Some faded-green soldiers stood clustered outside the entrance. Their dull black weapons and easy conversation.

Marita came striding out of the big building, the double doors. Her shoulders were swept back, her mouth deathly still. The soldiers got out of her way. He got out of her way. She strode right past him. Her chin jutted sharply from her neck. Her eyes were shiny, hard as quartz.

‘I asked if they wanted the uniform back right then and there,’ she said. ‘Because they could bloody well have it.’

Shortly beforehand they’d got married. It happened sooner than planned. In the wedding photograph she’s 115holding the bouquet low, the white roses blocking the waist of the black skirt-suit.

Precisely eight months after the ceremony, the child was born.

‘Or I should have,’ she said later. ‘I should have asked.’

One week passes. Two. Marita stops rolling in her bed. It’s bright on the ward and bright outside, bright on the ward and dark outside; it gets dark.

The snow is a blue glow in the room.

Marita’s knuckles sharpen; they’re carrying the skin, Fritz sees it. When she doesn’t answer him, he listens for her breathing. The child’s is shorter, small jolts. Fritz adjusts the flowers. Pinches off a petal. Opens the window and shuts it again.

The milk comes in. The nurses lift the child into the bed. Fritz goes outside and smokes, thinking of the life draining into the little mouth.

But the child is putting on weight, making noises. The swelling goes down. Its face begins to look like a face.

One day he picks up the child, puzzled by the body, which just hangs. The featherweight in his hands. He inspects its eyes, its chin, its hairless brow. Around the crusted wound the skin is tight and shiny, greyish-red. Its nose is soft and slightly crooked. Its whole face is a bit crooked. The doctor says it will get better with time. Fritz thinks the child looks like a child. He sticks his head close to 116the dangling body. Then bores his nose beneath the chin, into the skin folds, and sniffs his daughter’s milky neck.

It’s March. The snow disappears.

Marita recovers. Fritz welcomes her home with roses in tissue paper, with sighing snowdrops in a milk-glass vase on the bedside table. He puts his hands on her cheeks, her thin arms and heavy breasts, her hips. He draws her close.

She kisses him on the cheek, turns her back, stoops over the child.

April comes. Marita goes into the forest; she wants to show the child that there is a forest. The wheels on the pram are tall and a little wobbly. The baby’s cheeks slosh. They’re together in the anemone-white, beneath the blackness, the tangledness. ‘Anemone,’ Marita says in Danish.

‘Primroses,’ she says, pointing.

‘Yellow stars-of-Bethlehem. Corydalis.’