‘Rubbish,’ said Valdemar.

  ‘Is it something at work?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘You never talk about your job.’

  ‘You never ask about my job, Alice dear.’

  ‘That’s got nothing to do with it.’

  ‘Hasn’t it? Well anyway, everything’s just the same as ever at work. Isn’t it time you were going? It’s quarter to eight.’

  ‘We’ve got to talk to each other, Valdemar.’

  ‘Can’t it wait until next week?’

  ‘What are you saying? Just listen to yourself, the way you sound.’

  ‘I’ve always sounded like this, Alice. Are you sure you’re not the one who’s changed?’

  She seemed to consider this for a moment but then she sighed heavily, stood up and left the breakfast table.

  He would really have liked to go into Wettergren’s tobacconist’s to choose himself some tobacco and a pipe, but they didn’t open until ten. But he was able to buy a curved-stem cutty and a pouch of Tiger Brand in the video shop in Selanders väg.

  Imagine Tiger Brand still being around. His father hadn’t smoked that brand – he’d preferred old Greve Hamilton – but he had always spoken of it with respect, Valdemar could remember that. Tiger Brand and Skipper Shag and Borkum Riff. What a ring they had to them, those names. Where had all the sonorous old names gone?

  He’d been hoping to get his hands on a classic Ratos pipe, or a Lillehammer, but the girl in the shop just shook her head. If his newly acquired cutty had a name at all, it seemed to be Prince, but the lettering on the stem was hard to decipher. It could equally well be Pince-nez. But they were spectacles of some kind, weren’t they?

  What the heck, thought Valdemar, if it doesn’t taste good I can always promote myself to something better from Wettergren’s in due course. He decided not to spend any more time in Kymlinge laying in unnecessary supplies. He’d be better off checking what ICA in Rimmersdal had to offer him, and then top up in town later in the week.

  Of course there were also voices in his head telling him to stop wasting time. To get straight out to Lograna and see how his mysterious visitor was doing. Curiosity had been ticking away inside him the previous evening and all through the night, with the same questions in his head whenever he happened to wake up.

  Who was she?

  What had made her decide to spend the night in his cottage?

  Would she still be there today?

  He realized he was worrying that she might already have left. Yes, he really was. Worrying that she’d never pop up in his life again and that he’d never get an answer to his questions.

  That she’d vanish like a footprint in water.

  He decided he’d write that down. No, not water, wet sand was better.

  Some people and some events vanish like footprints in wet sand, that was the best he could come up with. He felt he’d like to add something about the tides washing things away, too, but for some reason he couldn’t find the right words.

  ICA Rimmersdal did not stock saws, axes or scythes.

  But it was able to provide him with a hammer, a frying pan, a large saucepan, a washing-up bowl, soft soap, washing powder, a scrubbing brush, tooth mugs, a draining rack, a paraffin lamp and some pork chops.

  And a cashier.

  ‘My name’s Valdemar,’ he said as she handed him his change. ‘In case you were wondering.’

  ‘Valdemar,’ she said slowly, with a cautious smile, as if sampling a chocolate. A chocolate with a new and slightly surprising centre. ‘That’s an unusual name. Mine’s Yolanda.’

  ‘Yolanda?’ said Valdemar. ‘That’s not particularly common either, is it?’

  ‘Not in this country,’ said Yolanda. ‘But where I come from, lots of women have the name Yolanda.’

  ‘Really?’ said Valdemar. ‘And what country’s that?’

  ‘It was called Yugoslavia when I left it,’ she said, looking suddenly sad. ‘I’m half Serb, half Croat.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Valdemar, because he did. ‘Hmm, life doesn’t always turn out the way we imagined it would.’

  She gave no reply, but smiled her warm smile at him and started dealing with the next customer.

  Yolanda? he thought once he was out of the shop. Yolanda and Valdemar. It sounded beautiful, almost like a pair of lovers in some old tale. Or in a chapbook of old ballads.

