that the tip of her nose is almost permanently dark gray. She stares intently at the dark shadows that develop-I think when she is painting she feels as if she were still out there among the dead in the pools on the peat bog, Offermossen.

Canvas after canvas is covered in oils, but since no one wants to buy or even exhibit the paintings, she keeps the rolled-up canvases in the empty, dry room next to the kitchen in the outbuilding.

I am also doing some painting, when there are colors and

paper left over, but the atmosphere in the house at the end of the world still remains grim. We never have any money, and Torun can no longer see well enough to work as a cleaner.

Torun has her forty-ninth birthday at the beginning of November; she celebrates alone with a bottle of red wine and begins to talk about the fact that her life is over.

Mine feels as if it hasn’t even begun yet.

I am eighteen years old, I have left school, and I have taken over some of Torun’s cleaning jobs while I wait for something better to turn up. I have missed the 1950s in every way. It is only when they are over that I come across some old copies of Picture Journal and find out that the fifties, apart from the death of Stalin and the fear of the atom bomb, was the decade of the teenagers, with white ankle socks, house parties, and rock and roll-but there wasn’t much of that out in the country. Our radio was old, and usually broadcast a mixture of crackles and ghostly voices. After the blissful season when it’s possible to go swimming, life on the coast is nine months of darkness, wind, long muddy roads, wet clothes, and constantly frozen feet.

The only consolation this year is Markus.

Markus Landkvist came from Borgholm in the fall that year and moved into a little room in the manor house at Eel Point. Markus is nineteen, one year older than me, and is doing casual work on the farms in the area while he waits to be called up for his military service.

He is not my first love, but he is definitely a step forward. Earlier romances have mostly involved standing and staring at a boy across the schoolyard, hoping that he will come over and pull my hair.

Markus is tall and blond and the best-looking boy around, at least that’s what I think.

“You know Eel Point is haunted?” I ask him when we meet in the kitchen of the manor house for the first time.

“What do you mean?”

He doesn’t seem in the least afraid or even interested, but I have made contact now and I have to carry on.

“The dead live in the barn,” I say. “They whisper behind the walls.”

“It’s just the wind,” says Markus.

It isn’t exactly love at first sight. But we start spending time together. I am the talkative annoying one, Markus is the strong silent one. But I think he likes me. I draw Markus from memory before I fall asleep, and start to dream about leaving Eel Point with him.

As I see it, Markus and I are the only ones here who have any kind of life ahead of us. Torun has given up, and the older men in the house seem content to work during the day and to sit around gossiping in the evenings.

Sometimes they drink home-brewed liquor in the kitchen with Ragnar Davidsson, the eel fisherman. I can hear their laughter through the windows.

We all move in our own circles at Eel Point, and this winter I discover the hayloft above the barn. There is hardly any hay in there, but it is full of possessions that people have left behind, and I set off on a journey of discovery almost every week. There are lots of traces of families and lighthouse keepers who have lived in the manor house; it is almost like a museum, with odds and ends to do with boats and wooden boxes and piles of old navigation charts and log books. I move things aside so that I can make my way further in among the treasures and the trash, and finally I reach the wall at the far side of the loft.

And I discover all those names, carved into the wall:

CAROLINA 1868

PETTER 1900

GRETA 1943

And many more. Almost every plank in the wall has at least one name carved into it.

I read the names and I am fascinated by all those who have lived and died at Eel Point. It feels as if they are with me up there in the loft.

My main goal in life is now to get Markus up there with me.