“Signe?” He didn’t follow me, just stood there calling me, in a low and controlled voice, as if he were talking to a child. “Come on, Signe. You have to tolerate that we don’t agree about everything.”

I could tolerate our not being in agreement about everything, of course I could, but I couldn’t tolerate that we didn’t agree about this. So I kept walking and luckily he followed me, finally. My back must have made an impression on him, because now he tried making some rude comments, silly, harmless, trying to show me that the conversation didn’t bother him. I pulled myself together, answered him, wanted to demonstrate the same thing, but the whole time his words kept spinning inside me. I wanted to scream, hit him in the head with my arguments, because this was a betrayal on his part, talking like this, talking like everyone else and at the same time taking the bite out of his words by making me the difficult one, the immature one, making me the one who couldn’t allow any disagreement, the uncompromising one who failed to see that there was more than one side to any issue.

We reached the dam, the man-made dam, and the concrete, strange, artificial lake created in the middle of the mountains. The sweat was dripping off my body and I tugged off my clothes without looking at him.

“Are you really going swimming?” he asked.

I didn’t reply, took one step out, balanced on a rock. The water came up to the middle of my shins, ice-cold meltwater, at its highest level now, in June.

The lake was huge and silent, deep and shiny, the water exceedingly clear. I thought I could discern the old summer farm far below.

I leaned forward, summoned my strength, and jumped.

The shock as I broke through the water surface, the biting chill against my skin . . . I swam away from shore, kicking hard, without another look at him, swam until I was directly above where I believed the summer farm was located.

Then I dived under and floated facedown with my eyes open just below the surface and even though the water made everything unclear and foggy, I was sure that I could see it.

I stuck my head out of the water again and now I forgot about being angry.

“It’s here!”

“What?” he shouted.

“The summer farm. The water’s clear. It’s easy to see.”

Then he too tore off his clothes and threw himself into the water, gasping at the cold, but nonetheless swimming quickly in my direction.

“Here,” I said, treading water above the site.

He dived under, floated below the surface for a few seconds, and came up again.

“I can see it too,” he said.

And he smiled—he had already forgotten everything. “Are you going to dive?”