The Unit

1

The aroma of chervil and freshly baked bread hit me as Vivi opened the door. I was late. I had hesitated for quite some time before I had actually walked out of my apartment and taken the few steps down the hall to Vivi’s door and knocked.

I had been feeling so tired. I had been so tired for so long, I just hadn’t had the strength to socialize, to turn up at parties or dinners or other gatherings where you were expected to have fun, to be interested in other people and to talk to more than one person at a time. I had withdrawn, been passive, at times even apathetic, and I would probably have cut myself off completely if it hadn’t been for Elsa, Alice, Vivi and Lena. They had been there the whole time. During the first weeks after Johannes’s final donation they had even taken turns to stay the night with me. Every time I woke up because I was upset or angry or felt sick or whatever, there was someone there to support and console and fetch water and make tea and listen and hold my hand until I went back to sleep.

But they were there afterward as well, after those first few days when I was presumably in shock. Quiet. In the background. On standby. And they were here whenever I needed them-or needed anyone at all-to talk to, or just to have around. And they did it without asking anything of me, without expecting me to be grateful or even pleasant. This had gone on for over two months.

When Vivi finally said one day that she was thinking of inviting some friends to dinner, and then, very cautiously, added: “It would be really lovely if you came too, Dorrit,” I felt that yes, perhaps I ought to try. And after a lot of dillydallying, here I was.

“You came!” said Vivi, taking my hand and pulling me in-as if she was afraid my courage would fail at the last minute, and I would run away if she didn’t grab hold of me and give me a helping hand.

She led me over to the table where the other guests were already seated and were just helping themselves to newly baked whole-grain bread and a steaming carrot soup with fresh chervil, because they had just given up on the idea that I might turn up. There was Elsa, Alice and Lena, and two people I’d never seen before. Vivi introduced them to me and we shook hands. They were called Görel and Mats.

Mats had arrived last month, Görel just a week ago, and she still had that expression newcomers always wear: horror and grief and rage-or whatever it might be. The fear of death, perhaps.

I sat down between Alice and Elsa, who hugged me from their respective sides. Alice took the opportunity to plant a noisy kiss on my cheek, and everyone laughed. When I turned and looked at her up close for the first time in ages, I noticed that she had changed. The coarseness of her facial features had been replaced by a kind of fragility, to a certain extent. She looked soft in a way I had never seen her look before. I thought perhaps the male hormones were finally beginning to leave her body. But she looked so tired as well, slightly hollow-eyed, slightly haggard. But then who isn’t haggard? I said to myself, pushing aside the stirrings of a sense of unease, and helped myself to the carrot soup.

During dinner the conversation moved through a range of topics. I didn’t take much part in it, I just sat there listening most of the time. Eventually they started talking about the outside world. The community. Things were changing out there. The number of childless fifty-year-old women and sixty-year-old men was dwindling significantly, and dispensable individuals were now being taken from professions that had previously been completely protected. It no longer mattered if you were a schoolteacher or a day care teacher or a welfare officer or a nurse or any other profession that involved caring for people; not even midwives were given a dispensation now; if you were childless, you were childless, end of story.

“And as if that weren’t enough,” said Mats, “there’s talk of reducing the age limit. People are really stressed out. Kids are getting pregnant at seventeen or eighteen, just to be on the safe side. The queues at the fertility and IVF clinics are getting longer and longer. The same with the adoption centers. Some people don’t make it to the front of the queue before it’s too late. And cases of HIV and chlamydia are increasing rapidly, because women are just going out and picking up one stranger after another and having unprotected sex.”

“And the number of small children being kidnapped has increased as well,” added Görel. “People are desperate.”

“There don’t seem to be any guarantees about anything any longer,” said Vivi. “Not for anyone. It makes everyone feel so insecure.”

“Yes, but why didn’t we think of that?” said Elsa. “Stealing a kid. The way these needed individuals spread themselves out with their strollers and carriages and little ones running around all over the place, they can’t possibly keep an eye on them all at the same time. I think it would be easy just to pick a sleeping baby out of its stroller in passing, while the parents are trying to watch the rest of the kids.”

I thought: So that’s the reason! That’s why Petra had so obstinately maintained that I was an unsuitable parent: because there was a shortage of dispensable individuals. The demand for organ donors and candidates for various experiments was no doubt as great as ever-perhaps even greater. I thought. But I didn’t say anything. Because I hadn’t yet told my friends I was pregnant. I hadn’t found the right opportunity yet.

Suddenly I realized that this was as good an opportunity as any, right here and now. So I opened my mouth to say: “Speaking of children, I’ve got something to tell you…”

But Alice beat me to it. Although she didn’t say “speaking of children,” she just came straight out and said, apropos of nothing at all:

“I’ve got something to tell you.” And she went on: “I’ve got something I have to tell you. And I have to do it as quickly as possible because I might not have much time left so I’ll do it now. I’ve got a brain tumor.”

There was silence. Not a cough, not a gasp, not even the slightest clink of glass, porcelain or cutlery. Just silence. Everyone froze, everyone turned to look at Alice as she sat there beside me, so small all of a sudden, it seemed to me, so old all at once. Just silence, just endless stillness, until she herself spoke again:

“They think it’s the radiation.” She turned to Görel, the new arrival, and explained: “You see, I’m involved in an experiment with some kind of radiation. Something radioactive.”

“But why?” asked Görel.

“Why? Because I’m a dispensable person and a lab bunny, of course!” said Alice, screwing her mouth up and chewing like a bunny rabbit.

Nobody laughed. Not even Alice.

“No, no,” said Görel. “I mean: what are they going to use the radiation for? What’s the point of the actual experiment?”

“The point?” said Alice, waving one hand dismissively. “My dear friend, I haven’t the faintest idea!”

2

The longer a person remains in the reserve bank unit, the more risky the experiments he or she is expected to participate in, while at the same time he or she moves closer to donating vital organs.

Now, knowing that there was a shortage of dispensable individuals, I could see that the situation in the unit had changed somewhat: fewer new arrivals came in each month-now it was usually two or three, whereas earlier it had been between five and ten. People were used up more quickly, and the generations grew shorter. Alice, for example, who had presumably been exposed to experiments involving chemical weapons, had only been in the unit for a year and a half. And during the time immediately following the dinner with Vivi, my closest friends had to undergo the following:

Elsa took part in a series of short but debilitating humane experiments, interspersed with donations. First it was a test involving some new super cleaning fluid, then an experiment with cigarettes and other tobacco- and nicotine-based products. Then her respiratory organs were exposed to vapor and gases from various chemical solvents. And between these experiments she donated part of her small intestine, the cornea from one eye, and the auditory bone from one ear. These operations just meant that she couldn’t see or hear as well, and that she got very tired, but the experiments gave her a horrible, itchy eczema on her hands and arms, bronchitis, and even asthma. Her general fitness and overall condition worsened. She was no longer the same athletic woman she had been just a year earlier; she got out of breath very easily and often had to rest. She stopped diving, and instead contented herself with quietly swimming the breaststroke in the shallow pool.

