The Cruel Stars of the Night - Kjell Eriksson [11]
Even after she managed to calm herself, it could take several days before she was able to address her father in a normal tone of voice.
“I see, you’re that way now,” he would usually comment on her state, unable to grasp what had upset her.
Once upon a time everything had been nicely ordered, then it fell into disarray. Books, manuscripts, and loose papers piled up and formed drifts on the floor. Laura sometimes had the feeling that she was out on the rocking waves of the sea. She had given up trying to keep things in order long ago. There was simply no aspiration for order. It was not part of her father’s worldview and Laura had grown up in an accelerating chaos.
The house smelled a little odd and it was only now, a month after her father’s disappearance, that she realized what it was. She had always thought it came from the discarded clothes that were heaped together on the floor.
She had detested him because of the mess. But while she was cleaning up after him she was forced to go into his bedroom, something she had avoided doing all these years. And there was the reading lamp, the one that had been there ever since she was a little girl. It had been bought in Germany at the end of the fifties, modern at the time and now again a desired object at flea markets and auctions.
When she stood close to the lamp the odor was more pronounced than ever. Against her will she sniffed closer and closer to the hateful thing. The plastic—the lampshade consisted of mottled plastic strips— emitted a stale smell when the sixty-watt lamp was on. He kept it turned on even at night. Laura suspected that some nights he fell asleep in the armchair next to the table, submerged in some problem that had to do with Petrarch or some chess game.
Her first thought was to throw the lamp out, but it still stood in its spot next to the table. She never turned it on and the smell slowly dissipated.
Most of the things in the bedroom were untouched. Even his reading glasses still lay on the nightstand. There was also an essay from the Humboldt University in Berlin. It was about Petrarch’s Laura, about whether or not a newly discovered portrait was a depiction of her.
Laura was named after this woman from the fourteenth century who had become a literary concept and the object of research. Many times she herself felt like a concept. As a teenager she started to doubt whether or not she lived, if she even existed here and now. What did she mean to her father? She pinched herself, experienced pain, cried, and felt her cheek grow wet with tears, but did that prove her existence?
She started to think he only saw her as Petrarch’s Laura, a shadow from the past, without human qualities. No daughter to love, but a reborn literary figure. Even so she continued to live, here and now, getting up in the morning, leaving the house, walking to school, walking home, growing up.
When she had her first period she immediately told her father. Her first feeling was one of shyness, perhaps shame, but suddenly she simply said it: “Father, I have to buy sanitary pads.” It was as if an unknown voice spoke through her mouth.
He put down his knife and fork and looked at her with an expression that was difficult to interpret. Laura imagined he felt offended. She rarely used the word Father. He wanted her to call him by his first name.
After a pause he resumed eating. She understood that his worldview had received a blow. He didn’t like it, she saw that.
Who will carry on after me?” he would sometimes exclaim, with that combination of pride and desperation that became more strongly reinforced in him over the years.
His contribution to research was incontestable. Or perhaps it was closer to the truth to say that those who may have had reason to question