May comes, and the war is over. The German uniforms vanish from the city. Marita buys some white bread and two soft cream-filled pastries.

Fritz is offered work. They move to another, smaller town.

The school is in a village outside Køge, adjacent to the church. Early in the morning Fritz shuts the door behind him and crosses the yard from the teacher’s accommodation to 117the schoolroom. Marita shuts herself around the child. They grow chubby-cheeked together. Fritz begins to lay out a garden. In the evening he sits down behind the paper. Marita ties herself into a bow behind her back; she unties it only to give milk, bathe, powder, cradle.

He lies down in her bed, lifts up her nightdress. Exposes friendly, slightly absent genitals.

The garden comes into bloom; he weeds between the stones. The fruit trees grow heavy.

The schoolchildren fill the courtyard. Fritz is fond of them, he’s good at teaching. Marita gets a job at a doll factory. In her hands the porcelain eyes open wide, and the child gets a blinking porcelain sister, dark-haired and grey-eyed like herself.

She teaches the doll her Danish words.

The child plays in the field behind the house and sings at church. She goes to school with the other village children. In the summer she sails home with her parents.

At Christmas they go on the radio and send greetings to the family back home in the long Faroese summer.

Afterwards Fritz has a schnapps.

*

The child’s eyes turned grey, sea-smoothed as a pebble picked up and carried in the hand. She became slender-limbed, grew the ivory skin; she kept the music, the names of the flowers. 118

I put my arm beside hers on the table. The ivory had faded slightly.

Behind me, Aunt Ása was clattering with the coffee machine. The glass pitcher hissed against the warm plate.

My mother’s veins are blue. In the space from the armpit to the crook of her elbow they shimmer faintly, opalescent. Mine are green and matte like the Tarantula’s. For a while as a girl I was obsessed with it, with that—the difference in blood. I did comparative studies of our skin, of the nuances in the wickerwork beneath: my heavy, swamp-green blood, the tarantula blood, and her clear blue blood, the opal blood, the snow-blue, Atlantic-blue, mother-blue, distant blue.

Aunt Ása set out cups then offered round the plate of rye bread squares, potato slices and pieces of weakly pink and glistening blubber.

The skerpikjøt, wind-dried mutton shank, appeared on the table too. The dark meat was already covered in sharpangled cuts.

We were being served the leftovers from St John’s Eve, the party food. My mother thought it was too much. Uncle Laurus cut off a bite-size hunk of mutton. The blade of the knife slipped through, angled towards his thumb. Then he handed the piece to my mother.