During the same period Vivi donated one kidney and a section of her liver; she also participated in all kinds of medical experiments, mostly involving psychiatric drugs that, as well as making her either listless and calm or euphorically high, also caused side effects including dizziness, palpitations, swollen limbs, rashes and hair loss. Within a very short time she and Elsa became old ladies, slowly hobbling along, arm in arm, as they went for their daily walk in the winter garden, stopping every few minutes to cough, catch their breath, or clutch their chest.

Lena, who by this time was one of the seniors, having spent three years in the unit, was taken in to donate her pancreas, liver, kidney and intestinal system. She did what Majken had done: told us that she was going to make her final donation, but not when, so that one day she simply wasn’t there anymore. The same thing happened to Elsa and Vivi as had happened to me: they went to Lena ’s room to look for her just as the section orderlies were busy clearing everything out.

But in my opinion Alice was the one who had suffered most because of the increased demand for dispensable material.

Meanwhile I was safe, protected like a sea eagle, and was sent for regular checks, given tried and tested dietary supplements, and went to yoga and dance and Friskis & Svettis. And the humane experiments I took part in involved harmless things like sleep or dream studies, or comparing and charting a person’s ability to see in the dark or to distinguish different tastes, smells and sounds.

It was only a matter of time before Elsa, Vivi and Alice would notice that I was being treated completely differently from them, despite the fact that the four of us had been in the unit for roughly the same length of time. It was of course also only a question of time before they would be able to see that I was pregnant. I had already filled out: my hips were broader, my breasts were bigger, and my stomach was protruding under the loose clothes I had started to wear to hide the changes for as long as possible. So far I could just about get away with looking like someone who had just put on weight-at least as long as I kept my clothes on. But at around this time I started to avoid changing or showering in the sports center, I stopped taking a sauna, stopped swimming because the shape of my stomach under my swimsuit was unmistakable.

In other words, it was high time I told the others about my condition. Since I still regarded Elsa as my best friend and confidante, I decided to start with her, and took the opportunity one evening when the two of us were alone together in her room. Vivi was busy with library inventory and wouldn’t be there until late-they always slept together nowadays, just as Johannes and I had done.

Elsa was lying on the sofa, breathing heavily and gasping for air from time to time. I was sitting in the armchair across from her.

“Elsa,” I said. “There’s something I have to tell you, something I’ve been… carrying for a while.”

She looked at me, closing her cloudy eye-the one from which the cornea had been donated-and squinting anxiously with the other.

“Don’t tell me you’re sick too, Dorrit?”

“No, I’m not sick. I’m pregnant.”

“What?” Elsa’s arms and legs flailed as she struggled into a sitting position, turned her good ear toward me, coughed, cleared her throat noisily, then said hoarsely, almost hissing: “What did you say?”

“I’m pregnant,” I repeated.

“Are you joking, have you gone mad?”

“I’m not joking,” I said.

Her expression-she had never looked at me that way, I didn’t recognize the way she was looking at me, didn’t know how to interpret it-disbelief or envy or disgust or what?

“How the fuck did that happen?” she spat out eventually.

I felt as if I’d been stabbed, she’d never sworn at me before. I didn’t reply.

“How long have you known?” she asked.

“Since the day before Johannes’s final donation,” I answered.

“But that was several months ago. Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I’m saying it now,” I said. “It’s…” I was stumbling now, a lump in my throat, “it’s not unusual to wait for a while before you tell friends and acquaintances; the risk of miscarriage is highest in the early weeks.”

“I know that, for fuck’s sake! Do you think I was born yesterday, do you think you’re the first person I know who’s ended up pregnant and started handing out a whole lot of completely superfluous information?”

Once again I didn’t reply.

“How far along are you?” she asked, then gasped for air.

“Seventeen or eighteen weeks,” I managed to say before her chest started rattling, and it was as if her windpipe was somehow blocked, as if something had gone down the wrong way, but then came a thin, whistling sound. I imagined a very, very narrow, flattened tube through which a minute amount of air managed to filter, down into her lungs. She grabbed her inhaler, which was next to her on the sofa, held it to her mouth, and pressed the button; there was a faint click and she breathed in. After a little while she began to breathe more evenly, more calmly, but the whistling sound was still there as a faint accompaniment when she spoke:

“So you’re going to have a child?” she said. “A baby? Here?”

I shook my head.

“No. Not here. Are you going to go out there and live a needed, worthwhile life, showing off with your offspring and spreading yourself out all over the streets and squares and public transportation, pushing everybody else out of the way with your stroller and all the rest of the stuff you’ll find it necessary to carry around with you?”

I shook my head again, then told her as briefly and matter-of-factly as I could about the two choices Petra had given me: have the fetus transplanted or have the child adopted. Of course I didn’t say anything about the third alternative, the one connected to the key card that was still in the right pocket of my pants; I put my hand in my pocket and touched it from time to time, undecided. So far I hadn’t been in any state to make my mind up on that particular question, or even to look for doors that might lead out of the unit.

After my short explanation I expected Elsa to be sympathetic, or at least to politely express regret at the fact that I wouldn’t be allowed to be a parent to my child. But she didn’t. Instead she said:

“I don’t know, Dorrit, but this feels really bad. It feels like shit, to be honest.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“Well, you’re not one of us anymore. I mean, how are we going to be able to… How are we going to be able to trust you? Now that you’ve gone and become like them?”

I didn’t know how to respond to this. I was completely unprepared for her reaction. I didn’t understand it. I understood that she probably, in common with most dispensable individuals, lived with the sorrow encapsulated within her of never having had a child, and that this sorrow had now been activated. But I didn’t understand why she was so angry with me; after all, I hadn’t gotten pregnant in order to upset her or to hurt anyone.

When I didn’t speak, she went on:

“So you’re going to be waddling around here, with a big belly like a Buddha, looking smug and important and on a higher plane, just like all those needed stuck-up bitches out there in the community?”

I didn’t say anything now either. I just got up and left. Behind me I could hear her having another attack, gasping and panting for air. The faint click of the inhaler was the last thing I heard before I closed the door behind me.

