The Cruel Stars of the Night

Thirty-five

Even though it was many years ago she was sure she would find it. In her inner image, or rather, a rhapsody of many different images, she saw the houses, the fields, and the narrow, curving gravel road.

It ran through a sunny landscape. From what Laura remembered it was always beautiful weather when she and Alice traveled those thirty, forty kilometers north.

Once they had stopped in a clearing in the forest and picked wild strawberries.

“This is the landscape of my childhood,” Alice said and smiled. “Of course I know where the wild strawberries are.”

She used words like that, like “landscape,” and dialect words for things such as pastures, paddocks, hay-cutting, and hay-drying racks. The landscape of childhood.

For Alice, the word “landscape” took on a magical meaning. It wasn’t simply the word used to refer to districts like Uppland, Västmanland, Dalarna, and the other brightly colored patches in the school atlas, no, landscape became something completely different, a scent, a few words uttered in passing, a smile, and some wild strawberries threaded on a stalk of grass.

The road followed the same course as before but had been widened. The forest had changed, as had the houses. It looked deserted. Alice’s landscape had grown more naked and cold. In part this must be due to the time of year but Laura had the impression that an illness had befallen the area. A slow-working virus that turned even the young spruce trees brown, and that bent the smoke from the chimneys, spilling a milky haze over the gardens and yards.

There seemed to be fewer people now, and they looked smaller, more afraid, barely looking up when Laura went past. It was as if they no longer cared. Back then they would straighten up, meet her gaze with curiosity, and hold up a hand.

She couldn’t find the clearing with wild strawberries and suspected it had been planted with trees.

The old school was still there but it had been converted into a private residence. A jeep was parked in front of the entrance. The old schoolyard had been replaced by a gravel display area for Entreprenad machines.

Alice often talked about her teacher Miss Olsson, a woman from the Dalarna district who taught Laura how to prune fruit trees, plant and thin vegetable beds, and how to make heaped rows of earth for potatoes.

“That’s its Latin name,” was something Alice would say, “and that’s what it’s called in Uppland dialect, and Dalarna dialect.” “Trifolium” became “bee bread” and “red clover.” “Genum” became “ three-flowered aven” and “prairie smoke.”

All manner of thought-provoking names of herbs flew from her tongue like beautiful butterflies.

For each kilometer that Laura clocked, new memories returned to her. It was like opening an old photo album and making a trip back in time. She drove slower and slower with a feeling of solemnity and grandeur, aware of the fact that this was probably the last time she’d be seeing her mother’s landscape.

Lars-Erik Jonsson came toward her with a wry, but nonetheless welcoming smile. Laura stifled an impulse to hug him. It was not a good idea. He wiped his hands off on his work clothes.

“After so many years,” she said, suddenly embarrassed at his inquisitive gaze, “you still recognize me.”

“You look the same,” her cousin replied and held her hand in a firm grip.

Lars-Erik was five, six years older than Laura. She thought he looked worn. The skin in his face was loose and gray and when he walked across the yard, he limped.

“Do you have aches?”

“Yes, but nothing to worry about,” Lars-Erik said. “It’s my joints.”

Laura knew that Agnes, her aunt and mother to Lars-Erik, had suffered greatly from rheumatism. Her aunt had died young, thirty-one years old, and Laura had no memories of her. She had only seen pictures of a woman who reminded her of Alice.

Lars-Erik had grown up with his father Mårten and two brothers. Alice would always tell Mårten what a fine job he was doing raising the three boys. A couple of times a year Alice and Laura traveled out to Skyt-torp to visit them.

Mårten had a soft spot for Alice. Perhaps mostly because she reminded him of her sister, but also because Alice always remembered his sons’ birthdays and namesdays, a Swedish tradition of celebrating the name assigned to each day throughout the calendar year.

“Will you have a cup of coffee? That thing’s not going anywhere,” Lars-Erik said and nodded his head at the tractor that he was in the middle of repairing.

The kitchen looked like before. The smell that came at Laura was also the same.

She wanted to talk, or rather, to hear her cousin’s voice.

“How is everything with Jan and Martin?” she asked.

