It was a real party. There was an abundance of food, made by Mrs. Simonsson from Tobo, one of the few of Alice Hindersten’s childhood friends with whom she was still in contact. Mrs. Simonsson would come two, three times a year and clean the house. Always before Christmas, but also in the spring and in September. Sometimes her husband came along, a quiet man who Laura was afraid of, mostly on account of his enormous hands. He performed minor repairs around the house, fixed gutters, re-caulked the windows, and oiled squeaky doors. One time Laura had seen him kill a stray cat that Ulrik Hindersten found annoying. First Simons-son had lured the cat over with some herring, then he twisted the cat’s neck without a word and buried it in a corner of the garden.
Mrs. Simonsson brought everything out, the guests ate and drank and became increasingly noisy. Laura was sitting between one of the Italians and a student from her father’s department. The student was as pale and timid as Laura, and ate cautiously. It looked as if he was having difficulties with Mrs. Simonsson’s food.
“Your father will become famous,” was the only thing he said to Laura during the entire dinner.
Laura didn’t know what that meant. She understood the word but not how this fame would affect her and her family. Famous, she thought, and imagined her father’s voice issuing from the radio in the living room and how he would appear on television.
She also did not understand where all the strange people had come from. There were never guests at the table and all of a sudden the room was bursting with unknown voices and laughter. Laura knew it had to do with the approaching fame.
She looked at her father. He spoke with food in his mouth, gesturing with the knife in his hand. He looked as if he wanted to stab his dinner guests. A spot of gravy on his shirt stood out like a flower. Laura saw how her mother watched him closely. But there was also an unusual expression around her mouth that could be interpreted as a faint smile.
Mrs. Simonsson carried out new tureens, dishes, and bottles. Everything disappeared at an incredible rate as if the guests were uncertain how long the hospitality would be extended. One of the biggest eaters sat directly across from Laura and she knew immediately who he was. Her father had talked about “The Horse,” a colleague in the department, who at present was shoveling in mounds of leek gratin, veal steak, and gravy with great relish.
After several mouthfuls “The Horse” interrupted himself, wiped his mouth on the napkin, struck his glass, and called for silence. His exhalations came intermittently across the table. As the speech progressed his pale cheeks were transformed. “Livores mortis” her father later called those glowing patches. “The Horse” continuously turned his knotted hands with veins like living worms under the blotchy skin, as if he wanted to strangle the linen napkin in his hand.
He began by describing the heights that Ulrik Hindersten had set his sights on and thereby started a path where only very few had been able to leave a mark. This got a rousing response, especially from Laura’s partner. He clapped and shouted something about the apt metaphor. Laura, who had been raised in the presence of Petrarch, figured that “The Horse” must have alluded to something in the writer’s work.
The speech was long. He talked about the meaning of obstinancy and her mother’s smile was extinguished. He talked about humility and several guests chortled. Even Ulrik smiled. “The Horse” spoke of Ulrik’s taking on Truth in single combat and now everyone laughed.
The student began to fidget when “The Horse” started in on the situation at the department. One of the Italians burped discreetly into his napkin. Someone tittered nervously. Mrs. Simonsson made an extra clattering noise with the dessert plates. Ulrik Hindersten’s colleague went on at full steam, apparently unaware of the reactions around him.
“There are powers,” he said, “that do not have the will nor the intellectual capacity to completely appreciate our host’s brilliant ability to shed light on Petrarch’s poetry. The contradictory elements of the medieval fourteenth-century mind . . . the complexity of man’s remorseful struggle for fusion with . . . for an understanding of . . . that Ulrik has already approached in a trailblazing manner in his dissertation . . . cannot be emphasized enough . . . with an envious pettiness the critics have put aside all scholarly . . . our hostess . . . charming daughter . . . a home that breathes . . . gathered . . . a pleasure . . . the fullest extent . . .”
He went on in this way. The horselike aspect in his appearance was reinforced as he became carried away by his own eloquence and neighing laughter. The guests squirmed nervously in their chairs; Mrs. Simonsson became more impatient as she was serving ice cream for dessert.
The colleague concluded his remarks with a toast. Laura felt a purely physical relief as the guests reached for their glasses. Her intuition signaled catastrophe.
Her father, on the other hand, sensed nothing. His good mood made him open a dusty bottle of Taylor’s when the guests left. It was a gesture of goodwill to her mother, who loved port. They sat in the bay window. Ulrik Hindersten was optimistic. He talked about buying a house in Italy. Laura sat down on the floor by her parents and listened. Her mother sat and listened dumbstruck to how detailed the plans had become. Outside Arguà, not far from Petrarch’s grave, her father had seen an old three-story house, admittedly in disrepair but fully functional. With the house came an olive grove and a garden that sloped to the west. He described almost passionately the knotted olive trees and the little terrace with a pergola where grapevines created a pleasantly filtered light and coolness.
“We can live there large parts of the year,” he explained. “You can cultivate the garden and I can do research. Sometimes I will of course have to travel back to Sweden but I think the department will only be happy if I am not there so often,” he said, smiling with rare self-irony.
