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said.
    “If my father were less of a businessman,” she replied, “he would shoot you.”
    “Then your father should be grateful that the husband of Mrs. Alfredsson who runs the konditori behind the church in Rättvik is also just such a businessman.” It was too long a sentence, he felt, but it did its work.
    That night, Anders Bodén lined up all the insults he had received from his wife and stacked them as neat as any woodpile. If this is what she is capable of believing, he thought, then this is what is capable of happening. Except that Anders Bodén did not want a mistress, he did not want some woman in a pastry-shop to whom he would give presents and about whom he would boast in rooms where men smoked small cigars together. He thought: of course, now I see, the fact is, I have been in love with her since we first met on the steamboat. I would not have come to it so soon had not Gertrud helped me there. I never imagined her sarcasm had any use; but this time it did.
    FOR THE NEXT two weeks, he did not allow himself to dream. He did not need to dream because everything was now clear and real and decided. He went about his work and in free moments thought about how she had not attended to the story of Mats Israelson. She had assumed it was a legend. He had told it badly, he knew. And so he began practising, like a schoolboy learning a poem. He would tell it her again, and this time she would know, simply from the way he told it, that it was true. It did not take very long. But it was important that he learn to narrate it just as he had narrated the visit to the mine.
    In 1719, he began, with some fear that the distant date might bore her, but also convinced that it gave the story authenticity. In 1719, he began, standing on the dock waiting for the return steamer, a body was discovered in the copper-mine of Falun. The body, he continued, watching the shoreline, was that of a young man, Mats Israelson, who had perished in the mines forty-nine years previously. The body, he informed the gulls which were raucously inspecting the boat, was in a state of perfect preservation. The reason for this, he explained in some detail to the belvedere, to the deaf-and-dumb asylum, to the brickworks, was that the fumes of the copper vitriol had inhibited decomposition. They knew that the body was that of Mats Israelson, he murmured to the dockhand on the jetty catching the thrown rope, because it was identified by an aged crone who had once known him. Forty-nine years earlier, he concluded, this time under his breath, in hot sleeplessness as his wife growled gently beside him and a wind flapped the curtain, forty-nine years earlier, when Mats Israelson had disappeared, that old woman, then as young as him, had been his betrothed.
    He remembered the way she had been facing him, her hand on the rail so that her wedding ring was not concealed, and had said, simply, “I would like to visit Falun.” He imagined other women saying to him, “I long for Stockholm.” Or, “At nights I dream of Venice.” They would be challenging women in city furs, and they would not be interested in any response except cap-doffing awe. But she had said, “I would like to visit Falun,” and the simplicity of it had made him unable to answer. He practised saying, with equal simplicity, “I shall take you there.”
    He convinced himself that if he were to tell the story of Mats Israelson correctly, it would make her say once more, “I would like to visit Falun.” And then he would reply, “I shall take you there.” And everything would be decided. So he worked at the story until he had it in a form that would please her: simple, hard, true. He would tell it her ten minutes after they cast off, at what he already thought of as their place, by the rail outside the first-class cabin.
    He ran through the story one final time as he reached the jetty. It was the first Tuesday in the month of June. You had to be precise about dates. 1719 to begin with. And