The Cruel Stars of the Night

Sixteen

The murmur from the radio turned into music. Laura reached over and turned the volume up. It was a piece she knew so well but could not place. She turned the volume up even higher.

Should I prove to be weaker than those who have looked down on me all these years? she thought and hit the doorpost as she rushed out of the kitchen, away from the music. She stopped short, whirled around, and glared at the radio, at the shiny volume knob whose rounded slightly glossy, chubby surface seemed puffed up with self-satisfied smugness.

Should I be weaker?

“Never, never!” she screamed and leapt forward, grabbing the radio and throwing it to the ground, stamping on the gray-tinted cover. Albi-noni’s “Adagio in G Minor” was silenced. She continued assaulting the appliance until all that remained of it were broken parts. She left the kitchen panting, then ended up standing in the living room, listening.

“That was a close call,” she muttered.

Her old life had tried to gain the upper hand.

What she feared most of all was to walk down the street and not exist, to step into the elevator at work and discover that the mirror reflected someone else, to exit the elevator and hear the poisonous tongues gabbing behind her back.

Never, never, never again. No one would ever trample on Laura Hindersten again. The music had stopped.

She swept her coat around her, opened the French windows as far as they would go, and then started to empty the bookshelves in the dining room. Fifteen books in each pile. Dust flew up. Some books fell on the floor and she kicked them out onto the terrace. Methodically she cleared case after case. There went the German collection, the early editions of Goethe, the beloved Voigt and the hated Kinz. Ditto two meters of filled bookshelves by and about Schopenhauer.

When Laura reached Virgil she hesitated for a moment but attacked the Roman classics with even greater determination.

Ariosto she tossed out with a laugh. Under “B” she had a difficult job with Bandella, Berni, Boccaccio, and Boiardo, and she was forced to sit down on the edge of the terrace to rest.

On the lawn in front of her feet lay the library Ulrik Hindersten had spent decades of labor collecting. At the very top lay Middlemore’s English translation of Jacob Burckhardt’s Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien. Laura picked it up and skimmed through it absently. Her father’s notes and underlinings indicated that he had scrutinized it alongside the original from 1860 in order to find errors and weaknesses.

She tossed it back onto the pile, stretched forward, and took up another that turned out to be a dissertation published in Zürich in the mid forties: Cicero und der Humanismus. Untersuchungen über Petrarca und Erasmus.

She remembered that one, as she did Mills’s The Secret of Petrarch and de Nolhac’s Petrarch and the Ancient World, which she also glimpsed in the heap of books. These, and many others, Laura had read in the eighties.

In June of 1987 Laura and Ulrik Hindersten had traveled to Italy. Laura was nineteen years old and had just graduated from secondary school. Her father had received a grant to write an extended research article on Petrarch’s epistolary exchange with Cola de Reinzó. It was intended that the text be included in a monograph published in honor of a professor in Lund who was to retire the following year.

Her father bit the sour apple-the professor was in reality one of his enemies-and set off on a two-month trip to Italy.

The first part of the trip they rented an old house outside of Florence. It sat up on a hill, surrounded by a neglected garden, and the city could be seen in the distance through a blue haze. Laura stayed on the upper floor.

Her father disappeared early every morning, sat in the archives, met with colleagues and old friends, while Laura read and took walks in the surrounding area. Laura liked the house and the little village and June was a pleasant time for walks. But she became depressed and sensed the reason why. June was a critical month. It was June 23-six years earlier- that Laura’s mother had died.

Her father didn’t notice her grief. Quite the opposite, he became more and more enthusiastic the longer they stayed in Tuscany. He repressed all thoughts of the Lund professor, started speaking only in Italian, and again brought up the idea of moving to Italy for good.

One day Laura decided to put him up against the wall. Why had he and her mother not been happy together? Her father put his teacup down on the rough-hewn wooden table, let his head droop with a despondent expression as if Laura had deliberately insulted him. It was an expression she knew well, from when he talked about his department.

“She didn’t fight,” he said finally.

She could tell he had chosen his words with care.

“Fight for what?”

“Pius II once said that a servant could rise to be king.”

Laura stared at him. She didn’t recognize the quotation, she didn’t know what context it came from, but she knew this was a strategy on her father’s part. He used the words in order to conceal the real conditions, or as a way to start a dialogue she did not want to have.

