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lived in a secluded house in Ulvkälla. One night Sture and Hans stood outside her darkened window. They listened in silence before they went home across the river bridge.
    The next night they returned and nailed a dead rat to her front door. Her deformity led them to torment her for a few intense weeks that summer.
    One night they threw an anthill they had dug up through her open kitchen window. Another night they splashed varnish all over her currant bushes and finished by putting a crow with its head cut off in her letterbox, along with some pages torn out of a well-thumbed and sticky issue of
Cocktail
that they had found in a dustbin. Two nights later they came back, this time equipped with a pair of Nyman, the courthouse caretaker’s, hedge clippers. Their plan was to butcher her flowers.
    While Hans stood watch by the corner of the house, Sture attacked one of the well-tended flower beds. Then the front door opened and the Noseless One stood there in a light-coloured bathrobe and asked them, quite calmly, without being sad or angry, why they were doing these things.
    They had an escape route planned. But instead of disappearing like two hares in a hunt they just stood there as though struck by a sight they couldn’t escape.
    An angel, thinks Hans Olofson much later, many years after vanishing into the tropical night of Africa. He remembers her like an angel descended from heaven, now that she is dead and he has set out on the journey to fulfil her dream that he has taken as his own.
    In the summer night the Noseless One stands in the doorway, her white bathrobe gleaming in the early grey light of dawn. She waits for their answer, which never comes.
    Then she moves aside and asks them to come in. Her gesture is not to be refused. With bowed heads they pad past her, into her freshly scrubbed kitchen. Hans recognises at once the odour of soap, from his father’s furious scrubbing, and he has a fleeting thought that maybe the Noseless One also scrubs her way through sleepless, haunted nights.
    Her kindness makes them weak, defenceless. If fire and fuming sulphur had spewed out of the hole where her nose used to be, they could have dealt with the situation more easily. A dragon can be more easily conquered than an angel.
    The smell of soap is mixed with the scent of bird cherry trees from outside her open kitchen window. A clock ticks softly on the wall. The marauders crouch down with their gaze fixed firmly on the linoleum. There in the kitchen, it is as quiet as if a prayer service were in progress. And perhaps the Noseless One is silently appealing to Hurrapelle’s God to counsel her on how she can make the two shipwrecked vandals explain why one morning she came out to a kitchen crawling with angry ants.
    In the minds of the two warrior brothers there is a great emptiness. Their thoughts are locked like frozen gears. What is there to explain? Their impetuous desire to torment her has no tangiblecause. The roots of evil grow in the dark subterranean soil that can scarcely be viewed, let alone explained.
    They crouch in the kitchen of the Noseless One, and after they sit in silence long enough, she lets them go. To the end she holds them there with her kindness, and she asks them to come back when they think they can explain their actions.
    The meeting with the Noseless One becomes a turning point. They return to her kitchen often, and slowly a great intimacy develops among the three. That year Hans turns thirteen and Sture fifteen. They are always welcome at her house. As if by silent agreement, they don’t talk about the crow with its throat cut or the crawling ants. A wordless apology is given, forgiveness is received, and life turns the other cheek.
    Their first discovery is that the Noseless One has a name. It isn’t just any old name, either; it’s Janine, a name that emanates a foreign, mysterious fragrance.
    She has a name, a voice, a body. She hasn’t yet turned thirty. She is still young. They begin to