The Cruel Stars of the Night - Kjell Eriksson [22]
Six
She drove slowly through the streets of the city She was on sick leave but was supposed to spend time with others, her doctor had said— meet friends, socialize, try to get over her father’s disappearance.
That he had disappeared did not mean he was gone. In fact, he had become even more real now. She thought she had been freed but his voice echoed inside her head. Sometimes in Italian. A few stanzas of a sonnet or a stream of curses.
Laura’s thirty-five years were arranged like a photo album where her father had taken and mounted all the pictures in the order that he wished.
She was forced to stop by the Flottsund Bridge. A wide cargo van appeared on the other side of the Fyris River. The driver held up his hand in thanks as he brushed past her car. When she was about to drive onto the bridge her car lurched and stalled. Immediately a car behind her honked. In the rearview mirror she saw a middle-aged man, how he waved his hand, how his mouth moved. She put the hand brake on, stepped out, opened the trunk, and took out a lug wrench.
As she smashed the man’s windshield she came to think of her father. Was it all of his repeated lectures about Queen Kristina’s life, above all the procession out of Uppsala, that made her think of her father? He never spoke of her arrival, when she and the whole court went from Stockholm to Uppsala in order to flee the plague. Surely they would have come to Uppsala on the same road, over Flottsund, through that which today is Sunnersta, over the fields by Ultuna with the castle on the hill in sight. No, it was the queen’s sorti that interested him, how she one day in early summer put down her crown and regalia, spoke to the estates of the realm in order to leave the city that same day and begin her long trip to Italy and her father’s beloved Rome.
“Sixteen fifty-four,” she muttered, as she hit the car with the lug wrench one last time. “I remember, I remember all the dates.”
Shaken, she returned to her car, started it, and drove over the bridge. Left behind was the broken Volvo with its shocked driver who only managed to call the police on his cell phone once the crazy woman had disappeared around the bend on the other side of the river.
Laura Hindersten took a left on the old Stockholm Road and drove back into town. She had thought herself south to the region where she and her father once spent a summer in a rented cottage. It was the year after her mother had died. Laura had the impression that her father for the first time experienced the house in Kåbo as the prison it had been for her mother.
It had been a happy summer. Their old Citroën took them twenty kilometers out into the country. Her father read as usual, most often in the garden, leaning over old manuscripts and reciting sonnets, so in this there was no difference to life in the city. But the landscape was different,the kilometer-wide view over fields and meadows that reminded her of the sea, or how Laura thought the sea might look.
The cramped house and garden of the city was far away. Outside the cottage there was space, a sky that Laura always experienced as light, even when it was overcast. On the other side of a little stream there were grazing cows. It seemed to her they were the luckiest creatures on the Earth. She could stand there for hours just looking at them. She was not allowed to crawl under the barbed wire—her father had ingrained that in her—but the cows often lumbered over to her, gawked at her. She fed them grass. Their muzzles and rough tongues, their indolence—as if they were full but still willing to accept another bite of grass since it was being offered—made her warm inside.
Even though they were plant eaters there was something carnivorous about the way they smacked and chomped. They did not eat like humans, who inhaled their food and chewed