Little Star

Laila was happy. It was a long time since Lennart had had anything against Laila being happy; but it was also a long time since he had had enough love or energy to try to make her happy. Now she was taking care of it herself.

It wasn’t really a bubbling happiness, more a constant spiritual smile that meant she would prepare decent meals or do some cleaning, for example-during breaks in the music. So all he could do was grit his teeth as Anita Lindblom took a deep breath and bellowed ‘Thaa-aat’s life’ for the third time that day. It had to be worth it.

In any case, Lennart had started to spend a lot of time down in the cellar, where the pounding beat of Swedish pop could be heard only as a distant changing of the guard. The girl’s musical education ought to be expanded, so Lennart bought a portable CD player and started to play classical music to her.

The very first thing he played was one of his personal favourites: Beethoven’s Spring Sonata in F-major for Violin and Piano. He had decided to start simply with piano and violin sonatas, then move on to string quartets and finally full symphonies. Introduce the instruments one at a time, so to speak.

He would long remember how the girl reacted. She was standing in her cot as usual, sucking on the piece of rope with four knots in it, when Lennart pressed play.

The girl stiffened during the enchanting violin theme and soft piano accompaniment that introduce the first movement. When the roles were reversed and the piano, carefree as a spring brook, repeated the theme, the girl began to sway as she stared into space, her expression halfway between ecstasy and fear.

After forty seconds she frowned as if she sensed that something was about to happen. As the violin built up to the piano’s powerful descent, then emphasised it with a coarser stroke, the girl’s face contracted and she shook her head, her fingers tightly clutching the frame of the cot.

The piece grew calm once more, the violin became gentle and compliant, but the girl listened with suspicion in her face as if she sensed that the harsher elements were still lurking beneath the surface. As the violin became more agitated and the piano grew excited in the background, she began to shake and jerk back and forth in the cot, her face contorting as if she were in pain.

Lennart jumped up and switched off the CD.

‘What is it, Little One?’

The girl wasn’t looking at him, she never did. Instead she fixed her gaze on the CD player as she shook the bars of the cot. Lennart had never seen anyone react to music like that. It was as if the strings were stroking every nerve ending within her, or a hammer was hitting every single one. The music went right into her.

Lennart switched to one of the cello sonatas. The girl was less agitated by the cello’s softer tone, even when the tempo grew faster. When they reached the short Adagio in the Sonata in A-major, she joined in with the melody for the first time.

After experimenting for a few days, it was clear that it was always the adagio sections that appealed to the girl most. Allegro passages made her anxious, and a scherzo could plunge her into despair. Lennart programmed the CD so that it played only the adagio sections. Then he sat down on the bed and watched, listening, as she added her voice, a third instrument, to the sonatas.

At first he was happy. He felt he was resting within the very genesis of music. Then he went upstairs and at a stroke found himself in the outer reaches of the nadir of Swedish pop music. Well, that was fine. He was in a state of harmony.

But all good things come to an end.

As the days turned to weeks and Beethoven gave way to Schubert and Mozart, Lennart sat in his musical sanctuary staring at his fingers. There was something wrong with them. He tried picking the girl up to feel her weight and warmth, but it didn’t help. He put her back in the cot.

He couldn’t have her on the floor when the music was playing. She would go over to the CD player and start examining it in quite a destructive way. She would beat the speakers with her small fists, or try to pick the whole thing up as if she were trying to shake something out of it.

At first Lennart had interpreted her behaviour as a sign that she didn’t like the music after all, but on the one occasion when he let her continue until she managed to destroy the player, he realised what she was after. She was searching for the music, for where it came from. She wanted to get inside the machine and find what was playing. Since this was impossible to explain to her, Lennart simply bought a new player and made sure she couldn’t get at it.

After putting the girl back in her cot, Lennart walked around the room studying his fingers. They looked white and shiny to him, like piano keys. He placed them on an invisible keyboard and pretended to play along with the Mozart sonata emerging from the speakers. No. It wasn’t playing he missed, he had played enough. He opened and closed his hands. They felt so strangely empty. Something was missing, they needed something to do.

He went out into the cellar and switched on the light above the workbench. Various tools hung neatly from their hooks. Screws, nails and fittings were tidily sorted in compartments on a shelf. He had never been what you might call a handyman, but he liked the tools themselves. They were so definitive. Each tool intended and made for a specific purpose, an extension of the human arm. Lennart picked up the drill and weighed it in his hand. It felt good. When he pressed the button, nothing happened. Run down. He rooted out the charger and inserted the battery. He picked up one or two chisels, tested the weight of the hammer.

What about making something?

Laila had made stuffed cabbage leaves, and the house was blissfully silent. When they had finished eating and Lennart was loading the dishwasher, he said quite casually, ‘I was just wondering if there was anything we needed? Anything I could make?’

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking.’

‘What do you mean by make?’

‘Make. You know, make. Put pieces of wood together so they turn into something. Make.’

‘What do you want to do that for?’

Lennart sighed and rinsed the remains of the sauce from his plate before putting it in the dishwasher. Why had he even bothered to ask? He poured powder into the compartment and slammed the door shut with unnecessary force.

Laila had been following his activities with her chin resting on her hand. As he picked up the dishcloth and began wiping the table, she said, ‘A shoe rack.’

Lennart stopped making circular movements over the wax cloth and visualised their hall floor. There were only four pairs of shoes. They each had a pair of outdoor shoes and a pair of clogs. Their Wellingtons were in the cellar.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I could do that.’

‘Then we could put our wellies there too,’ said Laila.

‘Yes. Good idea.’

He looked at Laila. She had lost a few kilos in recent months. Presumably this had something to do with the fact that he no longer found chocolate wrappers all over the house. She had stopped comfort eating.

It must have been something to do with the light, bouncing off the wax cloth and illuminating her face from a side angle. For a brief moment, Lennart thought Laila was pretty. The distance between his hand and her face was only half a metre, and he watched his hand slowly rise from the table and caress her cheek.

Then he grabbed the dishcloth and scrubbed at a dried-on patch of lingonberry jam with such force that the wax cloth slid to one side. He rinsed out the cloth, draped it over the tap and said, ‘All right, a shoe rack.’

Over the next few weeks Lennart made a shoe rack, two towel rails and a key cupboard. When he couldn’t come up with anything else they needed, he moved on to bird boxes.

Sometimes as he stood there surrounded by the smell of freshly sawn wood, listening to the sound of some Schubert quartet from the girl’s room, he felt perfectly contented. Step by step, everything had moved in the right direction. The sharp, hard edges of his existence had been rounded off with both grade one and two sandpaper, and he could run his hand over life without getting splinters in his fingers.

He put on the ear protectors and started up the jigsaw to cut out the windows and doors in the facade of a nesting box representing their own house. It was a tricky job that required concentration, and when he switched the saw off and removed the ear protectors five minutes later, sweat was pouring down his forehead.

The silence after the angry buzzing of the saw was pleasant, but wasn’t it a bit too