The Darkest Room by Johan Theorin Read Free Book Online

shoulder.
    His hand was firm as it grasped hers. Gerlof had gone to sea as a teenager, and despite the fact that he had come ashore twenty-five years ago, the calluses were still there from all the ropes he’d hauled, all the boxes of cargo he’d lifted, and the chains that had torn the skin from his fingers.
    “So what’s the weather got in store, then?” she asked.
    “Don’t ask.” Gerlof sighed and sat down on one of the chairs by his small coffee table, his legs stiff. “The radio station has changed the time when the forecast starts yet again, so I missed the local temperatures. But in Norrland it’s going to get colder, so I should imagine it will down here too.” He cast a suspicious glance at the barometer next to the bookcase, then looked out of the window toward the bare trees, and added, “It’s going to be a hard winter this year, a cold, early winter. You can see that by the way the stars shine so brightly at night, especially the Big Dipper. And by the summer.”
    “The summer?”
    “A wet summer means a hard winter,” said Gerlof. “Everybody knows that.”
    “I didn’t,” said Tilda. “But will it make any difference to us?”
    “It certainly will. A long, hard winter influences just about everything. The shipping on the Baltic, for example. The ice delays the ships and the profits fall.”
    Tilda moved into the room and was confronted by all the memories of Gerlof’s time at sea. On the walls wereblack-and-white pictures of his ships, oiled nameplates, and framed ships’ certificates. There were also small photographs of his late parents and his wife.
    Time stood still in here, thought Tilda.
    She sat down opposite Gerlof and placed the tape recorder on the table between them. Then she plugged in the flat table microphone.
    Gerlof gave the recording equipment the same look as the barometer. The tape recorder wasn’t very big, but Tilda could see his eyes flicking back and forth between it and her.
    “Are we just going to … talk?” he said. “About my brother?”
    “Among other things,” said Tilda. “That’s pretty straightforward, isn’t it?”
    “But
why?”
    “Well, to preserve the memories and stories … before they disappear,” said Tilda, and added quickly, “Of course you’re going to be around for years yet, Gerlof, that’s not what I mean. I just want to record them to be on the safe side. My dad didn’t tell me much about Grandfather before he died, you know.”
    Gerlof nodded. “We can talk. But when something’s being recorded, you have to be careful what you say.”
    “There’s no problem,” said Tilda. “You can always record over a cassette tape.”
    Gerlof had agreed to the recording almost without thinking when she had called him in August and said she was moving to Marnäs, but it still seemed to be making him a bit tense.
    “Is it on?” he said quietly. “Is the tape running?”
    “No, not yet,” said Tilda. “I’ll tell you when.”
    She pressed down the Record button, saw that the tape was running, and nodded encouragingly at Gerlof.
    “Right … we’ve started.” Tilda straightened up, and it seemed to her that her voice was more tense and formal than usual as she went on: “This is Tilda Davidsson, and I am inMarnäs with my grandfather Ragnar’s brother Gerlof, to talk about our family … and about my grandfather here in Marnäs.”
    Gerlof leaned forward a little stiffly toward the microphone and corrected her in a clear voice: “My brother Ragnar did not live in Marnäs. He lived on the coast outside Rörby, south of Marnäs.”
    “Thank you, Gerlof … and what are your memories of Ragnar?”
    Gerlof hesitated for a few seconds.
    “There are a lot of good memories,” he said eventually. “We grew up together in Stenvik in the twenties, but then of course we chose completely different professions … he bought a little cottage and became a farmer and a fisherman, and I moved down to Borgholm and got married. And bought