other men at university in Uppsala, and she simply happened to bump into them in various circumstances. Aron, the man she married and the father of Henrik, the reason why she changed her name from Lindblom to Cantor, was somebody she happened to sit next to on a flight between London and Edinburgh. She had received a scholarship from Uppsala University to attend a conference on classical archaeology, Aron was on his way to Scotland to go fishing, and up in the air, high above the clouds, they had fallen into conversation.
She forced herself not to think about Aron, not wanting to grow angry, and rang the number again. Still engaged.
She always used to compare the men she met after her divorce – it was not a conscious process, but she had a ranking scale deep down in her mind on which Aron was registered as the norm, and everybody else she went with was too short or too tall, too boring, too untalented. In other words, Aron always won. She still had not met anybody who could match his memory. That could make her both disconsolate and furious; it seemed that he still dictated the course of her life even though it was nothing to do with him any more. He had betrayed her, he had deceived her, and when the truth started to come out he simply disappeared – just as a spy about to be exposed flees to his controller. It had come as a terrible shock to her: she had no idea that he had been seeing other women. To make matters worse, one of them was a close friend of hers, a fellow archaeologist who had devoted her life to excavations on Thassos, in search of a Dionysos temple. Henrik was still very young at the time. She had taken a temporary post as a university lecturer while trying to survive what had happened and patching together her wrecked life.
Aron had shattered her like a sudden volcanic eruption can shatter a settlement, a person or a vase. When she sat with her ceramic fragments, trying to envisage the whole that she would never be able to reconstruct, she often thought of her own predicament. Aron had not only smashed her to pieces, he had also hidden some of the fragments in order to make it more difficult for her to recreate her identity, as a human being, a woman and an archaeologist.
Following Aron's disappearance she had found a letter a mere three or four lines long, carelessly written, announcing that their marriage was at an end, he simply couldn't go on any longer, he begged her pardon and he hoped that she wouldn't turn their son against him.
Then she heard nothing more from him for seven months. In the end she received a letter posted in Venice. She could tell from his handwriting that he had been drunk at the time, one of the staggering Aron benders he not infrequently indulged in, a constant state of intoxication dotted with peaks and troughs that could last for over a week. At last he had written to her, his tone was maudlin and oozing with self-pity, and he wondered if she could consider having him back. It was only then, as she sat there with the wine-stained letter in her hand, that it dawned on her that her marriage was over. She both wanted and didn't want to have him back, but she didn't dare risk it because she knew that he could well destroy her life again. A human being can be wrecked and then resurrected and restored once in this life, she thought – but not twice. That would be too much. So she replied and informed Aron that their marriage was finished. Henrik existed and lived with his mother, it was up to him and his father to work out what sort of a relationship they wanted to have: she would not intervene.
Almost a year passed before he was in touch again. This time it was by means of a dodgy telephone connection from Newfoundland, where he and several likeminded computer experts had assembled to form a network that was reminiscent of a sect. He explained somewhat vaguely that they were investigating the future of archives, now that all human experience could be reduced to a combination of ones and zeros. Microfilm and underground libraries were no longer of significance for the recording of human experience. Now it was computers that would guarantee that