Master lighthouse keeper Georg Ljunggren is leading the work at sea. He is standing in the prow of an open motorboat, and up on the veranda Alma can hear her husband’s booming orders echoing out across the shore, all the way up to the house.
When she opens the door, she can hear him very clearly.
Alma goes out into the cold and walks across the courtyard, recently cleared of snow, toward the barn, without looking down toward the shore.
There is no one in the barn, but when she opens the heavy door and walks in, the cows and horses start to move in the darkness. The storm makes them uneasy.
Alma slowly walks up the steps to the hayloft. There is no one here either.
The hay reaches almost to the roof, but there is a small passageway along the wall so that she can make her way across the wooden floor.
She walks over to the far wall and stops. She has stood here several times over the past few years, but now she reads the names once again.
Then she takes the sheep shears, places the point against one of the planks of wood, and begins to carve today’s date: December 7, 1916. And a name.
The shouts from the shore fall silent.
Everything is quite still, and up in the loft Alma drops the shears. She clasps her hands together by the wall and prays to God.
Everything is silent at Eel Point.
Then comes the explosion.
It is as if the air all around the manor house is compressed, and at the same time the thundering roar from the shore rolls inland. The blast wave comes a second later; it cracks several windowpanes in the barn and deafens Alma. She closes her eyes, sinks back into the hay.
The mine has exploded too soon. Alma knows it.
When the blast wave has passed, she gets to her feet in the hayloft.
After a few frozen seconds the cows begin to bellow down in the barn. Then comes the sound of loud voices from the meadow by the shore. They are getting closer to the house very quickly.
Alma hurries down the steps.
Both lighthouses are still standing, she sees; they haven’t been touched. But the mine is gone; all that is left is gray, murky water where it lay. And there is no sign of the lighthouse keepers’ boat.
Alma sees the other women coming: Ragnhild and Eivor,
the wives of the lighthouse keepers. They stare at her, their expression numb.
“The master?” asks Alma.
Ragnhild shakes her head stiffly, and now Alma can see that her pinafore is wet with blood.
“My Albert… was standing in the prow.”
Her knees give way. Alma rushes toward her along the stone path and catches her as she falls.
14
Livia slept peacefully that Sunday night. Joakim woke up as dawn was breaking after three hours of dreamless sleep. He could never sleep any longer than that at a stretch these days, and he woke with his head pounding with exhaustion.
In the morning he drove the children to Marnäs as usual, and when he got home the house was silent and empty. He carried on wallpapering the bedrooms at the southern end of the house.
At around one o’clock he heard the muted sound of a car engine approaching Eel Point. He looked out.
A large wine-red Mercedes was driving up the gravel track at high speed. Joakim recognized it; he had seen it leaving the church in Marnäs, one of the first cars to depart after the funeral.
Katrine’s mother had come to visit.
Even though the car was big, the woman who was driving
it seemed even bigger somehow. She struggled to get out of the car, as if she were stuck between the steering wheel and the driver’s seat. But eventually she was standing in front of the house, dressed in skin-tight jeans, pointed boots, and a leather jacket covered in buckles. A woman of about fifty-five, wearing red lipstick and thick black eyeliner and mascara.
She adjusted her pink silk scarf and looked over at the house with a forbidding expression. Then she lit a cigarette.
Mirja Rambe, his mother-in-law from Kalmar. She hadn’t been in touch at all since the funeral.
Joakim took a deep breath, let the air out slowly, then went through the house to open the kitchen door.
“Hello, Joakim,” she said, blowing smoke out of the corner of her mouth.
“Hi there, Mirja.”
“I’m glad you’re home. How are you?”
“Not so great.”
“I can understand that… this sort of thing makes you feel like shit.”
That was all the sympathy he got from her. Mirja dropped her cigarette on the gravel and moved toward the kitchen door; he stepped aside and she swept past in a miasma of tobacco and perfume.
In the kitchen she stopped and looked around. Joakim knew it was completely different from when she had lived in the house more than thirty years ago-but when she made no comment on all the work they had put in, he felt compelled to ask:
“Katrine redid most of this room last summer. What do you think?”
“It’s good,” said Mirja. “When Torun and I rented one of the rooms in the outbuilding, there were single men living in here, in the main house. It just looked like shit. Dirt everywhere.”
“Did they work in the lighthouses?” asked Joakim.
“The lighthouse keepers were gone by then,” said Mirja tersely. “These were just drifters.”
She shook herself, as if she wanted to change the subject, and asked, “So where are my little grandchildren, then?”
“Livia and Gabriel are at school. In Marnäs.”
“Already?”
“Well, it’s preschool. Livia’s doing activities for six-year-olds.”
Mirja nodded, but without smiling. “New names…” she said. “Same dog kennel.”
“Preschool isn’t a dog kennel,” said Joakim. “They love it.”
“I’m sure they do,” said Mirja. “In my day it was called little school. Same old crap… day after day.”
Suddenly she turned around again. “Speaking of animals…”
She went back outside.
Joakim stayed in the kitchen, wondering how long Mirja was intending to stay. The house felt much smaller when his mother-in-law was there, as if there weren’t enough air.
He heard a car door slam, and she came back into the kitchen with a bag in each hand. She held up one of them, a gray box with a handle.
“It was free, I got it from my neighbor,” she said. “I had to buy all the bits and pieces.”
Joakim realized that the box was a cat basket, and it wasn’t empty.
“Are you joking?” he said.
Mirja shook her head and opened the basket. A fully grown gray tom cat with black stripes jumped out and stretched on the wooden floor. He looked mistrustfully at Joakim.
“This is Rasputin,” said Mirja. “He’ll live like a Russian monk here, won’t he?”
She opened a big bag and took out several tins of cat food, a dish, and a tray with some cat litter.
“We can’t have him here,” said Joakim.
“Of course you can,” said Mirja. “He’ll liven things up.”
Rasputin rubbed up against Joakim’s legs and went out into the hallway. When Mirja opened the outside door, he shot off.
“He’s gone looking for rats,” she said.
“I haven’t seen a single rat here,” said Joakim.
“That’s because they’re smarter than you.” Mirja took an apple out of the bowl on the kitchen table and went on: “So when are you coming to Kalmar to visit me?”
“I didn’t know we were invited.”
“Of course you are.” She bit into the apple. “Come whenever you like.”
“Katrine never got an invitation, as far as I know,” said Joakim.
“Katrine wouldn’t have come anyway,” said Mirja. “But we called each other sometimes.”
“Once a year,” Joakim corrected her. “She called you at Christmas, but she always closed the door when she was on the phone to you.”
Mirja shook her head. “I talked to her just a month ago.”
“What about?”
“Nothing special… my latest exhibition in Kalmar. And my new boyfriend, Ulf.”