The Cruel Stars of the Night (3 page)

Fridh had stopped. Dorotea continued over to Blomgren’s large gate, hesitated a moment as if she was unsure of where she was going, then turned into the yard. Beatrice walked over to her.

Dorotea Svahn was out of breath. She covered her mouth with one hand, perhaps wiping some saliva from the corner of her mouth.

“I want to see Petrus,” she said in a strained voice.

Fridh had pulled up and Beatrice took the woman’s arm and guided her to the side so that the van could drive in.

“He’s badly beaten,” Beatrice said.

“I realize that,” Dorotea said.

“I’m sure you’ll be able to see him later, I mean when they’ve had a chance to clean him up.”

“I want to say good-bye. Here.”

There was a faint smell of mothballs around her.

“Of course you can say good-bye. I’ll come with you,” Beatrice said.

Fredriksson turned away. Haver kicked the leaves at his feet. Lindell and Sammy Nilsson looked at each other. Lindell shook her head, turned, and walked up to the house.

Beatrice accompanied the woman up to the door of the barn. Charles Morgansson had finished putting away his equipment and he made way for them. He nodded to Beatrice who took it as a green light for them to go in.

“I think the very first blow made him unconscious,” Beatrice said.

She felt Dorotea’s thin body tense up. She freed herself from Beatrice, took the cane as support, and sank down next to Petrus Blomgren, mumbled something, and put her hand on his shoulder. Bea was glad that Dorotea had not walked over alone in the dawn and found Petrus, but that she had just called the police and forced them to come out and take a look.

“He was my best friend,” Dorotea said.

Beatrice crouched down so she could hear better.

“My only friend. We pottered around here like ancient memorials, me and him. Petrus said many times that it wasn’t right, ‘They had no right,’ was how he put it.”

Beatrice didn’t really understand what she meant.

Dorotea’s hand caressed the wool sweater. She appeared oblivious of the blackened blood in the wound on the back of the head.

“Little Petrus, you went first. I could almost . . .”

Her voice was overcome with emotion. The bony hand went still, took hold of the sweater as if she wanted to pull the dead man to his feet.

“He came over with lingonberries this fall. More than usual. ‘Now you have more than enough,’ he said, as if he knew.”

She braced herself on the cane and slowly straightened to standing.

“When you are as old as I am you see things, how it is all connected. Petrus would always say it would be better to turn life around, be old first and then become younger, leave the frailty behind but keep the wisdom.”

“That would be good,” Beatrice said.

The old woman sighed heavily.

“They had ten cows in here, maybe twelve. He sold the land later on.”

“For a good price?”

“It was good enough. He didn’t lack for anything, Petrus.”

“It looks like he lived frugally,” Beatrice said, taking the old woman’s arm and helping her back out into the fresh air.

“That’s how we were raised,” Dorotea said.

“Do you know if Petrus had a special place for his valuable documents?”

Dorotea shook her head. “I don’t know anything about that,” she said.

The four police officers were still waiting in the yard. Beatrice had the feeling that she and Dorotea were leaving a church, as if after a funeral.

Fridh was sitting in the van and would remain there until after the old woman had left.

“Will you pray with me?” Dorotea asked. “Just a few words. Petrus was not a believer but I don’t think he’ll mind.”

Beatrice interlaced her fingers and Dorotea quietly said a few words, remained motionless for a few seconds before opening her eyes.

“He was a magnificent man,” she said. “With a good heart. May he rest in peace.”

Far off in the distance, a horse neighed.

Three

Had she ever liked him? She often asked herself this question. At times, perhaps. That time when he tripped outside the house and fell on his face she had at least felt sorry for him. That was what he had said, that he tripped, but Laura imagined that something else must have happened since he had scraped both his cheeks and forehead.

She dressed his wounds. She did this with divided feelings: part disdain for his whimpering when the disinfecting solution stung, part tenderness at his helplessness. The skinny legs dangling over the edge of the bed, the thinning hair growing still thinner, and the hands that gripped the soiled blanket.

At other times she could hate him almost beyond reason. If she was in the house and he was nearby she had to escape, out into the garden or even out into the town, in order not to strike him down with the nearest blunt instrument. This hate was indescribable, so dark and so consuming that she believed it deformed her physically.

Even after she managed to calm herself, it could take several days before she was able to address her father in a normal tone of voice.

“I see, you’re that way now,” he would usually comment on her state, unable to grasp what had upset her.

Once upon a time everything had been nicely ordered, then it fell into disarray. Books, manuscripts, and loose papers piled up and formed drifts on the floor. Laura sometimes had the feeling that she was out on the rocking waves of the sea. She had given up trying to keep things in order long ago. There was simply no aspiration for order. It was not part of her father’s worldview and Laura had grown up in an accelerating chaos.

The house smelled a little odd and it was only now, a month after her father’s disappearance, that she realized what it was. She had always thought it came from the discarded clothes that were heaped together on the floor.

