“You’d be better off sleeping with me and not the bloody Finns.”

Ingrid hurried on.

He shouted something after them. She didn’t hear what it was, this man who had been a busy black-marketeer before getting involved in the evacuation, a man who boasted of selling margarine for money and not ration coupons and transporting ten times more fish to the wholesalers in Trondheim than was officially declared, who seemed unmoved by the whole war or had made it his living – she stopped and looked around the freezing village: not a single person outdoors, but an island that was alive, with smoke from all the chimneys, the boats at their moorings, the day bitingly cold and the sky high above them like a dome of blue glass, the same sky that arched over Barrøy, and Ingrid didn’t know where she was.

Mikkel stopped and looked up at her quizzically; both he and his sisters had bruises after the ordeal of crossing the fjord. Ingrid asked if it was hard. He nodded.

“You’re strong.”

She straightened the wood in his arms so it wouldn’t fall and asked whether he missed his father.

At first he didn’t seem to know what she meant. Then he said yes. Ingrid said they would soon have him back. Mikkel said yes again. Ingrid was pleased by everything he said. She asked if the blue bump on his forehead was painful. He said no. She said it would soon be gone, and they walked on in the bitter cold.

~

Ingrid was sitting on a reindeer skin with her back to the wall watching Ellen and Ante frolic like tentative, newly fledged eider ducklings on the sand-scrubbed floor. Anja boiled salted pork that Ingrid had bought from a blacksmith with some of the money Erik Falc had given her, old Malmberget’s mysterious debt.

Anja had diced the meat. Then she had diced the potatoes and carrots and boiled them too long. Now she dipped crispbread into the pot and tasted it and looked around the crowd of children with the first hint of a smile that Ingrid had seen on her hollowed face, this was a woman of that indefinable war-ravaged age, somewhere between twenty-five and sixty, as though not only her husband and life had abandoned her, but also the seasons, and still she had something that Ingrid didn’t have, a simple, uncompromising clarity, an unmistakeable misfortune, visible and tangible, not just a swirl of elusive, confused images and emotions she couldn’t reconcile.

Ingrid heard Erik Falc’s words, about her having found love when it was there and grasping it, but the truth was that she hadn’t grasped anything at all, she had just been who she was when it happened, someone she wasn’t anymore – and she hadn’t bled for two months now.