He struggled to his feet and shuffled towards the window, then to the larder, turned and grimaced, not without some silent laughter, and looked down at his bare feet. He walked to the hallway door and back to the window, stared at his own reflection, stepped back, turned and looked at her in despair, until she got up, took him by his bandaged hand, led him into the hallway and up the stairs into the North Chamber and lay with him for the rest of her life.

9

Ingrid made a hideaway out of the closet behind the door. It was flush with and indistinguishable from the wood panelling in the South Chamber and resembled a downy nest. And as he could walk without difficulty now, she led him out into the darkness, waited while he sat on the lavatory and heard him talking through the open door. They walked south through the gardens without a word, but she could hear him weeping. She pointed to the sky and the northern lights, unwonted cascades of rainbows at the wrong time of year, recited the names of pitch-black mainland mountains, taught him the words water, wind, snow, grass, of which there was none, seaweed, boat, fish, cat . . .

One evening she took him to the barn loft and pulled the horse cloth off the dead man and asked who he was, she had laid the uniform over him.

He didn’t look at the huddled-up mummy, but muttered Alexander twice. She looked at him in surprise.

He said Sasha.

She held up the uniform and asked if they were friends and had the same name. He nodded vigorously and shook as if indicating the cold, and she thought he must have stolen the uniform to keep warm, realising at once that also the wood shavings meant warmth and that they, too, suggested he was a Slav. She asked whether he was Russian and he said Da, but only after she had repeated the question three times. She asked if he was a soldier and he answered yes and no, she had never felt more attractive, and she stopped asking questions.

~

She got him onto the stern thwart in the boat, where he sat like a terrified landlubber while she rowed through the sound between the island and Moltholmen and loosened the anchor lines on both sides of the sound. They towed the nets after them in the silvery wake, lifted them and dragged them onto the quay without seeing what they were doing. But there were no birds now. And she tried to console him.

They walked home, undressed each other, washed each other and lay in the North Chamber like husband and wife. Ingrid didn’t give a thought to her childhood, her parents, Barbro, Suzanne, Lars, everything she had missed, all the things she herself had messed up and destroyed, it felt as if she lacked for nothing.