Egon slept heavily beside her, and Helga lay observing him. Despite the late hour, she wasn’t sleepy. His chin was relaxed, he had a beard, and he was snoring. This was how one might think about a stranger, not one’s husband. Maybe he had been a stranger to her for quite some time – ever since the day she had gone to him with such high expectations, and departed with such deep disappointment, in her own quiet way, without acknowledging it as any great calamity. What does one person mean to another anyway, except when one forces the other to act?

Helga’s reaction was strange. The times when she’d stolen a small amount of the household money and concealed it in a little box, originally a jewelry box that she had been given for her confirmation, she hadn’t had any particular purpose in mind. Perhaps she had tried to convince herself that it was for Christmas gifts or other things they would struggle to afford. But now she realized why she had saved this money. She smiled suddenly in the dark, and very quietly slipped out of bed and walked to the drawer where she had hidden the box. The moon lit the little room like a false dawn. With the deftness of a thief, she counted the money. There were almost forty kroner. She held them in her hands, smiling gently, redeemed and alone, like a child smiling in her sleep. All she could think of was an open, translucent umbrella with a certain shape and color. She longed for the morning, and her heart pounded fast, the way a woman’s heart pounds when she is going to meet her lover. She imagined the street in the rain, and herself wandering beneath this silken canopy. Vague, bright images spread like dandelion tufts across her mind: a house where she had worked, the wife in a dinner dress: Oh, Helga, bring me my umbrella. She had held many umbrellas in her hand without thinking about them. Things outside her world didn’t really mean anything to her. Until now. Until she acted.