“The two of you talked about you, in other words.”
“And about her.”
“So what did she say?”
“She felt lonely here,” said Mirja. “She said she didn’t miss Stockholm… but she did miss you.”
“I had to carry on working there for a while,” he said.
He could of course have resigned from his teaching post earlier. He could have done a whole lot of things differently, but that wasn’t something he wanted to discuss with Mirja.
She wandered further into the house, but stopped at the Rambe painting outside Joakim’s bedroom.
“I gave this to Katrine for her twentieth birthday,” she said. “Something to remember her grandmother by.”
“She really liked it.”
“It shouldn’t be hanging here,” said Mirja. “The last picture by Torun that was sold at auction went for three hundred thousand kronor.”
“Really? But nobody knows we’ve got it here.”
Mirja stared intently at the picture, following the gray-black lines of the oil paint with her eyes.
“There are no horizontal lines at all, that’s why it’s so difficult to look at,” she said. “This is the way you paint if you’ve been out in the blizzard.”
“And Torun had?”
“Yes. It was our first winter here. They had issued a warning about snowstorms, but Torun went off to the peat bog anyway. She liked walking inland and then sitting down to paint.”
“We were there yesterday,” said Joakim. “It’s lovely by the bog.”
“Not when the blizzard comes,” said Mirja. “Torun’s easel blew away before she had time to take it down, and suddenly she could see only a few yards in front of her. The sun disappeared. There was nothing but snow, everywhere.”
“But she survived?”
“She was on her way out onto the bog and stumbled into the water, but then the snow eased for a moment and she caught sight of the flashing light of the lighthouse.” Mirja looked at the painting and went on quietly: “It was just in the nick of time. She said that when she was squelching about on the bog, she could see the dead… those who were sacrificed during the Iron Age. They rose up out of the water and reached out for her.”
Joakim was listening intently. He was beginning to understand where the atmosphere in Torun’s paintings came from.
“She had problems with her eyesight after that,” Mirja went on. “That was when it started. And of course she went blind in the end.”
“Because of the blizzard?”
“Maybe…At any rate, she couldn’t open her eyes for
several days. The blizzard lifted sand from the fields and mixed it with the snow… it was like having pins stuck in your eyes.”
Mirja took a step away from the painting.
“People don’t want dark paintings like this,” she said. “Here on Öland it has to be an open sky, blue sea, and great big fields full of yellow flowers, nothing else. Bright pictures in white frames.”
“The kind of thing you produce,” said Joakim.
“Absolutely.” Mirja nodded energetically, apparently not in the least annoyed. “Sunny summer paintings for the summer people.” She looked around. “But you don’t seem to have any Mirja Rambe paintings here. Or have you?”
“No. Katrine has postcards of some of them somewhere.”
“That’s good, postcards bring the money in too.”
Joakim wanted to leave the vicinity of the bedrooms-it felt too private. He moved back in the direction of the kitchen.
“How many of Torun’s paintings were there to start with?” he asked.
“A lot. There must have been fifty.”
“And now there are only six, is that right?”
“Six, yes.” Mirja’s expression was grim. “The six that were saved.”
“And people say-”
Mirja interrupted crossly: “I know what people say… that her daughter destroyed them. A collection that would be worth several million today… they say I put them in the stove one cold winter and burned them so we wouldn’t freeze to death.”
“Katrine said that wasn’t true,” said Joakim.
“Oh yes?”
“She said you were envious of Torun… and that you threw her paintings in the sea.”
“Katrine was born the year after it happened, so she wasn’t there.” Mirja sighed. “I hear the gossip here on the
island: Mirja Rambe is a difficult old woman… her boyfriends are too young for her, she’s an alcoholic… I suppose that’s what Katrine said as well?”
Joakim shook his head, but he remembered how Mirja had staggered around at their wedding in Borgholm, trying to seduce his younger cousin.
They were out on the veranda now. Mirja fastened her leather jacket.
“Come with me,” she said. “I want to show you something.”
Joakim followed her into the courtyard. He saw Rasputin slinking through the fence, heading down toward the sea.
“This hasn’t changed much,” said Mirja as they walked over the uneven stones. “Just as many weeds.”
She stopped, lit a fresh cigarette, then looked in through the dusty windows of the outbuilding.
“Nobody home,” she said.
“The agent called it the guesthouse,” said Joakim. “We’re going to fix it up in the spring… at least, that was the plan.”
From the outside the whitewashed building looked like a rectangular single-story block with a tiled roof. Inside was a woodstove, a carpentry workshop, a laundry room with a floor damaged by damp, a sauna built in the 1970s, and two guest rooms, each with a shower. In the past families had stayed in the guest rooms in the summer, when it got too hot in the main house.
Mirja looked at the building and shook her head.
“We lived out here for three years, Torun and I. Among the mice and the dust bunnies. It was like living in a refrigerator in the winter.”
Mirja turned her back on the outbuilding.
“This is what I wanted to show you… over here.”
She went over to the barn and pulled open the door leading into the vast darkness.
Mirja stubbed out her cigarette and switched on the lights,
and Joakim followed her over the stone floor. She pointed toward the loft.
“It’s up there,” she said.
Joakim hesitated for a few moments. Then he followed Mirja up the steep steps. Everything was just as untidy as the last time he’d been up in the loft.
“You can’t get through here,” he said.
“Sure you can,” said Mirja.
She made her way without hesitation among all the suitcases, boxes, old pieces of furniture, and bits of rusty machinery. She found narrow passageways between all the trash and went all the way over to the wall on the far side of the loft. Then she stopped and pointed at the broad planks of wood.
“Look… I found this thirty-five years ago.”
Joakim moved closer. By the faint light from the window he could see that someone had carved letters into the bare wood of the walclass="underline" a series of names and dates, and sometimes a cross or a biblical reference:
BELOVED CAROLINA 1884 was carved into a plank just below the ceiling. Beneath it came JAN, MUCH MISSED, GONE TO THE LORD 1884, and a little further down IN MEMORY OF ARTHUR CARLSSON, DROWNED JUNE 3, 1911, john 3:16.
There were many more names on the wall, but Joakim stopped reading and turned to Mirja.
“What is this?”
“These are the people from the manor house who have died,” said Mirja. Her voice, which had been quite loud, was now much quieter, almost reverential. “Those who were close to them have carved their names. They were already here when I was young… but these are new.”
She pointed to a couple of names close to the floor: it said ciki in thin letters in one place, and slavko in another.
“They could be refugees,” said Joakim. “Eel Point was a camp some years ago.” He looked at Mirja. “But why did people carve them here?”
“Well,” said Mirja. “Why do people put up gravestones?”
Joakim thought about the granite block he had chosen for Katrine the previous week. It would be delivered before Christmas, the stonemason had promised. He looked at Mirja.