lT HAD BEEN THE KIND OF YEAR THAT REFUSES TO LET GO. IT spun every which way and bit its own tail like a rabid dog. Weeks and months seemed to go on forever.

From where Erik Winter sat, the coffin appeared to hover in the air. Daylight poured through a window to his left and lifted it from the bier on the stone floor. Everything merged into a rectangle of sunshine.

He listened to the psalms of death, his lips unmoving. He was surrounded by a circle of silence. It wasn’t the unfamiliar atmosphere that made him feel isolated. Nor was it his grief, but another kind of feeling, akin to loneliness or the void that you stare into when you’re losing your grip.

The warmth of my blood is gone, he thought. It’s as if the path behind me is overgrown with weeds.

Rising with the others, Winter walked out into the light and followed the pallbearers to the grave. Once the farewell handfuls of soil had been thrown, there was nothing more to do. Only after he had stood quietly for a few minutes did he feel the January sun caress his face like a hand dipped in lukewarm water.

He walked slowly westward along the street to the ferry dock. The civil war within a man is over, he thought. An armistice has been signed. Now only the past remains, and my grief is just beginning. If only I could simply do nothing for a long time and then start weeding the paths to the future. He smiled wistfully at the low sky.

He climbed aboard and went up to the car deck. The vehicles on the ferry to Gothenburg were covered with dirty snow. They clattered like hell and he put his left hand over his ear. The sun was still out, lucid and impotent over the water. He had removed his leather gloves as the casket was being lowered into the grave, and now he put them on again. He couldn’t remember a time when it was ever this cold.