3

Alice went downhill quickly. It had begun with headaches, pains in her jaw, dizziness and anxiety. Just after she had told us about her tumor, she started to get confused from time to time. She would suddenly lose the thread while she was talking, would forget that we’d arranged to meet, would get lost and be unable to find her way home, or would get the day’s activities all mixed up. She was often upset, weeping in despair. The unit authorities let her carry on as long as she was no danger to herself or to others, for example as long as she didn’t do anything like leaving something on the stove. But we all knew it was only a matter of time before she was sent away to make her final donation.

We tried to spend time together as we used to do, Alice, Elsa, Vivi and I, but we didn’t have the same joy, the same healing humor between us. This was partly because Alice ’s illness increasingly overshadowed everything, and partly because the relationship between Elsa and me was chilly to say the least, which naturally affected the atmosphere too.

I hadn’t gone through with my plan to tell Vivi and Alice about my condition as well. I presumed that Elsa had passed the information on to Vivi, and I wasn’t sure whether I ought to tell Alice at all. When I noticed how quickly she was deteriorating, getting lost in time and space more and more often, and staying that way for longer and longer periods, I decided there wasn’t any point in saying anything.

But even if we couldn’t quite manage to socialize like before, we still took care of Alice. When she became bedridden we took turns sitting with her every evening and night. During the day members of staff came and went, made sure that she ate something, washed herself and got dressed-things that at quite an early stage she forgot to do, or forgot that she’d done already. Sometimes she took a shower every hour or so, sometimes she didn’t wash for several days, sometimes she ate breakfast several times a day, while on other days she would forget to eat at all. She would go around wearing several layers of clothes because, strangely enough, she didn’t notice that she was already dressed when she decided it was time to put some clothes on.

One night when it was my turn to sit with her, I was woken by the sound of her crying as I lay on the sofa in the living room. She was crying like a child, that all-absorbing, abandoned sobbing that is so heartrending you’ll do anything in your power to make things right again, and I shot up from the sofa, felt dizzy and almost lost my balance in the darkness, leaned on the wall for support, and tottered off feeling slightly nauseous. In the bedroom I switched on the light and she was lying there in bed, flat on her back with her arms down by her sides, looking up at the ceiling and sobbing so hard that her whole body was shaking.

I sat down and got hold of her shoulders.

“There now, Alice, it’s okay,” I said. “What is it? What are you sad about?”

She didn’t reply, just kept on sobbing as if she could neither see, hear, nor feel my presence. I spoke to her in a calming voice, stroked her arms, her hair and her cheeks, dried her tears with the back of my hand. I tried to reach her, tried to make her understand that she wasn’t alone.

“I’m here, Alice,” I said. “I’m here. Maybe I can help you. Don’t be scared, there’s nothing to be scared of.”

I just kept talking, as reassuringly and calmly as I could, and after a long time the sobbing slowly subsided and she said:

“I know. I know you’re there, Mom, but I can’t see you.”

For a fraction of a second I considered whether I should tell her that I wasn’t her mother, but decided not to bother; when it came down to it, it didn’t really matter who I was at that particular moment, and instead I said:

“That’s because you’re looking up at the ceiling, darling. I’m sitting beside you.”

She lowered her gaze then, her eyes flickering around the room, turned her head in my direction and eventually managed, with some difficulty, to focus on my face. She sighed deeply, closed her eyes, rolled over onto her side facing me, curled up, made a few contented smacking noises with her lips, then fell asleep. I pulled the covers up over her shoulder, stroked her hair and went back to the sofa in the living room, and I fell asleep too.

In the morning she knew exactly who I was once again. She was just tired, bone weary somehow-the sort of tiredness, I assume, that sleep doesn’t really touch; you just have to work your way through it, and either it disappears of its own accord, or it stays put and becomes a part of you. In Alice ’s case, of course, the tiredness was due to the tumor, and was definitely there to stay. I helped her to the bathroom then back to bed, an effort so taxing that she went back to sleep for a while as I got breakfast ready.

“Thank you, Dorrit,” she said, slurring her words slightly, when I carried in the breakfast tray. “You’re an angel.”

“So are you,” I said. “You’ve taken care of me plenty of times.”

She drew herself up into a sitting position and I plumped up the pillows so that she had some support for her back when she leaned against the headboard.

“Yes, but you weren’t ill,” she said. “It’s harder work with sick people, especially if they’re going to die soon.”

As I passed her a cup of coffee I said I wasn’t sure if I agreed with her. “A person who’s physically healthy but in despair can be just as difficult to deal with, surely. Looking after someone who’s ill is quite simple, really; at least you know what you have to do, in purely practical terms. But what do you do with someone you can’t do anything for?”

Alice smiled.

“You listen, I guess,” she said.

“Yes, and isn’t that the hardest thing of all?” I said.

“Is it? It doesn’t require any special knowledge or skills. Just the ability to hear. And a little calm in your body. The ability to sit still and listen. I don’t see why it should be so difficult.”

Then she turned her attention to her coffee for a while, taking tiny, tiny sips, closing her eyes for a second after each sip, looking as if she was really enjoying it. Then she suddenly stopped, looked at me and said:

“Try not to be angry with Elsa.”

“What?” I said. “So you know we…”

I didn’t know how to finish the sentence, so I let it hang there, gaping, incomplete.

“I’ve noticed,” replied Alice in that slow, tired tone of voice that had become hers. She added:

“You have told her, haven’t you?”

“Told her what?”

“That you’re having a baby, of course.”

I frowned and glanced down at my stomach.

“Oh, it’s been obvious from the start,” said Alice. “Ever since… let’s see, it must have been just before Johannes died, I think. A week or so before that.”

I must have looked as if I’d seen a ghost, because she laughed and said:

“Don’t look at me like that, there’s nothing strange about it, I’m not psychic or anything. I’ve known so many women who’ve gotten pregnant and had children that I’ve learned to recognize the signs straightaway. Something happens to a woman’s face when she becomes pregnant; it becomes a fraction broader, somehow, and so does the mouth. And there’s something subtle about the posture and the look in the eyes that changes too, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.”

She put the cup down on the bedside table, her hand shaking; it was as if she didn’t have enough strength to talk and hold a coffee cup at the same time.

“What are you going to do?” she asked. “Are you going to give birth to it?”

“Yes.”

“And then?”

I snorted. “What do you think?” I said.

“I don’t think anything,” she said. “You tell me.”

“They’re going to take it away,” I said. “They’re going to take it from me and give it to someone else.”

