The Cruel Stars of the Night

Five

The parrot’s name was Splendens. It lived in a cage in the living room. It was messy. And noisy, filling the room-no, the whole house- with its racket. It drove her mother crazy, and as often as she could she covered it with the dark cloth. It was called Splendens for Mussolini. Because it screeched in Italian.

“It’s an endangered species in Brazil,” her father would often use as an argument when the subject of getting rid of it came up.

“Then we’ll send it there,” her mother answered every time.

When it died, the house became quiet as the grave. They never found out why it happened. One day it no longer moved, made no noise, simply sat completely still on its favorite perch, comfortably propped up against a branch. It looked like it was sleeping. Maybe it was dreaming of the Amazon.

Laura was nine and did not really grieve. Splendens had never been tempting to cuddle or spend time with. Even giving it food was boring. It always looked displeased, even when Laura brought the tastiest morsels. It jabbed at her fingers.

It seemed as if her father could not accept its death. He was under the impression that it had entered into a state of suspended animation and that it would start its screeching again at any moment. Several days went by before he pulled the parrot from its perch and buried it in the garden.

Her mother was jubilant but her father stopped her from throwing out the cage. It remained on its pedestal like a threat that her father could at any moment drag home a replacement for Splendens.

He sometimes stood and stared somewhat foolishly at the empty cage, the floor of which still contained some dust-covered sticks.

When Laura entered the living room it was as if she were transported back twenty-five years. The cage stood in its place, and she thought she could hear Splendens run through its repertoire of curses and dirty words in Tuscan dialect, phrases that Laura sometimes used in the office. These were always a big hit. Laura as fresh-mouthed Italian hussy became a staple at the annual office Christmas party, even if she afterward felt dirty inside.

She walked over to the cage. It still smelled of droppings, she thought, but realized it had to be her imagination. The cage looked smaller and she tried to remember how big Splendens had been. In her childhood she had thought it enormous, frightening, its claws quickly scrabbling up and down the wires of the cage, life-threatening, its broad beak ever ready to hack, pinch so hard that Laura’s skin was striped with blood. Only her father could stretch in his hand. Then the parrot put its head to one side and let out an almost loving sound.

Now the cage was on its way out. She put it in the driveway where mounds of junk had gathered the past few days.

The professor came walking by and condescended to say a few words. He asked her if she had heard anything about her father. Laura shook her head.

“Spring cleaning?”

Laura nodded. You hypocritical bastard, she thought but smiled.

“That always feels good,” her neighbor went on. “Eva-Britt and I are thinking about ordering a container. One always ends up accumulating so much stuff.”

Lies, Laura thought.

“Oh, what kind of things?” she asked innocently.

The professor was at a loss for words.

“I’m thinking about renovating,” she said suddenly.

The thought hadn’t even crossed her mind but when she saw how nervous her neighbor looked she continued firmly.

“Renovate. Perhaps knock out a few walls and make the living room bigger.”

“So you’re planning to stay here?”

“It’s my home.”

They said nothing more and he went back to his house. Laura remained outside although she was cold. The professor was at least talking to her. His wife hadn’t said a word to her in several years, hardly said hello. Many times she pretended not even to see Laura.

The disdain, which sometimes grew to hate, surrounding “the Dream House” sent out sour puffs that enveloped the house in a permanent atmosphere of isolation and contempt.

Laura Hindersten was cleaning. A whole life, or rather several lives, lay at her feet. She was wading through decades of former thoughts and hopes as she picked aimlessly through the junk. Sorrow congealed around worn toys, birthday presents, and binders with school essays, stored between old tablecloths and lace-trimmed sheets.

A ceramic vase bought at the outdoor folk museum, Skansen, released a whole world. It was spring but still very chilly, with strong winds from the north. They were standing by the monkey hill. Her mother’s hat blew off, bouncing, was lifted up and floated down to the monkeys who immediately threw themselves over it, pulling and chewing on the hat.

Her father broke out into one of his rare bursts of laughter. Her mother was furious. Laura, who thought the whole thing had been comical, did not know how she should behave. She offered to climb down and get it. Her mother grew quiet, looked at her daughter and said something that Laura didn’t hear in the wind. Was it a yes or no? During the whole Skansen trip she thought about it and all expected pleasure trailed off in the wind.

Many years later Laura returned to Skansen, during a school trip to Stockholm, and she immediately threw up in the parking lot by the main entrance. The teacher hurried over. He thought her nausea was due to the bus trip. He crouched down in front of Laura, offered her his handkerchief, and spoke kindly in a very low voice as if he wanted to shield her from the world. Laura felt ashamed but was warmed by his unexpected warm-hearted manner.

Later in the day she bought the vase as a gift to her teacher but she couldn’t bring herself to give it to him. Now it lay in a box in the garage. It was hard to hold it in her hand. The kindness burned. The sweet, sympathetic words from the teacher came back to her. His name was Bengt-Arne and he disappeared after a semester or so. The vase remained, ugly and a little damaged, meaningless to everyone except Laura. It went into the garbage bag, like a lot of other things.

She found a box filled with linen dish towels that she had admired so much as a girl, tracing the curlicue letters with her fingertips and fantasizing about the people who were concealed by the embroidered monograms. She asked her father about it but he didn’t know, or he didn’t want to talk about it. He didn’t care, to him the towels were worthless. They came from his mother’s family. “Those old bags,” he simply said, “they had nothing else to do.”

They were folded in bunches of twelve, wrapped up in paper string. Laura loosened a bundle, unfolded a towel. It was as if the initials spoke to her, as if there was a concealed message, but the unknown names were as foreign as the language her father always talked about, that language that was spoken before the time of the Etruscans. It was the subject of many and lengthy discussions on his part.