“Oh, like always,” Lars-Erik said with a smile. “Janne is still up in Fors-mark and Martin has married, divorced, and remarried.”

He warmed to her question and spoke at length about his brothers. Since they had lost their mother so early they had become very close. Laura had never heard them quarrel or say a harsh word about each other.

Lars-Erik measured out the coffee and poured water in the cof-feemaker. Laura looked at his gnarled hands.

“And you? Are you married?”

Laura shook her head. She considered telling him about Stig but didn’t. Maybe Lars-Erik wouldn’t understand.

“What about Ulrik?”

“Do you know about what’s happened?”

“Well,” Lars-Erik said, “I did see in the paper that he’s missing.”

“He’s still gone,” Laura said.

He looked searchingly at her before he silently set out cups and plates.

“Perhaps I should have called,” he said finally, but they both knew it was an unnecessary comment.

He took out a loaf of bread, cut about half a dozen slices, set out butter, cheese, and a packet of smoked ham. Laura made sandwiches, they drank coffee, and talked about people they knew in common. To Laura’s surprise the conversation flowed well. But Lars-Erik was the most communicative, more open than his younger brothers. He had a streak of nonchalance that both irritated and attracted Laura. He smiled often, quick in his thinking and conversation, putting her at ease with a frankness that she wasn’t used to. She wished she had visited him much earlier.

In the office everyone talked past each other, used euphemisms and carefully chosen words that-behind their apparent innocence-could hurt. Not even praise could be taken at face value. Behind acknowledgements and fine words there could be jealousy and barbs.

Sometimes Lars-Erik paused before giving her an answer to her questions, became thoughtful and silent, replying briefly but with an unspoken signal that he would return to the topic later. It was a habit she knew so well from Alice.

“So, you don’t have a man?”

“No, it didn’t work out that way.”

“Not for me either. Rose-Marie lived here for a while, but then she got a job in town. She thought it got too far to keep driving back and forth.

“It can be lonely sometimes but I have the house,” he added.

She couldn’t bring herself to say that she was preparing to leave Sweden. It would feel wrong. Lars-Erik wouldn’t understand, he who couldn’t even imagine moving to Uppsala, but she couldn’t help asking if he didn’t sometimes long to go away.

“You are so like my mother,” he said. “Not just in your appearance but… everything,” he continued, and now there was a hesitation in his voice that had not been there before. “She was an anxious soul. My father said later that she had gypsy blood in her and of course she was dark, just as you are.”

“We have gypsy blood?”

“No, but that desire to travel, to get away.”

“I’ve lived in the same place for thirty-five years,” Laura said, feeling ill at ease.

“But are you happy?”

Laura looked at him, startled, then looked away, confused.

“I don’t mean to say…”

“I know what you mean.” Laura interrupted his attempt to try to cover over his unexpected question.

No, I am not happy and I never have been.

“Alice should have stayed here,” Lars-Erik said and looked at Laura with an expression as if he was testing the limits for what he could say.

Now she could tell him! She knew that her cousin, and perhaps above all his father Mårten, had never liked Ulrik.

“It’s going to get better now. I am… I have met a man.

“He’s married,” she added and made it sound like a bonus.

Lars-Erik did not appear to be interested in a continuation.

“I have to ask one thing,” he said and drew a deep breath before going on. “It’s about Alice. This is a hard question to ask but I have to know. She died in the basement. No one really knows what happened. Father said something a long time ago that maybe you pushed her down the stairs. He said that. That Laura was not an innocent child.”

“It’s a lie! Ulrik made that up.”

“Ulrik came here once after Alice died. They argued, almost so it turned into a fight. It was probably something Ulrik said. Father wasn’t himself for a long time. He was so fond of Alice.”

Laura looked at him but Lars-Erik avoided her gaze. He kept talking as if to himself.

“It’s not always how you think. I know that Alice and my father were close.”

“Mårten never said a mean word to me.”

“No, it was probably just something Ulrik tossed out.”

Laura gazed at her cousin.

“Did you think, do you think that I pushed Alice?”

“No, why would you do something like that?”

Lars-Erik started to clear away the coffee cups and the plate of sandwiches.

