The Cruel Stars of the Night

Twenty

The flames reached almost as high as the snowball bush. Laura had to retreat because of the heat. For a few moments she was worried but told herself the damp grass was not flammable.

To burn books, she thought and remembered how her father, during a trip to Florence, had lectured her about Savonarola who had incited people to burn books during Carneval.

Ulrik Hindersten was divided in his opinion of this Dominican, who was a “devil” in that Petrarch’s and Livius’s books were on the bonfire. He took this as a personal insult and expressed genuine sorrow at how many antique texts had thereby been lost.

But her father also admired Savonarola as a speaker and for his ability to engage his audience. There was something attractive about his popularity. Her father appreciated strong personalities who were able to motivate the masses.

Savonarola ended up much like the books he had banned. Her father had taken her to Piazza della Signoria in Florence, the square where the monk was humiliated and burned as a heretic. With his Italian friends he discussed whether or not it was right to declare Savonarola a saint.

These debates were very much to Ulrik Hindersten’s taste. Laura remembered how she had admired his ability to find arguments in the hour-long disputes.

Now Livius and Petrarch were destroyed in her own bonfire, and they burned well, the new dissertations as well as the old volumes, bound in calfskin and representing centuries of learning.

She followed the black flakes with her gaze and noted with satisfaction that many of them were blowing in the professor’s direction. She bent over and picked up a slim volume of Capablanca and tossed it onto the fire. The pages flipped nervously in the wind before they were caught by the flames and were transformed into sooty confirmations of Laura’s decree.

With tense anticipation she stared into the fire as if against the black paper there would appear the glimmer of a message about what her new life was going to look like. Laura crouched down, leaned forward, the heat brought tears to her eyes, and she was gripped by a feeling of solemnity as if at a graduation or funeral. She was so moved that she did not hear the car that parked on the street, nor the light steps across the mossy lawn.

“Excuse me, are you Laura Hindersten?”

Laura had to steady herself with a hand against the ground in order not to fall into the dwindling fire, and she turned toward the woman who was standing a few meters away.

“I’m sorry if I startled you. My name is Ann Lindell and I’m with the police.”

Laura looked at her sooty hand and then gazed at Ann. Clearly, Laura could see her but it was as if her unsteady gaze could not bear to bring her into focus. Several seconds went by before she answered.

“Yes, my name is Laura Hindersten. What is this about?”

The voice was pleasing, completely devoid of concern or surprise. Ann saw how the woman in front of her changed from emotionality to coldness, as she stood up calmly and smiled.

“It’s about your father, as perhaps you’ve guessed.”

Åsa had forewarned her. Laura Hindersten was snobby and treated the police as if they were idiots and therefore Lindell unconsciously wore a stern expression.

“Because of some other cases we are checking on the individuals who have gone missing recently, and your father disappeared in September.”

Laura Hindersten looked watchful. Lindell discovered that there was something mocking about her smile and had the thought that her father had returned. What if this woman was pulling something over on her? Was Ulrik Hindersten having a cup of coffee in the kitchen?

“Have you heard from him at all?”

Laura shook her head.

“What are you burning?”

“Old junk.”

Ann Lindell bent down, picked up a book, and read the title on the spine.

“That’s Livius’s first book,” Laura said.

Lindell hesitated in the middle of dropping the book back onto the ground. Laura took it out of her hand.

“Who was Livius?”

“A Roman.”

Lindell was satisfied with the answer. Laura threw the book onto the fire, which was giving off a pleasant heat. Fires invite reflection and neither of the two women felt it was strange that they stood silently for a while side by side and watched Livius’s words go up in flames.

“That was that,” Laura said.

“Is it a series?”

“Series,” Laura giggled, “Ulrik should have heard that. Yes, there’s maybe some hundred and fifty books.”

“And you’re burning them all?”

“No, most of them have disappeared and there are only a few that have been translated into Swedish.”

Lindell looked at the woman next to her. She hadn’t noticed any of the heralded snootiness; instead Laura seemed to have more of a thoughtful, almost meditative aspect. Laura met her gaze and smiled introspectively

Lindell wished she was a smoker. Then she would have taken out a cigarette, lit it, and then smoked it in peace and quiet while the fire so eagerly licked up the rests of Livius and all the others.

