The cabin is cramped. Two bunks and a table bolted down.

Marita is lying in the bottom bunk with half a metre of cheesecloth underneath her. The fabric is sticking to her thighs. The nappy, soaked in sweat, is gnawing at her groin.

At Ingrún’s hotel the towels are thick and snowy white, with embroidered initials. She stole a couple of the small ones, ripped them up and stitched them into narrow pockets. Now they’re ready in the darkness of the bunk, underneath the blanket, stuffed with the shreds of a torn-up pinafore, two pairs of woollen socks, a discarded vest. A little crocheted tablecloth.

The foetus is the size of a walnut. 65

She’s imagined it like a luminous brain in the flesh, a thistle of blood, a woodlouse that unfolds. Twitching. Hard, small legs.

The nausea is heavy as panic.

In the upper bunk, a young housewife is snoring. Marita pictures the schnapps-laden breath slipping greasily out of the open, vulnerable mouth. There had been something pony-like about the housewife. That practised way of sticking out her thin gold ring. Now she’s rattling blind drunk through the nose and occasionally giving a long, wet groan. Couldn’t hope for grander company, Marita thinks.

Her womb contracts, lazily. An icing-over in her coccyx. The woodlouse is heavy now, rolling with the boat back and forth across her soft organs. She’s tried lying on her side. Her little passenger swooped with the movement, distending her belly towards the mattress.

A dull pain clenches its fist around the base of her spine, twisting every now and then.

‘The infection does the work. The body empties itself.’

Ragnar said so. He didn’t wave goodbye. Crumpling almost, back-lit, as the boat slid away. Around her on the quarterdeck the travellers stood in clusters, some with their arms full of luggage and children, others with one stupid hand flapping in the air. A few geese, doubled in the water, vanished beneath the shadows of the low rowing boats. Marita was happy. At that moment she was. 66

Later, on deck, she thought the boat seemed a large and friendly insect, climbing over something glass-green past islands and rocks. She heard a golden plover call across the fjord, two long jabs from its throat, the comical puu-yii, puu-yii.

Turning her face upwards, she let the sun into her mouth. Thought of the country that lay ahead, soft and warm as an egg. Its yellowish smile, billowing with corn, humming with insects.

The first pang stabbed into her back, short and sharp as a crow’s caw. She gasped for breath. The crow pecked at her urethra, grabbed hold and gave a black, spastic jerk of the head. Her jaw twitched. The sun fell out. She fumbled after the pain, following it below deck.

The situation with Ragnar, how can she explain it?