Her mother didn’t say anything, just stared out into the garden.
“You’ll have to leave the apple trees, but you’ll get oranges and olives instead,” Ulrik said and placed his hand on hers.
Laura didn’t know if it was the unexpected show of affection or the thought of the garden in Italy that made her mother suddenly burst into tears. Only later did she understand that her mother was more clearheaded than her father. She had known there would never be an olive grove.
“It won’t present any difficulties for Laura either,” her father continued. “Her Italian is as good as mine. She’ll adapt. Don’t worry.”
Laura shivered. How many times had she replayed this scene in the bay window to herself? She remembered every line, every expression, and her mother’s beautiful but sorrowful, almost transparent profile.
It was as if she did not have a body, as if her father were speaking to a creature whose veil-thin skin contained something immaterial.
Laura reached out and grabbed her mother’s ankle. The answer was an almost imperceptible head movement.
Several months later—when the garden was blanketed under the first snow—her mother returned to the topic of the dinner and especially “The Horse’s” speech.
“They’re not like other people,” she said. “When they say one thing they mean another. Remember how ‘The Horse’ talked, how he praised your father. Everything was a lie. Everyone sensed it, everyone except your father. If the decision to appoint your father to the professorship had been made, then ‘The Horse’ would not have said a single word, perhaps would not even have come for dinner. But he came, ate like a horse, and deliberately talked nonsense. He enjoyed it. He knew your father would never receive his title.”
“But why did he say those things?” Laura asked.
“So the fall would be even greater. The higher he could get Ulrik the greater the disaster. It’s like that china figurine,” her mother said and pointed to the figure of a girl in the window. “If it topples out of the window it will break in two, but if you drop it from a great height it will smash into a thousand pieces.”
Mother and daughter, united for a few minutes of conversation, knew their husband and
father all too well. He would never make his peace, accept the way things were, and be content to end his career as an associate professor.
Laura allowed her gaze to glide from the figurine to the garden. A line of snow that rested on the lowest branch of the pear tree blew down at that moment and for an instant the air was filled with a whirling white smoke cloud.
There would never be a house in Arguà, never any day trips to Venice, never walks among olive trees. She knew this in the moment her mother got up from the table without a word of comfort. Not even when Laura picked up the china figurine and dropped it on the ground did her mother turn around. She walked into the kitchen. It was almost dinnertime.
Laura got up on stiff legs. Her body felt foreign to her. Her face flamed and grew hot, her limbs felt prickly, and she felt slightly dizzy. It wasn’t just the lack of sleep and food; it felt like the time she had taken a medication that did not agree with her. It had given her nightmares and she had vomited violently in the morning.
She put a hand on her crotch, which still ached. Stig would return, he had said this several times. She smiled suddenly. He loved her, she knew that now. And only Jessica stood in their way, the only thing that prevented him from coming back to her forever.
“Ulrik!” she yelled, as if to convince herself that her father was not there.
She dragged in the grocery bags from the terrace. A jar of honey fell out of a bag but she left it there. The exertion made her sweat. She unpacked the items in a trance-like state. The kitchen was one big mess. Masses of unwashed dishes were piled up on the counter, as well as glasses, teacups, and pots. On the kitchen table there were newspapers and unopened mail.
She ended up standing in front of the refrigerator. Inside it some shriveled vegetables, containers of margarine without lids, and dried heels of cheese were living their own life. Several slices of salami were covered in a green film of mold.
“Mrs. Simonsson,” she called out helplessly, but in an attack of will she pulled a garbage bag out of the pantry and filled it with all the leftover food.
Before replacing them with the newly bought items she had to sit down and rest.
She read the headline in the newspaper that was lying on top of the pile. The preamble talked about the “country butcher” who had struck again.
Laura unfolded the paper. The photograph on the front page made her wince. She felt that swinging sensation from her childhood. The stale air in the kitchen was replaced with the smell of freshly cut grass.
She put her hand over the picture and looked out through the window, and the longing for a diffuse sense of something, a possibility, missed many years ago, blocked her thoughts for a few moments as if a temporary electric error had created a short circuit in her brain.
Fifteen
Someone had laid flowers by one of the fence posts by the entrance to Petrus Blomgren’s house. Ann Lindell slowed down and stopped. There were fresias and something green. They looked frozen. A note was attached to the bouquet. “All the good ones die. Thank you for your solicitude.” No signature. Ann reread the two sentences. “Solicitude” was such a beautiful word. Had Blomgren been a caring person? Many things suggested this, not least Dorotea Svahn’s testimony.
The house already looked abandoned, as if it had aged a great deal in only a few days. The foundation appeared to have settled and sunk several inches and the roof tiles appeared to have taken on a darker shade, or so Ann imagined, and she had the feeling that the whole place was going to be transformed over the course of the winter into a gray, moss-clad boulder that rested in an increasingly wild terrain, that the vegetation was going to take over and erase all traces of settlement and human life.