“Sometimes I think Ulrik is here,” Laura said quietly.

“Do you think he’s alive?”

Laura shrugged.

“Do you know anyone by the name of Petrus Blomgren or Jan-Elis Andersson?”

“No.”

“Do you read the paper?”

When Laura made no attempt to answer, Lindell continued.

“Maybe you’ve heard about the two farmers who were murdered last week? They were the same age as your father.”

Laura smiled at her and Lindell’s feeling that the woman in front of her was unwell was strengthened.

“I’m thinking of going away. There are beaches that… my father…”

She stopped in the middle of a sentence, her mouth half open as if the words didn’t want to leave her mouth. Lindell had an impulse to shake her so they would fall out.

“Can we go in and talk? The fire looks like it will take care of itself.”

They sat down at the dining room table. Lindell noted the mess but decided not to ask more about Laura Hindersten’s cleaning project. Instead she tried to get her to talk more about her father.

After a moment of hesitation Laura became more animated. Lindell could listen, study her features and shifting expressions as the narrative progressed at a comfortable pace. She had the feeling that she was listening to a public radio lecture, the type of program that she all too often turned off, but that at those times when the tempo around her were conducive to listening, were an invitation to closeness to another person and a restful reflection.

Ann recalled how she had listened to a conversation between two women who had both been abused by their husbands and how that dialogue had taught her more than all of the seminars, arranged by various lecturing professionals, that she had participated in.

She fairly soon developed a kind of understanding for why Laura was burning her father’s possessions and although she found it wasteful and unethical to burn books as if they were junk, she could identify with Laura’s feelings and motivations. She used the word “free” on several occasions and then her voice took on a special quality, like a chord that a newcomer to the guitar has just learned and strums again and again with pride and wonder at the harmonious sound.

“You see,” Laura said and brushed her hand across the table, “love and knowledge, Augustine’s words. Ulrik had ideas, but most of them were borrowed.”

Lindell looked at the hand on the dark tabletop. Laura sighed and the hand stopped.

“You didn’t want to walk in his footsteps?”

“For a while, maybe. You saw the books; I’ve read most of them. When I was twenty I knew three languages, besides Swedish and Latin, and a little colloquial French.”

She laughed a little.

“But I don’t have any words for the simplest things.”

“I can speak Eastern dialect pretty well,” Lindell said.

“Stick with that,” Laura said.

Lindell again looked at Laura’s hand on the table, thin, almost transparent, with well-groomed nails, a round smudge of soot on the back of her hand that spread into a fine-veined pattern when she balled up her fist.

“Would you like a glass of wine?”

Ann shook her head.

“No, of course not,” Laura said with a smile.

She got up, walked over to a small table in one corner of the dining room, and took out a bottle of red wine.

“One of best things about Ulrik was that he taught me to appreciate wine. Only the best was good enough. This is a La Grola from 1990.”

She put out the half-empty wine bottle.

“Bought in a small place north of Verona,” Laura went on, and pulled out the cork. “Smell it! Produced by Allegrini. They became our friends, like many others in Valpolicella. We traveled around the vineyards and wineries. Ulrik could really charm people.”

Ann leaned forward and positioned her nose over the bottle. It smelled different than the cheap red wines she usually drank.

“We were often guests of the Alighieri family. One of Dante’s sons bought the property and it is still owned by the family. The thirteen hundreds,” she added when she saw Ann’s quizzical expression.

“You have to spend more than one thousand kronor for this, maybe more, I don’t know. The cellar is full of bottles.”

Laura stopped and looked at the bottle.

“I think my mother knew more about life and love than Ulrik,” she continued more thoughtfully.

“Do you miss her very much?”

Laura didn’t answer immediately.

“My mother came from the countryside and had a language for it. It worked. There weren’t many who could talk and laugh like her, but she couldn’t do it here, not in this house. It feels as if all of that has been lost. I sometimes imagine that there are people somewhere who speak like my mother, some dying population that is hanging on in a forgotten landscape.”

