The Cruel Stars of the Night (6 page)

The only public performances were at the end-of-the-year school events in June. The promise of summer holidays blackened into anxiety in the face of the thought of standing alone on stage, enduring everyone’s looks and to play two pieces chosen by Miss Berg.

Every time in the wings she brought up her breakfast but was forced onto the stage by the teachers. Miss Berg was also there. Otherwise Laura might have found the courage to refuse. She played with a sour taste in her mouth, thought she was ugly, pitiable, and smelly.

Every time she received praise and applause. Her father was proud, Miss Berg hugged her, and the teachers patted her on the head. Stig-Björn Ljungstedt and Leif Persson sat at the very back of the auditorium and laughed scornfully at her. They would continue with this. Laura could sometimes see them on TV, the same mocking grin and derision as before. At home they were beaten but at school they were kings.

It was at the school graduation in eighth grade that she touched her violin for the very last time. Miss Berg had died that spring. In spite of her father’s nags and threats she stopped playing. He had found her a new teacher but Laura refused with a stubborness that bordered on hysteria. The violin fell silent and disappeared into the junk in the garage, the family’s sad archives.

Six

She drove slowly through the streets of the city She was on sick leave but was supposed to spend time with others, her doctor had said— meet friends, socialize, try to get over her father’s disappearance.

That he had disappeared did not mean he was gone. In fact, he had become even more real now. She thought she had been freed but his voice echoed inside her head. Sometimes in Italian. A few stanzas of a sonnet or a stream of curses.

Laura’s thirty-five years were arranged like a photo album where her father had taken and mounted all the pictures in the order that he wished.

She was forced to stop by the Flottsund Bridge. A wide cargo van appeared on the other side of the Fyris River. The driver held up his hand in thanks as he brushed past her car. When she was about to drive onto the bridge her car lurched and stalled. Immediately a car behind her honked. In the rearview mirror she saw a middle-aged man, how he waved his hand, how his mouth moved. She put the hand brake on, stepped out, opened the trunk, and took out a lug wrench.

As she smashed the man’s windshield she came to think of her father. Was it all of his repeated lectures about Queen Kristina’s life, above all the procession out of Uppsala, that made her think of her father? He never spoke of her arrival, when she and the whole court went from Stockholm to Uppsala in order to flee the plague. Surely they would have come to Uppsala on the same road, over Flottsund, through that which today is Sunnersta, over the fields by Ultuna with the castle on the hill in sight. No, it was the queen’s sorti that interested him, how she one day in early summer put down her crown and regalia, spoke to the estates of the realm in order to leave the city that same day and begin her long trip to Italy and her father’s beloved Rome.

“Sixteen fifty-four,” she muttered, as she hit the car with the lug wrench one last time. “I remember, I remember all the dates.”

Shaken, she returned to her car, started it, and drove over the bridge. Left behind was the broken Volvo with its shocked driver who only managed to call the police on his cell phone once the crazy woman had disappeared around the bend on the other side of the river.

Laura Hindersten took a left on the old Stockholm Road and drove back into town. She had thought herself south to the region where she and her father once spent a summer in a rented cottage. It was the year after her mother had died. Laura had the impression that her father for the first time experienced the house in Kåbo as the prison it had been for her mother.

It had been a happy summer. Their old Citroën took them twenty kilometers out into the country. Her father read as usual, most often in the garden, leaning over old manuscripts and reciting sonnets, so in this there was no difference to life in the city. But the landscape was different,the kilometer-wide view over fields and meadows that reminded her of the sea, or how Laura thought the sea might look.

The cramped house and garden of the city was far away. Outside the cottage there was space, a sky that Laura always experienced as light, even when it was overcast. On the other side of a little stream there were grazing cows. It seemed to her they were the luckiest creatures on the Earth. She could stand there for hours just looking at them. She was not allowed to crawl under the barbed wire—her father had ingrained that in her—but the cows often lumbered over to her, gawked at her. She fed them grass. Their muzzles and rough tongues, their indolence—as if they were full but still willing to accept another bite of grass since it was being offered—made her warm inside.

