Your background? How could I help you with that when I don’t even know who you are?

But I know who you are.

Really? Who am I, then?

You are Danilo.

Brilliant. Did you work that out all by yourself, or did you perhaps read my name on the door?

You are someone else, too?

You mean I’m schizoid?

Show me your neck?

He had fallen completely silent.

You’ve got another name written there, she had said. I know what it says. If I guess right then you must tell me how you got it. If I guess wrong then you can let me go.

We’ll change the agreement a little. If you guess right then I’ll tell you. Sure, that’s no problem. If you guess wrong, or if I don’t have a name on my neck, then I’ll shoot you.

She had guessed correctly.

She took another sip of wine, went into the room, sat on the chair and put the glass on the desk in front of her.

She felt some sort of melancholy about what she had to do.

No one knew that she had a room dedicated to all of the unsorted memories of her childhood, and no one would ever know, either. She hadn’t said a word about it to anyone. Not her father or mother. The room had been her own business and no one else’s.

Last spring, she had gotten more answers about her background than she had wanted. She had found out about the man who had made her into what she was, into what she had been: a child soldier.

She still remembered his words: From a crushed child you can carve out a deadly weapon. A soldier without feelings, without anything to lose, is the most dangerous there is.

She was made to call him Papa.

But his real name was Gavril Bolanaki.

Now Gavril was dead, and from Danilo—or Hades, as was carved into his neck as a trafficked child—there was nothing left to gain.

She got up suddenly and started to pull the pictures of the shipping containers from the walls and folded them up. She ripped down the pictures of the house on the island outside Arkösund, where she had lived with Danilo and the other children. She put the photographs of mythological gods and goddesses into an envelope and piled the books about Greek mythology in stacks. She erased the notes from the whiteboard. She took empty boxes, lined them up along the wall in the bedroom, and put all of the pictures, books, photographs and notes in them. Finally, she took down the sketch of Danilo and put it on the boxes.

In the kitchen, she poured a new glass of wine and drank it standing up. Then she went back into the bedroom, opened her nightstand drawer and looked at the journals hidden there.