Barbro smacked the coffee pot down on the stove once more. Henriksen got up shaking his head so violently that it looked as if it was about to fall off, swept his mittens and fur cap from the table with an angry flourish and strode out of the door, still cursing. Ingrid kept screaming at him until he had passed the window and they could see the black figure battling his way down through the snow, ponderous and heavy-legged. Far too long after that they heard the drone of a distant engine, short, sharp heartbeats, then they were gone, too.

Barbro managed to get Ingrid down into the rocking chair, war she heill barkers? Ingrid felt a cool hand stroke her lower arm and began to recount what had happened in the winter, aware with every word that passed her lips that it became more horrific than it had been, but also different, as though it was about somebody else, not herself, and that she was beginning to talk to herself, as an islander must in order not to go to pieces, until her voice dropped and everything faded into a long silence – the two or three days before the men came had also gone, the days from the night he left her until they found her; she didn’t know when the darkness set in, whether it was brought on by him or herself, or by the loss of that which could not disappear from her mind.

Something had happened to Barbro’s face while Ingrid was talking, something Ingrid had never seen before, but had nonetheless sensed must have been there, since she wasn’t surprised to discover it, it was as if Barbro, too, could have secrets, and had the ability to keep them. Ingrid placed a hand on her arm and her aunt shook it off. Ingrid went out into the barn that evening as well, and sat with the sheep.

5

At the crack of dawn next day Barbro rowed to the village, without saying a word before she left, and returned late in the afternoon with provisions, apparently the same person she had always been, but saying excitedly that they had to go over in two days and accompany Margot’s son to the Fort, where he was to pick up a steelyard.

Ingrid said she had never heard the like of it.

“A steelyard?!”

Yes, that was as much as Barbro knew, Margot was going to slaughter some animals and needed the heavy-duty scales she had lent the Germans . . .

“Hva? Slachter ’em nu?” Ingrid screamed, out of herself.

“Ya, she’s run out o’fodder,” Barbro yelled defiantly at the ceiling beams – wasn’t Ingrid going to do anything today, either, they were supposed to be doing some baking, weren’t they?