“Don’t you ever see relatives on her side?”

“No. I have three cousins, but I never see them. Their mother was Alice’s sister. I don’t even know if their houses are still there. I’m not sure I remember their language.”

Ann thought about Vilsne village.

“My life has always been driven by others,” Laura continued, “but now I’ve decided to change all that.”

“Do you have any idea why your father disappeared? Do you think it may have been voluntary?”

Laura shook her head.

“He was too much of a coward to take his own life.”

“He might be alive.”

“No!”

“You seem very certain.”

“He wouldn’t leave this life voluntarily,” Laura said in a voice that was barely audible.

Ann Lindell suddenly had a feeling of claustrophobia but squelched her impulse to get up and leave the house.

Laura retracted her hand from the table. She whispered something that Lindell couldn’t hear. If Laura had seemed like an open and reasonable person only a minute or so ago, with even a touch of humor in her comments, her sunken posture and tightly clenched hands resting in her lap testified to a woman in the grips of enormous confusion and anxiety.

She glanced at Lindell who could sense both helplessness and fury in Laura’s gaze. It reminded her of a prisoner, someone who all at once becomes aware of the massive walls and the closed door.

“What was your mother’s maiden name?”

“Andersson,” Laura said quickly as if she had been expecting that very question.

“Where was she from?”

“Skyttorp.”

Lindell tried to place the name. It was an area north of the city, she knew that much but no more. She stood up and Laura flew up from her chair.

“Thanks for the chat,” Lindell said and stretched out her hand. “I have one last question and you don’t need to answer if you don’t want to. Did your father abuse you?”

Laura let out a short laugh, a dry, sharp laugh.

“Is that what you think? Yes, he abused me, every day.”

Lindell wanted to take hold of Laura, who noticed her impulse and took a step back.

“He abused me with words. And now I’m burning all the words,” she spat and gestured with her head to the garden.

When Ann Lindell had left Laura remained standing for a moment in the middle of the room.

After reassuring herself that the policewoman’s car really had left the street and that the fire had died down without setting fire to the grass, Laura went back in, opened the basement door, and walked down. She took the thirteen steps very carefully, turned the lightbulb so it would go on, and looked around. Everything looked normal. And who would have been down here?

It consisted of a storage area that, like the garage, had served as a storage place for a variety of unusued items, a laundry room that had not been used since her mother’s death, and a boiler room where the old wood-fired boiler rested like a surly animal from the past. Next to the boiler room there was a poorly lit section where the wood was stored.

The policewoman’s visit had made her talk. It was the first time she had spoken of her father in that way. It was as if the outspokenness had delivered her, as if the words became more true once they were out in the open. They had been thought so many times over the years, now they had been uttered and were thereby legitimate, that was how she felt.

The visit had also set off an uncertainty in her that now forced her to go down into the cellar. She had been tempted to crack the door to her inner life and afterward had had the thought that there was something secretive about the policewoman’s visit, that the police knew more than this Ann Lindell had wanted to say. She had of course not asked to inspect anything but there was something about her questions that had worried Laura.

Checking the cellar calmed her. She sat down on the stairs even though the bad air made her feel sick. It was laden with memories. On the worn concrete in front of her was where her mother had lain in a crumpled position, her arms outstretched as if she had thrown herself from the top step in order to fly but had never gained air under her wings and had crashed to the floor.

Laura made herself stay put and she felt as if she was paying a vague debt, unsure of to whom, and that with each payment she was lifting a portion of the suffering from her shoulders.

She wished she could get up, leave the cellar, and emerge as a new person, clean and brave in the way the world demanded.

“I want to be normal,” she muttered. Many times she had cursed her life as the daughter of a man who saw the ordinary as a weakness, a sickly defect.

Now she was paying back but she knew deep inside she would never be debt-free.

A memory from Italy surfaced in her mind. It was early spring, the cherry trees in the mountains above Verona had just blossomed. Ulrik and she winding along the hairpin roads. He was driving jerkily, unused to the rental car, sweaty and stressed because they might have taken a wrong turn.

