exercise.”
He patted his stomach.
“Hello!”
They heard Sanna’s voice on the stairs. Bella jumped up, barking.
“Down here,” called Rebecka.
“Hi,” said Sanna, and came down. “It’s okay, I like dogs.”
She was speaking to Sivving, who was holding on to Bella’s collar.
She bent down and let Bella sniff at her face. Sivving looked serious.
“Sanna Strandgård,” he said. “I read about your brother. It was a terrible thing. I’m sorry.”
“Thank you,” said Sanna, her lap full of friendly dog. “Rebecka, Curt rang. He’s on his way with the keys.”
Sivving stood up.
“Coffee?” he asked.
Sanna nodded and accepted a thick china mug with a pattern of brown and yellow flowers around the top. Sivving offered her the bag of buns so that she could dunk one in her coffee.
“They’re good,” said Rebecka. “Who’s been baking? Was it you?”
Sivving’s reply was an embarrassed grunt.
“Oh, that’s Mary Kuoppa. She can’t cope with the idea that there’s a freezer somewhere in the village that isn’t full of decent buns.”
Rebecka smiled at his pronunciation of “Mary.” He said it so that it rhymed with “Harry.”
“The poor woman’s called Mary, surely?” said Sanna, and laughed.
“Well, that’s what the teacher at our school thought too," said Sivving, brushing a few crumbs off the cloth; Bella licked them up straightaway. “But Mary just used to stare out of the window and pretend she didn’t realize he was talking to her when he said ‘Maaaary.’ ”
This time he sounded like a bleating sheep. Rebecka and Sanna started giggling, and looked at each other like a couple of schoolgirls. Suddenly it was as if all the awkwardness between them had been swept away.
I still care about her, in spite of everything, thought Rebecka.
“Wasn’t there somebody in the village called Slark?” she asked. “After the parents’ idol, Slark Gabble?”
“No,” laughed Sivving, “that must have been somewhere else. There’s never been anybody called Slark in this village. Then again, when your grandmother was young she knew a girl she felt really sorry for. She was very delicate when she was born, and because they didn’t think she was going to survive, they got the schoolteacher to do an emergency baptism. The teacher was called Fredrik Something-or-other. Anyway, the little girl lived, and then of course she was to be baptized properly by the priest. Of course, the priest understood only Swedish, and the parents only spoke Tornedalen Finnish. So the priest picked up the child and asked the parents what she was to be called. The parents thought he was asking who had baptized the child, so they answered, ‘Feki se kasti,’ it was Fredrik who baptized her. And so the priest wrote ‘Fekisekasti’ in the church register. And you know how people respected the priest in those days. The child was called Fekisekasti for the rest of her life.”
Rebecka glanced at the clock. Curt was bound to be here by now. She could catch the flight, even if there wasn’t an awful lot of time.
“Thanks for the coffee,” she said, and stood up.
“Are you off?” asked Sivving. “Was it just a flying visit?”
“Arrived yesterday, leaving today,” replied Rebecka with a brief smile.
“You know how it is with these career women,” said Sanna to Sivving. “Always on the move.”
Rebecka pulled on her gloves with jerky movements.
“This wasn’t exactly a pleasure trip,” she said.
“I’ll hang the key up in the usual place,” she went on, turning to Sivving.
“Come back in the spring,” said Sivving. “Drive out to the old cottage at Jiekajärvi. Do you remember in the old days, when we used to go up there? Your grandfather and I took the snowmobile. And you and your grandmother and Maj-Lis and the kids skied all the way.”
"I’d like to do that," said Rebecka, and discovered that she was telling the truth.
The cottage, she thought. It was the only place grandmother allowed herself to sit still. Once the berries picked that day had been cleaned. Or the birds that had been shot had been plucked and drawn.
She could see her grandmother now, absorbed in reading a story while Rebecka played cards or a board game with her grandfather. Because the cottage got so damp when nobody was there, the pack of cards had swollen to double its size. The board game was warped and uneven, and it was difficult to balance the pieces on it. But it didn’t matter.
And the feeling of security, falling asleep as the adults sat chatting around the table beside you. Or slipping into dreams to the sound of Grandmother washing up in the red plastic