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to end with: the first Tuesday of June in this Year of Our Lord 1898. The sky was bright, the lake was pure, the gulls were discreet, the forest on the hillside behind the town was full of trees that were as straight and honest as a man. She did not come.
    GOSSIP NOTED that Mrs. Lindwall had not kept her rendezvous with Anders Bodén. Gossip suggested there had been a quarrel. Gossip counter-suggested that they had decided on concealment. Gossip wondered if a sawmill manager lucky enough to be married to a woman who owned a piano imported from Germany would really allow his eye to stray to the unexceptional wife of the pharmacist. Gossip replied that Anders Bodén had always been an oaf with sawdust in his hair, and that he was merely seeking out a woman of his own class, as oafs are wont to do. Gossip added that marital relations had not been resumed in the Bodén household since the birth of their second child. Gossip briefly wondered if gossip had invented the whole story, but gossip decided that the worst interpretation of events was usually the safest and, in the end, the truest.
    Gossip ceased, or at least diminished, when it was discovered that the reason Mrs. Lindwall had not gone to visit her sister was because she was pregnant with the Lindwalls’ first child. Gossip thought this a fortuitous rescue of Barbro Lindwall’s endangered reputation.
    And that was that, thought Anders Bodén. A door opens, and then closes before you have time to walk through it. A man has as much control over his destiny as a log stencilled with red letters which is thrust back into the torrent by men armed with spiked poles. Perhaps he was no more than they said he was: an oaf lucky enough to marry a woman who had once played duets with Sjögren. But if so, and his life, from now on, would never change, then, he realized, neither would he. He would remain frozen, preserved, at this moment—no, at the moment which nearly happened, which could have happened, last week. There was nothing in the world, nothing wife, nor church, nor society could do, to prevent him from deciding that his heart would never move again.
    BARBRO LINDWALL was not convinced of her feelings for Anders Bodén until she recognized that she would now spend the rest of her life with her husband. First there was little Ulf and then, a year later, Karin. Axel doted on the children and so did she. Perhaps that would be enough. Her sister moved to the far north, where cloudberries grew, and sent her pots of yellow jam each season. In the summer, she and Axel went boating on the lake. He put on predictable weight. The children grew. One spring, a labourer from the sawmill swam in front of the steamboat and was run down, the water stained as if he had been taken by a shark. A passenger on the foredeck testified that the man had swum steadily until the last moment. Gossip claimed that the victim’s wife had been seen going into the forest with one of his workmates. Gossip added that he was drunk and had taken a bet that he could swim right across the steamer’s bows. The coroner decided that he must have been deafened by water in the ears and recorded a verdict of misadventure.
    We are just horses in our stalls, Barbro would say to herself. The stalls are unnumbered, but even so we know our places. There is no other life.
    But if only he could have read my heart before I did. I do not talk to men like that, listen to them like that, look them in the face like that. Why couldn’t he tell?
    The first time she had seen him again, each of them part of a couple strolling by the lake after church, she was relieved that she was pregnant because ten minutes later she had a bout of sickness whose cause would otherwise have been obvious. All she could think of, as she vomited into the grass, was that the fingers which held her head belonged to the wrong man.
    She never saw Anders Bodén alone; she made sure of that. Once, spotting him board the steamboat ahead of her, she turned