The MAN sitting crouched on a toilet seat with the lid down. The cubicle door is unlocked, but almost closed. The MAN is dressed in jeans and a college sweater. VOICES can be heard.

INTERIOR, COMMUNAL WORKS TOILETS

VANJA and a female COLLEAGUE are standing by an open window. They are both smoking cigarettes, and making sure that the smoke is blown outside, where gusts of wind are fluttering yellow and red leaves on a tree in the back yard.

VANJA: I’m not exactly afraid. But I feel a certain distaste. No, a strong distaste. Enough to tell me it’s time to stop.

COLLEAGUE: But is it advisable? I mean … for him? How long has he actually been coming to you?

VANJA: Six months or so. I thought it had been going well so far.

COLLEAGUE: What happened, exactly?

VANJA: He identified one of them. In a newspaper photograph from the Ski Museum last spring. The opening of an exhibition. ‘Skiing in Norway through Four Thousand Years’. Or something like that.

COLLEAGUE: He surely can’t be sure. Wasn’t he just a young child when it all happened?

VANJA: Yes. Seven years old. Of course he can’t be certain, even though he himself is convinced. He says it had something to do with a pair of skis. Very special, the very first fibreglass skis he had. Or rather, his brother’s skis.

VANJA taps ash out of the window. Her COLLEAGUE inhales and then drinks from a mug of coffee she has placed on the window ledge.

VANJA (cont.): It could well be that a particular event could trigger the memory. In this case it was a connection between a pair of black Madshus skis and something that was said.

COLLEAGUE: Was the actual incident initially suppressed? Are we dealing with a dissociative disorder?

VANJA: No. Definitely not, as I see it. He remembers everything that happened at that time. In detail, in fact. We’ve gone through it many times. My aim has been to get him to realize that he can’t go on carrying around the guilt. That in actual fact it’s irrelevant to talk about guilt, since he was only a little child. And that, regardless of what happened to his parents afterwards, it’s certainly not his responsibility.

COLLEAGUE: So the incident at the Ski Museum was simply a matter of … identification?

VANJA: Yes. Fairly straightforward. He was too young when it all took place to know for certain who they were. Besides, he moved away not long afterwards to another part of the country. With his father.

COLLEAGUE: At that time? In the seventies? Surely it wasn’t usual to stay with the father in those days?