The Cruel Stars of the Night by Kjell Eriksson Page A

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 said, “they had nothing else to do.”
    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,