When they have put the boat away, Arne says to Fredrik, oh, well, that’s another day you’ve survived, then puts the provisions in a fish crate, hoists it onto his shoulder and walks towards the house.

Ingrid takes Fredrik’s hand and says everything will turn out fine for him on Barrøy, but he shouldn’t think anymore about these fathers of his, nor talk about them. Fredrik says, yes, it’s a nice island. Ingrid says loudly that peace is not much different from war, and goes straight up to the North Chamber and takes out the sheet of paper with the nine lines from beneath her dress, because she wants to burn it.

But how can she do that in the North Chamber, there is no stove.

She is in the North Chamber because she needs to be alone as she re-reads the lines, and she doesn’t go down again that day. Instead she lies beneath the eiderdown, and once more she knows he is dead, she can sense it in her body, a dual paralysis, of greater and lesser magnitude, a steel string that vibrates through her whole existence.

But then she gets up again, goes to the window and looks north across the fields and the sea towards Oterholmen, and suddenly she feels she must be alive after all, either dead or alive, she can’t die, all according to where she is in this room, where she paces back and forth all evening, and which she now knows she will never be able to leave, no matter how hard the frost may be in the winter. Suzanne will have to stay in the South Chamber.

13

With peace comes the return of Johannes Malmberget, the priest. No-one knows where he has been, but he is such an integral part of the islands that no-one asks, he is so ancient that, of his old self, only his voice is left.

It booms out, however, after his two youngest sons have carried him to the altar and sat him in an armchair with a microphone and a discarded German loudspeaker. The locals think it sounds like a speech from London on a banned radio and are on the point of applauding. And again he focuses on the question that has puzzled him all his life and has been a faithful component of every single sermon he has written: is man great or small?

For the first time they also understand what his position on this matter is, for he has come to a conclusion: man is great.