She threw away the towel and all the other packets followed.

Fourteen black garbage sacks in total, neatly lined up along the driveway. She tied them up carefully. Nothing could slip out.

Many times Laura imagined that there was a knot of life, a tidy little stump tied up in a bow. If you tugged on it all problems fell away They unraveled. Dissolved.

Often it was a red bow that resembled those that decorate thoughtfully wrapped packages, but it could also be a sloppy knot with a couple of dangling ends.

Laura pulled on the thread and in a dream world a landscape emerged. It did not remind her of anything she had ever experienced. She stepped in among the blooming bushes where there were tall trees laden with delicious fruits and the breeze was mild, caressing her cheeks.

She became one with the pleasing surroundings, disappeared into the luxurious vegetation, was swallowed up never to reemerge.

Sometimes it could be frightening because she never knew what awaited her. It could be the realm of death; behind a cleverly alluring curtain there was a sooty and suffocating hellish realm of suffering. She did not want to believe it. Nothing ugly could exist behind the good-tasting fruits in the trees and the shiny nuts on the ground.

A cat slinked by, freezing in mid-movement when it discovered Laura, and then darted off through a couple of planks in the fence.

There was nothing here that in any way resembled a heavenly gate that she would be able to walk through. She closed her eyes and tried to will it into being but it did not want to appear. When she opened her eyes the cat was sitting in front of her feet. It had snuck back without a sound. The tip of its tail was moving slowly.

“I’m alone,” she said softly.

The cat stared at her with eyes that looked like a concentration of hatred.

Laura Hindersten let them take away the old Citroën that had been in front of the garage for almost fifteen years. It had started to melt into the surroundings, had assumed a mottled shade of green-brown, hidden under ever-more lush and wild greenery. It was really only the wheels that signaled that it had once been a car.

The man who came to take it away laughed when he saw the wreck. Laura was upset at first but then joined in. When he had attached the hook and winched the car onto the tow truck she started to laugh again. The squeaking sound of the winch was like the most beautiful postlude over her father and the life she had lived. The man from the scrap yard smiled, unsure of her reaction. The old car protested, the steel frame creaked, leaves that had been lying on the roof slipped off reluctantly, and the deep cracks in the dried-up tires wailed.

It was when the wreck was settled on the tow truck that the absence came. The space it left in front of the garage became a void in Laura’s interior. Confused, she went and stood where the car had just been. No person had stood in exactly this spot for many years. The last time might have been when she graduated from grammar school. The car worked back then. Her father had picked her up from the Katedral school. Even then the car was basically a wreck, a sorry sight, and she was embarrassed. Her classmates were picked up with horse-drawn carriages, leaf-adorned carts, and shiny American cars, driven through town in celebratory triumph and happiness.

But she had sunk deeply into the backseat and glared at the back of her father’s head, listening to his disjointed conversation and irritated by his clumsy driving. The gears jammed, there was a rattling sound from under the hood, and she wished she were far, far away.

Now the car was on its way from here. She absently signed the piece of paper that the man held out to her. He looked at her in a way she knew well. There was wonder, mixed with ridicule and pity.

That was two weeks ago. Now there was a much fresher car in the driveway. To drive the Ford into the garage was a physical impossibility. The garage was full of discarded furniture, boxes with publications no one read any longer or even knew existed, empty bottles, piles of newspaper, and mounds of other junk.

Already the new car was her ally, sworn to loyalty. Her secrets were only shared with him. It was a he, she had felt that at once. He obeyed her, took her to the places she had decided to visit. He never doubted whether it was right to go here or there. She talked to the Ford, shared her thoughts and plans. He answered by starting willingly and following her orders.

Now he stood at the ready, heard Laura rattling the keys. She hesitated for a few seconds. There was still time to put the keys away and go back into the house. She knew that as soon as she got into the car there would be no turning back. The agreement with the Ford had to be upheld.

She counted silently in her head. When she reached the count of five she opened the car door and got in. The Ford shook itself and the outfit rolled out onto the street. Everything in Kåbo was calm. She turned onto the street that ran right through the neighborhood.

A child was walking on the sidewalk, a violin case in her hand. Laura slowed down, carefully rolling down the street, looking at the girl who was walking in the way that children do, a little dreamily with an eye for the small details.

Laura was very close now. The girl, who was perhaps ten, twelve years old, was dressed in a red parka. Her hair was held back in a ponytail with a white, broad hair band. It swung in time with the girl’s step. She turned her head around, probably heard the sound of the car. Brown eyes, searching gaze.

Laura smiled. The girl smiled back, a little unsurely, but you’re supposed to smile back when you are greeted with one. This way, Laura thought, you’re supposed to smile, she’s been raised this way.

She slowed down and lowered the window. The girl stopped, hesitantly waiting.

“I used to play the violin, too,” Laura said.

The girl nodded.

“Is it going well?”

“Yes, pretty much.”

“Even if it’s difficult, you should keep practicing.”

A new nod. She had probably heard this before.

“Good luck,” Laura said and drove on, her gaze stubbornly fixed on the wet asphalt right in front of the car. With a hasty movement, she pulled the heating knob to zero. She wanted to look around in the rearview mirror, but that would be too painful.

The violin was still there. Laura had seen a glimpse of the case in the garage. For six years she had practiced and practiced, once a week walked-just like the girl on the street-the three blocks over to Miss Berg, the violin teacher, who lived in a house not unlike the Hindersten family’s. It had the same smell and the same stale atmosphere.

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.