“You have to spend more than one thousand kronor for this, maybe more, I don’t know. The cellar is full of bottles.”
Laura stopped and looked at the bottle.
“I think my mother knew more about life and love than Ulrik,” she continued more thoughtfully.
“Do you miss her very much?”
Laura didn’t answer immediately.
“My mother came from the countryside and had a language for it. It worked. There weren’t many who could talk and laugh like her, but she couldn’t do it here, not in this house. It feels as if all of that has been lost. I sometimes imagine that there are people somewhere who speak like my mother, some dying population that is hanging on in a forgotten landscape.”
“Don’t you ever see relatives on her side?”
“No. I have three cousins, but I never see them. Their mother was Alice’s sister. I don’t even know if their houses are still there. I’m not sure I remember their language.”
Ann thought about Vilsne village.
“My life has always been driven by others,” Laura continued, “but now I’ve decided to change all that.”
“Do you have any idea why your father disappeared? Do you think it may have been voluntary?”
Laura shook her head.
“He was too much of a coward to take his own life.”
“He might be alive.”
“No!”
“You seem very certain.”
“He wouldn’t leave this life voluntarily,” Laura said in a voice that was barely audible.
Ann Lindell suddenly had a feeling of claustrophobia but squelched her impulse to get up and leave the house.
Laura retracted her hand from the table. She whispered something that Lindell couldn’t hear. If Laura had seemed like an open and reasonable person only a minute or so ago, with even a touch of humor in her comments, her sunken posture and tightly clenched hands resting in her lap testified to a woman in the grips of enormous confusion and anxiety.
She glanced at Lindell who could sense both helplessness and fury in Laura’s gaze. It reminded her of a prisoner, someone who all at once becomes aware of the massive walls and the closed door.
“What was your mother’s maiden name?”
“Andersson,” Laura said quickly as if she had been expecting that very question.
“Where was she from?”
“Skyttorp.”
Lindell tried to place the name. It was an area north of the city, she knew that much but no more. She stood up and Laura flew up from her chair.
“Thanks for the chat,” Lindell said and stretched out her hand. “I have one last question and you don’t need to answer if you don’t want to. Did your father abuse you?”
Laura let out a short laugh, a dry, sharp laugh.
“Is that what you think? Yes, he abused me, every day.”
Lindell wanted to take hold of Laura, who noticed her impulse and took a step back.
“He abused me with words. And now I’m burning all the words,” she spat and gestured with her head to the garden.
When Ann Lindell had left Laura remained standing for a moment in the middle of the room.
After reassuring herself that the policewoman’s car really had left the street and that the fire had died down without setting fire to the grass, Laura went back in, opened the basement door, and walked down. She took the thirteen steps very carefully, turned the lightbulb so it would go on, and looked around. Everything looked normal. And who would have been down here?
It consisted of a storage area that, like the garage, had served as a storage place for a variety of unusued items, a laundry room that had not been used since her mother’s death, and a boiler room where the old wood-fired boiler rested like a surly animal from the past. Next to the boiler room there was a poorly lit section where the wood was stored.
The policewoman’s visit had made her talk. It was the first time she had spoken of her father in that way. It was as if the outspokenness had delivered her, as if the words became more true once they were out in the open. They had been thought so many times over the years, now they had been uttered and were thereby legitimate, that was how she felt.
The visit had also set off an uncertainty in her that now forced her to go down into the cellar. She had been tempted to crack the door to her inner life and afterward had had the thought that there was something secretive about the policewoman’s visit, that the police knew more than this Ann Lindell had wanted to say. She had of course not asked to inspect anything but there was something about her questions that had worried Laura.
Checking the cellar calmed her. She sat down on the stairs even though the bad air made her feel sick. It was laden with memories. On the worn concrete in front of her was where her mother had lain in a crumpled position, her arms outstretched as if she had thrown herself from the top step in order to fly but had never gained air under her wings and had crashed to the floor.
Laura made herself stay put and she felt as if she was paying a vague debt, unsure of to whom, and that with each payment she was lifting a portion of the suffering from her shoulders.
She wished she could get up, leave the cellar, and emerge as a new person, clean and brave in the way the world demanded.
“I want to be normal,” she muttered. Many times she had cursed her life as the daughter of a man who saw the ordinary as a weakness, a sickly defect.
Now she was paying back but she knew deep inside she would never be debt-free.
A memory from Italy surfaced in her mind. It was early spring, the cherry trees in the mountains above Verona had just blossomed. Ulrik and she winding along the hairpin roads. He was driving jerkily, unused to the rental car, sweaty and stressed because they might have taken a wrong turn.
Laura didn’t care. She admired the view and the trees, with shiny trunks as if they had been polished with rags, and the intense flowering that was flooding the valleys and hillsides, and Laura thought it looked as if God had laid out all his bedclothes for airing.
In a little village that only consisted of six or so stone houses, above Negrar, Ulrik stopped to ask for directions. Laura also got out, a little dizzy from the hairpin curves and walked into an orchard, sitting down on a low wall whose stones could hardly be seen because of wild cascades of yellow-flowering runners. Bees were buzzing in the trees. In the background she heard Ulrik’s voice. She got up and started to walk down the hillside between rows of trees. The buzz became louder and created a sound weave of low, contended activity.
Laura turned and looked back. The houses of the village could no longer be seen. A valley that cut down between the steep hillsides reminded her of a fruit, whereas the occasional house resembled dark seeds in the green-white flesh. She paused and experienced a couple of seconds of absolute silence before a dog started to bark somewhere in the valley. Angry, aggressive. She turned around but caught sight of movement between the trees. It was a woman and a man. No longer young, perhaps in their forties, they sat leaning against a tree, talking eagerly. The man laughed and the woman joined in, bopping him lovingly on the head. He grasped her arms, sort of winding himself around her and they rolled onto the ground, tightly entwined.
Laura looked away and started to walk back to the village but then stopped and looked back at the couple. They did not seem to have noticed her presence. The woman’s pale shoulder stood out. The man kissed her neck. Her hands moved under his shirt, pulled it out of his pants, and exposed his back.
Laura curled up. She was perhaps twenty meters away from the couple. Their excitement, accompanied by the bees’ zealous industry, was carried through the air by a warm, sweet breeze. Laughter, a few words, but above all the passion in the lovers’ movements. Enchanted by the timeless scene she watched them take each other’s clothes off, how the man with a few quick moves arranged their clothes into a kind of bed for their lovemaking.