Inger [antikvár]

Part One LONGING Inger returned to the island in the afternoon. At a brisk pacc she crossed the central square of the town, a taste of dust in her mouth, a suitcase in her hand. A mild late-summer sun was warming the sides of houses, trees and asphalt. Two men emerged from the co-op store, the younger one had a flashing tin bath under his arm. They both gave her an amicable smile and although she knew neither of them, it gladdened her heart. On the sunset side one branch of the maple tree on the edge of the square was already maroon all over as if it had imbibed nothing but the blood red afterglow, the last sap of the sun. The selfsame tree again, the same way it was last year. The same tree and I am coming home. Home from home, from my parents' to being on my own. And I must get accustomed to it again. Just now I am a stranger, the same way I was last year. It was nearly two months that she had been away from here. During the time the wall of aloofness, the foundations of which she was carrying inside her all the time, had again grown into a veritable barrier. She no sooner alighted from the plane than she had to begin tearing it down to restore her former, last-spring approach to life-to be a teacher, a kind of neatly lined paper on which the school puts down its regulations and prohibitions, its fullness and emptiness. During summertime even her flatlet in the attic had grown strange. Her vase was waterless, grey puffs of fluff perched on top of her wardrobe like swallows on a line. Everything needed getting in the spirit of, in the habit of, accustomed to,