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they also hint at what became of the people who lived here?’
    Forgetful, Hans shook his head. Mustapha was looking at him directly and his eyes were bright in the lamp bèam. It was not they which were at fault, but the nerves serving them. At first Hans had suspected that the poet was lying about being blind; he moved so surely about the room in which they’d met. Seeing eyes, inescapably one assumed that they saw.
    Recovering almost at once, he said, ‘No, but we can dismiss fallout, I think. This area must have been well out of range of the big blasts at Kiruna and Trondheim.’
    Reflexively he confirmed that statement with a glance at his radiation-counter, even though it had remained silent. At most places he went to in the line of duty as a recuperator it beeped incessantly, and he had to sort through weathered industrial junk hampered as much by its distracting row as by his lead-impregnated suit.
    ‘One would have expected that, yes,’ Mustapha murmured. ‘Disease, possibly? So many epidemics were imported here by the skelter … There are other rooms. For the sake of your “after” pictures, Hans, you go into them first.’
    With an ironical little bow.
    Sourly, Hans complied, mentally agreeing with the other’s guesswork. Sickness after killing sickness had exploded like shrapnel from the few surviving reservoirs in less fortunate areas of the world into those whose inhabitants had neglected their immunization shots, as though they were convinced that they bore charmed lives. What, of the many that came this way, had carried off the Erikssons? Could it have been plague, diphtheria, cholera, rabies, smallpox –?
    No, none of these. Violence.
    In the small room adjacent to the study a child’s skeletonlay in bed. The coverlet had been soaked with blood, urine and excrement, then with the liquid foulness of rotting flesh, and dried into a hard loathsome lump.
    ‘Ah,’ Mustapha said with the air of a man whose favorite suspicion has been confirmed. ‘I take it we have stumbled on an actual body?’
    Hans swallowed against nausea, though it was far from the first time he had chanced across similar horrors, and lowered the camera with which he had been ready to take one of what Mustapha scathingly referred to as his ‘after’ pictures. Customarily what he did at each of these lost homes was, as it were, to reverse the effects of time: record on his arrival the state to which the passage of years had reduced the place, then with much care and labor restore it to something like the way it must have looked when it was in regular occupation. ‘Before and after’, as the old advertisements used to say.
    But a scene like this … No, he didn’t want it included in his report.
    Then, with that incredible depersonalized interest which at first Hans had privately termed callousness, but now knew was something his vocabulary furnished no name for, Mustapha slipped past, located the bed, ran his hands lightly over the disgusting mass until he located the shape of the skull.
    ‘A child,’ he said. ‘Boy, girl?’
    Hans surveyed the room, torch-beam dancing wildly on the irregular surfaces of a table, a half-open closet, a shelf of toys and books with brightly colored pictures. On a chair-back, casually deposited, two pathetic scraps of cloth, the parts of a bikini.
    ‘Girl.’
    ‘And young, by the size. Ten, twelve?’
    ‘More likely ten. So far as I can guess from the toys and books without disturbing them.’
    He thought in passing: funny, one had the impression that Swedes were casual about their bodies, that a child so young would be let run naked … but perhaps like so many other preconceptions it was a trick of perspective. Around the Mediterranean what had been believed about Swedes in the old days, fifty years ago, would logically have been based onthe atypical behavior of expatriates.
    A hall of distorting mirrors. The whole world had been turned into one – and sometimes the distortions had been