and two slightly smaller ones, and she had one item of clothing left over, half a person, and they were all men.
She stuffed the clothes into the string bag she always carried with her, intending to burn them at the northernmost tip of the island. But they were wet, and they couldn’t be buried in the frozen ground either, so she hung them beside the man already on the rack and decided to walk all the way around the island again.
In the bay where she had found the first clothes, she spotted the eagles again, the white-headed giant and the smaller brown one, perched on a rock in the sea, beating their wings, pecking and clawing at each other as though fighting over prey.
But it was no rock, all around was open water, a hundred fathoms deep, and the rock was moving with the waves.
She ran out to the headland, was about to turn back to get the telescope, but slipped on a stone and caught sight of another rock where there shouldn’t have been a rock either, and it too was moving, disappearing and reappearing like a driftwood log, a whale’s back. And above them both hovered clouds of cackling, angry birds which converged and dispersed, dived and pecked and fought in a swirl of feathers and noise until everything disappeared from view in a fierce snowstorm.
Ingrid covered her eyes with her hands and cried out. Nausea rose and her heart pounded, she had to get down on all fours, unable to breathe as she realised what she had seen.
She pressed wet snow to her face and ran home, passing yet more clothes, two whole outfits and a pair of breeches without a jacket, a torn grey cloak . . . swept them along with her as she ran through the gardens and hung them on the rack, made it to the house and lit all the lamps, also in the sitting room.
She stoked both wood stoves and stood in her dripping coat staring at a headless army on the rack, flapping in the soundless wind, one with one leg, one with one arm, a torso, two gaily fluttering cloaks, one without an arm . . . when it occurred to her that she had actually bothered with them because they were personal effects, no matter how torn and worthless they might be, and the wood shavings?
Ingrid went down into the Swedes’ quay house and found the telescope, a heavy, extendable cylinder of something that resembled black moulded leather, with brass rings and two small focus wheels, she vaguely remembered that her father never used it because it distorted his vision, and now she decided she didn’t need it anyway, she knew what she had seen.
She put down the telescope as if it were burning her fingers, fixed the two dry nets hanging on the pegs until her fingers were cold, then dragged them through the snow, tied the anchor rope to the eye of the first net and watched the cork floats bobble out into the waves, attached the smooth slate sinkers, careful not to crack them against the rocks, tied on the next net and pulled, two nets, the usual fifteen fathoms from land, then her eyes rose from the line and the sea to Moltholmen and she saw the first body.
The line slipped from her hands, she plunged into the sea and grabbed hold of it, waded ashore and fastened it, placed the palms of her hands on her knees and straightened her back, stared across the sound and still saw what she saw, what she had seen the previous day, yet she had slept like Nelly nonetheless.
She smacked her mittens together and saw the man lying half way up on the rock with his legs dangling in the sea as though someone had moored him to the anchor peg.
But the sea was falling and he would soon be on dry land, until the next high tide lifted him loose again and carried him away, and flocks of screaming harpies would dive down and tear at this brown figure.
Ingrid walked north to the boat shed and reflected that she had been to the barn loft twice, once to check the sacks of down and once to fetch some wool; there, too, she had seen something without understanding what it was, and she had left the house countless times, but had not been round at the back where the fruit bushes were, they never went there in the winter, who would ever think of walking around their own house . . . ?
She ran past the fish rack and over the marsh, hesitated before opening the porch door, went in and stood stock still in her own home, then ran with the blood pounding in her ears from one room to the next and paused and ran out again, around the house, and saw the tracks just visible beneath the new snow, as though someone had dragged a sack through the garden and up the barn bridge.
She walked up and confirmed the doors were locked with the bolt drawn on the inside, she ran around the building and into the cowshed and remembered she had seen drops of water on the steps, thinking they had come from a leak in the roof, climbed up into the hayloft and in the dim light she saw two legs sticking out from under some old sheepskins. She pulled the skins aside and saw a middle-aged man, bald, with bluish-black bristles in a wasted, chalk-white face, a dead man. But someone had closed his eyes and arranged his hands on his chest, as though praying.
She went further in and caught sight of another man, under two sacks of down and an old horse cloth. She pulled it off him and saw he was wearing the same brown rags, padded with the same wood shavings that spilled out of the sleeves and holes, and above all this a uniform with badges and stripes, a German uniform; he, too, was hollow-cheeked, bald and lean, but he had no bristles, he was too young, and he was alive.
6
Ingrid knelt down and tugged at him. He didn’t react. Through a rip in his trouser leg, at the top of his right thigh, she saw a deep wound with edges that had swollen to form thick, blue lips. She pressed her fingers against them, saw living blood and heard a distant groan. One of his hands looked as if it had been burned in a fire, but most of the fingers were intact, the nails on the other hand were missing, it too was black.
Ingrid wrung a few drops out of the uniform and tasted them, it wasn’t salt water, so there had to be a boat somewhere around the island, moored presumably in the only place she hadn’t looked, near the ruins at Karvika, she was afraid of the ruins at Karvika, she always had been.
She managed to raise him into a sitting position, went down on her haunches and locked her hands around his chest, dis-covered how surprisingly light he was and dragged him over to the barn door, unbolted it and lugged him through the garden and into the kitchen, manoeuvred him up onto the bench, and covered him with blankets.
She grabbed the ladle in the bucket, propped him up and moistened his cracked lips. He writhed and groaned. She shoved a cushion under his head and fetched a funnel, stuck it down his throat until he retched and forced open his singed eyelids and tried to resist with his hands.
She held the ladle in front of his wild eyes.
He nodded, drank a few drops, coughed and raised his mangled hands as if to study them, and display them to her, or to God, as soot-blackened tears streamed from his scorched eye-sockets down his skeletal face, finding nowhere in his smooth, young features to stop them, making him look as if he had never been human, nor ever would be.
She grasped the hand missing only fingernails, sat holding it, staring into space, when she suddenly felt an imploring tremor, as if he were preparing to die. She began to shake the limp body, shouted no, no, grabbed the ladle and forced more water down him, causing more fits of retching, which eventually abated, reducing him to a whimpering infant, and the stench that permeated the warm kitchen was unbearable.
She got to her feet, went into the larder and stopped in front of the rows of shelves stacked with preserves and canned food. She grabbed a jar of redcurrant jelly and spooned the contents into a cup, mixed it with warm water, breathing through her mouth, and began to force a thin, red liquid down him. He coughed and spat and had to gulp to avoid choking, managed a few greedy gulps, brought them up again, swallowed a few small spoonfuls, she counted them, and he kept them down, until he passed out.
Ingrid placed the cup on the table, wiped her face on her jumper, heard two sobs, which were her own, and declared in a loud voice to the walls that this could not be true, before once again making sure that he was breathing, whereafter she went out into the driving snow and stared up into the darkness.
Only to realise that there was no way out of this.
She walked down to the landing stage and put out