I have the impression that during the time we spent together, she managed to read my books. She mentioned one in particular during a hike. It had become winter, we were in the forest, and the surroundings creaked with snow and ice. She’d read the book but didn’t quite know what to think of it. She found the indecisiveness of the female protagonist especially hard to bear.

We crawled over an old stone wall. The sun was shining, my eyes hurt from all the whiteness, and recently I had seen an old photo from the gold-mining town of Yellowknife, near the Arctic Circle. It was a picture of an Inuit and then the sun, and it wasn’t alone. It had company. It’s an optical phenomenon—the sun’s light is refracted by ice crystals and two bright points appear, one on either side. Under the picture it said that the sun had been joined by its rivals, the ones that in the language of the prairie were called sun dogs. As she stood there, Halldis, with her hood covering her ears, she could have been taken for such a figure. Strong in profile, yet still fragile. 22

“What exactly are you afraid I’m going to write about?” I asked her then. “I don’t know,” she said.

She stood there and the light went right through her, that’s the way I remember it. How the sun caused her physical form to cease. On the broad white expanse she cast a sharp shadow and I stood opposite her, not alone.

“Halldis?” I said.

She tugged at her mittens, nodded.

23

HYGGE

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