Because when push came to shove, he wasn’t as good at discerning my needs, at seeing the needs of others, as I’d thought. When push came to shove, he was still just a child of his generation and the belt had made its mark. He wanted to move back to Ringfjorden. He grew tired of Bergen, he said, tired of being required to have an opinion on every street corner, tired of having to take a stand on every issue, and it had better be the “correct” stand. He wanted to move back home, wanted to have a garden, a kitchen—but actually I was the one who would be there, in the kitchen, because the whole time he was searching for the thing in me that had brought us together, the thing he could rescue.

Everything else about him was just talk.

He was less daring than our fathers, he took no chances, because actually he was just like all the other young men at that time, with shaggy beards and gentle smiles, who pussyfooted their way through life and talked about how everything was going to be different, without meaning it.

The work we took part in, the demonstrations we walked in, the flyers we wrote together, it was just a game for him. I look forward to seeing his eyes when I am standing in front of him with the ice, when I dump it out in his yard—the expression on that padded, middle-aged man-about-town face of his, with traces of red wine from the evening before on his lips. And his sweet little wife with a forehead just a bit too smooth and a smile just a bit too tight and the grandchildren who for sure are visiting. Maybe they are the ones who will stomp the ice into the dust, sully it, because it’s their future he is stealing. It is their future his entire generation is stealing—my entire generation has stolen. Those of us who have only experienced prosperity, never any obstacles.

Yes, perhaps the children should be allowed to do it, because they are the ones he is hurting. But they probably don’t want to, because they don’t care either, the children of today. They are pushed forward by the generations behind them, feel only the absence of any impediment. They don’t care as long as they can have the latest iPhone when they turn seven, and their own large-screen television and an apartment on their twentieth birthday. They won’t care—they won’t even look at the ice melting on the ground, much less stomp on it, because something else gets their attention, a screen beeping, a synthetic jingle. And besides, their feet could get cold.

My head spins. I need food, I need water.