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back at the jetty. In church she sometimes glimpsed the back of his head, and imagined hearing his voice separately. When she went out, she protected herself with the presence of Axel; at home, she kept the children close. Once, Axel suggested they invite the Bodéns to coffee; she replied that Mrs. Bodén would certainly expect Madeira and sponge cake, and even if that was provided would look down her nose at a mere pharmacist and his wife who were both incomers. The suggestion was not repeated.
    She did not know how to think about what had happened. There was no one to ask; she thought of similar examples, but they were all disreputable and seemed to have no bearing on her own case. She was unprepared for constant, silent, secret pain. One year, when her sister’s cloudberry jam arrived, she looked at a pot, at the glass, the metal lid, the circle of muslin, the handwritten label, the date—the date!—and the occasion for all this, the yellow jam, and she thought: that is what I have done to my heart. And each year, when pots arrived from the north, she thought the same thing.
    AT FIRST , Anders continued to tell her what he knew, under his breath. Sometimes he was a tourist guide, sometimes a sawmill manager. He could, for instance, have told her about Defects in Timber . “Cup shake” is a natural splitting in the interior of the tree between two of the annular rings. “Star shake” occurs when there are fissures radiating in several directions. “Heart shake” is often found in old trees and extends from the pith or heart of the tree towards its circumference.
    IN SUBSEQUENT YEARS , when Gertrud scolded, when the akvavit took hold, when polite eyes told him he had indeed become a bore, when the lake froze at its edges and the skating race to Rättvik could be held, when his daughter emerged from church as a married woman and he saw in her eyes more hope than he knew existed, when the long nights began and his heart seemed to close down in hibernation, when his horse stopped suddenly and began to tremble at what it sensed but could not see, when the old steamboat was drydocked one winter and repainted in fresh colours, when friends from Trondheim asked him to show them the copper-mine at Falun and he agreed and then an hour before departure found himself in the bathroom forcing his fingers into his throat to make the vomit come, when the steamer took him past the deaf-and-dumb asylum, when things in the town changed, when things in the town remained the same year after year, when the gulls left their stations by the jetty to scream inside his skull, when his left forefinger had to be amputated at the second joint after he had idly pulled at a stack of timber in one of the seasoning sheds—on these occasions, and many more, he thought of Mats Israelson. And as the years passed, Mats Israelson turned in his mind from a set of clear facts which could be presented as a lover’s gift into something vaguer but more powerful. Into a legend, perhaps—a thing she would not have been interested in.
    She had said, “I would like to visit Falun” and all he had needed to reply was, “I shall take you there.” Perhaps if she had indeed said, flirtatiously, like one of those imagined women, “I long for Stockholm” or “At nights I dream of Venice” he would just have thrown his life at her, bought rail tickets the next morning, caused a scandal, and months later come home drunk and pleading. But that was not how he was, because that was not how she was. “I would like to visit Falun” had been a much more dangerous remark than “At nights I dream of Venice.”
    AS THE YEARS PASSED , and her children grew, Barbro Lindwall was sometimes assailed by a terrible apprehension: that her daughter would marry the Bodén boy. That, she thought, would be the worst punishment in the world. But in the event Karin attached herself to Bo Wicander, and could not be teased out of it. Soon, all the Bodén and the Lindwall children