She turns her mind to boulevards. Big, open quarters.

The handle of the suitcase is leather-covered; it chafes her hand. She straightens up, still a little slanted. The pain in her abdomen has turned dull. A heaviness. Sharp at the edges.

Now she takes a small step forward. Says, ‘So!’

Among those come to wave her off is Ingrún from up at the hotel. Ragnar. A few of the girls from the factory.

Marita takes their hands, their raw fishy fingers. She wants to free them from that smell, she thinks. Kiss it from every last joint, hold it in her mouth and then, far out on the open sea, spit it straight back where it came from. 14

She breathes in Ingrún’s soap-flake scent, the perfume in the little hollow behind her earlobes.

‘Take care of yourself down there,’ says Ragnar, without sounding very sure. He touches her shoulder with a solid, slightly clumsy hand. Marita kisses his bearded cheek. Her heart is in her mouth a little.

Part of what makes Red Ragnar a topic of conversation in the village are all the books and pamphlets he gets in the post. More than a few people have shared a furtive chuckle over the postmarks from France, England and even the Soviet Union. But Ragnar spells his way laboriously through all of it with his dictionary and his sailor’s English. Where proficiency fails, imagination must suffice, and he claims he understands the greater part of it.

Now he lets his hand fall. Takes a step back and nods. His face looks more than usually dark. Out in the world, things are happening he only just understands. He knows that in the spring, while the March storms howled around the corners and rattled the hinges in Vágur, Spain’s rightful government fell. They are sitting eating consolation croissants now, in Paris. General Franco is sitting on Madrid. Ragnar follows events as best he can, but he doesn’t know everything. He knows that.

The big countries are creaking, giving way. He senses more than understands it. That the continental crust is fissuring, the pus beginning to leak.

But Marita is leaving. 15

He sees her heave her suitcase on board. Narrow hips inside a floral-patterned dress he sees, and hair catching at the headscarf’s edge. Freedom beneath those feet as they tread the deck. Water in the August sun. Death in Marita’s belly.