Hanne was only seven, but she already possessed a great deal of formless anxiety. She always wanted to be somewhere other than where she was at that moment. When she sat in the nursery with her little brother, who was completely absorbed with playing, she would listen for her father’s and mother’s steps downstairs and do what she could to follow their strange conversation. They spoke differently with each other when they were alone than when she was listening. Her mother’s voice went delicate and quiet, which made her own belly feel both nice and bad – mostly bad – and her father laughed at what her mother said almost all the time. If Hanne came jumping or sneaking down the stairs, they went completely quiet. Then her mother might say, ‘How about going out to play, honey?’ And if Hanne walked over to her, she didn’t put her on her lap or tell her stories, but went kind of stiff, so Hanne herself became nearly immobile, feeling her father’s expression wrap a dark cloak of anxiety around both of them. Then her mother said, without looking at her, ‘How about going back up and playing with your little brother? Your daddy’s tired.’ But that wasn’t true at all, because he could just go to bed and sleep, like other people did when they were tired, and he wasn’t even the one who said it. He never said much to Hanne, and when he did, he just asked what two times twenty was, or if she had learned to read yet, but he didn’t always listen to how she answered.

Still, he was a nice daddy, because he had never hit her or yelled at her at all, and she knew he went to work every day to earn money for clothes and food for all of them, and it would be the most horrible thing if he left them. Her mother had explained this to her one day when Hanne suddenly said, ‘Oh, Daddy is so stupid,’ when she saw him turn in through the garden gate on his bicycle, just as they were having such a cozy time, she and her Mommy.

There was so much to be afraid of and to be careful about. First and foremost, she had to watch her little brother, who could get strangled in his baby carriage harness or who could grab a few matches and set himself or the whole house on fire. Hanne could never relax except when she was sleeping at night, when she was relieved of her anxiousness. Not because she would be so heartbroken if her little brother died, but her mother would be so terribly sad and she would cry for days and days, just like back when Hanne’s real father left them, and everything was so cheerless until they got a new one.