Even though they were plant eaters there was something carnivorous about the way they smacked and chomped. They did not eat like humans, who inhaled their food and chewed frenetically in order to swallow quickly and load up on more. The cows ground their fodder, sensually, slowly, and with pleasure, paused from time to time and goggled with dull curiosity.

Green-fingered and with the animals’ dried saliva all the way up her arms, she walked across the slender plank across the stream and then ran home.

Did they themselves eat anything? She had no memory of her father making any food. He simply sat in the garden. Many times she got on the swing in the large pear tree. Her father had put it up. She swung in wide arcs. Sometimes he looked up, occasionally smiling slightly before he returned to his tomes.

In the evenings they played chess in the light from a hurricane lamp. Her father’s hands looked sickly in the sharp, white-yellow light. He moved his pieces with great care, always with commentary. They never played with a timer and Laura was very thoughtful. Her father never hurried her.

Sometimes moths came in, fluttering around the lamp. Then her father would interrupt himself, go to some lengths to capture the visitor, and gently carry it out into the dark. She liked him a lot for the trouble he took to save the small creatures.

She would always remember his bent figure in the doorway, the pitch-black darkness outside and the lamp that generously cast its beam of light into the yard. She thought there was a limited supply of light, that the chessboard would get darker when the door was opened and the dark outside stole some of their light.

The contract on the cottage was not renewed. The owner, whom they rented from, said he was going to renovate it for a relative. Laura recalled how her father burned all the sheets and furniture in the yard the last evening. For a few moments she thought he was going to burn down the whole cottage.

Laura had looked around. It was still burning. Some of the joy and excitement of the summer holiday in the cottage had evaporated but it was with great sorrow that she took her final look at the red house, the outhouse and the woodshed, in the door of which she had carved her very own sonnet in Italian.

When Laura reached the roundabout in Nåntuna she became unsure. Should she turn around and go south as she had planned or turn around and drive home? The incident at the Flottsund Bridge had thrown her off kilter.

She knew the police must have been called in and that they were looking for her. She had no idea if there had been other cars or pedestrians at the bridge. Perhaps someone had made a note of her license plate number? She tried to think back through the events and did not think she had seen any witnesses.

She became convinced her father would have been proud of her. She fought back, didn’t let anyone steamroller her, and she meted out a punishment at once. That the punishment was not in proportion to the crime would almost certainly not have troubled her father. He wanted so to strike back, but the powerlessness that increased with the years had reduced his desire for revenge to a displeased querulousness. He said on many occasions that he wanted to bomb the whole miserable lot.

His language could get very vulgar. He could talk of “the saggy boob conspiracy” when two women in his department had made a written complaint about his teaching to the chair.

“They’re about as exciting as hollowed-out old trees whose caterpillars and beetles in their interior is their only life. One should plant a bomb under their fat arses.”

But it was only words, at first some counter missives with rancorous attacks that inflamed the situation, later on harangues of invectives and insults.

She turned in toward Bergsbrunna after a sudden inspiration that there might be a patrol car by Lilla Ultuna, keeping lookout for a woman driver in a red car. Now she instead curved around past the Denmark’s Church and came out onto Almunge Road. From there she found her way back in toward the city and its center.

The other drivers signaled to her, gestured and made angry and frustrated faces. She crept through the western parts of Uppsala. This was her city. The other side of the river barely existed in Laura’s consciousness. She had an impulse to go there. It was only a couple of kilometers away. Maybe that would lead to something else, something better? But she dismissed the thought.

Her father had spoken of the “pölsa,” or scrapple, city, which was how he referred to the eastern part. Laura had never eaten
pölsa
but had seen the brown meat-and-grain dish in the school cafeteria and so she imagined that people on the eastern side of the river slurped this unattractive mush while they followed some soap opera on TV.

“I’m burned out,” she said suddenly out loud to herself at a stoplight by Norby Road.

