Ingrún was right, she was losing weight. In the beginning the tension had filled her stomach with nervous quicksilver. Later she’d thought she could starve herself empty. But the woodlouse would grow, it would, she sensed it. The way it licked the sponge cake down. The coffee came washing up, sour, and filled her mouth, while Ingrún’s hoarse stream of words continued, and she nodded and nodded. In the middle of a nod she made her choice. 69

Marita coaxes one arm free and feels around on the top bunk with her fingertips. If she hits her head during the night? If she faints? It’s four short steps from the bunk to the cabin door. At the end of an angular, windowless corridor is the washroom. The white-scrubbed enamel tubs.

The death of a child can be purifying, it says so in the Bible; it’s written in sour milk in human nature. She has seen her face in the scratched mirror, the lines around her mouth. Wonderful how fearsome.

Ragnar made her knee disappear in his hand; he called her little soldier.

At first he’d been so pleased. He’d shown a man’s idiotic pride in his own ability to breed. She had to say the obvious out loud. That it had to happen, that it had to be this way. Then they sat for a while in silence. Jointly they studied his large hands.

At last he got up, slung his grief over his shoulder and muttered that he thought he probably had a book. If it had to happen.

The cervix was drawn like the stem of a glass. Lines on the paper connected the stem and the triangular womb with small Latin words. They read them together. Later, among the pine trees, she eased the steel wire up, clenched her teeth, scraped. Prayed for the soft tissue.

The cramps are dry, grating at the mucous membrane.

The boat throbs through the blackness. 70

The woodlouse is wandering around inside.

The blood still isn’t coming. Minutes fall to the ground in loose seconds. The night picks them up one by one.

Now, with each spasm, a languid apathy pours poison into her limbs. Something dark is prowling around the cabin, noiseless and alert, like a cat waiting for milk. She’s sweating. The housewife in the upper bunk turns, creaking, and empties her bowels of air. The sea holds the boat trapped between massive thighs, squeezing the hull and mumbling.

A line from one of Fritz’s letters:

Small islands can be born in a night, and they can vanish in a night. What came next? Deep under the sea, all land masses meet. There was more, but it’s vanishing before her now. He lectures, Fritz, acts the intellectual in his letters, stuffs them with what he’s learned at the teaching college. She can smile about it. Now she tries, and seems to manage, more or less.