Ingrid read that Leutnant Hargel’s first names were Albert Emil and she knew that he had encroached upon her life in ways very different from simply confiscating her weapons and removing dead bodies, but not how. She also realised she had told the doctor about Russians, but was unsure whether she had talked about her Russian; she asked what physical state she had been in when she arrived, and had to repeat the question, whereupon he muttered:

“Pretty bruised, after a fall maybe, down a flight of stairs?”

The sea would never be pure again, but the searing flashes were gone, and the foreign letters of the alphabet, and she had no pain. She was allowed to keep the newspaper cutting and clung to it as if it were a lifebuoy, even though it spoke of German troops with no mention of any Russians. But she had heard about it from Henriksen when they came to fetch the bodies, though that didn’t make it any more credible, and she had found P.O.W. uniforms, balls of wood shavings used for warmth, men with no names or faces, except for one, and perhaps it too was a notion that came from the outside, unless she was carrying it within herself, his face; now she could visualise it again, but that was all.

2

They said she was strong and showing signs of improvement, they also seemed to mean it, both the staff and her fellow patients, the latter thought she was employed there.

The doctor who never smiled continued to offer her friendly counsel, and began to call her a remarkable woman, a choice of words Ingrid asked him to clarify. He looked embarrassed and mumbled some vague explanation, so she chose to focus mainly on the “woman” part, which made her smile, and she wasn’t used to that, so she checked herself and bowed her head in a kind of bashfulness, unless this behaviour had been sparked by some memory, a hazy shadow, or was it only to pick up the pencil that had fallen out of her hand at the onset of the smile?

He asked her what she was writing.

Ingrid was writing a letter and wanted to give it to him. He shook his head and said she would soon be returning to a life the hospital had no part in, then he took it all the same; it was for Suzanne, who had once been like a daughter to Ingrid, but she, too, had left her.

He asked her for the pencil.

She gave it to him.

He made some changes to the letter, finished reading it and said, still without smiling, that Ingrid was being too hard on people she liked and told her she had made some grammatical and spelling mistakes, which he had taken the liberty of correcting.