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several washings. I remember, as I stood there, thanking God my father and I had come on this trip to Smögen alone. My mother, as friendly as she was with Torsten, would have had a fit. More than once during our visits to Smögen, we’d seen or heard of a family’s smokehouse blowing up like a meth lab. The men were careful, but the buildings were old and makeshift. Without official regulations or inspections, they were also unsafe.
    The floor was littered with spare rods, old fish skin, and the odd pieces of stone that Torsten occasionally dropped into the drum with a clank and a hiss. Six or seven metal rods hooked into the side walls and spanned the width of the room; each rod could hold up to forty fish. Depending on the day’s catch, Torsten cured eel, herring, or mackerel. Eel was a rarity and therefore highly prized, but my favorite was the mackerel, which the smoking process magically transformed from a stripy gray and green to a shimmering gold and black.
    Hanging with Torsten in his smokehouse was more than a way to spend the afternoon. It was an initiation of sorts, into manhood. Chest puffed up, I stoked the fire, yanked fish off rods, and piled up stones. Torsten talked the whole time, loud and clear, always telling me whathe was doing, asking me if I understood the process, what came next, why we did what we did.
    “Low heat, close the door, leave it overnight.”
    “I’ve done this before, Uncle Torsten.”
    “Come back every other hour,” he ordered. “Check the wood.”
    He handed me a pan of cured fish. “Has your father caught any mackerel lately?”
    “We brought in twenty-five this morning,” I told him.
    Torsten raised an eyebrow. “Well,” he said, smiling. “Your father’s been down in Göteborg a long time. No one can hold such a modest number against him.”
    My great-aunt Nini, Torsten’s wife, screamed from the back door of the house, “Are we ever going to get any fish? Time for lunch already!”
    “Finally, she appears,” Torsten said, as he handed me two smoked mackerel.
    In the kitchen, Nini had laid out four open-faced sandwiches: sliced boiled eggs, roe paste, mayonnaise, and a sprinkling of chives on a piece of brown bread. With a knife, she quickly filleted the mackerel, dressed it with black pepper and garlic, and topped each piece of bread with the warm, flavorful fish.
    I carried Torsten’s plate over to the table, placing it in front of him. He took a bite, and I could see in his face the pleasure he took in the rich simplicity of the meal: the flaky chunks of fish, the velvety texture of the egg, the saltiness of the roe. Then he closed his eyes. “That’s a good life,” he said.
    Torsten and Nini had a louder, more brash style than my parents, and I loved to watch the way they mirrored each other. Their shouts and seemingly exasperated murmurs were the words of two old people who had stood, united, against the harshness of the cold blue sea for sixty years and made a life together. I looked at the two of them and the simple but hugely satisfying meals they shared, and I thought, Torsten is right. That
is
a good life.
    A T 5:00 ON OUR LAST NIGHT IN S MÖGEN , my father and I walked down the hill to visit Ludvig. He had been widowed young and lived by himself on the top floor of a large house that had tenants on the first floor and nothing going on, as far as I could tell, on the floor in between. Stellan had dropped off some mackerel earlier in the day and Ludvig was halfway through cleaning it when we walked in. He’d gutted the fish and cut off their heads; then my father took over, sharpening a thin, curved knife on a block of stone and deftly slicing the flesh off the bone.
    “Marcus, if you don’t cook, we don’t eat,” my father joked.
    It was a joke, of course, because my father knew I needed no prompting to cook, which is probably why he let me take over the meal. This was my first time cooking on my own, as opposed to helping my grandmother or