The Darkest Room

WINTER 1961

In the evenings that fall and winter Markus and I creep around with a paraffin lamp among the ropes and chains and open chests and look at old documents relating to the lighthouses.

It looks like a garbage dump, but there are fantastic things up there-so many memories from the hundred-year-old history of the manor. All the trash every family and every lighthouse keeper left behind at Eel Point seems to have ended up here in the barn sooner or later, and has been forgotten.

After a few weeks we carry all the spare blankets we can find in the house out to the barn and make a little tent out of them. We sneak out bread and wine and cigarettes and start to have picnics up there too, high above the dreariness of everyday life.

I show Markus the wall with all the carved names of those who have died. We trace the letters with our fingers and I fantasize gleefully about the tragedies that have visited Eel Point over the years.

We carve our own names into the floor of the loft instead, close beside each other.

It takes three picnics in the loft before he dares to kiss me on the mouth. Markus isn’t allowed to do much more-the old doctor still haunts me-but I live on his kiss for several weeks.

And now I can paint Markus quite openly.

Suddenly Eel Point is not the end of the world after all. It is the center of the world, and I start to believe and hope that Markus and I will be able to do what we want, travel wherever we want. We get through the long winter together.

The sea is cold and as usual it takes a long time for the summer to reach the island, but at the end of May the sun shines bright and clear over the meadows once again. But that is also when Markus gets ready to leave-not with me, but alone. He has been called up for one year’s military service on the mainland.

We promise to write to each other. Lots of letters.

When he has packed his suitcase, I go with him to the train station in Marnäs. We stand there in silence, waiting with other residents of the island. The railway on Öland is to be closed this year, and the atmosphere in the waiting room is gloomy.

Markus has gone, but Ragnar Davidsson continues to moor his boat at Eel Point and come up to the house.

He and I actually have a number of discussions about art, even if the level is quite low. It starts one day when I come out into the hallway of the outbuilding and notice that the door to the middle room is open. When I look in, Davidsson is standing there in the middle of the floor. He is looking at all the dark paintings that cover the walls.

It is obvious that this is the first time he has discovered Torun’s huge collection, and he doesn’t like it. He shakes his head.

“What do you think?” I ask.

“It’s all just black and gray,” he says. “Just a lot of dark colors.”

“That’s what a blizzard looks like at night,” I say.

“In that case it looks like… crap,” says Davidsson.

“You can also look at it from a symbolic point of view,” I venture. “It’s a blizzard at night, but it also represents a soul… the tormented soul of a woman.”

Davidsson shakes his head. “Crap,” he says again.

He has clearly never read Simone de Beauvoir. I haven’t either, of course, but at least I’ve heard of her.

I make one last attempt to defend Torun, and say, “They’ll be worth a lot of money one day.”

Davidsson turns his head and looks at me as if I’m insane. Then he walks past me and goes outside.

When I go back into the other room, I see Torun sitting by the window, and realize straightaway that she heard the whole conversation. Despite the fact that she is almost completely blind now, she stares out of the window.

I try to talk to her about something else, but she shakes her head.

“Ragnar is right,” she says. “It’s crap, all of it.”

I stop going up to the hayloft once Markus has gone. It reminds me of him too much, it feels too empty.

But of course we send letters to each other. I write the most often-several long letters in reply to one of his short ones.

Markus’s letters are mostly about military exercises, and they don’t come very often. But this just makes me fill letter after letter with my dreams and plans. When can we see each other again? When is he on leave? When does he finish?

He doesn’t really know, but promises that we will meet up. Soon.

I begin to realize that I have to get away from Eel Point, take the ferry to the mainland and Markus. But how can I leave Torun? It’s impossible.