Alice looked at me, with absolute clarity, as if she were looking straight through me, but she didn’t say anything else; it was as if she knew, or at least suspected, that I had a choice, a possibility, a way out.

There’s something strange about people who know they’re going to die soon. It’s as if their senses are expanded to superhuman dimensions, as if they acquire X-ray vision and become mind readers and can see into the future and suddenly understand everything that’s going on inside and between other people. And either that really is the case, or else we just want to believe it is, because it makes dying more attractive and easier to reconcile ourselves with, somehow.

In the end Alice said:

“Anyway, try not to be angry with Elsa.”

“I’m not angry with Elsa,” I said. “She’s the one who’s angry with me.”

“Try to understand her,” said Alice. “I might have reacted like her as well, if it weren’t… if it hadn’t been for this.”

She tapped herself on the head.

“Try to understand her,” she repeated, and I was afraid she was on her way into a new episode of short-term memory loss. But she went on: “You haven’t forgotten how it feels to lose a friend because of a child, I hope?”

“But she isn’t losing me,” I said. “I’m here, I’m not about to disappear. And if anyone is losing anything it’s me, losing my child.”

Alice looked at me in that same way again, clear and omniscient. I didn’t say any more, and we sat there quietly for a while. She reached for her coffee cup again. I offered her a plate with two cheese sandwiches that I’d made, but she shook her head. She looked even more tired now, and I had the impression that I was literally watching her disappear, little by little, before my eyes. I put the plate back on the bedside table, and all of a sudden I felt inexpressibly sad; it was as if a trapdoor had opened inside me, and I couldn’t stop myself from crying. In a vain attempt to hide the fact that I was crying, I turned my head away.

“Dorrit, my dear…,” said Alice, putting her cup back down on the bedside table.

“I’m sorry!” I sniveled. “I ought to be strong. Strong for you. But it’s just that I can’t stand-I hate-the thought of losing you!”

“I know that, Dorrit,” she replied calmly. “It comforts me to know that. And that’s enough for me. You don’t need to be strong.”

That was the first time in my life someone had told me I didn’t need to be strong.

“Hey,” she said next. “How about climbing in here with me for a while? I think it would do both of us good.”

I nodded, blew my nose on one of the napkins on the tray, then went around to the other side of the double bed, lifted up the covers and crawled in beside Alice. She was warm, red hot, like a stove.

That was the last real conversation I had with the Alice I had gotten to know. That was the last time she knew it was me she was talking to for more than a couple of minutes at a time. Within a week she had made her final donation. A boy with diabetes received islet cells from her pancreas, and one of the country’s most popular television personalities, a mother with two children, received her remaining kidney.

4

My new writing project had remained more or less untouched over the past few months. The only thing I had done was to read through what I had already written: thirty pages or so, a good start-though I say so myself. But a good start doesn’t go far, not if you no longer have any idea how you want the narrative to proceed, and particularly if you can no longer remember what you wanted to achieve with the story. It was as if the train had left, the train carrying the theme and my motivation.

I did, however, make one last attempt just after Alice ’s final donation. I thought perhaps I might find some solace in the project, I thought I might be able to rediscover my motivation through that solace. So I sat down on my fantastic desk chair with support for the base of my spine, my neck and my arms, switched on the computer, opened the file. Then I sat there for a good while, three or four hours or more. Wrote a few lines. Deleted them. Wrote a few more lines. Deleted them again. Took out a notepad and wrote by hand instead. Crossed out what I’d written, turned over the page and tried again, wrote, crossed out, turned the page and tried over and over again, but no, I just got angry and tired. In the end I decisively selected the document on the screen and moved it to the recycle bin, then emptied the recycle bin and shut down the computer. Leaned back in the chair against the headrest. My gaze happened to fall on Majken’s picture of the deformed fetus, either grimacing with pain or smiling scornfully. And it was then, at that very moment, that I first felt a movement in my belly. A brief, fleeting movement a bit like an air bubble, somehow, that was definitely not gas or anything else connected with the digestive process.

I looked down at my belly and it happened again: a kick or a push, perhaps even a movement of the head, how should I know, but it was the first tangible sign that something was not only growing but also living-and living it up-in there.

“Hello there,” I whispered, and pressed my hand gently against my stomach over my shirt. “Hello, little one.”

I did nothing more that day. I just called down to lab 4, where I was currently participating in a safe but irritating psychological experiment to do with living space and territory and so on, and said I needed to rest today. The team leading the experiment was very understanding about that kind of thing. It was partly because they knew I was expecting a child and was tired and slightly nauseous almost all the time, and partly because they were psychologists, so I guess it was their job to be understanding. Afterward I went and lay down on the bed, took the fossil stone out of my left pocket and lay there holding it, turning it round and round in one hand while the other hand rested on my stomach beneath my shirt.

After an hour and a half I felt another bubbling movement in my belly, and at the same time a very, very slight, almost imperceptible pressure against the palm of my hand. I pressed back, carefully. Another movement, almost like a reply. I gasped, then I laughed, then I cried, then I got up and went to the bathroom and had a pee and washed my face. Then I went and lay down again and fell asleep.

If anyone had asked me whether these early kicks or pushes made me happy or unhappy, I wouldn’t have known how to answer them. I didn’t know whether what I felt was longing or loss, togetherness or loneliness.

A few days later I went for an ultrasound. Amanda Jonstorp herself was doing it. She squeezed out a blob of clear gel; it was cold and it tickled and I giggled a little. She smiled at me, then picked up the wide probe and began to slide it over my stomach, alternating between small movements and broad sweeps. At the same time she stared with concentration at a computer screen that was turned away from me.

“Does everything look okay?” I asked.

“Yes, everything looks great,” said Amanda. “Better than expected, to be honest.”

“So can I have a look now?” I said.

“What?” she said, stopping abruptly in mid-sweep through the slippery gel on my stomach, and I realized I wasn’t meant to see my child on that screen, wasn’t meant to carry around a blurred picture of my scan to show everybody I bumped into who wasn’t quick enough to come up with an excuse to get out of it.

Amanda had red blotches on her cheeks and something of Petra Runhede about her as she stumbled over her words:

“I… I’m… really sorry, Dorrit. I thought… I thought you… realized. I thought… You do understand it would be wrong for us to encourage you to… to… bond with the fetus.”

