The whole gang come running down, she can see them over the newly painted gunwale, they stand in a line between the boat shed and the high-water marker staring out at her and the boat, there have never been so many young people on Barrøy who don’t belong there, seven of them. Ingrid can see their heads, their various heights and the colours and lengths of their hair, through a green mist, her breathing is like a piston pumping inside her. In their midst stands Barbro, mouth agape and an arm waving in the air helplessly, the sky is grey today and the sea as white as a snow-covered plain.

It is a difficult birth, brutal but short. Ingrid does as Barbro tells her and kneels between the thwarts. And once again it is Arne who strips down and swims out. He scrambles into the boat, but he can’t bear to see human blood in the space where he has bled so many thousands of fish, nor can he bear to see Ingrid’s ashen face, so he closes his eye and rows the boat back, jumps onto the quay and runs towards the south of the island, his brothers wide-eyed in astonishment. Then they race after him, closely followed by Benjamin and Jørgen.

Barbro and Daniel help Ingrid and the baby out of the boat and take them up to the house. Barbro also cuts the cord, ties it and stops the bleeding. Ingrid is conscious the whole time and the baby is alive and well, she just needs to look into its eyes.

Barbro understands what she is doing and says that newborn babies’ eyes are all the same, the colour develops later, their own individual colour, she knows what she is talking about. And Ingrid notices that the sobbing no longer has her in its grip and she can wait, because it is a girl, her name will be Kaja, and she can see the unmistakeable features, it is the Russian, and the colourless eyes of thousands of innocents killed on the slave ship Rigel that everyone has forgotten, the girl’s father has been killed too, Ingrid can see that now, Kaja is a child of the Rigel.

15