  Valdemar and Yolanda. It had a ring to it.

  He read the message and tried to identify the emotion running through him.

  A sense of regret? Of loss?

  Nonsense, he thought. You can’t feel the loss of something you’ve never had.

  Or could you, in actual fact? Was it some sort of bitter truth about life, that you perpetually went round with some unspecified sense of loss in your breast? A yearning for something you could only sense but not really see.

  No, decided Ante Valdemar Roos, things simply couldn’t be that bloody bad.

  Disappointment, then? Yes, that was more like it. It was a simple, more manageable feeling. The unknown woman had been in his immediate vicinity – and in his consciousness – for twenty-four hours, and now she was gone. Little wonder things felt a bit empty. A . . . a parenthesis with nothing inside it, he thought, something that had finished before it had even begun.

  He sat down at the table and wrote down the words he’d devised in the car that morning.

  Lograna, the 9th of September

  Some people and some events vanish like footprints in wet sand.

  A few minutes later, he added:

  Some lives vanish that way, too.

  Then he sat there for a while, thinking about how close together expectation and disappointment resided in the soul. Like two neighbours – or even a pair of twins – who could never quite bear to close the door between their rooms.

  And pondering how readily thoughts turned inwards instead of outwards. The idea of getting this place hadn’t been to create more time for brooding about his inner self. Quite the opposite, in fact; the whole point had been to observe and think about the world around him. To walk in the forest. Listen to the wind in the trees, see animals and plants and birds; to come home, make a fire, eat his fill, have an invigorating sleep – these were the components that were to build meaning into life. To be part of all the rest, as it were.

  That was it, he thought. To be part of. It was so obvious there was no need to write it down.

  Thank you. My name is Anna.

  He folded up the sheet of paper and slipped it into the back of his notebook. Then, taking his pipe, tobacco and matches, he went out into the forest.

  First he walked south, then west and then veered slightly northwards, and an hour later he was up on the little ridge with its sparsely growing birches and a view over the house and land at Rödmossen. He sat down on a fallen tree trunk and prepared for his smoke. He filled the pipe with clumsy, inexpert fingers, pressed the tobacco down with his thumb as he remembered his father doing, struck a match and sucked on the pipe. Getting it to light was easy and he just puffed out the smoke to start with, but eventually he risked drawing it into his lungs as well.

  It felt like a kick in the chest and for a few seconds everything went black. Whoops, he thought when he had recovered a little. Well blow me down, this is going to take some practise.

  It didn’t taste too bad, as long as he was careful not to inhale too much at a time. Ante Valdemar Roos had only ever smoked for about six months of his life, in the early days with Lisen, and he’d never tried a pipe. Just the occasional filter cigarette – he realized this was an activity of an entirely different order.

  He sat there for a while after he had finished his pipe and felt the faint, lingering dizziness ebb away. Then he got to his slightly unsteady feet and set off back to Lograna.

  He had not gone more than a few hundred metres, down into the hollow through the meadowsweet and bog myrtle round the disintegrating wooden hunting tower. It wasn’t much, just a fleeting impression of something appearing and vanishing again, all in fractions of a second; yet somehow he could swear it wasn’t an animal.

  It was a person. He remembered he’d read somewhere – or heard someone say, in which case it was most likely Tapanen, who tended to claim things about the world and its terms of operation that he sometimes didn’t understand himself – that this is precisely how our perception works.

  First, that it is the movement itself that we immediately register, even if it is surrounded by a jumble of objects and non-moving stimuli. That’s why it is always safer to lie still if you are a hunter’s prey. A hunter can perceive the movement of a head or a tail from a hundred metres away, but he could be standing right beside his unmoving quarry and remain oblivious to it.

  Second, that we can instantly differentiate between an animal and a human being. Though he did wonder quite how true this was, considering how many people were accidentally shot in the elk-hunting season each year. Maybe it was just an invention. One of those characteristic half-truths so readily accepted as life skills by the common man. Olavi Tapanen, for example.