As I was walking toward the elevators in the clinic reception area, I pushed my hand into my pocket and felt the key card. Just as when I had been carrying that little crumpled note with the message to Potter, I had changed pants several times since that day in February when I had been given the card, and by this time I had become very adept at moving it from the dirty pair on their way to the laundry to the clean pair I took out of the closet. I would hold it against my palm with my thumb and make sure I kept the back of my hand angled upward until I had slipped the card into the right front pocket of the clean pants. At the same time I would do my best to distract attention from that hand by doing something with the other: scratching my head, coughing into it, lifting the lid of the laundry basket and putting in the dirty pants, smoothing out a crease or picking off a loose thread. I was silent, quick and discreet, just as Birthmark had advised me to be.

The key card had been constantly on my mind over the past months. I had often slipped my hand into my pocket to feel it as I was doing now, and every time I had done so I had repeated the code to myself: 98 44, 98 44-which I also did now. But I hadn’t done any more, not yet; I still hadn’t come to a decision as to whether I would use the card or not. I didn’t make a decision now either, but this time it was as if everything associated with the key card-the possibilities, the risks and the uncertainty -had moved up into the part of the brain that actually thinks. And I realized I had reached a point where I had to make a decision.

I don’t know if it was because of this shift or if I would have seen what I saw in any case, but just as I came out of the hospital lobby with my hand in my pocket and started to walk toward elevator H, I saw, in an alcove next to the row of elevator doors, a staff member fiddling with something, her face turned to the wall. The wall was the color of linden flowers just there, exactly like the uniform shirt she was wearing, and it was quite dark in the alcove. But not so dark that I couldn’t see her, and after a moment I also saw that she was actually standing in front of a door, a very narrow one, with no handle; it was the same color as the wall, surrounded by a door frame, again exactly the same shade of green, and she was fiddling with something next to this door frame, but not for long; it only took two or three seconds for her to do what was necessary to open the door, and a second or two more for her to push it open a little way, slip through it and disappear, whereupon the door quickly and soundlessly closed behind her.

5

Vivi carried herself just as beautifully as before, just as fine-limbed and lovely. But she was moving more slowly and more stiffly as she walked around the library pushing a little cart, replacing the books on the shelves. I saw her through the big window facing out onto the square as I came around with two films and a book to return.

For the past two weeks or so I hadn’t gone out any more than necessary; I had just spent time with my own thoughts and my steadily expanding belly. It was showing now, my belly, I could no longer hide it, even under the loosest, bulkiest clothes, even if it wasn’t yet quite so large that an observer could be 100 percent certain I was pregnant just by looking at me when I was fully dressed. At least that’s what I thought. When I walked into the library and Vivi caught sight of me, she stopped short and said:

“Wow! I mean: hi! I haven’t seen you for a long time, Dorrit.”

She left the cart of books between two shelves and hobbled over to me at the circulation desk.

She had lost great clumps of her thick, shiny hair and nowadays always wore a handkerchief knotted around her head. It made her face look smaller, and her eyes and mouth bigger, and the whole thing gave her a naked, vulnerable appearance.

“How are things?” I asked tentatively.

“Okay,” she said.

“And… Elsa?”

“Not bad. A little better than she was a while ago, actually.”

I placed the book and the films on the counter, and was just about to ask her to give Elsa my best wishes, when she said:

“What’s going on with you two these days? You never see each other. She never talks about you. And if I ask her about something to do with you, she changes the subject. What’s happened?”

“Hasn’t she said anything?”

“No, that’s what I’m telling you: she doesn’t say a thing.”

And that’s the way it was: Elsa hadn’t told Vivi about our conversation, our quarrel. She hadn’t told her I was expecting a child.

“You’re joking!” she exclaimed when I told her.

And then she laughed. “And there I was thinking… I was thinking you’d started comfort eating or something. Or maybe you were taking part in some experiment that made you swell up, or where you had to eat a load of candy and cookies all day and weren’t allowed to exercise or something, these researchers come up with so many dumb ideas. And in fact you’re…”

She broke off, and said: “But how did it happen? I mean, how is it possible? Have you had hormone treatment? Or fertilized eggs implanted?”

“Why would I have done that?”

“I don’t mean on your own initiative, of course,” she said. “But it could have been done to you, couldn’t it? While you were anesthetized.”

“But I haven’t been anesthetized,” I said. “Not since I donated my kidney, and that’s ages ago; only an elephant could be pregnant that long.”

“I see,” she said. “Well, maybe you were impregnated naturally.”

“I think so,” I said.

I was about to leave; I was tired and Vivi seemed kind of strained, somehow. But now she said in her usual warm, serious tone:

“Was it Johannes who…?”

I nodded.

“Did he… Did he find out before…?”

“Just about,” I replied.

She looked at me. It was too much for me, that sympathetic look. I glanced away, swallowed. Then she held out her long arms, pulled me close to her, wrapped me in her embrace and stroked my back. She was almost as tall as Johannes; the top of my head reached her chin, and I closed my eyes, allowed myself to be enveloped by her, leaning my cheek against her breast. The scent of her reminded me of honey and fields of oilseed rape in bloom. I thought about Jock, and my dilapidated house and the farms and meadows around it, I thought about early summer in Skåne, about the wind and the sound of tractors and blackbirds and nightingales and young crows and the neighbors’ children playing and the wood stacked up to dry and washing hanging on the line between the apple trees, flapping in the breeze, and I could see my blue-painted garden furniture and there, on one of the chairs, I saw Johannes sitting, scratching Jock behind the ears as I walked toward them with a tray of coffee and cookies. I could see it as if it were a memory, and I didn’t cry, but it was as if my throat had been ripped apart, as if I had been crying, and my legs were about to give way.

Vivi led me over to her chair behind the circulation desk. I sat down. She fetched me a glass of water and pulled out a chair for herself, then sat down beside me with her arm around me. I drank a little of the water. Then we just sat there, behind the desk, until some borrowers came along needing Vivi’s help.

6

Elsa was lying on the lawn in the winter garden. She was lying on her side in the sun on a blanket. She was resting her head on her arm; an open book lay beside her. But she wasn’t reading, she was sleeping. Her rib cage was heaving, long deep breaths, even, almost completely free of that rattle now, but she coughed in her sleep from time to time. I stood in the shade on the gravel path just a few yards away from her. Stood there missing her. Dare I go over? Dare I go over and sit down next to her, be there when she woke up?

I did it, I walked from the crunching gravel onto the silent grass, sat down cross-legged an arm’s length away from her, in front of her, so that I wasn’t casting a shadow over her.

