Karabekian’s potato barn

Karabekian’s potato barn is at once a converted farm structure, Rabo’s former home and studio, and the novel’s deliberately sealed mystery. Its long, windowless interior once made room for paintings too large to work on elsewhere; after Edith’s death, Rabo locked the barn and stayed out. He insists that something real remains inside, but withholds its identity, turning a practical building into a forbidden chamber that concentrates the story’s questions about art, memory, and what a person chooses not to reveal.

Origins and Domestic Use

Rabo first came to know Edith through the barn. Long before her husband died, he persuaded her and her husband to rent it to him as a studio. The land belonged to Edith, not her husband. She and her husband had bought a parcel from the farmer next door, away from the beach, to keep it from being developed; the potato barn came with the land, although they had never been potato farmers themselves.

Rabo and Edith grew close only later, after her husband died and Rabo’s first wife, Dorothy, and their sons, Terry and Henri, left him. He sold the family house in Springs, six miles north, and made Edith’s barn both his studio and his home. The barn thus changed from an unused outbuilding into the setting for a new domestic life. It was separate from the main house: the structure could not be seen from the house where Rabo is writing.

Design and Artistic Function

The barn’s shape came from its original agricultural purpose. Long and narrow, with no windows, sliding doors, and a potbellied stove at each end, it was designed to keep potatoes at a steady temperature in changing weather. The farmer could use the stoves and doors to keep the crop from freezing or sprouting before it was ready for market. What served the potatoes’ need for controlled storage also gave Rabo a large, enclosed work space unlike an ordinary room.

The unusual dimensions of such buildings, together with the formerly cheap property in the area, had drawn painters there when Rabo was young, especially artists working on exceptionally large canvases. The barn made it possible for him to work on the eight panels of Windsor Blue Number Seventeen as a single piece. Its artistic importance therefore arises not from a special design for art, but from the way an agricultural structure’s scale and enclosure accommodated a particular kind of painting.

Sealing the Barn

After Edith died, Rabo shut the studio off from the rest of his life. He nailed one end’s doors shut from the inside with six-inch spikes and immobilized the doors at the other end from outside with six padlocks and massive hasps. The barn has no windows, so Circe Berman cannot even glimpse its interior. Rabo has not gone back in since sealing it. The double barrier makes the absence of access physical and deliberate: neither a visitor’s curiosity nor the artist’s own return can easily cross it.

The secret is not presented as an empty joke or a merely symbolic gesture. Rabo says that after his death, when he is buried next to Edith and the executors open the doors, they will find something inside—not thin air, a broken paintbrush, or his Purple Heart left on a swept floor. He rules out other possible punch lines as well, including a painting of potatoes, a Virgin Mary in a derby holding a watermelon, a self-portrait, and a work with a religious message. He offers one measure, and no identification: the thing is bigger than a bread box and smaller than the planet Jupiter.

The Forbidden Chamber

The locked doors make the barn a source of sustained curiosity. Rabo says the building has become famous in the art world: visitors who have seen the collection in the house often ask to see the barn too. He will show them its exterior, which he calls a significant landmark in art history, but does not open it. The barn’s public reputation grows around the very thing that prevents its contents from being publicly seen.

The mystery also tests friendship. Even Paul Slazinger has failed to guess what is inside, and has said more than once that he does not see how their friendship can continue if Rabo believes his secret would not be safe with him. Circe is the person Rabo identifies as finding the mystery most intolerable. She repeatedly asks him for the six keys; he tells her they are buried in a golden casket at the foot of Mount Ararat, an answer that sends the search elsewhere without giving her access.

Rabo frames Circe’s pursuit through the story of Bluebeard, whose new wife cannot stop wondering what lies behind a forbidden door. He tells Circe that his studio is his forbidden chamber, and urges her to think about something else. The comparison makes the barn’s secrecy more than a question of locks: it is a rule Rabo declares and Circe presses against. Yet the evidence does not disclose the barn’s contents. Its importance rests on the combination of a real, carefully secured space, its history as Rabo’s home and working studio, and the promise that the secret will be opened only after his death.