Did they themselves eat anything? She had no memory of her father making any food. He simply sat in the garden. Many times she got on the swing in the large pear tree. Her father had put it up. She swung in wide arcs. Sometimes he looked up, occasionally smiling slightly before he returned to his tomes.
In the evenings they played chess in the light from a hurricane lamp. Her father’s hands looked sickly in the sharp, white-yellow light. He moved his pieces with great care, always with commentary. They never played with a timer and Laura was very thoughtful. Her father never hurried her.
Sometimes moths came in, fluttering around the lamp. Then her father would interrupt himself, go to some lengths to capture the visitor, and gently carry it out into the dark. She liked him a lot for the trouble he took to save the small creatures.
She would always remember his bent figure in the doorway, the pitch-black darkness outside and the lamp that generously cast its beam of light into the yard. She thought there was a limited supply of light, that the chessboard would get darker when the door was opened and the dark outside stole some of their light.
The contract on the cottage was not renewed. The owner, whom they rented from, said he was going to renovate it for a relative. Laura recalled how her father burned all the sheets and furniture in the yard the last evening. For a few moments she thought he was going to burn down the whole cottage.
Laura had looked around. It was still burning. Some of the joy and excitement of the summer holiday in the cottage had evaporated but it was with great sorrow that she took her final look at the red house, the outhouse and the woodshed, in the door of which she had carved her very own sonnet in Italian.
When Laura reached the roundabout in Nåntuna she became unsure. Should she turn around and go south as she had planned or turn around and drive home? The incident at the Flottsund Bridge had thrown her off kilter.
She knew the police must have been called in and that they were looking for her. She had no idea if there had been other cars or pedestrians at the bridge. Perhaps someone had made a note of her license plate number? She tried to think back through the events and did not think she had seen any witnesses.
She became convinced her father would have been proud of her. She fought back, didn’t let anyone steamroller her, and she meted out a punishment at once. That the punishment was not in proportion to the crime would almost certainly not have troubled her father. He wanted so to strike back, but the powerlessness that increased with the years had reduced his desire for revenge to a displeased querulousness. He said on many occasions that he wanted to bomb the whole miserable lot.
His language could get very vulgar. He could talk of “the saggy boob conspiracy” when two women in his department had made a written complaint about his teaching to the chair.
“They’re about as exciting as hollowed-out old trees whose caterpillars and beetles in their interior is their only life. One should plant a bomb under their fat arses.”
But it was only words, at first some counter missives with rancorous attacks that inflamed the situation, later on harangues of invectives and insults.
She turned in toward Bergsbrunna after a sudden inspiration that there might be a patrol car by Lilla Ultuna, keeping lookout for a woman driver in a red car. Now she instead curved around past the Denmark’s Church and came out onto Almunge Road. From there she found her way back in toward the city and its center.
The other drivers signaled to her, gestured and made angry and frustrated faces. She crept through the western parts of Uppsala. This was her city. The other side of the river barely existed in Laura’s consciousness. She had an impulse to go there. It was only a couple of kilometers away. Maybe that would lead to something else, something better? But she dismissed the thought.
Her father had spoken of the “pölsa,” or scrapple, city, which was how he referred to the eastern part. Laura had never eaten pölsa but had seen the brown meat-and-grain dish in the school cafeteria and so she imagined that people on the eastern side of the river slurped this unattractive mush while they followed some soap opera on TV.
“I’m burned out,” she said suddenly out loud to herself at a stoplight by Norby Road.
They talked about that at work, how everyone walked around burned out. For her part she had felt burned out most of her life. All of her insides were a pile of ashes, black soot clung to her blood vessels, and from her mouth there came puffs of breath with the smell of singed flesh.
The light became green and she crossed the intersection and turned into the parking lot of the Botanical Garden. At this time of year there were not many visitors and there were only a few cars parked outside. She stayed in the car and let the engine run for a good while before she got out and steered her course to the entrance. As a child she had come to the “Botan” almost every week. It was her mother who took her, sometimes she had packed a basket with coffee, juice, and rolls, and they had spread a blanket on the grass and had a picnic.
They became friends with people who remained nameless, other frequent visitors who loved to follow the changes in the garden, many day by day They fell into conversation with these nameless strangers. Here nothing else mattered, only the flowers and bushes.
The visitors crouched down, leaned forward and inspected the fine plants, drew in their scent and smiled. They came down to Laura’s level, looked into her face as if she too were a flower, smiled and said something about her dark hair. They spoke with low and friendly voices. No adult raised their voice in the Botanical Garden.
Her mother encouraged her to get closer, to scrutinize some plant nerves or the petals of a geranium that had just bloomed, a daylily or a primrose of some sort. Even though her mother knew many species and kinds by name, many times she only mentioned them in passing. The names were not important, it was the shape, the color, and scent that filled her senses, that made her smile and speak with complete strangers.
She always wanted to see the new flowers, giving cries of delight, subjecting them to close scrutiny and inhaling their scent. Sometimes Laura felt embarrassed. Her mother never checked herself, let her joy bubble over like a child and laughed a great deal.
The garden around their own house was narrow, bordered with hedges and could be surveyed in a single glance. Laura had measured out its length in steps. Thirty-eight steps in one direction and twenty-six in the other. Everything was known.
“Botan” by contrast was gigantic. Here she could never manage to keep track of the figures the times she tried to count it out. Laura tripped over her own legs, fell over, and the number of steps spilled out onto the lawn.
Her mother used to sit down next to Laura, kick off her shoes and wiggle her toes, lean back and turn her face to the sun. Her dark hair tumbled back. Laura thought she looked like a statue.
The people who walked past slowed down, glanced at her, their gazes finding their way back to her mother’s outstretched figure. They looked like they wanted to stop, turn back, and join this dark, beautiful woman and her daughter.
It was as if Laura sat in a force field where her mother was the power source, leisurely relaxed but nonetheless crackling with a vital voluptuousness that flowed together with the garden’s strength and beauty.
There were no holds barred in the life joy that her mother expressed. The sight of this wordless satisfaction, resting in a sea of green and blooming flowers made Laura shake as if with cold. She wanted to scream, embrace the garden and the world, throw herself into her mother’s lap, and laugh, cry, burrow her face against her mother’s neck.
But nothing of this took place. Laura sat where she was, turned into stone, dazzled, and with only one thought left in her head: don’t let Father turn up. But the chances were infinitesimal. Her father never set foot in the garden. But what if he all of a sudden decided to go there? What if he surprised his wife and his daughter on the lawn, partly concealed behind the area for North American perennials but still visible to the world?