Then she passed me a glass, said ‘skål’ quietly and we drank. The taste of the wine made my palate constrict for a second and I could feel it lying like a very thin membrane over my teeth.

‘The girl I once was,’ she said pensively.

I opened my mouth, but she raised a palm and carried on: ‘How long do you think we carry the past with us? We are not the same any longer of course. All the cells have changed. Medically, or physiologically, I’m quite a different Rebecca from the one you saw then. Every single battery has been changed, the lacquer has lost its shine, my hair…’ She held both sides of her head. ‘A completely new person. You don’t know me any longer.’

‘In which case you’re a bloody good copy,’ I said. ‘Your voice sounds exactly the same. Eyes. If I leaned over … and kissed you…’

She raised her glass to her mouth to show it was busy. ‘Yes?’

I gestured towards her. ‘You are the same Rebecca. With half a lifetime’s experiences, perhaps more … With a lot of new memories. But still you’re … mine.’

‘Yours?’

‘Yes? You meant something to me once, Rebecca.’

She looked past me again and started another conversation: ‘Childhood’s like … its own country. A life we move around in, innocent and unknowing. Like … well, small angels. But then we grow up…’

‘Eat from the tree of knowledge…’

‘Yes, perhaps.’

‘And are driven out…’316

‘Or in. For me becoming an adult was … falling in love with Jakob. Both happened at the same time.’

I was silent.

She continued: ‘I … it was so strange. I’d known you both from Nordnes. Then I met you both again after some years, at upper secondary. But still nothing was happening.’

I grinned. ‘Do you remember … we discussed for hours who Cain’s wife was.’

She looked at me, distracted. ‘Lilith, wasn’t it?’

‘So you’ve started reading apocryphal writings now as well? In the Bible it says only that Cain travelled to a country, Nod, which is east of Eden and took himself a wife there. But there’s nothing about who the wife was.’

‘Oh.’ She still wasn’t with me.

‘And if Adam and Eve were the first and only people on earth, then in Nod Cain couldn’t have had any wife, unless she was his runaway sister. That was of course a kind of explanation, yet not really acceptable in the circles you moved in. If a brother and sister had … Admittedly the deluge came afterwards, but nevertheless …’

‘I thought most people had accepted by now that these are myths. Fabulous myths, but still myths? Adam and Eve could hardly have been alone, people like them lived in Nod and other places, in Asia and Africa, and there were animals in America long before Adam and Eve were children.’

‘Yes, of course. But think of all the discussions we would’ve missed out on.’

She changed tack. ‘Anyhow, afterwards I had a few other relationships, very superficial, and still nothing happened…’