Church benches.
He was at one end of something that looked like an old wooden chapel inside the loft. It was a little room dedicated to worship beneath the high, angular roof, set out with four benches and a narrow aisle alongside them.
The wooden benches were dry and split and the edges were battered, completely without any kind of ornamentation; they looked as if they came from a medieval church. They must have been put here when the barn was built, Joakim realized. There was no door through which to carry them in.
There was no pulpit in the room. And no cross. High up on the wall in front of the pews was a filthy window. Below it a sheet of paper was hanging from a nail, and when he went over he saw that it was a page ripped out of a family Bible: a Doré drawing of a woman, Mary Magdalene perhaps, staring in amazement at the stone rolled away from the entrance to Jesus’ tomb. The big round stone lay cast aside on the ground, and the opening to the tomb gaped above her like a black hole.
Joakim looked at the picture for a long time. Then he turned around-and discovered that the wooden benches behind him were not empty.
In the glow of the flashlight he could see letters lying on them.
And dried-up bunches of flowers.
And a pair of white children’s shoes.
On one of the benches lay something small and white, and when he bent down he saw that it was a set of false teeth.
Possessions. Mementos.
There were also several small plaited baskets containing pieces of paper. Joakim reached down and carefully picked one out. He shone the flashlight on it and read:
Carl, forgotten by everyone, but not by me or the Lord.
Sara
In another basket lay a yellowing postcard with a black-and-white picture of an angel on the front, smiling serenely. Joakim picked it up, turned it over, and saw that someone had written on the back in ink, in ornate handwriting:
Tender loving thoughts of my dear sister Maria, sadly missed. My daily prayer goes to the Lord our God that we may soon meet again.
An unbearable loss.
Nils Peter
Joakim gently put the card back in the basket.
This was a prayer room-a sealed-up room for the dead.
A book lay on one of the benches. It was a thick notebook, Joakim saw when he picked it up. Inside was page after page of handwriting, too small and spidery to read in the darkness, and on the title page The Book of the Blizzard was written in black ink.
He pushed it inside his jacket.
Joakim straightened up, looked around for one last time, and noticed a small hole in the wall beside the bench at the front.
He went closer, and realized what it was: the hole he himself had hacked in the wall of the hayloft a few weeks ago.
He had reached through with his arm that evening, as far as he could. On the bench just below that little opening lay the object he had touched:
A folded cloth bundle.
A pale blue, tattered denim jacket, which Joakim thought he had seen before.
When he recognized some of the small badges on the front, which said RELAX and PINK FLOYD, he knew whose jacket it was. Joakim had seen it night after night when he looked out into the street from behind the curtains at the Apple House.
It was his sister Ethel’s denim jacket.
I was the one who discovered the big hayloft in the barn, but I enticed Markus up the steps with me and we explored it together. It was my first romance, and perhaps my best.
But it was so short.
– MIRJA RAMBE
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.