I lived on the thought of you. Endured because I could think about you. But when father charged after me in the byre I stopped thinking about you. You vanished as if nothing had happened.

It sounds strange but I still hardly know who you are but you must have recognised me when we met in the blizzard.

Of course I did he said.

Why didn’t you say anything then I asked.

We had met before then. A couple of years later he replied. In the shop. You had come by with bror. Bror and I talked together for a while. You and I said hi but your eyes didn’t register me. I thought maybe you didn’t want to remember or perhaps you just didn’t.

Anyway these letters he said. Why don’t we read them together now that we’re here. I have.

No I interrupted him. What katarina and I had between us is nobody else’s business. Not even yours.

175

THIRTYTWO

We woke late in the morning. The wine had given me a headache. My mouth was dry and sticky. I clambered out of bed and went to the loo. Sat there for a bit wondering about the truth of the story we had told each other yesterday. Had I really gone with him willingly. A man of whom I had absolutely no memory some twenty years later despite his face and build being so striking and unusual that it should be impossible to forget him.

But there was a kind of freedom in not knowing. I wasn’t a righteous person. I was just as pleased with halftruths.

John went home. I started all over again. Made crispbread sandwiches and a cup of tea. Sat down on the bergère and fiddled with the bundle of letters. Pulled off the string and sorted the letters by geography.

Our community was shaped like a cross. The central point was where the shops were and the library the churches the filling station the school they had closed and the eldercare office. The roads that radiated from the centre in four directions went to the smaller villages. To get to our village one turned eastwards. Many tens of kilometres separated the easternmost from the westernmost village. The same was true of the southern and northern villages. Dirt tracks that led to houses standing on their own branched off each one of the main roads here and there.

I arranged the letters as if around a clock face where twelve was north. For form’s sake I counted. Fiftytwo letters. But apart 176from that I couldn’t see any structure. The addressees seemed unrelated to each other. Katarina had been pilfering at random just because she could. But might have been deliberate in some cases.

I opened the first letter. A postcard for kristinasvensson in northvillage. I knew her. Towards the end of primary school we were in the same class for a couple of years.