a little of the boiling-hot coffee.
'Sigrid hadn't been in the water for very long when I found her,' said Simon. 'Just a few hours. Despite the fact that it was a year since she disappeared.'
'But she was dead, wasn't she?' said Anders.
'Oh yes,' said Simon. 'Then she was dead.'
Anna-Greta held the coffee pot out to Anders, and he waved it away impatiently. She put it back on the tablemat, ran her hand over her forehead and closed her eyes.
'What are you saying?' said Anders. 'I thought she'd…been dead for a year, but only in the water for a few hours. That was the odd thing about it.'
'No,' said Simon. 'She'd been gone for a year. But she'd died from drowning just a few hours before I found her.'
Anders looked at his grandmother, who was still sitting with her eyes closed as if in pain, a deep furrow of anxiety between her eyebrows. He shook his head violently and said, 'So where was she, then? All that time?'
'I don't know,' said Simon. 'But she was somewhere.'
Anders sat motionless as goose bumps covered his entire body. He twitched. Stared straight ahead. Saw the picture. Twitched again.
'And that's where Maja is now,' he whispered. 'Without her snowsuit.'
Nobody said anything for a long time. Anna-Greta pushed away her saucer and looked anywhere but at Anders. Simon sat there fiddling with his matchbox. Outside and around them the sea breathed, apparently asleep. Anders sat still, twitching from time to time as yet another horrible picture pierced his breast like a cold blade.
Something inside him had known this. Perhaps he had actually remembered what had happened with Sigrid, somewhere right at the back of his mind. Or perhaps he simply knew. That a part of Maja existed inside him, and another part existed…somewhere else. Somewhere where she couldn't reach him and he couldn't reach her.
Anna-Greta broke the silence. She turned to Anders and said, 'When your great-grandfather was little, there was a man in the western part of the village who lost his wife to the sea. He would never talk about how it had happened. But he never stopped searching for her.'
Anna-Greta pointed to the east.
'Do you know about the wreck? On the rocks on Ledinge? There were bits left when I was young, but it's all gone now. That was his boat. I don't know what he did to…annoy it. But at any rate his boat was found there eventually. Way inland, up on a hill. Smashed to pieces.'
'Sorry,' said Simon. 'Did you say he was from the western part of the village?'
'Yes,' said Anna-Greta. 'That's what I'm getting at. His house and all the houses around it…disappeared. A storm came from the west. And as you know perfectly well: storms don't come from the west, from the mainland. It's not possible. But this one did. It came in the night, blew up to hurricane force in a moment. Eight houses were… smashed to kindling. Five people died. Three of them were children who didn't get away in time.'
She uttered the last sentences with her gaze firmly fixed on Anders. 'Plus the man who set out in the first place. The one who started it all.' When Anders didn't say anything she added, 'And you know what happened to Domaro even further back in the past. We told you that yesterday.'
Anders grabbed the bottle and took another couple of swigs. He didn't respond. Anna-Greta's face was distorted into an expression somewhere between sympathy and rage-more of a grimace, really.
'I understand how you feel,' she said. 'Or at least…1 can guess. But it's dangerous. Not only for you. For everyone who lives here.' She reached across the table and placed her hand on the back of Anders' hand, which was ice cold. 'I know this sounds terrible, but…1 saw you standing looking at the anchor yesterday. In Naten. There are many people who have drowned, who have disappeared…naturally, if I can put it like that. Maja could have been one of them. You could look at it like that. And forgive me for saying this, but…you have to look at like that. For your own sake. And everyone else's.'
The handover (we are secret)
Anders was sitting on the edge of the bed in the guest room. Among all the pictures that had flashed through his mind during the course of the evening, there was one that wouldn't go away, that left him no peace.
He had brought it up from the kitchen and hung it carefully over the back of the wooden chair by the window. Now he had it in his arms as he rocked back and forth.
If he could only dress her in her snowsuit, if he could only do that. He caressed the slightly worn fabric, the patch with Bamse and the jars of honey.
Simon and Anna-Greta had gone to bed an hour ago. Anders had offered to sleep on the sofa downstairs if they…wanted to be alone on their wedding night, if they didn't want anyone nearby. The offer had been met with an assurance that it was absolutely fine to have someone nearby, that as far as the wedding night was concerned, this was a night like any other. A quiet night.
Anders hugged the snowsuit, torn between two worlds. A normal world, where his daughter had drowned two years ago and become one of those lost at sea, a world where you could talk about sleeping on the sofa and receive an indulgent reply, where people got married and put on a buffet.
And then there was the other world. The one where Domaro lay in the arms of dark forces that held the island in an iron grip. Where you had to watch every step and be prepared to be torn away from relationships at any moment. So that not everything will disappear.
That was probably why Maja had always liked the stories about Bamse so much. There were problems, there were baddies and there were those who were stupid. But it was never really dangerous. There was never any real doubt about how you ought to behave. Everybody knew. Even Croesus Vole. He was a baddie because he was a baddie, not because he was splintered and anxious.
And Bamse. Always on the side of good. Protector of the weak, unfailingly honest.
Anders snorted. Bamse was much more interesting in Maja's version. A bear who means well, but can't help getting into a fight as soon as he gets the chance.
Yes, perhaps. Perhaps it was because she broke the songs that she broke things as well. They had to become splintered, to become like her. But more interesting.
Anders took out one of the Bamse comics he had brought with him and found that the story was ridiculously appropriate for what was going on. Little Leap wins a holiday in a ski resort. The hotel turns out to be haunted. The ghost seems to be after Little Leap, but Shellman understands, as always.
He builds a machine that makes a Little Leap costume drop down over the invisible ghost. The ghost sees himself in the mirror and stops being horrible. He wasn't after Little Leap at all. He just wanted i‹› be like him.
Anders felt something switch off inside his head while he w.is reading the story; he came back to himself only when he put the comic down.
He wanted to sleep. He wanted Maja to take over and give him some kind of guidance. Before he undressed he placed the chair next to the bed. On the chair he placed a pen and an open notepad. Then he drank three gulps of water, got undressed, climbed into bed and snapped his eyes shut.
It didn't take many minutes of keeping his eyes screwed tightly shut to realise that he was wide awake. There was absolutely no chance of falling asleep, however much he wanted to. He sat up and leaned back against the wall.
The paper on the chair glowed white, and his eyes were drawn towards it. The clarity of his vision shifted. He