  He stopped walking. Kept still, waiting for the next movement as he engaged in these reflections, but nothing happened. Not even the sound of a bird’s wingbeat. The forest stood motionless all around him, brooding secretively.

  But he knew. He knew the whole way back to Lograna that there had been another person near him, who had revealed their presence by mistake and who absolutely did not want to be discovered.

  Some things you just know, thought Ante Valdemar Roos. You don’t understand how, but you know them.

  The rest of the day passed without incident. He had a pork chop with lots of onions and three boiled potatoes for lunch, made some coffee, had a cautious pipe of tobacco in his chair in front of the outbuilding, did some crosswords and slept for three quarters of an hour.

  But there was still something there. Not the same strong feeling as yesterday, but its content, the nub of the feeling, was the same.

  The perception of a presence.

  She hasn’t gone, he thought. It was her I glimpsed, over at Rödmossen.

  And the twin neighbours in his chastened soul, expectation and disappointment, knocked on each other’s doors and reached an agreement.

  Before he got in the car to return to Kymlinge, he tore a page out of his notebook and wrote a simple message.

  He left it on the table and as he slid the key into position under the eaves he realized his heart was racing.

  14

  She counted to 200, just like the day before. It was five o’clock again today and she wondered if that was his regular routine. He would come at about half past nine in the morning, stay all day and leave about five.

  But if so, why? Why didn’t he stay overnight?

  She didn’t take the rucksack and guitar straight back inside with her. Retrieving the key from its usual place above the door, she went in to see whether anything had changed. Whether he had read her note and reacted to it in any way. Or simply thrown it away.

  He had all but spotted her out in the forest, she realized. She’d spent the morning wandering round a bit aimlessly, mainly to keep from losing too much heat. She’d sat down to read a couple of times in sunny clearings, but only for ten or fifteen minutes on each occasion. Even though she was better dressed than the day before, it was cooler today. As she walked she made sure to remember some landmarks, so she didn’t get lost. The huge glacial boulder. The anthill. The road, of course, the rise up to the three tall spruces, the marshy area clogged with tree shoots and thickets down on the other side – and suddenly she saw him coming, making almost straight for her. He was still quite a long way off, and she dived for cover behind a curtain of young spruces. He passed her at a distance of only ten or fifteen metres, and to be on the safe side she stayed there flattened to the mossy ground, her eyes shut, long after he had gone.

  What I can’t see, can’t see me either, that was a good old rule and not to be laughed at.

  There was a sheet of paper on the table. She held her breath as she picked it up and read:

  My name’s Valdemar. If you stay until tomorrow, we can talk to each other, all right? I’ll be there about nine thirty as usual.

  Warm wishes

  V.

  Valdemar? she thought. What a strange name, she’d never met anyone called that in her entire life. She didn’t think she’d even heard of the name.

  She went out to get her rucksack and guitar. She lit a fire in the hearth; it was easier now, but the first time she’d used up half a box of matches before it got going. He had fetched in more wood, stacked it in a pile under the window, as if he wanted to make sure she’d be nice and warm overnight.

  She made coffee on the stove and put a big saucepan of water to boil on the bigger hotplate; it was a new pan, so he must have brought it with him today. She found a plastic bowl and a packet of washing powder under the sink and spent half an hour washing and rinsing dirty clothes. Socks and underwear. She looked for a line to hang them out on, but couldn’t find one. They wouldn’t dry outside in any case, she thought; it would be better to hang them over the backs of chairs in front of the fire.

  There was a solitary pork chop in the fridge, but she didn’t like pork chops. She made herself a packet soup instead, and put liver paté and gherkin on two slices of bread.

  Four days, she thought as she sat at the kitchen table working her way through the bread. I’ve only been here four days, but I feel as though I actually live here. Some of the time I do, anyway.

  Right now I do, at any rate.

  It was strange, but maybe that was the way of things: there were certain places where you felt at home, while in others you never had that sense of contentment, no matter how long you stayed there.

