She ran past the fish rack and over the marsh, hesitated before opening the porch door, went in and stood stock still in her own home, then ran with the blood pounding in her ears from one room to the next and paused and ran out again, around the house, and saw the tracks just visible beneath the new snow, as though someone had dragged a sack through the garden and up the barn bridge.

She walked up and confirmed the doors were locked with the bolt drawn on the inside, she ran around the building and into the cowshed and remembered she had seen drops of water on the steps, thinking they had come from a leak in the roof, climbed up into the hayloft and in the dim light she saw two legs sticking out from under some old sheepskins. She pulled the skins aside and saw a middle-aged man, bald, with bluish-black bristles in a wasted, chalk-white face, a dead man. But someone had closed his eyes and arranged his hands on his chest, as though praying.

She went further in and caught sight of another man, under two sacks of down and an old horse cloth. She pulled it off him and saw he was wearing the same brown rags, padded with the same wood shavings that spilled out of the sleeves and holes, and above all this a uniform with badges and stripes, a German uniform; he, too, was hollow-cheeked, bald and lean, but he had no bristles, he was too young, and he was alive.

6

Ingrid knelt down and tugged at him. He didn’t react. Through a rip in his trouser leg, at the top of his right thigh, she saw a deep wound with edges that had swollen to form thick, blue lips. She pressed her fingers against them, saw living blood and heard a distant groan. One of his hands looked as if it had been burned in a fire, but most of the fingers were intact, the nails on the other hand were missing, it too was black.

Ingrid wrung a few drops out of the uniform and tasted them, it wasn’t salt water, so there had to be a boat somewhere around the island, moored presumably in the only place she hadn’t looked, near the ruins at Karvika, she was afraid of the ruins at Karvika, she always had been.

She managed to raise him into a sitting position, went down on her haunches and locked her hands around his chest, dis-covered how surprisingly light he was and dragged him over to the barn door, unbolted it and lugged him through the garden and into the kitchen, manoeuvred him up onto the bench, and covered him with blankets.