She had detested him because of the mess. But while she was cleaning up after him she was forced to go into his bedroom, something she had avoided doing all these years. And there was the reading lamp, the one that had been there ever since she was a little girl. It had been bought in Germany at the end of the fifties, modern at the time and now again a desired object at flea markets and auctions.

When she stood close to the lamp the odor was more pronounced than ever. Against her will she sniffed closer and closer to the hateful thing. The plastic—the lampshade consisted of mottled plastic strips— emitted a stale smell when the sixty-watt lamp was on. He kept it turned on even at night. Laura suspected that some nights he fell asleep in the armchair next to the table, submerged in some problem that had to do with Petrarch or some chess game.

Her first thought was to throw the lamp out, but it still stood in its spot next to the table. She never turned it on and the smell slowly dissipated.

Most of the things in the bedroom were untouched. Even his reading glasses still lay on the nightstand. There was also an essay from the Humboldt University in Berlin. It was about Petrarch’s Laura, about whether or not a newly discovered portrait was a depiction of her.

Laura was named after this woman from the fourteenth century who had become a literary concept and the object of research. Many times she herself felt like a concept. As a teenager she started to doubt whether or not she lived, if she even existed here and now. What did she mean to her father? She pinched herself, experienced pain, cried, and felt her cheek grow wet with tears, but did that prove her existence?

She started to think he only saw her as Petrarch’s Laura, a shadow from the past, without human qualities. No daughter to love, but a reborn literary figure. Even so she continued to live, here and now, getting up in the morning, leaving the house, walking to school, walking home, growing up.

When she had her first period she immediately told her father. Her first feeling was one of shyness, perhaps shame, but suddenly she simply said it: “Father, I have to buy sanitary pads.” It was as if an unknown voice spoke through her mouth.

He put down his knife and fork and looked at her with an expression that was difficult to interpret. Laura imagined he felt offended. She rarely used the word
Father.
He wanted her to call him by his first name.

After a pause he resumed eating. She understood that his worldview had received a blow. He didn’t like it, she saw that.

Who will carry on after me?” he would sometimes exclaim, with that combination of pride and desperation that became more strongly reinforced in him over the years.

His contribution to research was incontestable. Or perhaps it was closer to the truth to say that those who may have had reason to question his earlier work saw no reason to do so now, thirty-five years after the dissertation. At one time he had been important, but now he was marginalized and excluded from the debate.

He himself contributed to this in large part. Like a boxer who relies more on raw strength and intensity than technique and calculation, he slugged his way through the academic world. At first he was successful, in part due to his renowned ability to tire out his opponents with masses of data, many times dished out in long, apparently incoherent tirades. But as time went by he became labeled a fossil who had become stuck in outmoded ideas.

But there were still those who allowed themselves to be seduced by his words, above all when he recited some of the more emotional sonnets. He did so with such feeling and in such perfect Italian that the words by their own power appeared to hover in their own rarefied space with no room for questions, objections.

Was he a genius? Or simply an overeducated lunatic? Or both?

He was never promoted to full professor.

“I am consistently overlooked,” he said. “In Florence and Paris they realize my greatness but in this backwater one rewards mediocrity. Here inbred careerists from the land of Lilliput take the high seat, while the giants are forced to jostle just to get inside the door.”

He dug through his stacks of paper, extracted letters from colleagues all over the world, waved them excitedly in the air, and shoved them under her nose.

“Here, here are the witnesses who shoot down the claims of the feebleminded.”

He raised his voice, came up close to her, and forced her to study the letter, struck the signature with his index finger, and told her that the author of the letter was one of the world’s greatest authorities on the poetry of the Italian Renaissance.

“He is a scholar, mark my words.
Scholarship,
not loose assumptions or flabby opinion.”

His raised his voice a notch. Suddenly he could drop his arms, turn inward, retreat to his room. Once, after an outburst of this kind, she had followed him, had stood in the doorway to his room and watched him from behind. He had dropped the letter and it had fluttered to the floor and slid halfway under the bed.

Laura had also seen other sides of her father, sides that were only rarely revealed in public. His love of the words themselves. He could become intoxicated by a single phrase, a few tentative letters on a page, as if only hesitantly entrusted to the page, a spontaneous expression of the author’s inner life. Sometimes it was quite moving, if a little tiring, when her father called her to him and read something to her, a couple of verses, parts of a sonnet, almost trembling, with his glasses perched on his nose. Often they were about love:

Tempo non mi parea da far riparo

contra colpi d’Amor: però m’andai

secur, senza sospetto; onde i miei guai

nel commune dolor s’incominciaro.

“Isn’t it beautiful? So vivid, so expressive,” he would always exclaim after he had let the words sink in. Laura was not expected to say anything, simply listen. Her father needed an audience. Someone who did not talk back, did not engage in sparring about the text. Someone who simply listened, enraptured. Listened to the words that intoxicated, that carried one away, transformed and gave life meaning.