She did not really find it that remarkable. The farmer Petrus Blomgren no longer existed so why should his house remain? Lindell stepped out of the car, struck by the thought that the house should not be touched, that no one should be allowed to step through a murdered person’s door, taking control of the hall, kitchen, and room. Never ever. Everything should be allowed to deteriorate as dictated by nature.
She smiled at her own thoughts and realized that it was the absence of human voices and the quietness of the place that had made her reflective. She would not have been surprised if an animal had appeared out of the forest and communicated in some way.
Ann was searching for a complete picture and felt she sensed who Blomgren had been and what it was that had been lost. The hillside in Jumkil drew heavy breaths. Maple leaves floated to the ground. No creature emerged from the forest, not even a hint of wind altered the scene in any way.
It was with a feeling of melancholy grandeur that Ann Lindell knocked on Dorotea Svahn’s door. The old woman opened the door immediately and Ann guessed she had been spotted a long time ago.
“Come in,” Dorotea said. “I’ve put on coffee.”
Ann made small talk while Dorotea poured out the coffee and filled the bread basket with half a dozen sweet rolls that she had warmed up in the microwave.
“I saw you linger at the gate for a while,” Dorotea said. “It’s easy to get caught up in one’s thoughts.”
“Yes, I was thinking about the silence,” Ann said, “how it comes over you. I’m so used to stress and noise that the silence impresses me with another reality. I sometimes feel that I don’t have the concepts I need to express what is happening when I experience silence. Does that make any sense?”
Dorotea nodded but didn’t say anything.
“Did you leave those flowers by the gate?”
“No.”
“Anyone you know?”
Dorotea shook her head.
“I don’t know who it is,” she said curtly and Lindell dropped it, not convinced she was telling the truth.
“I’ve read my colleague’s, Beatrice Andersson’s, notes on her conversation with you,” Lindell said, starting over. “You and Petrus seem to have been very close. Maybe you were the person who knew him best.”
Dorotea nodded again.
“You said something to her about Petrus going abroad once, I think it was to Mallorca. Do you know anything else about that trip?”
Dorotea took a sugar cube and mixed the coffee with a spoon before she answered.
“Not any more than just that Petrus was a changed man when he came home.”
“How do you mean?”
“He was . . . happier,” Dorotea said after a couple of seconds of hesitation.
“Tell me!”
“He never used to go anywhere and then suddenly he was off to Spain.He was anxious about it beforehand, all the business with ordering his passport, but he got away. One week he was gone. The car gone too, he parked it at the airport. That cost him two hundred kronor right there. He said he had had fun down there. He managed with the language. They could almost speak Swedish down there.”
“Did he go alone?”
The question caused Dorotea to squeeze her eyes together momentarily.
“I think so,” she said and Lindell saw she was lying.
“Did he talk a lot about Spain when he returned?”
“Yes, the first while maybe.”
“Did Petrus have difficulties sleeping?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Dorotea said. “Why do you ask?”
“We found an old package of sleeping pills in the house.”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
“What year did he travel to Mallorca?”
“It was about twenty years ago. I don’t think he had turned fifty? No, he didn’t until the next fall, or . . . perhaps it was . . .”
“Was it 1981?”
“In May,” Dorotea said and nodded. “After the spring planting season.”
“The sleeping pills were prescribed in June 1981,” Lindell said.
She paused for several seconds, letting the information sink in, before she continued.
“Can’t you tell me? It’s important to understand what happened to Petrus.”
Dorotea sudde
nly stood up and left the room with surprising agility. She returned with a postcard in her hand that she placed on the table in front of Lindell.
The card showed a beach in front of a hotel. There was everything one would associate with a charter trip: a bar in the background shaped like a giant shell, sun umbrellas, and lounge chairs in the foreground.
Lindell flipped the postcard over. It was addressed to “Dorotea Svahn, Vilsne village, Jumkil, Sweden.” The text was brief: “Hi Dorotea! I am so happy and having a good time.” Signed, “Petrus.”
Dorotea stood with her hand held out and as soon as Lindell looked up she took the postcard from Lindell’s hand.
“I want to keep it,” she said.
“Of course,” Lindell said.
Dorotea left again and returned, sitting down and looking at Lindell.
“I think he met a woman.”
“It seems like it,” Lindell said. “He used the word ‘happy.’ He didn’t say anything when he came home?”
“No, and I didn’t want to pry.”
“Were you upset?”
Dorotea shook her head.
“Then he got a prescription for sleeping pills,” Lindell continued. “You didn’t notice anything, like him being down or anything?”
“Nothing. Petrus was not the kind to talk about himself.”
Ann Lindell trusted Dorotea’s judgment. Even if Petrus had not said anything about a woman Lindell was convinced that Dorotea had reasons for her suspicions.
“Do you have any idea who the woman might have been?”
“I don’t know anything else,” Dorotea said firmly and Lindell understood there was nothing more to say on the subject.
Lindell stayed for another half an hour before taking her leave. On her way to her car, which she had parked on Petrus Blomgren’s property, she wondered if he had met the woman in Mallorca or if she had been his travel companion from the start.
The possibilities of checking passenger lists from May 1981 were slim, but she would look into it.
The Cruel Stars of the Night Page 12
