The Cruel Stars of the Night by Kjell Eriksson Page B

before the rude awakening, had responded to the gentle, almost sensual undertone and that she had smiled in her dream. Had she not stretched out after him, been happy for his visit, whoever he was?
    For a split second she had felt a great satisfaction. It was a promise. She let out a sob in bed. Sure, it was a promise of something, she sensed, was almost completely convinced of, something that would grant her the greatest happiness.
    Thereafter came the threat for her. Behind the illusory tender atmosphere conjured by the voice there was the hard, on the verge of physically painful. “You must.” The voice contained no mercy.
    Laura Hindersten pulled the blanket to her, slid out of the bed, and snuck over to the window, pulling the thick curtain to the side. It was still dark out there. The garden brooding as sorrowfully as ever.
    Was he still in the house? The uncertainty made her take a couple of cautious steps, lean her ear toward the closed door, and breathlessly listen for the nighttime intruder.
    Who was he? She tried to remember the details but the image of his face fluttered away like a veil of mist, dissolved, and disappeared. A warm smell came toward her, not at all unpleasant. It was the breath of the person who had stood leaning over her and who had pronounced the words with such authority and weight, certain that Laura would obey.
    In vain she fished for signs of recognition in the muddy waters of her memory but the only thing she found was the feeling of a forceful power over her. And her own powerlessness.
    She pushed the door open. Barefoot she fumbled her way over the cold wooden floor in the dim hall. She bumped against the telephone table, stopped, and listened. She thought she heard a car drive by on the street. I have nowhere to run to, she thought at once and the image of the little harbor restaurant from her daydream of the warm, foreign country appeared before her eyes. I have no valid passport to get me out of here. No ticket anywhere. Only a worn suitcase, with a sticker from Firenze, down in the basement.
    A breeze swept up from the basement, a smell of raw clay and mold. She closed the protesting cellar door with care and turned the key.
    With one hand clenching the blanket around her chest and the other trying to find a hold along the walls Laura felt her way around the large house. In the living room she saw herself for a moment in the large gold-framed mirror, like a shadow that flitted by in a landscape of giant bookcases, full of dust and tomes with texts that few knew or wanted to decipher, and thick draperies that closed around oak furniture, the chiffonier, the lead-heavy chairs with false decor and the pedestal table in the same grotesque style, cluttered with decades of withered knowledge.
    In the kitchen she sat down on a chair. There was a knife on the table, a bag of grapes, and a chipped glass in the bottom of which some wine had dried into a dark spot.
    She didn’t dare turn on the light. In the dirt-brown blanket that she had decided to throw away but that was her only protection right now, she had decided to await the sunrise.
    She curled up, pulled the blanket more tightly around her, pulled her feet up on the chair and pressed her limbs against each other, let her hair become an extension of the blanket, closed her eyes, and stone by stone she reconstructed her inner being.
    That which was true, the multitude of the Botanical Garden and the laughter that rose up from the uncountable grass blades, the raspy tongues of the cows and the butterfly in the panting flame of the hurricane lamp, she put aside in a safe place, out of reach of the world.
    Laura Hindersten’s inner being was becoming petrified at the same pace as the day was dawning. Everything artificial pulverized and melted together into a massive piece of black shimmering diabase. For this, one needed a superhuman strength that was only possible under immense pressure and a minimal amount of oxygen.
    To think a person