The Cruel Stars of the Night - Kjell Eriksson [149]
“Ulrik grabbed you?”
“Not him,” Laura said and drew her breath. Panic was shining from her eyes.
“Laura, maybe you need help? I don’t get all this but that you’ve had a hard time of it, I understand that much. You are welcome to talk with me, but maybe you need someone who’s good at this kind of thing.”
“You’re sweet, Lars-Erik,” she said and took his snifter, drained it in one go, and poured another glass.
“I think about Alice,” he went on, “such a life-loving person. To die like that. It’s so pathetic. On the stairs.”
Laura took a sip of cognac and grimaced. Lars-Erik thought she was going to throw the glass against the wall again.
“And if I was the one who did it, what difference does that make? I knew even then . . .”
“What do you mean?”
Laura drained the glass again.
“She laughed at me. Do you understand? She laughed. I just wanted her to be like a mother should be, but in the end she didn’t care. She didn’t even pretend. She laughed at me. I asked her to stop, to be a mother.”
“You’ve had relationships yourself and know how hard everything can be!” Lars-Erik burst out. “It couldn’t have been easy to live with that block of wood.”
He poured out a cognac and drank, setting the glass down on the table heavily.
“She was unfaithful,” Laura said, “and it was just as well that she died.”
“You can’t kill everyone who’s unfaithful!”
“Don’t yell at me. I’m warning you, don’t yell at me!”
Lars-Erik drew a deep breath.
“She tripped. I can’t help that, can I? She said something about lin-gonberries and laughed. They were his lingonberries. I wanted to smash the jar.”
“But, Laura . . .”
“She was my mother and she let me down. She was like an apple that is rotten on the inside. You only saw the outside. But she burst in the end.”
“Oh dear God.”
Laura’s face crumpled up. It was as if a great weight had landed on her. Her shoulders were pulled down and her head fell forward.
“Will you come with me?”
“Where to?”
“I know a place. A restaurant by the sea.”
Laura didn’t notice him shake his head. Lars-Erik thought she had changed into a little old lady.
“Can’t we go there, just you and me? We can have a good life.”
“No, Laura. Stay here for a few days instead and get your strength back.”
Lars-Erik made up a bed in his father’s old room. He walked past the suitcase in the hall but didn’t know what he should do with it. If he carried it up it would give the impression that he expected her to stay longer.
Laura was still sitting in the kitchen.
“It’s time to get ready for bed,” Lars-Erik said.
He had been standing for a while looking at his cousin, how she poured out another glass and downed it.
She got up on unsteady legs and walked over to the window. Her face was reflected in it. She smiled and started to recite a poem:
“When evening drives away the shining day
And our deep night to others brings the dawn
Sadly I gaze upon the cruel stars
That formed my body out of sentient earth
And I do curse the day I saw the sun
Until I seem like one reared in the wood.”
“Beautiful,” she said and turned around, “Stars are cruel. They shine, beaming toward me, but so cold, so cold.”
The silence in the kitchen lasted several minutes before she let out a sob.
“That is what I have received. Poems.”
Lars-Erik walked over to her and put his arm around her shoulders.
“Do you want to make love to me?” she asked abruptly.
Her breath was sweet and strong from the cognac. Lars-Erik caught his breath.
“I don’t think that would be so good,” he said. “Let us be friends.”
“Friends is good,” she said, still turned toward the window.
Lars-Erik woke up, as he usually did, shortly before six. It took a while before he remembered he had a guest in the house.
He tiptoed down into the kitchen and closed the door behind him,turned on the radio and started to make his breakfast. He always ate porridge with lingonberry jam.
Radio Uppland started their transmission.
“Violent fire in Uppsala . . . may have a connection to the serial killings the past