The Cruel Stars of the Night - Kjell Eriksson [109]
“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.