“The sonnet is superior!” he could suddenly shout and then burst into laughter when he saw her expression of surprise and—sometimes—fear.

If only he had laughed more. That was what Alice, her mother, had said, that her father took life too seriously. He was an expert in the language of love but incapable of romance or tenderness, imprisoned in an environment where the beautiful words did not carry any weight.

Laura had noticed the tension between laughter and silence early on. Sometimes her mother would sing but she always stopped when her father approached. It was as if it was inappropriate to display joy over something as trivial as fair weather, the scent of the roses from the garden, or that a movement could be an expression of a joy in living and not simply a means to get from the desk to the dining table.

Laura’s mother was from the country. He would use Skyttorp, the name of her village, like an insult. It became a synonym for stupidity and laxity. He loved to correct her country expressions and when she used a dialect word he pounced on her like a hawk. Her language shrunk. She swallowed the words and the songs of her childhood on a small farm between Örbyhus and Skyttorp.

Laura remembered one time when her mother had cracked, how she in a forceful attack accused him of being a hypocrite: he loved Petrarch’s simple Tuscan language dialect but despised her own. Astonished, he listened to her barrage, her increasingly vulgar language, how she assaulted him in pure Uppland dialect, and finally burst out into a ringing laughter that seemed never to want to end.

“Hysterical,” Ulrik called her and Alice slapped him across the mouth.

She grew silent and kept up her silence when her husband was around. She died eighteen months later. She had recently turned forty-four.

As her father’s health declined and his isolation increased, as the world’s scorn, the neighbors’ pointed words and open disdain grew, Laura was erecting a strong line of defense around the house. She placed the ridiculously ugly white plastic furniture in the center of the garden only to taunt the nearest neighbor, the aesthete who edged his lawn every other week. The furniture shone, jumped out at the professor and his wife. Later she completed this arrangement with a sun umbrella that loudly proclaimed the superiority of Budweiser.

She fed pigeons so that they would dirty the surroundings, played senseless music at high volume outside while she lay inside reading, refused to do anything about the shared hawthorn hedge that was encroaching on the neighbor’s carefully tended vegetable patch.

When the professor complained she was unapologetically rude. That worked, she knew. Insolence, an unwillingness to discuss things reasonably, vulgarity—that was what the academics in the neighborhood found the most distressing.

She flaunted her poor taste, dressed even worse than her father, entertained loud acquaintances who sat in the white garden furniture and carried on noisily long into the night.

Her father was oblivious to it all. He only went out into the garden a few times a year when he walked around and talked in a concerned way about the increasing state of disarray but without doing anything about it. Sometimes he would say that they should hire someone to help prune the old fruit trees but nothing was done. In the garden there were wild apple-oaks that blew down during fall storms, groaned under the weight of moldy fruit that was never harvested.

The state of disrepair both inside the house and in the garden became more extensive. Why did she keep living there? Sometimes her colleagues asked her this but she couldn’t answer. She tried to explain it in terms of financial considerations, but that was a lie, everyone knew that. She offered reasons such as the need to take care of her confused father. That was more satisfying but was still not completely satisfying.

Sometimes she claimed she felt so comfortable in the old house that she could never get used to a modern apartment or townhouse. But people around her shook their heads, concerned that she was taking after her father.

She sat at the kitchen table with the same feeling of liberation she had felt a month ago. The radio had been on that time. The Swedish people had just voted no to joining the European Monetary Union and the kitchen was filled with commentary that did not interest her in the least. She had not even voted.

She looked out of the window, turned off the radio, and was overcome with the silence. The room shrunk. The dark green kitchen cabinets seemed to bulge out, to be coming closer. The kitchen counter—covered in dishes—seemed to expand with deep breaths.

A moment of regret, or rather, reflection, came over her like a tremor, but disappeared just as quickly. The way she had chosen left no room for doubt. Or rather, the path her life had taken was not the result of a conscious decision, was how it seemed to her. She had given herself up to a wave, a force that was now mercilessly carrying her forward, simply forward. No history, no reflection, simply a kind of quiet rush, hard as flint, that far exceeded her father’s emotions at reading those beautiful words. His euphoria was relative and fragile. He was weak. She was strong.

Words, words, words, into infinity. She did not want them, the artfully arranged, duplicitous assurances that people surrounded themselves with. She silenced the words and eradicated their falseness.

Laura felt that she now commanded two worlds. Now she could step out into reality without anxiety or anticipation. She carried a shield, an armor against which the words bounced off.

“You seem happier,” a colleague said in the lunchroom a few weeks after her father’s disappearance.

“It’s the only way,” Laura answered cryptically.

The colleague was pleased, thought she could see a new Laura, convinced it was because her suffocating life with her father was over, that a new Laura was being born in the midst of longing and grief. Horrible, but true.

“Maybe we could go out sometime,” the colleague had suggested.