The Cruel Stars of the Night - Kjell Eriksson [19]
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