I had thought a great deal about what Alice had said. “You haven’t forgotten what it feels like to lose a friend because of a child, I hope?” Of course I hadn’t forgotten that feeling of being abruptly pushed out of a close circle to some distant periphery. Coming second, third, fourth, last. Being treated like someone less knowledgeable, someone inferior. Being shut out-and yet, paradoxically enough, being taken for granted. The old friends out in the community who had become parents had continued wanting to see me, but when we did meet up they were distant, sometimes condescending and always inaccessible, as if they were wrapped in invisible padding, at least when the children were small. The strange thing was that this only applied to my female friends; the men were certainly very much preoccupied with the child and with the upheaval involved in becoming a parent, and later with the chaos that ensued when they had their second child, which intensified when they had the third, fourth, fifth and so on. The men were absorbed, yes, but it was as if the women were on Valium: they talked and laughed and nodded and smiled, but they weren’t really there. It was as if they focused all their energy and all their interest in others on one single entity: the child.

I had always thought this was a deliberate stance, that they actually chose to close themselves off to more or less everyone except the child, who of course was dependent on them for its existence. I had always been convinced that this was a conscious decision to prioritize. But now I wasn’t so sure anymore. Now, while I was carrying something that would be a child, I noticed that I was changing; I was becoming self-absorbed in a new way that was hard to define, and I was beginning to sense that the self-sufficiency of those parents I had known was perhaps not a matter of choice. It wasn’t that I didn’t care about my friends anymore. My senses were heightened as never before, particularly my sense of smell and my hearing, and I was sensitive and easily moved, but at the same time I was becoming less and less receptive to the sorrows and troubles of those around me, and to their joy and happiness as well, when it came down to it. My friends meant a great deal to me-the few who were left. I didn’t think any less of them than before, quite the opposite, in fact. I rejoiced in the new ones, Görel and Mats and a couple of others, was immensely grateful that Vivi was such a good friend, and I grieved for Alice and Lena and Erik and Vanja and Majken and all the others I had lost. And Elsa, lying here in front of me on the grass, her head resting on her arm-I missed Elsa so much it felt as if my heart were being ripped out of my body. I enjoyed meeting and spending time with my friends, and when I did see them I registered everything they said and reacted to it, but a second later it slid off me like rain off a newly polished car: rapidly and without friction and without a single drop penetrating the surface. It was strange: in one way I was more sensitive than ever, in another I was more or less closed off.

When I had perceived this change in my own attitude, I couldn’t help asking myself if there might be a biological cause, if this might be some form of primitive behavior on the part of the female mammal that women couldn’t escape, just as we couldn’t escape the fact that if we were to become a parent naturally, then unlike men we didn’t have all the time in the world.

At any rate, I had to admit that Elsa was right, and I intended to tell her so as soon as she woke up, which I did. She had just about realized that I was sitting there, when I said:

“You were right, Elsa. I am indeed waddling around looking smug and important and on a higher plane, just like all those needed stuck-up bitches out there in the community.”

She sat up, pushed her hair back, yawned, and rubbed her eyes. “Oh yes?”

“But,” I went on, “I have to tell you that the smugness has nothing whatsoever to do with human economic growth. It’s not that kind of self-sufficiency; it has absolutely nothing to do with what I can do for society or how good and valuable I am. Everything is here-and here.” I placed my hand on my midriff, then on my head. “And I can’t help it. It isn’t something I have any control over, that’s just the way it is. I’m at the mercy of my hormones!”

“Okay,” she said. “I understand. I understand that’s something I don’t understand. I don’t suppose you’d like to go for a swim instead of sitting here talking in riddles?”

I couldn’t help laughing. I stood up, held my hand out and pulled her to her feet in a gentlemanly manner. She picked up her book, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights , and I folded up her blanket, and we ambled off arm in arm with the book and the blanket along the gravel path toward the galleria, stopping to say hi to Mats who was digging in a flowerbed, dressed only in shorts and heavy boots and a tool belt. On a cart behind him on the path were shrubs in pots, waiting to be planted. In the distance, on a bench, I could see Potter with his round, black-framed glasses. He was munching on an apple and flipping through a magazine. It was lunchtime; people were pouring up and down the staircase to the Terrace restaurant and its groaning buffet. Still arm in arm, Elsa and I emerged into the Atrium Walkway, and took the first elevator down to the sports facility.

We swam, slowly and for a long time, side by side, in silence. Afterward we had a sauna. I sat at the bottom, closest to the door, pushing it open slightly from time to time, unsure what I had actually heard about pregnancy and saunas: had I heard that it was a good thing, or had I heard that it wasn’t? Elsa sat right up at the top where it was hottest, on the third bench, and leaned back against the wall. We didn’t say much, we mostly just sat there being friends again. From time to time one of us would say lazily to the other something along the lines of: “Have you heard that so-and-so is involved in an experiment with this and that?” or “So-and-so has finished with so-and-so, did you know?” or “Do you remember that guy back home in the village who was like this or that and who used to do this or that?”

But when we eventually decided we’d had enough, and Elsa climbed down, she said:

“Dorrit, do you remember what we promised each other at the start?”

I remembered. Shortly after Majken’s death Elsa and I had promised each other that the day one of us found out we were on the list for our final donation, we would tell the other-and not only that it was going to happen, but also when. So that the other person wouldn’t have to run around looking for someone who no longer existed.

“Yes,” I said, looking up at her as she stood there in front of me, the sweat pouring down her wiry body, which was quite scarred by this stage.

“Why?”

“Does it still apply?” she said.

“Yes, I guess it does,” I said, and felt the anxiety stab down into my chest and squeeze it, hard. Don’t say it’s time now! I thought. Don’t say we have to part now, when we’ve just made friends again, don’t say that she’s going to… and my voice was trembling as I repeated, emphasizing the question:

“Why?”

“Oh,” said Elsa, taking a step toward the door and pushing it open, “I just wanted to check. I just wanted to know that’s what will happen. That you won’t just disappear. That you won’t just be gone one day, without telling me in advance.”

Feeling relieved I got up and followed her out. My legs were shaking, I had been so scared and now I was so relieved. In the shower room she turned to me.

“Can we promise each other, Dorrit? Can we promise each other again?”

“Of course, Elsa,” I said. “Of course we can.”

“Good,” she said, and her voice gave away the fact that she was moved. It was trembling, somehow exposed, as she went on: “Shall we shake on it?”

We clasped hands and then we hugged each other, standing there naked and covered in sweat on the tiled floor outside the sauna. A woman with short white hair smiled at us as she passed on the way in. She reminded me a little of Lena, but she had a longer, narrower face and her expression was more tired.

