This evening Mommy filled the wing with people, and I remember looking forward to it. Mommy associated with so many people all the time, and now they came, all of them, filled the hallway with the scent of perfume, with their indoor shoes in bags and their loud voices: the school principal with his wife and children, the director of the fish landing station with his wife and baby, the editor with his wife, who was expecting, the journalist who was a woman and not married, and all the engineers and building contractors who had moved here in recent years to work at the plant and left behind their wives and children in other parts of Norway—and therefore were especially appreciative of the invitation to visit someone’s home and enjoy a home-cooked meal. They spoke about this loudly as they took off their coats, changed their shoes, and lit cigarettes and pipes.

Then they occupied the living rooms of the house, with warmth, laughter, and tobacco smoke. Their sounds filled me, words that rose and fell in the air, jazz on the record player, high heels clacking against the floor in the dining room, where the furniture had been cleared away, their children running through the rooms, playing, until the youngest fell asleep like abandoned rag dolls in armchairs and chaise longues.

I was older than the other children, maybe twelve or fourteen, a head taller than them, but nonetheless I wasn’t as tall as the women and lacked everything that they had. I had become slender, skinny, almost a washboard with breasts—my arms were long and I couldn’t control my legs, but nonetheless I stayed close to the adults. I thought I belonged there, more than with the children. I tried to talk, take part in their conversation, but nobody heard my loud voice and maybe where I was seated was too far away, in an armchair by a wall, outside the circle the adults formed around the coffee table—or maybe my voice wasn’t as loud as it used to be.

There was a man speaking—I couldn’t remember ever having met him, hadn’t noticed him before now, had only heard his name. It was Svein Bredesen, the chief engineer, speaking loudly and for a long time about the work on the power plant. He talked with such pleasure about the barrage that was almost completed. And it wasn’t supposed to form a lake, as I’d believed at first, as had several of the guests, but rather a structure that would dam up the water from the snowmelt, so that it was collected there and could be diverted into pipes through the mountain, all the way down to the power plant and to the turbine, which was called Pelton and which he spoke about as if it were a close friend.

I liked him. I remember that, that I liked him.