  Yes, but then I’m just a fucking loner, she thought. Sonja at Elvafors was dead right about that. My type doesn’t fit in with people, and that’s my big problem.

  That was true, wasn’t it? She’d been in the forest two whole days now, seven or eight hours each day, and in a way it didn’t bother her. As long as she had the right clothes on and something to eat, she liked wandering around amongst the trees, the moss-covered rocks, the tussocks of twiggy lingonberry, with no plan beyond doing just that. She felt safe. Calm and contented.

  And that was even stranger, really. She was born and raised in an urban setting, and had never spent much time in the country. Those summers at Julek’s house in Poland, of course, and at Grandmother’s. A few school trips, but that was about it.

  Well there’d been a couple of nights camping with Jossan and Emily too, she remembered. They’d hitchhiked their way south for a week one summer a few years back; the idea had been to get to Denmark but they’d ended up by a lake in the forest in Småland instead. It had been so totally different to here and now, she thought. It felt like a hundred years ago and she couldn’t help smiling about it. They’d drunk beer and smoked hash the whole time and Jossan had been so scared of the dark and freaked out that they’d had to stay awake and hold her and talk to her all the time.

  She wondered how things had turned out for Jossan. She got pregnant and had a baby before she was nineteen. Then she moved to Stockholm with the father and their baby daughter. Hallonbergen, wasn’t it? The father was from Eritrea and his family was still there. Maybe Jossan had found her feet thanks to the baby, thought Anna, but things could just as well have gone in the other direction.

  At any event, she wouldn’t have fitted in here. Living alone, in a little cottage out in the forest, no, that was an existence most people wouldn’t leap at the chance of. Or at least, not if they happened to be a girl and only twenty-one.

  Though I don’t actually live here, was her next thought. This is just temporary. If I had somewhere else to head for, of course I wouldn’t stay in a place like this. She went outside and smoked her last cigarette. As she stubbed it out, a great sense of desolation descended on her. She was on the verge of tears, but managed to pull herself together. This is also the way of things, she observed to herself. The needs of body and soul. I shall have to leave here simply because I need to get hold of some cigarettes.

  Five minutes later she found his pipe and tobacco where he’d left it, on the shelf above the bed.

  That night she dreamt about Marek, her little brother. It was more of a memory than a dream, really, but in the dream, things went far worse than they had done in reality.

  The dream was about that time he was in hospital. He was only four, Anna sixteen. Marek had been getting peculiar pains in his stomach for a while, not every day, but they recurred at irregular intervals. No one was sure if they were real or he was just pretending, and that was almost the hardest thing about it, Anna thought.

  Why should a four-year-old boy invent pains in his stomach?

  It always happened when he was feeling upset, too. Anna’s mother had to fetch him from nursery several times, Anna also had to help out, and in the end they took him to hospital for a proper examination. Anna didn’t know why they had kept Marek in overnight, but they did. And Anna was the one who had to stay with him, sleeping in the other bed in the brilliant-white room up on the tenth floor. Her mother wasn’t able to stay, for some reason Anna couldn’t remember either.

  He was so scared, her little brother, and in the end she climbed into his bed; it simply wasn’t enough for her to be half a metre away, holding his hand.

  And he asked her such strange questions.

  Why am I so stupid and unkind?

  Are you going to give me away when I’m a bit bigger?

  Why does Daddy say such horrible things?

  I’m never going to be a white angel, am I?

  Was it normal for four-year-olds to ask questions like that? She didn’t know, but she found it hard to believe. And what were the horrible things that his dad, who wasn’t Anna’s dad, had been saying? Well, Marek didn’t want to talk about it.

  Don’t tell Mum what I said, he begged. And not just once, but twice.

  She did her best to console and pacify him, of course. Just before he finally went off to sleep, he asked her if he was going to die during the night, if that was why he was here, and she had assured him he would wake up the next morning as hale and hearty as a little foal.