The Cruel Stars of the Night - Kjell Eriksson [20]
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