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Gothenburg.
    The bell above the cake shop door tinkled.
    “Afternoon.”
    The girl behind the counter was blonde and pretty, and looked extremely bored. She listened to Julia with a vacant expression as she asked for two cinnamon pastries and a couple of strawberry cream cakes for herself and Gerlof.
    This girl could have been her thirty years earlier, but of course Julia had moved away from the island when she was just eighteen, and had lived and worked in both Kalmar and Gothenburg before the age of twentytwo. In Gothenburg she had met Michael and gotten pregnant with Jens after just a few weeks, and much of her restlessness had disappeared then and never returnednot even after their separation.
    “There aren’t many people here now,” she remarked as the
    girl lifted the cakes out of the glass display counter. “In the autumn, I mean.”
    “No,” said the girl, without smiling.
    “Do you like living here?” asked Julia.
    The girl shook her head briefly. “Sometimes. But there’s nothing to do. Borgholm only comes to life in the summer.”
    “Who says that?”
    “Everybody,” said the girl. “People from Stockholm, anyway.”
    She fastened the box of cakes and handed it over. “I’m moving to Kalmar soon,” she said. “Will that be all?”
    Julia nodded. She could have said that she too had worked in Borgholm as a teenager, in a cafe down by the harbor, and that she too had been bored, waiting for life to begin. Then all of a sudden she wanted to talk about Jens, about her sorrow and the hope that had made her come back. A little sandal in an envelope.
    She said nothing. A fan was humming away; otherwise the
    cake shop was silent.
    “Are you a tourist?” the girl asked.
    “Yes … no,” said Julia. “I’m going up to Stenvik for a few days. My family has a cottage there.”
    “It’s like Norrland up there now,” said the girl as she handed Julia her change. “Practically all the houses are empty. You never see a soul up there.”
     
    It was half past three in the afternoon by the time Julia emerged from the cake shop and looked along the street. Borgholm was virtually deserted. There were a dozen or so people around, one or two cars, not much else. The huge ruined castle looked down from the hill above the town, its windows dark, empty holes.
    A cold wind was sweeping along the streets as Julia walked
    back to the car. It was almost eerily silent.
    She passed a big notice board covered in a patchwork of posters, all stuck on top of one another: American action films at the cinema in Borgholm, rock concerts in the ruined castle, and various evening classes. The posters had faded in the sun, and their corners had been chewed to pieces by the wind.
    This was the first time Julia had visited the island as an adult so late in the year. During the low season, when Oland slowed down. She walked back to the car.
    I’m coming now, Jens.
    North of the town the dry, grassy plain of the alvar continued on both sides of the road. The road headed slowly inland from the coast, pointing straight into the flat landscape, where round, lichencovered gray stones had been lifted from the fields and used to build long, low walls. The walls formed a gigantic pattern right across the alvar.
    Julia had a slight feeling of agoraphobia out here beneath
    the vast sky, and longed for a glass of red winea longing which grew stronger as she got closer to Stenvik. At home she was trying to stop drinking every day, and she never drank when she was driving, but out here in this desolate place the bottles of wine in her bag seemed like the only interesting company she had. She wanted to lock herself in somewhere and devote all her attention to them until they were empty.
    On the way north she met only two vehicles, a bus and a
    tractor. She drove past yellow signs bearing the names of small villages along the road, names she remembered from all those earlier journeys. She could recite them by heart, like a nursery rhyme. They