Laura didn’t care. She admired the view and the trees, with shiny trunks as if they had been polished with rags, and the intense flowering that was flooding the valleys and hillsides, and Laura thought it looked as if God had laid out all his bedclothes for airing.

In a little village that only consisted of six or so stone houses, above Negrar, Ulrik stopped to ask for directions. Laura also got out, a little dizzy from the hairpin curves and walked into an orchard, sitting down on a low wall whose stones could hardly be seen because of wild cascades of yellow-flowering runners. Bees were buzzing in the trees. In the background she heard Ulrik’s voice. She got up and started to walk down the hillside between rows of trees. The buzz became louder and created a sound weave of low, contended activity.

Laura turned and looked back. The houses of the village could no longer be seen. A valley that cut down between the steep hillsides reminded her of a fruit, whereas the occasional house resembled dark seeds in the green-white flesh. She paused and experienced a couple of seconds of absolute silence before a dog started to bark somewhere in the valley. Angry, aggressive. She turned around but caught sight of movement between the trees. It was a woman and a man. No longer young, perhaps in their forties, they sat leaning against a tree, talking eagerly. The man laughed and the woman joined in, bopping him lovingly on the head. He grasped her arms, sort of winding himself around her and they rolled onto the ground, tightly entwined.

Laura looked away and started to walk back to the village but then stopped and looked back at the couple. They did not seem to have noticed her presence. The woman’s pale shoulder stood out. The man kissed her neck. Her hands moved under his shirt, pulled it out of his pants, and exposed his back.

Laura curled up. She was perhaps twenty meters away from the couple. Their excitement, accompanied by the bees’ zealous industry, was carried through the air by a warm, sweet breeze. Laughter, a few words, but above all the passion in the lovers’ movements. Enchanted by the timeless scene she watched them take each other’s clothes off, how the man with a few quick moves arranged their clothes into a kind of bed for their lovemaking.

When he entered her she cried out. Laura ran off, tripping between the same trees where she had experienced such peace and tranquility only a few minutes ago.

Ulrik was standing by the car looking displeased. He complained about the farmers and the fact that she had disappeared. Now they would definitely arrive late to the Allegrini family.

Laura stared into space, panting after the quick run, indifferent to her father’s reproaches and exhausted by what she had seen. She felt as if she was bursting inside in a remarkable mixture of fear, anger, and excitement.

She had to turn around, away from her father, and stare out at the hill on the other side of the road where the grapevines tied to supports resembled people hung up on a cross, holding hands in a ring dance on an enormous Golgotha.

She wanted to stay in the village, but when Ulrik shut his car door she got in on the passenger side, gathering up her body into a little package that was going to be transported down the hill toward Fumene. Nothing of the landscape lingered on her retina. It was as if she was traveling through a tunnel. Before her she only saw the woman’s naked skin, her oustretched throat, and the passion that had joined her with the man.

Allegrini welcomed them and Ulrik’s apologies with his usual hospitality. Marilisa Allegrini had opened a bottle of Amarone in advance that she immediately poured into some unusually beautiful glasses. They raised their glasses in a toast and drank. As usual when wine of the best quality was involved, Ulrik was amiable in that chivalrous way that all Italians appreciated, especially from a foreigner.

The somewhat bitter cherry note in the wine reminded Laura of the village and the orchard. She stared down into the dark wine. One of the Allegrini brothers was watching her, their eyes met for a second, and she tried to smile.

“What a spring,” he said.

Laura stood up, took a deep breath, and then walked with heavy steps up the stairs. She lost her balance once and had to steady herself with a hand against the wall. Perhaps it was the wine, perhaps it was the flood of memories that streamed through her, that caused her misstep.

She tried to set Italy aside and instead think about the policewoman who had come to see her. Ann Lindell was not someone who, if you met her on the street, you would react to in any particular way, Laura thought, but the deliberateness with which she practiced her profession appealed to Laura.

She had asked about Petrus Blomgren and Jan-Elis Andersson. Laura smiled to herself. The police could search all they liked, it didn’t matter to her. They didn’t know about Ulrik Hindersten’s life and her own secrets. How could they understand anything about real life?