The men who walked by liked to look at her mother, and although Laura could not completely identify with their gazes she understood they conveyed more than simply an interest in black-eyed Susans and butterfly weed. Her mother smiled back at everyone, including the men, and often exchanged a few words with those who walked by. It was as if she wanted to say: “Tell me something about the weather or the garden, not necessarily anything of substance, only a few words to show that we exist.”
She found it easy to make contact with other people, looked those that she spoke to in the eyes and used only a few words but could still get people to converse and laugh. But this was only true in the Botanical Garden, it was like a preserve, a green oasis where her mother went in order to speak freely.
Sometimes she lapsed into a kind of dialect that Laura thought sounded strange and that she later realized was the North Uppland dialect from her mother’s home region. It was particularly when she spoke with other women that the words came. “Jestanes,” she could cry out, “endes” and “vurte” left her beautiful mouth and together with her gestures they created an aura of intimacy around her and her conversational partner.
Laura came to linger under a tree, the branches of which hung all the way to the ground. Someone had thrown a piece of paper on the ground and Laura picked up the dirty note. “Milk, horseradish, ricotta, soup-in-a-cup, chips” written in a handwriting that was barely legible,and at the very bottom a string of digits, perhaps a telephone number. The piece of paper, a list composed in haste, disturbed her. Not because it littered this area-it was insignificant and would soon crumble away-but the painful aspect was the quotidian message from a world where you bought horseradish and chips.
Laura crumpled it up, but then folded it flat just as quickly with an impulse to dial the phone number. It was a sign, it hit her, perhaps a coded message for help.
She stared at the note, had to steady herself against the tree trunk, and tried to imagine another person, one with soup-in-a-cup in front of her, sitting at the kitchen table. Or else she had, because surely it was a woman, lost this list before she went shopping and was standing in the grocery store right now trying to remember the items she needed to buy.
Laura tossed the scrap of paper, pushed her way through the branches, and stepped out onto the gravel path. It was as if her legs no longer had the strength to carry her farther into the garden. She remained rooted to the spot, indecisive. An older man was strolling around the alpine section. He cast a quick glance in her direction and smiled.
Laura hesitantly followed the path and after a couple of meters turned toward the scrubby remains of some tall perennials. Her feet sank into the lawn that was soggy after the rain of the past few days.
She didn’t really find things as she remembered them. The organization of the flower sections had been changed. She had run around here as a girl, chasing butterflies, stood absolutely still behind bushes and spied on her mother.
Now it was different. It was like visiting the neighborhood of your childhood where the buildings had been torn down and the streets repaved. Laura looked around. Everything had withered away except a few asters that were clinging to the remaining autumn warmth.
She heard voices from the entrance of the tropical greenhouse. Several women in work clothes stood on the steps, smoking. One of them laughed. Laura turned away.
“What am I doing here?” she asked herself. She looked at the asters. Maybe they had stood there twenty-five years ago. Laura couldn’t remember. Her mother would have known. At different times she took her daughter to the most colorful areas, told her about the flowers. Sometimes she used names other than those printed on the metal signs. “My names,” she explained, “the ones I learned when I was a little girl.”
Laura knew that her grandmother had been known for her flower beds. They had never met. Her grandmother had died a few years before Laura was born. Her grandfather, who shortly thereafter moved to Tierp, she rarely saw. Perhaps sometimes in conjunction with a birthday. He did not come when she graduated from grammar school and did not even send a greeting when she graduated from the university. Then he died as abruptly as her grandmother. Laura attended his funeral alone. Her father did not have the time, he said, but Laura knew he had never liked his reserved father-in-law. There had been many people in Örbyhus Church. She recognized a few faces. She spoke to Mårten Jonsson, who had been married to Alice’s sister Agnes, and his three sons. It looked as if Lars-Erik, one of the cousins, wanted to say something to her but the others’ disapproving attitude held him back.
After Agnes had died, only thirty-one years old, contact between the Hindersten and Jonsson families had become much less frequent.
Laura knew who a couple of the other funeral guests were, but most of them were unknown, men as taciturn as her grandfather, buttoned into suits that were too tight, women who spoke quietly but without ceasing in her mother’s dialect, with turns of phrase that Laura had not heard in years.
She cried at his graveside. The people from Örbyhus, from Skyttorp and Tierp, shot glances at her but did not say a kind or comforting word. Many speeches were given in her grandfather’s honor but they did not say anything to the woman from the city, the grandchild who only turned up to the funeral.
Laura was ashamed of her tears. She wanted to scream out over the churchyard that, in fact, she had liked her grandfather and she grieved for him, but she knew they wouldn’t believe her. Her words were meaningless in Örbyhus.
She was starting to get cold but could not make herself go on. The unwelcoming and damp garden, that at this time of the year only breathed death, was her church. She was struck by the thought that she wanted to be buried here. Without ceremony and speeches, simply lowered into the ground and shoveled over.
Suddenly her thoughts turned to warmth, mild winds, and a life far from Uppsala. They sometimes turned up, these thoughts. She had never visited a country other than Italy and then always with her father but nonetheless she had a vision of a little hotel by the sea. A place where it was always warm, that had a sun-drenched harbor with a little restaurant that she was in the habit of patronizing, where she was known and welcome.
She had once told Stig about her daydream. At first he laughed but then he became serious, looked at her, and said something about there being other lives. One only had to take the opportunity, and he said those possibilities were open to Laura, free as she was.
Sometimes Stig figured in this daydream, in that idyllic hotel where it seemed so easy to live, but she never talked about it. She thought that if she told him about her fantasy she could get him to dream in similar ways.
“I’m tired of hotels,” was all he said.
As the director of marketing he traveled a great deal and complained loudly about the boredom when he was forced to travel to promote the company abroad.
Laura was awakened from her thoughts by the women who had apparently finished smoking and were on their way back into the greenhouse again. She walked back and got into the chilled car. She could leave the country, drive out on the E-4 and go south. She was free, as Stig had pointed out, now more than ever before. Instead she took the Norby Road to the Castle, turned right toward the Academic Hospital, down the hill next to the hospital, and passed the swan pond. Since she had bought her car this was her new route to work. She looked at the clock on the wall of the toll house, as she had started doing. From here it was eight minutes to the office.