Her father loved to converse in dialectical play, in a labyrinth where nothing could be taken for granted, where all words turned out to be double-edged, carrying multiple meanings. It was an art he had mastered to the fullest extent.

“I am your daughter. I need simple, normal words,” Laura said and tried to catch his eye without success.

“Words can be simple but when they are used in combination they necessarily become-”

“I need true words!”

“I wanted to protect you from everything unpleasant,” he said with unusual mildness. “Your mother did not have this ability.”

“You are no better than Petrarch,” Laura said. “He went on about the pure and the divine but would fuck anyone given the chance.”

Ulrik Hindersten was taken aback by his daughter’s words. He had never heard her speak in such vulgar terms. He tried to interrupt but Laura went on in a frenzy that made her spit out the words.

“I am sick of all the words, all the empty words! You talk about love but when it comes to this life here and now then it’s nowhere to be seen. Not even when Mom died did you say anything to comfort me. I have never heard you say anything nice about my mother.”

“You know as well as I how Alice died,” Ulrik Hindersten said, “but I choose not to talk about it. But if you want to, then go ahead.

“We loved each other,” Ulrik Hindersten said after a long period of silence, “you know that. I have not met anyone after…”

“I am talking about the hypocrisy,” Laura said. “On the one hand you valorize the Middle Ages, when you would find living then a hell. You have always wanted to be the best, despised by all colleagues and scholars. You have squashed students who have asked for guidance because you were afraid they would outshine you.”

Unconsciously Laura assumed Augustine’s role in close combat with Petrarch. She had read his Secretum and underlined long passages. Now everything was mixed up in a bitter concoction.

“A lack of inititative and indolence are names we today assign to modesty,” Ulrik Hindersten countered with a smile where Laura discerned a streak of pride.

The battle raged on for a month. Ulrik Hindersten’s “Vallis clausa” as he often referred to the little valley where they lived, was transformed into a battlefield. They clashed with increasing frequency. Ulrik was in his essence, this was his domain. Laura fought with the implacability and rebelliousness of youth, but she became worn down over time.

She started to imagine that Ulrik was fanning the flames of the conflict, that he loved it for its own sake but also because he wanted to make Laura in his image.

“You must be toughened,” he said.

“I don’t want to be like you!” she cried.

“You are like me. It’s you and me. You are my blood.”

“But also my mother’s!”

“I don’t think you should talk so much about Alice. You are stronger than that and you have the talents that are required.”

“She saw beauty. You only see the dirt. You don’t really see the olive trees, the cypresses and stone walls, they are only a stage set for a fantasy image. It is Petrarch’s landscape, nothing more. You don’t see the farmers who harvest the olives and struggle up the steep slopes to prune the grapevines, you talk to them but you have no words for their world. You laugh and they smile back but out of sheer politeness. You can’t even climb a ladder without a quote by Cicero or Seneca. You think you can capture everything on a page but the sweat on a farmer’s brow is a form of writing you can’t read. For them the ladder is a ladder, for you it’s a metaphor.”

Laura moaned out loud and rocked from side to side. The memories from Tuscany were ambivalent: the upsetting discussions but also the unparalleled closeness she had experienced with her father. It was as if the endless debates had brought them closer than ever before.

He revealed things about his childhood, details about the grandparents she had never heard before. Ulrik’s father, a high-ranking official at the National Customs Service, had been dead for many years. Laura had only a diffuse memory of a large man in a sick bed. Grandmother Hindersten had left the family when Ulrik was five years old. Why, and what became of her, was a taboo subject, but Laura did hear that she had gone to Denmark with a Dutch artist and had settled somewhere on Fyn. News of her death at the end of the seventies was received with indifference by her father.

She got up, stared at the mound of books. She realized that she could not set fire to them where they were, that it could spread to the house. She retrieved the wheelbarrow from the storage and started carting all the books over to the middle of the lawn.

It took a long time but Laura paid no attention to the fact that she was getting tired. To the contrary, she felt as if the soreness of her muscles freed her of a pain that had been too long in her life. The stack of books grew, and with it her conviction that the path she had chosen would lead her to freedom.