Ingrid thanked her, still without getting up, and in the same strange voice said it was the seventh of January. Eva Sofie stopped and gave a sulky smile, went over to the noticeboard by the window, balanced the tray on the fingertips of her left hand, marked a cross on a chart detailing days and hours and things Ingrid had to remember, and not forget, the life that told her not only who she had been, but also who she was, so that she could live with herself, it looked like a completed crossword.

Eva Sofie mumbled O.K., O.K., and fine, let go of the pencil, which was left dangling from the string, and went out with Ingrid hot on her heels.

Ingrid was given two cups of coffee in the duty room, she chatted amiably with the four staff members sitting there, she knew them by name, and was almost dancing as she skipped along the corridor, a cup in each hand, backed against door number 27, thrust it open with her bottom and a second later saw a red flash on the wall in front of her, in the corridor, and was flung into the same wall by a violent blast and a storm of broken glass.

3

Ingrid opened her eyes in a new and equally white room, but now she was lying on her stomach and had pains in her back and head from the shards of glass they had plucked from her with tweezers. Then they had patched her up with lots of small, black cross-stitches which she could see in two mirrors they held up for her, but it was the same doctor.

He asked if she could hear him, she blinked yes.

He went through one elaborate detail after the other, which Ingrid still remembered so vividly that it was almost intolerable, and only then did he tell her that a snowplough had driven over an unexploded shell left from the time bombs rained down on the town. One wing of the hospital had been obliterated, two people killed and eleven injured.

Ingrid shouted into her pillow.

“It wasn’t snowing!”

He sat in a chair directly in front of her, when he lifted his head she could see him. He said quietly, as if to a child, with a rare tone of respect in his voice, that they weren’t clearing snow, they were moving the plough, the cuts to her head and back would heal.

She buried her face in the starched, white linen, the blessed and the pure, and enquired after Ingvaldsen, from the doctor’s silence she realised the old man was one of the dead and she closed her eyes again.

The chair came closer and his hands held her head and forced it up again.