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smell Tomas on her body even though she had showered, sense the stinging red all over her skin, her lips swollen from the kisses of a man who was not her husband; but then she had been sick in the taxi and none of what was planned had happened, and now she was sitting in the chair knowing only that she must not lose him.
    “You’ve got a nice voice,” he said.
    He spoke quietly. There was no need to shout from the kitchen.
    “I’ve had too much to drink,” she said.
    “You’ve got a nice voice even when you’ve had too much to drink,” he said.
    No, she must not lose him. She got up, crossed the living room—her legs would carry her now—and went into the kitchen. She didn’t really know what it meant, this knowledge that she must not lose him. She fell to her knees and wrapped her arms around him, resting her head at the back of his knee.
    “Don’t go.”
    He stood motionless.
    “Erika, I can’t make coffee with you hanging on to me like that,” he said.
    “I don’t want coffee.”
    “What do you want, then?”
    “I don’t know. I want to live here with you.”
    “You can live here for a while,” he said.

Chapter 21
    Ragnar ran through the long grass, past Erika and Laura as they lay dozing in the sun. He turned left and ran into the woods. If you turned right, you came to the sea; if you went straight on, as Ragnar had done the first time they saw him, you came to Isak’s door. Ragnar ran and ran and ran.
    It was windy. The wind gave you goose pimples and you needed an anorak even though the sun was shining. Erika and Laura had found a sheltered patch in the grass. At breakfast that morning, Isak had told Erika and Laura they weren’t to go down to the beach; they would have to stay near the house. He said the way it was looking, a storm was likely to blow up and then both of them, small and thin as they were, could be carried right out to sea. Rosa agreed. Erika and Laura ate nothing; they ate like two little mice, and such nibblers couldn’t stand up to the sea the day it decided to come and get them. Nibblers would have to ride the waves all the way to the Soviet Union, or even farther, and there they would have to stand in a queue for the rest of their lives to buy a few wretched potatoes, and they would never be able to go back home, because everybody who tried was shot at the border. So Erika and Laura ate two more slices of bread with cheese, although they were too big to believe stories like that, and they each drank a glass of O’boy, which tasted best if you took it with a dessert spoon, as if the chocolate milk were an elegant soup, although Rosa never let them; nor were they allowed to put more than two teaspoons of O’boy powder in each glass, and that wasn’t enough: three teaspoons was the absolute minimum, and five tasted really nice, especially if the powder formed lumps in the milk—like syrupy chocolate bubbles that would melt on your tongue.
    Isak was strict about a lot of things. Outdoors time, for example. And bedtime. And dinnertime.
    Every so often, Erika and Laura would be ordered out to find Molly, who used to hide in the woods. For on the stroke of six,
dinnertime,
Isak would come clumping through the living room into the kitchen and yell,
I’m as hungry as a bear,
and Molly, who nearly always had a blue dress on, would shout back,
Not bear! Not bear!
Then they could all sit up at the table and be served by Rosa.
    But he was not strict about the O’boy. He saw no reason why the girls shouldn’t be allowed to gulp down as much chocolate milk as they wanted, and he didn’t care if they drank it from a glass or laboriously with a spoon. When Rosa went to the mainland to shop, he said they were welcome to tip the whole packet of O’boy down their throats if they liked, provided they didn’t expect any sympathy when they were sick afterward.
     
    When Ragnar ran past them through the grass on his way into the woods, Erika and Laura decided to run after him. He had