“Are you moving?” he asked suddenly, his back turned to her.

Laura didn’t answer but he took this for a yes.

“Far?”

“Yes.”

“You can move to Skyttorp. There are houses for sale.”

Suddenly her plans appeared so paltry. All calculation and planning was in vain.

“Even though we’re cousins,” Lars-Erik continued, “I don’t know you very well, but there are bonds that make us receptive to the same wavelengths. I saw that as soon as you got out of the car. At first I was shocked because you looked so much like Agnes. It’s almost spooky. As if she had come back, for a couple of moments.”

Laura stretched out and nudged his hand with hers.

“You looked so lost,” he said, and Laura saw how he steeled himself to maintain his calm. “You gave me a look that said ‘Save me!’”

“I have to do that myself.”

Lars-Erik smiled.

“Where did Ulrik go?”

“He disappeared.”

“And that made you happy?”

Laura nodded. He looked at her and she expected more questions but her cousin left the kitchen. She heard him walk up the stairs to the upper floor and suddenly felt abandoned, as if he had left her for good.

He returned with a small cardboard box in his hand, placed it on the table, and gave her a look that said, this is important. Don’t say anything to ruin this moment.

Laura kept quiet while he untied the string that kept the lid in place. The box smelled like closet.

When he removed the lid she saw that the box contained letters and photos.

“Your mother wrote letters to my father,” he said and took out a thick bunch of letters tied up with paper string. When he undid the knot she immediately recognized her mother’s handwriting on the uppermost page.

“There’s about thirty-something in all. The first one came about a week after my mother died and last one was written the week before Alice died.”

Laura stared at him.

“Why did she write to Mårten?”

“She needed someone to talk to,” Lars-Erik said. “I know it may feel unpleasant but we’re adults now. I read some of them for the first time two years ago, after my father had died. I learned a lot about him. Everything may not have been so fun but that’s life. Why I should I judge others?”

“Why did he keep them?”

Lars-Erik didn’t answer.

“Are they love letters?”

“No, not really, but there is a lot of love in them. I’ve arranged them in chronological order. Do you want them? They are yours as much as mine. More yours, really.”

Laura held out her hand and pulled out an envelope from the bunch, but hesitated in taking out the letter.

“Your mother was unhappy,” he said.

“I hate him,” she said.

“I thought as much,” Lars-Erik said. “Do you think he’s coming back?”

Laura shook her head. She couldn’t tear her gaze away from the envelope with the neatly printed address. She experienced the divided feeling of both being close to her mother and being betrayed by her. She had written to another, and although Laura had only been a child when the letters were written she wanted all her mother’s confidence. But the letters were also a greeting from Alice. The almost physical sensation of her mother’s presence that seeped from the stack of envelopes filled Laura with sadness. Alice was still talking to her.

“May I…?”

“Of course,” Lars-Erik said.

“I won’t read them now,” she said and put the letters away, carefully re-tying the string and putting everything into her bag.

“You can get them back later,” she said.

Her cousin’s expression conveyed that it didn’t matter.

Both he and Laura had trouble finding the thread again. The carefree conversation, the light talk about what had been, and the gossip about people in common did not want to restart.

Lars-Erik picked up the cardboard box, got up, and walked up the stairs. Laura looked out the window. Dark rainclouds were piling up on the horizon and gliding together into gigantic formations that threatened the sun.

So much sky, so much space and life, Laura thought. A movement on the other side of the road caught her attention. It was an old woman who with great effort came out of the woodshed with an old-fashioned wood-bin in her hand. She stopped halfway, put down her burden, and rested.

“That’s Elsa,” Lars-Erik said, having silently slipped back into the kitchen. “She is my only neighbor. She’s turning eighty-seven this year.”

“I remember her,” Laura said. “It’s a wonder that she’s still alive. I thought she was ancient twenty-five years ago.”

“She still keeps chickens. Her grandmother was called Egg-Magda, her mother Egg-Karin, and now it is Egg-Elsa. But it stops there.”

“Egg-Elsa,” Laura repeated quietly. “A whole life connected to chickens.”

“There are worse titles,” Lars-Erik said.

“My closest neighbor is a professor.”

