The Cruel Stars of the Night Read Online Free PDF

were leaving a church, as if after a funeral.
    Fridh was sitting in the van and would remain there until after the old woman had left.
    “Will you pray with me?” Dorotea asked. “Just a few words. Petrus was not a believer but I don’t think he’ll mind.”
    Beatrice interlaced her fingers and Dorotea quietly said a few words, remained motionless for a few seconds before opening her eyes.
    “He was a magnificent man,” she said. “With a good heart. May he rest in peace.”
    Far off in the distance, a horse neighed.

Three
    Had she ever liked him? She often asked herself this question. At times, perhaps. That time when he tripped outside the house and fell on his face she had at least felt sorry for him. That was what he had said, that he tripped, but Laura imagined that something else must have happened since he had scraped both his cheeks and forehead.
    She dressed his wounds. She did this with divided feelings: part disdain for his whimpering when the disinfecting solution stung, part tenderness at his helplessness. The skinny legs dangling over the edge of the bed, the thinning hair growing still thinner, and the hands that gripped the soiled blanket.
    At other times she could hate him almost beyond reason. If she was in the house and he was nearby she had to escape, out into the garden or even out into the town, in order not to strike him down with the nearest blunt instrument. This hate was indescribable, so dark and so consuming that she believed it deformed her physically.
    Even after she managed to calm herself, it could take several days before she was able to address her father in a normal tone of voice.
    “I see, you’re that way now,” he would usually comment on her state, unable to grasp what had upset her.
    Once upon a time everything had been nicely ordered, then it fell into disarray. Books, manuscripts, and loose papers piled up and formed drifts on the floor. Laura sometimes had the feeling that she was out on the rocking waves of the sea. She had given up trying to keep things in order long ago. There was simply no aspiration for order. It was not part of her father’s worldview and Laura had grown up in an accelerating chaos.
    The house smelled a little odd and it was only now, a month after her father’s disappearance, that she realized what it was. She had always thought it came from the discarded clothes that were heaped together on the floor.
    She had detested him because of the mess. But while she was cleaning up after him she was forced to go into his bedroom, something she had avoided doing all these years. And there was the reading lamp, the one that had been there ever since she was a little girl. It had been bought in Germany at the end of the fifties, modern at the time and now again a desired object at flea markets and auctions.
    When she stood close to the lamp the odor was more pronounced than ever. Against her will she sniffed closer and closer to the hateful thing. The plastic—the lampshade consisted of mottled plastic strips— emitted a stale smell when the sixty-watt lamp was on. He kept it turned on even at night. Laura suspected that some nights he fell asleep in the armchair next to the table, submerged in some problem that had to do with Petrarch or some chess game.
    Her first thought was to throw the lamp out, but it still stood in its spot next to the table. She never turned it on and the smell slowly dissipated.
    Most of the things in the bedroom were untouched. Even his reading glasses still lay on the nightstand. There was also an essay from the Humboldt University in Berlin. It was about Petrarch’s Laura, about whether or not a newly discovered portrait was a depiction of her.
    Laura was named after this woman from the fourteenth century who had become a literary concept and the object of research. Many times she herself felt like a concept. As a teenager she started to doubt whether or not she lived, if she even existed here and now. What did she mean to her