It was only some hours later, during the night, as I was lying alone in my bed with one hand on my stomach, gazing up at the ceiling, that it occurred to me: “disappear” didn’t necessarily have to mean “make the final donation.” It could just as easily mean “leave,” “run away.” And if I decided to go, if I decided to run away, I wouldn’t be able to keep my promise to Elsa unless I revealed my secret to her, which would mean breaking the promise I had made never to tell anyone about the key card. And I am not the kind of person who breaks promises. I am not the kind of person who betrays a trust. For example, in this story I have not revealed the true circumstances under which I received the key card. Neither of the two nurses who met me when I raced into the surgical department that day has a birthmark. Nor was it either of those two who gave me the key card, and the conversation with the person who did give me the card did not in fact take place in the break room where I sat and waited as I gazed out at the snow-covered park with the pond and the ducks, but in a completely different room in a completely different part of the unit, and at another time. And the code is actually not 98 44 at all.

No, I am not the kind of person who breaks promises. And so now I was faced with a dilemma.

I turned over, facing the side of the bed where Johannes used to lie. I placed one hand on the pillow where his head used to rest. The child in my belly turned over as well. Then we slept.

7

In the newspapers, on the radio and on TV it was early summer. The national days had been celebrated, first the Norwegian and then the Swedish, with flag-waving, royalty, and parades with bands playing. The usual euphoria surrounding those national days was now gradually evolving into the usual euphoria surrounding midsummer. On the news, on talk shows, and in documentaries, they had just finished picking over the to-be-or-not-to-be of the monarchy and the eternal question of why the Norwegians were so much more energetic in their national celebrations than the Swedes, and were just starting to fill report after report and feature after feature with the price of strawberries and new potatoes, and with midsummer poles ready to be danced around, regional variations on the national costume, wooden horses from Dalarna, with islands in the archipelago, barn dances and red-painted cottages, with herring and aquavit, drunken parties and drunk driving offenses. Obviously the old traditions were being kept alive out there. But here inside the unit we celebrated neither the one nor the other; we saw no sign of a flag or a midsummer pole. Aquavit and herring were not on the menu. We could get fresh strawberries all year round, they were grown in a greenhouse in the galleria, and I never heard anyone mention new potatoes. Personally, I have always thought that new potatoes taste unpleasantly doughy, somehow.

It was, however, time for the monthly welcome party, and I had decided to go. I had wanted to dress in a feminine way, but none of my dresses fit me any more. So I stuck to pants, shirt and jacket. I had put weight on all over my body, and had even grown the hint of a double chin. For those who didn’t know me or didn’t know about my condition, and weren’t expecting to see a pregnant dispensable person, I expect I just looked fat. That suited me perfectly, because I didn’t want to offend any of the new arrivals, didn’t want to cause any kind of unpleasantness or consternation. Not tonight. Tonight I was in the mood to have fun. I was in the mood to dance and get to know some new people.

I combed my hair, then stood there looking at my reflection, alternating between the front view and profile. I pushed my hands into my pockets-in the left was the fossil stone, in the right the key card. I stood up straight. I actually looked strong; it was easy to understand why people were happy to believe that I was. I looked indomitable. I looked as if I had authority.

The menu consisted of apple and cauliflower salad with a yogurt dressing, butterfly salmon with teriyaki sauce and stir-fried vegetables, plus, for dessert, chocolate and orange cream with mascarpone and crushed cookies. I was sharing a table with Mats, Vivi and a new arrival, Miranda, who was a sculptor. Like most new arrivals she was very quiet, poking unhappily at her food. I decided to make a point of talking to her during the party, to try to make her feel better. We started chatting, during the meal at first and then later in the bar as we tried out different drinks with umbrellas in them.

The band hadn’t started playing yet, and slow, rhythmic music was churning out of the loudspeakers at a relatively low volume. Miranda was telling me about her work. She made small and large sculptures in clay-the biggest the size of a human, the smallest the size of thimbles-depicting humanlike figures in contorted postures. She had, as she put it, “a weakness for contorted bodies,” and saw a great deal of beauty in the crooked, the misshapen and the scarred.

“There is,” she said, “actually something beautiful in suffering. Even in purely physical pain. Does that sound perverse? Does it sound as if I’m a psychopath?”

“Well…” I said. “Maybe it does. But I presume that an artistic eye, an eye that doesn’t evaluate and analyze, but primarily observes, ought to be able to perceive beauty in more or less any shape or expression.”

“Oh, it’s so nice to talk to someone who understands!” said Miranda. “Because that’s exactly how it is; it isn’t about my evaluation, it isn’t that I think it’s cool if someone is deformed or suffering or in pain. I just happen to think it’s beautiful.”

There was something about her that reminded me of Majken. She was like “the dark side of Majken,” she was the same but the reverse, you might say. And I told her about Majken’s picture of the deformed fetus that was now hanging above the desk in my apartment.

“I’d really like to see that,” said Miranda, and I told her where I lived and said she was welcome to drop by any time.

Just as I said that, the rock band came on stage. I only needed to hear the first two or three beats of the intro to recognize the ballad “For My Girl,” and out of the corner of my eye I saw a figure approaching from the side with a self-assured walk, straight-backed, lithe, his shirt sleeves rolled up, his forearms muscular, his face weather-beaten and healthy and with a slightly cheeky but somehow shy smile, sparkling eyes, a playful look in those eyes that were-so it seemed to me-seeking mine; and as he came closer I turned slowly to face him, ready to hear him say: “Dorrit, you look lovely tonight,” and to bow and kiss my hand.

But it was someone else of course, someone I had never seen before, someone who didn’t even stop, but just walked past me with a polite nod.

Miranda said something to me, I didn’t hear what it was, the music was loud now. I was just going to ask her to repeat it when there was a movement inside me, a push or a kick. Automatically I pressed my hand against my stomach. Another push now, against my hand, very clear. It was as if we were giving each other a high five, and I wanted to tell someone-no, not someone, I wanted to tell Johannes, I wanted to tell Johannes and no one else that I had just done a high five with our baby. I wanted to take his hand and place it on my stomach, feel the warmth of his hand, let him feel the movements of our child. Let him say hello to his baby.

I could see that Miranda was saying something else, closer now, right next to me. She looked troubled, I thought, but I still couldn’t hear what she was saying, and suddenly I didn’t know how to open my mouth and speak. I must have looked like an idiot, staring at her vacantly and stupidly, as if I suddenly had no idea who she was. But the baby was somehow pressing on my bladder, because all of a sudden I was desperate for a pee, and I came to my senses, smiled apologetically at Miranda, and said:

“Sorry, what did you say?”

“Don’t you feel well?” she almost shouted.

“I’m fine, it’s just… It’s just… it’s this song, it… Old memories, you know.”

She nodded.

