The Cruel Stars of the Night - Kjell Eriksson [69]
“Do you miss her very much?”
Laura didn’t answer immediately.
“My mother came from the countryside and had a language for it. It worked. There weren’t many who could talk and laugh like her, but she couldn’t do it here, not in this house. It feels as if all of that has been lost. I sometimes imagine that there are people somewhere who speak like my mother, some dying population that is hanging on in a forgotten landscape.”
“Don’t you ever see relatives on her side?”
“No. I have three cousins, but I never see them. Their mother was Alice’s sister. I don’t even know if their houses are still there. I’m not sure I remember their language.”
Ann thought about Vilsne village.
“My life has always been driven by others,” Laura continued, “but now I’ve decided to change all that.”
“Do you have any idea why your father disappeared? Do you think it may have been voluntary?”
Laura shook her head.
“He was too much of a coward to take his own life.”
“He might be alive.”
“No!”
“You seem very certain.”
“He wouldn’t leave this life voluntarily,” Laura said in a voice that was barely audible.
Ann Lindell suddenly had a feeling of claustrophobia but squelched her impulse to get up and leave the house.
Laura retracted her hand from the table. She whispered something that Lindell couldn’t hear. If Laura had seemed like an open and reasonable person only a minute or so ago, with even a touch of humor in her comments, her sunken posture and tightly clenched hands resting in her lap testified to a woman in the grips of enormous confusion and anxiety.
She glanced at Lindell who could sense both helplessness and fury in Laura’s gaze. It reminded her of a prisoner, someone who all at once becomes aware of the massive walls and the closed door.
“What was your mother’s maiden name?”
“Andersson,” Laura said quickly as if she had been expecting that very question.
“Where was she from?”
“Skyttorp.”
Lindell tried to place the name. It was an area north of the city, she knew that much but no more. She stood up and Laura flew up from her chair.
“Thanks for the chat,” Lindell said and stretched out her hand. “I have one last question and you don’t need to answer if you don’t want to. Did your father abuse you?”
Laura let out a short laugh, a dry, sharp laugh.
“Is that what you think? Yes, he abused me, every day.”
Lindell wanted to take hold of Laura, who noticed her impulse and took a step back.
“He abused me with words. And now I’m burning all the words,” she spat and gestured with her head to the garden.
When Ann Lindell had left Laura remained standing for a moment in the middle of the room.
After reassuring herself that the policewoman’s car really had left the street and that the fire had died down without setting fire to the grass, Laura went back in, opened the basement door, and walked down. She took the thirteen steps very carefully, turned the lightbulb so it would go on, and looked around. Everything looked normal. And who would have been down here?
It consisted of a storage area that, like the garage, had served as a storage place for a variety of unusued items, a laundry room that had not been used since her mother’s death, and a boiler room where the old wood-fired boiler rested like a surly animal from the past. Next to the boiler room there was a poorly lit section where the wood was stored.
The policewoman’s visit had made her talk. It was the first time she had spoken of her father in that way. It was as if the outspokenness had delivered her, as if the words became more true once they were out in the open. They had been thought so many times over the years, now they had been uttered and were thereby legitimate, that was how she felt.
The visit had also set off an uncertainty in her that now forced her to go down into the cellar. She had been tempted to crack the door to her inner life and afterward had had the thought that there was something secretive about the policewoman’s visit, that the police knew more than this Ann Lindell had wanted to say. She had of course not asked