![]() ![]() I’m just imagining things, he says to himself. The mare hasn’t whinnied because Lövgren hasn’t taken his usual nightly walk to the stable when his prostate acts up and drives him out of his warm bed. A window that has always been closed at night is open. Then he looks at the window again, and now he’s sure that it’s open. Or is it just the darkness that’s confusing him? He blinks and counts to twenty to rest his eyes. All these years he has cast an occasional glance at his neighbour’s window. He realises that he’s looking at the kitchen window of the neighbour’s house. A retired, crippled farmer’s day is long and dreary enough as it is. So I can lie down under the quilt for a little while longer. Whinny in your stall so I know that everything’s all right. He looks at the neighbour’s house, peering, trying to penetrate the darkness of the winter night. In our lives, love has always been something totally different. Someone who has been a farmer for more than forty years, who has worked every day bowed over the heavy Scanian clay, does not use the word “love” when he talks about his wife. But he shields himself from his own thought. Don’t stand there freezing, you’ll catch cold.” That’s where the mare stands in her stall, and that’s where she whinnies uneasily at night when something disturbs her. The stable in the corner against the farmhouse has a pale yellow lamp above its black door. He squints towards the neighbouring farm where the Lövgrens live. The lamp outside the kitchen door casts its glow across the yard, the bare chestnut tree, and the fields beyond. It’s January 7, 1990, and no snow has fallen in Skåne this winter. Every morning when I wake up I’m surprised all over again that I’m seventy years old. He can feel his left knee aching as he crosses the wooden floor to the window. It’s also the only bed they’ll ever have. It was the only piece of furniture they bought when they got married. Carefully he gets up from the creaky bed. I hear it without waking up, and in my subconscious I know that I can keep on sleeping. With his fingertips he can feel that she’s warm. He stretches out one hand tentatively until he touches his wife’s face. Why did I wake now? He listens to the darkness and suddenly he is wide-awake. I’ve done that for more than forty years. He checks the clock on the table next to the bed. Daybreak will reveal that one of us has been left all alone. One of these mornings she’ll be lying dead beside me and I won’t even notice, he thinks. His wife’s breathing at his side is so faint that he can scarcely hear it. He lies still in the darkness and listens. Then I would have been hot and sweaty, as if I had suffered through a fever during the night. A well that reveals nothing of its contents.Īt least I didn’t dream about the bulls, he thinks. He has forgotten something, he knows that for sure when he wakes up. ![]()
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