never seen.
One death was linked with the other. Did it help, did anything become comprehensible by staring into one black mirror in the hope of seeing something constructive in the other?
Death was darkness, there was no light to be found there. Death was attics and cellars, it smelled raw, of mice and soil, and loneliness.
'I don't really know anything at all about her,' said Louise, shuddering in the early-morning air.
'It was a sort of fairy tale,' he said. 'Fate steered her into my path.'
'Didn't it have something to do with America? Something I've never really understood? Something you've never told me?'
They began walking along the path. The faces carved in the tree trunks kept watch over them. He started talking, and he tried to present himself as Artur, not as her father. He was the narrator now, and he would try to tell the story as accurately as he possibly could. If he could divert her attention from Henrik, even for a short time, he would have achieved something worthwhile.
Heidi had come to Härjedalen after the war, 1946 or 1947. She was only seventeen, despite the fact that everybody thought she was older. She had found work at the Vemdalskalet mountain hotel for the winter season, and cleaned rooms and changed bed linen for the tourists. He had met her as a result of his work as a lumberjack, delivering logs. He was intrigued by her peculiar Swedish accent, and they married in 1948, even though she was only eighteen. A lot of documentation was required because she was a German citizen and nobody really knew what Germany was any more – did it really exist, or was it only a sort of no-man's-land under military supervision, devastated by fire and bomb sites? But she had never been involved in the horrors of the Nazi period – indeed, she was a victim herself. Heidi had never said anything much about her origins, only that her grandmother on her mother's side had been Swedish, called Sara Fredrika and emigrated to America around the time of the First World War. She had arrived in America with her daughter, Laura, and had been forced to live in very harsh conditions. In the late 1920s they had lived on the outskirts of Chicago, and Laura had met a cattle dealer of German descent and accompanied him back to Europe. They married, and in 1930 celebrated the birth of their daughter Heidi, despite the fact that Laura was so young. Both her parents had died during the war, victims of nocturnal bombing raids, and she had been a wandering refugee until the war was over and purely by accident had hit upon the idea of emigrating to Sweden, which had not been involved in the war.
'A Swedish girl goes to America? Then her daughter emigrates to Germany before the circle is closed by her grandchild? Who returns to Sweden?'
'She thought that her background wasn't all that unusual.'
'Where did her grandmother come from? Did she ever meet her?'
'I don't know. But she used to go on about the sea and an island, an archipelago somewhere or other. She suspected that there was some complicated reason why her grandmother left Sweden.'
'Aren't there any relatives still in America?'
'Heidi didn't have any documents, no addresses. She used to say that she had survived the war. But that was about all. She had no possessions. No memories. The whole of her past had been bombed out, and had been consumed by the flames.'
They had returned to the logging track.
'Are you going to carve Henrik's face?'
The thought caused them both to weep. The gallery closed down on the spot. They sat in the car. He was about to start the engine when she put her hand on his arm.
'What has happened? He can't possibly have taken his own life.'
'He might have been ill. He used to travel to dangerous places.'
'I don't believe that. Something doesn't add up.'
They drove back home through the forest. The mist had lifted, it was a bright autumn day, the air clear. She made no objections when Artur sat down at the telephone with grim determination, refusing to give up until he had tracked down Aron.
He is like his old hunting dogs, she thought. All the Norwegian elkhounds and spitzes that came and went, hunted in the forest, grew old and died. Now he has turned into a dog himself. His chin and cheeks are covered in shaggy fur.
It took all of twenty-four hours, involving desperate attempts