They talked about that at work, how everyone walked around burned out. For her part she had felt burned out most of her life. All of her insides were a pile of ashes, black soot clung to her blood vessels, and from her mouth there came puffs of breath with the smell of singed flesh.

The light became green and she crossed the intersection and turned into the parking lot of the Botanical Garden. At this time of year there were not many visitors and there were only a few cars parked outside. She stayed in the car and let the engine run for a good while before she got out and steered her course to the entrance. As a child she had come to the “Botan” almost every week. It was her mother who took her, sometimes she had packed a basket with coffee, juice, and rolls, and they had spread a blanket on the grass and had a picnic.

They became friends with people who remained nameless, other frequent visitors who loved to follow the changes in the garden, many day by day They fell into conversation with these nameless strangers. Here nothing else mattered, only the flowers and bushes.

The visitors crouched down, leaned forward and inspected the fine plants, drew in their scent and smiled. They came down to Laura’s level, looked into her face as if she too were a flower, smiled and said something about her dark hair. They spoke with low and friendly voices. No adult raised their voice in the Botanical Garden.

Her mother encouraged her to get closer, to scrutinize some plant nerves or the petals of a geranium that had just bloomed, a daylily or a primrose of some sort. Even though her mother knew many species and kinds by name, many times she only mentioned them in passing. The names were not important, it was the shape, the color, and scent that filled her senses, that made her smile and speak with complete strangers.

She always wanted to see the new flowers, giving cries of delight, subjecting them to close scrutiny and inhaling their scent. Sometimes Laura felt embarrassed. Her mother never checked herself, let her joy bubble over like a child and laughed a great deal.

The garden around their own house was narrow, bordered with hedges and could be surveyed in a single glance. Laura had measured out its length in steps. Thirty-eight steps in one direction and twenty-six in the other. Everything was known.

“Botan” by contrast was gigantic. Here she could never manage to keep track of the figures the times she tried to count it out. Laura tripped over her own legs, fell over, and the number of steps spilled out onto the lawn.

Her mother used to sit down next to Laura, kick off her shoes and wiggle her toes, lean back and turn her face to the sun. Her dark hair tumbled back. Laura thought she looked like a statue.

The people who walked past slowed down, glanced at her, their gazes finding their way back to her mother’s outstretched figure. They looked like they wanted to stop, turn back, and join this dark, beautiful woman and her daughter.

It was as if Laura sat in a force field where her mother was the power source, leisurely relaxed but nonetheless crackling with a vital voluptuousness that flowed together with the garden’s strength and beauty.

There were no holds barred in the life joy that her mother expressed. The sight of this wordless satisfaction, resting in a sea of green and blooming flowers made Laura shake as if with cold. She wanted to scream, embrace the garden and the world, throw herself into her mother’s lap, and laugh, cry, burrow her face against her mother’s neck.

But nothing of this took place. Laura sat where she was, turned into stone, dazzled, and with only one thought left in her head: don’t let Father turn up. But the chances were infinitesimal. Her father never set foot in the garden. But what if he all of a sudden decided to go there? What if he surprised his wife and his daughter on the lawn, partly concealed behind the area for North American perennials but still visible to the world?

The men who walked by liked to look at her mother, and although Laura could not completely identify with their gazes she understood they conveyed more than simply an interest in black-eyed Susans and butterfly weed. Her mother smiled back at everyone, including the men, and often exchanged a few words with those who walked by. It was as if she wanted to say: “Tell me something about the weather or the garden, not necessarily anything of substance, only a few words to show that we exist.”

She found it easy to make contact with other people, looked those that she spoke to in the eyes and used only a few words but could still get people to converse and laugh. But this was only true in the Botanical Garden, it was like a preserve, a green oasis where her mother went in order to speak freely.

Sometimes she lapsed into a kind of dialect that Laura thought sounded strange and that she later realized was the North Uppland dialect from her mother’s home region. It was particularly when she spoke with other women that the words came. “Jestanes,” she could cry out, “endes” and “vurte” left her beautiful mouth and together with her gestures they created an aura of intimacy around her and her conversational partner.