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have seemed to him that I hadn’t lifted a finger.
    It was a long and restless night.
    Accusations came from every corner of the room, recriminations from under the bed, threats from up near the ceiling, that I was a miserable and worthless person. That I lacked backbone and any notion of self-sacrifice. At the same time I was dazzled by it all, as if someone had selected me as sole witness to that awful event. I didn’t get to sleep until nearly daybreak, exhausted by everything that had happened, and when the light came through the window, I jumped out of bed.

Chapter 10
    I WENT STRAIGHT to the living room and switched on the radio.
    When the foreign news was over, they ran a piece about a missing skier, just as I’d expected. The man had gone out for exercise and hadn’t come home, they said. They feared he’d gone through the ice. Search parties had found ski tracks on the lake. I listened to all this as I prepared a light breakfast: a couple of slices of wholemeal bread with marmalade, and some really hot, strong coffee, which tasted wonderful. It struck me that I could still phone the police, and simply mention guardedly that I’d seen a skier dressed in red in the fields close to Lake Mester. But I ate and did nothing; I was excited by the whole event, and a bit troubled at my own reaction, and there was a slight rushing in my head, like there used to be when I was a boy and had eaten too much sugar. The sight of the man who went through the ice was mine alone, it was something I wanted to keep to myself. God hadn’t seen him, nor yet the devil, only I, Riktor, had that drowning man branded on my memory for ever.
    Afterwards, I went to the park.
    I sat by the fountain and wrestled with thoughts of life and death. The secret lay there like a shining red mark on my chest, and I imagined that everyone could see it through my clothes. Suddenly a man came walking up the path, big, muscular and bowed. He took no notice of
Woman Weeping
, but went directly to one of the benches and sat down, slightly hunched, ignoring my modest presence. Straight away I felt a little nervous, because there was undoubtedly something awe-inspiring about him. His skin and hair were black, he was dressed in combat gear and tall, black leather boots as if he were fighting a war. I realised immediately that he was from the Refugee Reception Centre, it wasn’t far away, only ten minutes’ walk from the Dixie Café. Where, incidentally, the asylum seekers weren’t welcome because they stole things. At least, the owner claimed they were a bunch of thieves, stealing sweets and other things that were on the counter. People from the Reception Centre were often to be seen wandering along the road, they walked without any object or aim, they had nothing to do, apart from play table tennis, and that soon wears thin. Knocking a ball back and forth over a net isn’t much of a challenge. The man suddenly stared in my direction, and I froze and willed myself to become invisible. His eyes were black and hard, there wasn’t an iota of friendliness in them, only despondency. I was careful not to return the stare, I didn’t want to arouse any violent impulses in him, didn’t want to activate that mountain of muscle. Perhaps he was traumatised, that’s probably why they come, perhaps he’d seen his own child hacked up with a machete, or impaled on a bayonet, you never can tell. And the brutality we hear of in other parts of the world is almost impossible to imagine.
    Where’s his knife? I wondered, in the midst of my fear, for by now my imagination was running wild. Could it be in his boot, or does he keep it in a pocket? Perhaps it was my turn to face death now, and there were no witnesses. Someone would find me on the ground, bleeding, in front of the bench, with punctured lungs, possibly it would be Miranda and her mother, possibly Arnfinn. Maybe I’d be able to crawl down the path to the Dixie Café; sometimes people managed such things even