Already the new car was her ally, sworn to loyalty. Her secrets were only shared with him. It was a he, she had felt that at once. He obeyed her, took her to the places she had decided to visit. He never doubted whether it was right to go here or there. She talked to the Ford, shared her thoughts and plans. He answered by starting willingly and following her orders.
Now he stood at the ready, heard Laura rattling the keys. She hesitated for a few seconds. There was still time to put the keys away and go back into the house. She knew that as soon as she got into the car there would be no turning back. The agreement with the Ford had to be upheld.
She counted silently in her head. When she reached the count of five she opened the car door and got in. The Ford shook itself and the outfit rolled out onto the street. Everything in Kåbo was calm. She turned onto the street that ran right through the neighborhood.
A child was walking on the sidewalk, a violin case in her hand. Laura slowed down, carefully rolling down the street, looking at the girl who was walking in the way that children do, a little dreamily with an eye for the small details.
Laura was very close now. The girl, who was perhaps ten, twelve years old, was dressed in a red parka. Her hair was held back in a ponytail with a white, broad hair band. It swung in time with the girl’s step. She turned her head around, probably heard the sound of the car. Brown eyes, searching gaze.
Laura smiled. The girl smiled back, a little unsurely, but you’re supposed to smile back when you are greeted with one. This way, Laura thought, you’re supposed to smile, she’s been raised this way.
She slowed down and lowered the window. The girl stopped, hesitantly waiting.
“I used to play the violin, too,” Laura said.
The girl nodded.
“Is it going well?”
“Yes, pretty much.”
“Even if it’s difficult, you should keep practicing.”
A new nod. She had probably heard this before.
“Good luck,” Laura said and drove on, her gaze stubbornly fixed on the wet asphalt right in front of the car. With a hasty movement, she pulled the heating knob to zero. She wanted to look around in the rearview mirror, but that would be too painful.
The violin was still there. Laura had seen a glimpse of the case in the garage. For six years she had practiced and practiced, once a week walked-just like the girl on the street-the three blocks over to Miss Berg, the violin teacher, who lived in a house not unlike the Hindersten family’s. It had the same smell and the same stale atmosphere.
The only public performances were at the end-of-the-year school events in June. The promise of summer holidays blackened into anxiety in the face of the thought of standing alone on stage, enduring everyone’s looks and to play two pieces chosen by Miss Berg.
Every time in the wings she brought up her breakfast but was forced onto the stage by the teachers. Miss Berg was also there. Otherwise Laura might have found the courage to refuse. She played with a sour taste in her mouth, thought she was ugly, pitiable, and smelly.
Every time she received praise and applause. Her father was proud, Miss Berg hugged her, and the teachers patted her on the head. Stig-Björn Ljungstedt and Leif Persson sat at the very back of the auditorium and laughed scornfully at her. They would continue with this. Laura could sometimes see them on TV, the same mocking grin and derision as before. At home they were beaten but at school they were kings.
It was at the school graduation in eighth grade that she touched her violin for the very last time. Miss Berg had died that spring. In spite of her father’s nags and threats she stopped playing. He had found her a new teacher but Laura refused with a stubborness that bordered on hysteria. The violin fell silent and disappeared into the junk in the garage, the family’s sad archives.
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 frenetically in order to swallow quickly and load up on more. The cows ground their fodder, sensually, slowly, and with pleasure, paused from time to time and goggled with dull curiosity.
Green-fingered and with the animals’ dried saliva all the way up her arms, she walked across the slender plank across the stream and then ran home.