Then a sudden chill crept up from her legs, and both women glanced over at Asger, who was cleaning his pipe, oblivious to their attention and conversation. The old woman nodded. ‘I know, there’s something around the mouth,’ she said, vaguely triumphant, or maybe just with the kind of satisfaction all parents feel upon seeing their own features replicated in their children. She looked intently at the young woman and repeated, slightly louder: ‘There really is a striking resemblance around the mouth.’

And his beloved couldn’t understand it, and didn’t know why it was so unsettling. She didn’t even know if that was the cause, or if it would still affect her when she had left the room and its atmosphere, but an anxiety she had never before experienced in her life wrapped unmercifully around her like a cloak, when she admitted that the young woman in the picture – the one who later went crazy – had a small, weak mouth with tiny smile wrinkles continuing out to her cheeks, just like Asger.

He took a deep breath when they were out on the street.

‘So, was it bad?’ he asked, tenderly teasing, and adding, when she didn’t respond, ‘We had to get it over with – so what do you want to do now? Is it too late to go to the woods?’

He was in a great mood. He had gotten through something unpleasant. But the young woman looked askance at him with tears in her eyes for that mouth she had loved, which was now ruined for her. So far, just that.

Then she said, ‘You know what, I’m kind of tired. I think I would rather go home.’ And she had to hurry home to be alone, before the tears really started flowing – tears over something that maybe wasn’t completely broken, but would still never be the same.

Up above, from behind the curtains, his mother stood watching them, motionless and unseen, her eyes dark and imbued with emotion. In her hand she was still holding the picture of her sick sister.

Queen of the Night

While her mother powdered her face and pulled the white angel-hair wig down over her forehead, Grete held up the mirror for her.

Grete was kneeling on a chair, leaning in over the table from the other side, staring from behind the mirror with open mouth and wide eyes, round and shiny with excitement.

‘That looks so great,’ she said.

Her mother whispered nervously, ‘Ssh, you’ll wake Daddy.’ She wrinkled her forehead while applying a thick, greasy pencil to her eyebrows. Then she turned her head and peeked in the mirror to see how far into her temples the line should go. Her skin looked brown as coffee against the white wig. Grete put out her hand.

‘Can I touch it?’ she whispered.

‘Hold the mirror up for me.’

Grete pulled back her hand.

‘Oww,’ she said, surprised.