In one of the streets in the sawmill district there lived a man known as Herr Gustav, who was said to be a writer. When Lena was about two years old, he gave her some old books with pictures in them. For want of other toys, she became familiar with the illustrations. Unable to read the rudimentary text, she invented stories of her own about the monkeys in red breeches and the lions in top hats.

When she was old enough to go with her mother to the market, she looked at the faces of the men who sold the vegetables and wondered if one of them was her father. It might be the man in the green apron who sometimes gave her an apple. He would be a good person to have on your side. Or it could have been the man who sold the woollen waistcoats with brass buttons in the cobbled street behind the square. He might be richer than the apple man and might live in an apartment in one of the old buildings with open courtyards. He would teach her how to make money for herself and what to say in church. Most of all she hoped her father was Herr Gustav. He seemed lonely, walking in his heavy coat, with his gold glasses and the books held under his arm. She could quite easily have looked after him in his brick house and made him food at night.

Lena viewed all society as hostile because her mother did. The town hall and the shops, the schools and court buildings were frightening to her, inhabited by the ones who understood – people of a different kind. On rare occasions, Lena had a flash of hope, when she believed that not all these people were exceptional. Some of them might have started out like her, knowing nothing till someone handed them a key. But if she asked too many questions her mother sent her to play in the yard behind the wharf and told her not to speak to other children. Beyond the yard was the river, where Lena must never go for fear of drowning.

Rather than try to solve the mystery of her exclusion – or of how the world worked – it seemed easier to hope for luck. When she saw an institutional building, she hoped that it might at last be the one that admitted her, Lena, into the company of the elect. It was surely no more difficult than having a ticket in a raffle. And when she saw a young woman with a thoughtful face, she believed that she might be the one in a thousand who would explain things to her with a laugh and throw open a door.

One day when she was five, Lena was taken by her mother to the hospital where she’d been born. She had no memory of the building, which looked to her like a prison. Indoors, in the brick corridors, were printed signs with words she couldn’t read. Men and women in white coats hurried past with long faces, pushing trolleys that rattled with a clank of twisted metal instruments half-concealed by cloths. The dim electric bulbs at intervals along the walls gave off the glow of winter twilight, but just enough to catch a fine moisture on the brickwork, a chemical sweat that caught Lena’s throat with a compound of iodine and what she thought of as the breath of illness.