“Do you feel like dancing?” she asked.

“Sure. But I have to go the bathroom first,” I replied. “I’m bursting. Back soon, I won’t be long!”

I pushed my way through the sea of happy party people, residents and staff mixing together; many well-known faces, roughly the same number vaguely familiar, and a small number completely unknown, I said hi and nodded and waved to the left and the right and soon I had reached the toilets at the far end of the room: a row of doors with people going in and out. Voices rumbling and roaring, laughing and shouting, music pulsating from the main room: “This is for my girl, this is for my woman, for my world. Baby, baby, this is all for you…”

The baby must have taken its foot off my bladder-or moved its bottom or head or elbow-because the pressure had gone and suddenly I didn’t need to go to the bathroom at all. Perhaps that was why I now noticed three extra doors at the end without the toilet symbol on them. These three were a bit smaller and looked more like some kind of decoration, a kind of fake door rather than real doors. There were no signs on them, no handles, and it was only when I-sauntering up and down in front of the doors in an attempt to look as if I were desperate to pee-got really close that I saw the narrow metal-framed slot in the door frame.

Without thinking-as if I were on autopilot, simply functioning, simply acting, like a robot-I took the key card out of my pocket and swiped it through the slot as if in passing. A small gap in the door frame immediately slid open, revealing a keypad not much bigger than that of a cell phone. In a state that can best be described as a panic-stricken trance, I keyed in 98 44, pushed open the door, stepped over the threshold and onto the other side, and before I gave myself time to see or register where I had ended up, I grabbed the handle on my side of the door and pushed it firmly shut.

It was incredibly bright. I was bathed in a white, harsh neon light and a silence so complete that my own heart sounded like thunderclaps recorded on a loop and played back at a very high speed. It took a little while, I don’t know how long, seconds or minutes, before I was able to see in the cold light. And when I finally saw that I was on a landing in a stairwell, exactly as the person I call Birthmark had explained, my feelings caught up with me. Panic grabbed hold and penetrated my body and raced through my veins and arteries, rushing and roaring right through me.

Up or down? I thought feverishly, shrugged my shoulders and started to run upstairs; the party room was on K1, and should therefore be below ground level. It was only when I had gone up a couple of floors that I remembered my experience in the break room in the surgical department, where there had been a window facing onto the outside world despite the fact that it was located on what was called the basement level.

So I turned and ran downstairs instead, two floors, three, then down another half staircase which came to a stop at another door, a substantial door made of metal. This time the slot wasn’t hidden in the door frame, but was on the wall next to it, in full view and with a keypad similar to the ones you find in stores for customers to key in their debit pin number.

With my hand shaking-shaking and sweating-I swiped the card, my other hand hovering over the keypad, ready, and-oh no! It was as if the code had been completely wiped out of my memory, the code was-yes, that was it, I remembered, keyed in 94 88. But nothing happened, there was no click. I pushed down the handle anyway, but the door was locked, obviously.

I tried again: 99 48-no.

48 99 then? No.

There was something wrong with those four numbers, they were right but yet they were wrong. My whole body was shaking now, sweat pouring down my back, my mouth was dry and I was on the verge of tears, almost hysterical, my head was spinning-when that trivial refrain suddenly echoed through my brain and stopped the spinning:

This is for my girl, this is for my woman, for my world. Baby, baby, this is all for you…

All at once I was perfectly calm, perfectly clear, and firmly keyed in the combination 98 44, whereupon the door obediently gave a faint click and I pressed down the handle, pushed open the heavy door, walked out, took two steps, and the metal door closed behind me.

I was out. Outside. There was a breeze, that was the first thing I noticed. I could feel it against my face, I could feel it in my hair, lifting it and messing it up. I could feel it making the legs of my pants flap loosely against my calves. It was almost dark; the sun was drawing its last burning threads from a part of the sky that was already dark and full of stars, toward a still-glowing strip on the opposite side. It wasn’t cold, but it was very cool; the night was likely to be quite chilly.

I stood there for a moment just outside the door, watching the wind run its invisible fingers through the leaves on the trees, making the flowers on the lilac bushes nod and bow and the birch trees rustle and whisper. I was in a park. There were lawns and gravel paths; one of the paths led to the left, around the corner of the building. Beyond the corner there was, from my point of view, only darkness. A little way ahead of me, over to the right, I could just see a pond among some low bushes. Tall trees towered up behind the pond, their huge crowns swaying. It was the same pond I had seen from the window of the break room that day in February. My first impulse was to run over there, to get behind the bushes and in among the trees, and to hide myself somewhere. But I realized at once that if there were surveillance cameras out here, which seemed likely, and if anyone saw me running, that would attract attention. It would look suspicious, because why would a staff member run out of the workplace and in among the bushes to hide? No, that would be silly, I reasoned, the only sensible thing I could do was to follow the path around the corner. So that’s what I did.

The gravel crunched beneath my feet-deafeningly, it seemed to me-and I expected to hear running footsteps behind me at any moment, to be escorted back into the building by a couple of strong guards, or for a patrol of some kind to be waiting around the bend. But nobody came running and no patrol was waiting. When I got around the corner I saw instead, in the romantic, ghostly atmosphere of the twilight, with its mixture of evening sun and darkness, heightened here by the glow of the streetlamps, that the path led over a patch of grass to a low white wooden fence with an open gate in it. I walked the twenty yards or so to the fence which was ridiculously low, hardly up to my knees; the open gate was completely superfluous, but as the path led to the gate I went out through it anyway, and found myself on a road that was illuminated for fifty yards or so in each direction.

On the other side of the road was a rolling landscape of fields and forest groves and individual farms and houses, their outside lights twinkling like lanterns in a sea of night. Above this sea there was still a glowing, golden pink strip from the sun. So that was the west, I established, or rather northwest, as it was around midsummer. In other words, the road ran north-south-roughly, at any rate. After a moment’s hesitation I chose to go north.

When I had gotten beyond the scope of the streetlights, and the golden twilight strip in the northwest had changed to a faint grayish glow, I found myself surrounded by black, cool night. With each step I took it was like climbing further and further into total nothingness. I wasn’t afraid, it didn’t feel eerie, just uncertain. Since I couldn’t see the ground in front of me, I looked up instead, and above my head the sky was so clear that even the most distant stars could be seen-some so distant they have never been named and do not appear on any map of the constellations. The sky was covered with them. Less distant, far below these billions of anonymous stars, was the Little Bear, which Johannes had taught me to find. And there was the Dipper, and there, just to the side and in a straight line from the two stars at the back of the Dipper, glowed the North Star.