“I didn’t realize that you’d decided to move back to Sweden.”

“It’s just a few Christmas presents, Erik.”

In the car she huddled up, then stretched out again, blew into her hands.

“It’s colder than I expected.”

“We’re having one of the coldest winters of the twentieth century.”

“And tomorrow it’s Christmas Eve.”

“Exactly.”

“When are you going to Lotta’s?”

“I gather we’re eating at half past one.”

“I’m looking forward to that.” She looked out into the dark night and the white snow lighting up the landscape.

“How’s Angela?”

“Never felt better.”

“She’s growing as she should?”

“Everything’s going according to plan.”

“You’re taking Christmas off I hope, Erik?”

“Of course.”

38

Two burning torches flanked the front door. There was a hissing noise as drops of sleet fell into the flames, but they didn’t go out. Lotta’s house in Hagen was ablaze with light in the murk of the afternoon. The sunshine had gone, and it now felt as if it had been a casual visitor. The sky was acting backward this winter. Winter paused on the slippery stone path and looked up at the first floor. As an eleven-year-old he used to gaze out of that window, at the Hagen chapel and Berglärkan on the other side of the valley.

Angela slipped and held on to him. There was a rustling noise from the packages in the paper shopping bags they had brought with them from the Mercedes he’d parked in the street.

Bim and Kristina opened the front door before they’d even started walking up the steps. Lotta’s daughters were well on their way into the adult world, but not today. Today was the day. Winter tried to hug the two teenagers as best he could with his arms full of Christmas presents.

There was a smell of Christmas the moment they entered the hall: fried spare ribs, spices, the thin, salty smell of anchovies. Hyacinths. A special glow from the candles, and from the Christmas tree that they could just glimpse in the living room; the unusual radiance of festivities in the early afternoon when it was dark outside. Winter noticed the slightly sharp smell of needles from the fir tree as he took off his outer clothes in the hall, and his mind went to the pine grove above his father’s grave in Nueva Andalucia. He could see it even more clearly when his mother emerged from the kitchen with a tray of steaming mulled wine.

“Welcome, my dears,” she said.

“When you’re carrying that, Siv, I can’t give you a hug,” Angela said.

“Give it to me,” Lotta said, following her mother out of the kitchen, drying her hands on a towel. She took the tray.

Ferdinand the Bull was wheeled back home to the cork oak. The Andalusian landscape recovered its air of tranquillity.

“Have you ever seen a bullfight, Grandma?” asked Bim from the floor, where she was half-lying on a beanbag.

“Oh no.” She turned from the television screen to the young girl. “There’s a little arena down in Puerto Banús and your granddad went once or twice, but it’s not for me.”

They had spoken about Granddad earlier. Not much, but the girls had asked a few questions. Winter hadn’t said much, but he’d been there. He wasn’t left out.

“It seems pretty nasty,” Kristina said. ‘And why do they have to kill the bull? Surely you can still have a bullfight without killing it?“

“Yes,” Winter said. “That’s how they do it in Portugal, I think. And the South of France.”

“What did Granddad say?” Bim asked. “When he’d been to the fights?”

“He said it was a kind of theatrical performance,” Siv answered. “Above all else, it was drama. The arena was a sort of theater, with various different sections where you could sit, depending on how much you wanted to see.” She reached for the nutcracker and a walnut. “Sitting in the sun all afternoon’s hard work.” She cracked the shell and extracted the brain-shaped kernel. “But some of the seats were in the shade.”

Winter was Santa Claus, and all went well despite the fact that nobody in the house believed in Santa Claus. As he got changed, he thought about his mother’s words describing death as a theatrical performance with the spectators sometimes hidden both from one another and from whoever died or lived down below in the red sand.

He wore a mask that was at least thirty years old. Maybe he should do this more often. He marched into the living room asking if there were any well-behaved children there, just like every other Santa in every other Swedish living room on Christmas Eve.

Of course, he wasn’t actually there when Santa came with all the presents. Bim explained that he’d gone out to buy an evening paper, and so Santa put all the presents for Winter in a little pile under the Christmas tree.

The teenagers insisted that everybody should open their parcels in order, one at a time. Everybody had admired their presents by the time Winter returned from the newsstand.

“Oh, has Santa been already?” he asked.

“Your presents are under the tree,” Angela said. “Where have you been?”

“I went to buy a newspaper.”

“Where is it, then?”

Everybody burst out laughing and Winter went over to his pile, and when he opened his first parcel it was something that felt hard but turned out to be soft. A fur hat, the sort that men in Russia wear.

“That’s to keep your head warm,” Lotta said.

His father had fallen asleep by the time Donald Duck started on the television. Ulla had left in a huff an hour earlier, as something had annoyed her. She’d slammed the door so hard that some flakes of paint fell off.

Mickey Mouse was dressing the Christmas tree. You don’t need a Christmas tree. Look what happened to that one. Patrik could hear the snores coming from what used to be his room. He raised the volume of the television. Ferdinand was under the oak tree, smelling the flowers. Patrik could smell the hyacinth he’d bought the previous day, from a stall at Linnéplatsen. His father didn’t say anything when he saw it, and Ulla wasn’t there.

His mom always used to buy a hyacinth at Christmastime. It was the Christmas smell, it seemed to him, and he went to close the door so that he could hear the squeaking of the wheelbarrow when Ferdinand was taken back from the bullring.

That brought the cartoons to an end. He went to the refrigerator and took out the party sausages and meatballs he’d bought. They were all right. He didn’t like the traditional marinated herring, so it didn’t matter that there wasn’t any. He could whip an egg and make an omelet. An omelet was good with thick mushroom sauce, but mushrooms were expensive and so was cream and there were other ingredients and he didn’t really know how to make it.

He fried a few sausages. They smelled good. He looked for some mustard, then realized he’d forgotten to buy any. There was ketchup. His father had bought a tin of red cabbage. Christmas isn’t Christmas without red cabbage, he’d said-but he seemed to be managing all right without it, fast asleep in his room. Dad will manage all right without any Christmas at all. So will I.

Christmas is for amateurs. Just like New Year’s Eve.

He heard somebody laughing on the landing, then the front door opened and Ulla shouted something, then marched into the kitchen, still in her overcoat and boots and followed by a couple of winos. Abruptly he walked away from the cooker and the frying pan and into the hall. As for the party sausages, they could turn to charcoal for all he cared, so that those bastards couldn’t eat them, but they’d eat them even so, not now, but some time later tonight.

He pulled on his boots and was halfway down the stairs before he put on his jacket.

Once in the street he noticed that the snow he’d watched dancing past the kitchen window had turned into sleet. He pulled up his hood and set off toward the center of town. When he got to Haga Church he saw they’d erected spotlights to shine on the walls: what was the point of that?