“A remarkable woman,” Lars-Erik continued. He had walked over to the window. “She’s phenomenal at solving crossword puzzles. I usually see her when she’s sitting at the kitchen window. Sometimes it happens that she comes over and asks about a word, but it’s rare because most of the time she cracks them on her own.”

The old woman resumed her walk and went into her house. There was smoke rising from the chimney.

The sun went behind clouds and the kitchen immediately became almost dark.

“I collect clouds,” Lars-Erik said and leaned forward, looking up at the sky. “It is like an enormous art exhibition. I like to stand out in my yard and watch nature give me fresh exhibitions every day, and to top it off it’s free. Have you ever thought about how the sky can give rise to the most unbelievable formations?”

Laura was watching her cousin, how his gaze and posture completely changed as he spoke so lovingly about the clouds, unaffected and surprisingly poetic.

“But the beautiful formations vanish immediately,” she interjected, mostly to get him to keep talking.

“That’s true, but it doesn’t matter to me. I live in the moment, happy for each second. In town people hurry around, running to galleries and throwing their money away on art. Here everything is free. Sometimes Egg-Elsa comes out into her yard and we stand there on either side of the road looking up at the sky. There are worse forms of entertainment, wouldn’t you say?”

“I have to go,” Laura said abruptly.

They stood there facing each other. His shirt was spotted with oil. The dark stubble took on a metallic gleam in the dim light from the window. The brown eyes were Alice and Agnes. He opened his mouth to say something but stopped in the attempt.

Suddenly he looked taken aback and frail. The face that had earlier seemed so open, his cloud face, now seemed to hold many unspoken questions. She understood that his speech about the free art of the sky and finding joy in the moment were veils of loneliness.

Laura again felt an urge to hug him but held out her hand instead and he took it with such force and an intensity that bewildered her. She was used to neat, short handshakes.

“Come back,” he said, “before you go anywhere.”

Laura nodded, but knew they would never see each other again.

He didn’t let go of her hand.

“Whatever has happened, you have to like yourself,” he said. “Everything is not your fault.”

What is “everything,” she wondered.

“You saw the tractor out there,” Lars-Erik went on. “For close to two years I have been restoring it. Egg-Elsa sometimes teases me and says I’m married to a fifty-year-old tractor. It’ll be finished soon. I drove it out of the workshop yesterday. But what then?”

Laura didn’t really understand what he was getting at with his question. She pulled her hand from his.

“You know that…”

“I know,” Laura said.

The letters from her mother to Lars-Erik’s father were in her purse. About thirty in all, written over a ten-year period. Three a year. That wasn’t very much but Laura only had only received one letter and two postcards from Alice.

The letters weighed on her. As if she had a bomb in her bag. She didn’t know if she would be able to bring herself to read them. Not right now. Maybe later, by the sea. Read them out loud to the staff and the other diners who would not understand a word but would listen and smile anyway.

The visit to Lars-Erik had made her despondent. Not that she wished she hadn’t done it, because if she hadn’t gone back to her mother’s landscape one last time she would have regretted it. Now it was over. The next to last stop behind her.

She was happy to have come into these greetings from her mother, but a fear of what the letters might contain and her jealousy toward her uncle-who had had such a lengthy and almost intimate contact with Alice-soiled the landscape and Laura’s own memories. The visits, together with Alice, to Mårten and his three sons, now took on a different meaning. Had Mårten and Alice been in love? The letters would perhaps provide an answer.

Again she stood outside and peeked into Alice’s world. Instead of putting the landscape behind her as she had thought she would be able to accomplish with her visit to Skyttorp, the letters gave rise to new questions.

She felt Lars-Erik’s gaze on her back as she got into her car. The smoke from Egg-Elsa’s house billowed thickly. In the ditches the ferns were wilting and creating a yellowing edge to the green spruce curtain.

She pulled out onto the the road behind a lumber truck, whose heavy load made the ground tremble, followed it a kilometer or so before she overtook it but then immediately regretted it since the forceful vehicle had seemed to guide her through the terrain of memories.

It had felt safe to lie behind it and let the truck set the speed. Now she was driving along much too quickly.