For a moment they wonder whether the war has reduced the priest to banalities, but he justifies his answer using stirring words such as staunch and steadfast, mightiest mountains and the tiniest grain of sand, that which shall never perish, at the end he also manages to find a place for Jesus’ resurrection and ascension to heaven, although it is neither Easter nor Whitsun but the first Sunday after the Feast Day of St John the Baptist; his tired clichés about salt and the skerries and the islands are fresh and sparkling again, as if hewn from stone.

In a grandiloquent finale he bellows: many of you are no doubt familiar with developments around the world; seen in that perspective we up here on the grey margins are fortunate, as absurd as that may seem; this may not be obvious, but please dwell on it for a while and see if you don’t recognise the truth in the words of a wise man, not mine, the Lord’s.

A murmur runs through the uplifted congregation, attendance is good, almost every single survivor has returned. Ingrid sees Nelly again, she has spent the winter in Havstein, and her family, friends from her schooldays, Jenny and Hanna with the cats, and not least Anja, who has left the skipper, taking all her children, and has a ticket north on the coastal steamer, she isn’t going home, but to a reception camp, to meet her husband who apparently has recovered after all. She looks a little sorry, but she is no longer in that war-ravaged, indefinable age between twenty and sixty, looking more like the twenty-nine-year-old registered in Henriksen’s papers, and Ingrid says she won’t forget them, they mustn’t forget her, either, they have to write.

Anja asks how she is?

Ingrid looks at her and says she doesn’t know, yet, and places a hand on Sara’s head.

~

Ingrid has asked to have a word with the priest. His sons carry him down the nave, lower him into the sidecar of a German motorbike they bought at the auction and trundle him down between the graves so that the meeting can be as private as Ingrid wants it to be.

She confides to Johannes Malmberget that she is with child, as though he hadn’t noticed, her clothes are loose and summery, and she doesn’t want any stigmas attached to this child, the priest is the best person to guarantee this.

He does, too, with a mere flourish of the hand, likewise without even asking who the father is. To be on the safe side, she says he was a resistance fighter, and was hiding in the islands.

“Is he alive?” the priest asks.