All day long he thought about the lost knife. Back when he was a little boy, he used to walk the overgrown path in the woods behind his parents’ house. His knife gleamed in the air before him, sunshine glancing off the blade. He cut willow sticks with it. Drunk with power, he decided which branches he would spare, and which would fall before his knife. Some of those he cut were weak and inadequate, and he couldn’t use them. Sometimes he decided that a strong, vigorous branch would be allowed to survive. The willow branches were enemies in a defeated army. Decisively and capriciously he cut them down. Proudly, he showed his treasure to another little boy and let him feel its weight in his hand. The boy gave it back to him as if it were nothing special. Big clouds passed overhead. Others didn’t understand that he was meant for something glorious and triumphant. When he felt the knife against his hip, he was strong and alone in the wilderness. It had been bought in Finland. His father had brought it home from a business trip. There wasn’t another knife like it in all of Denmark. He played ‘Country’ with some friends, stabbing the knife angrily into the ground like it was the heart of his worst enemy. The blade stayed vertical, vibrating a bit with a barely audible tone. He drew a circle around himself on the ground. ‘I’ll kill anyone who steps over this line,’ he shouted. No one tried to step over the line. They chatted peacefully on the outside and let him stand inside the circle, swinging his knife. He didn’t care about the games they played, and they didn’t understand his. Even before he started school he had developed a taste for being alone. He felt it was a sign that he was different than the others, selected by fate as a person who would do great things. He talked out loud to himself on the way to school when no one was around. He was an army general conferring with enemy heads of state. He formulated his words craftily and deviously, borrowing them from Carit Etlar’s and Ingemann’s novels. He was good at world history. For a long time Napoleon was his hero. He thought Napoleon must have been like his father, a quiet, strict man, with an unpredictable and puzzling nature. His mother talked a lot, often confusingly. Suddenly she would go quiet and look at his father. They never fought. Still there was something secretive between them. He had felt, in some obscure way, that they were enemies, and he sided with his father. He sat between them in the evening, looking at his knife. It wasn’t a toy, but a weapon made to be used at the proper time. Finnish sailors always carried knives just like it.