These debates were very much to Ulrik Hindersten’s taste. Laura remembered how she had admired his ability to find arguments in the hour-long disputes.
Now Livius and Petrarch were destroyed in her own bonfire, and they burned well, the new dissertations as well as the old volumes, bound in calfskin and representing centuries of learning.
She followed the black flakes with her gaze and noted with satisfaction that many of them were blowing in the professor’s direction. She bent over and picked up a slim volume of Capablanca and tossed it onto the fire. The pages flipped nervously in the wind before they were caught by the flames and were transformed into sooty confirmations of Laura’s decree.
With tense anticipation she stared into the fire as if against the black paper there would appear the glimmer of a message about what her new life was going to look like. Laura crouched down, leaned forward, the heat brought tears to her eyes, and she was gripped by a feeling of solemnity as if at a graduation or funeral. She was so moved that she did not hear the car that parked on the street, nor the light steps across the mossy lawn.
“Excuse me, are you Laura Hindersten?”
Laura had to steady herself with a hand against the ground in order not to fall into the dwindling fire, and she turned toward the woman who was standing a few meters away.
“I’m sorry if I startled you. My name is Ann Lindell and I’m with the police.”
Laura looked at her sooty hand and then gazed at Ann. Clearly, Laura could see her but it was as if her unsteady gaze could not bear to bring her into focus. Several seconds went by before she answered.
“Yes, my name is Laura Hindersten. What is this about?”
The voice was pleasing, completely devoid of concern or surprise. Ann saw how the woman in front of her changed from emotionality to coldness, as she stood up calmly and smiled.
“It’s about your father, as perhaps you’ve guessed.”
Åsa had forewarned her. Laura Hindersten was snobby and treated the police as if they were idiots and therefore Lindell unconsciously wore a stern expression.
“Because of some other cases we are checking on the individuals who have gone missing recently, and your father disappeared in September.”
Laura Hindersten looked watchful. Lindell discovered that there was something mocking about her smile and had the thought that her father had returned. What if this woman was pulling something over on her? Was Ulrik Hindersten having a cup of coffee in the kitchen?
“Have you heard from him at all?”
Laura shook her head.
“What are you burning?”
“Old junk.”
Ann Lindell bent down, picked up a book, and read the title on the spine.
“That’s Livius’s first book,” Laura said.
Lindell hesitated in the middle of dropping the book back onto the ground. Laura took it out of her hand.
“Who was Livius?”
“A Roman.”
Lindell was satisfied with the answer. Laura threw the book onto the fire, which was giving off a pleasant heat. Fires invite reflection and neither of the two women felt it was strange that they stood silently for a while side by side and watched Livius’s words go up in flames.
“That was that,” Laura said.
“Is it a series?”
“Series,” Laura giggled, “Ulrik should have heard that. Yes, there’s maybe some hundred and fifty books.”
“And you’re burning them all?”
“No, most of them have disappeared and there are only a few that have been translated into Swedish.”
Lindell looked at the woman next to her. She hadn’t noticed any of the heralded snootiness; instead Laura seemed to have more of a thoughtful, almost meditative aspect. Laura met her gaze and smiled introspectively
Lindell wished she was a smoker. Then she would have taken out a cigarette, lit it, and then smoked it in peace and quiet while the fire so eagerly licked up the rests of Livius and all the others.
“Sometimes I think Ulrik is here,” Laura said quietly.
“Do you think he’s alive?”
Laura shrugged.
“Do you know anyone by the name of Petrus Blomgren or Jan-Elis Andersson?”
“No.”
“Do you read the paper?”
When Laura made no attempt to answer, Lindell continued.
“Maybe you’ve heard about the two farmers who were murdered last week? They were the same age as your father.”
Laura smiled at her and Lindell’s feeling that the woman in front of her was unwell was strengthened.
“I’m thinking of going away. There are beaches that… my father…”
She stopped in the middle of a sentence, her mouth half open as if the words didn’t want to leave her mouth. Lindell had an impulse to shake her so they would fall out.
“Can we go in and talk? The fire looks like it will take care of itself.”
They sat down at the dining room table. Lindell noted the mess but decided not to ask more about Laura Hindersten’s cleaning project. Instead she tried to get her to talk more about her father.
After a moment of hesitation Laura became more animated. Lindell could listen, study her features and shifting expressions as the narrative progressed at a comfortable pace. She had the feeling that she was listening to a public radio lecture, the type of program that she all too often turned off, but that at those times when the tempo around her were conducive to listening, were an invitation to closeness to another person and a restful reflection.
Ann recalled how she had listened to a conversation between two women who had both been abused by their husbands and how that dialogue had taught her more than all of the seminars, arranged by various lecturing professionals, that she had participated in.
She fairly soon developed a kind of understanding for why Laura was burning her father’s possessions and although she found it wasteful and unethical to burn books as if they were junk, she could identify with Laura’s feelings and motivations. She used the word “free” on several occasions and then her voice took on a special quality, like a chord that a newcomer to the guitar has just learned and strums again and again with pride and wonder at the harmonious sound.
“You see,” Laura said and brushed her hand across the table, “love and knowledge, Augustine’s words. Ulrik had ideas, but most of them were borrowed.”
Lindell looked at the hand on the dark tabletop. Laura sighed and the hand stopped.
“You didn’t want to walk in his footsteps?”
“For a while, maybe. You saw the books; I’ve read most of them. When I was twenty I knew three languages, besides Swedish and Latin, and a little colloquial French.”
She laughed a little.
“But I don’t have any words for the simplest things.”
“I can speak Eastern dialect pretty well,” Lindell said.
“Stick with that,” Laura said.
Lindell again looked at Laura’s hand on the table, thin, almost transparent, with well-groomed nails, a round smudge of soot on the back of her hand that spread into a fine-veined pattern when she balled up her fist.
“Would you like a glass of wine?”
Ann shook her head.
“No, of course not,” Laura said with a smile.
She got up, walked over to a small table in one corner of the dining room, and took out a bottle of red wine.
“One of best things about Ulrik was that he taught me to appreciate wine. Only the best was good enough. This is a La Grola from 1990.”
She put out the half-empty wine bottle.
“Bought in a small place north of Verona,” Laura went on, and pulled out the cork. “Smell it! Produced by Allegrini. They became our friends, like many others in Valpolicella. We traveled around the vineyards and wineries. Ulrik could really charm people.”
Ann leaned forward and positioned her nose over the bottle. It smelled different than the cheap red wines she usually drank.
“We were often guests of the Alighieri family. One of Dante’s sons bought the property and it is still owned by the family. The thirteen hundreds,” she added when she saw Ann’s quizzical expression.