She had been found floating lifeless in the pool at the Tøyen swimming baths; it was at about half past three on an ordinary afternoon in October, the time of day when the noisy school classes that fill the pool in the mornings have left and exercising adults do their monotonous lengths in peace. A woman who had been swimming alongside Minna for a bit saw her floating and thought at first that ‘the lady had just decided to rest’ in the water. She swam calmly on but when she came round a second time, she took in the fact the body ‘didn’t move’ and called for help. One of the employees, a pool lifeguard, tried to save Minna with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and then applied a defibrillator. It was too late. When the ambulance reached the hospital, it was established that Minna had died. The police suspected suicide because there were tranquilliser tablets in the bag she had left in the changing-room locker. Later, suicide was ruled out. The post-mortem examination did indeed find a small amount of water in her lungs but no trace of alcohol or prescription drugs in her blood. Conclusion: death from natural causes. Natural causes? Minna was forty-one years old when she died. Would someone at that age simply expire ‘from natural causes’? Looking back now, I’m not sure what tormented me most: that she floated in the water for so long before anyone noticed and realised that she had died, or the insight that I should never have stopped watching out for her, that I ought to have been in some inconspicuous spot in a high row of seats, keeping an eye as my sister swam her lengths. Just as, over the years, I had scrupulously observed everything she did, in secrecy or in full view of everyone. If only I had been there, it would not have ended like that. Or was it the other way round? This was precisely how she wanted to die, in complete privacy, seen by no one and, least of all, by me. I talked with Margit, one of the women in the collective and someone whom Minna was probably closer to than anyone else, and learnt that Minna had stayed abroad for only a couple of weeks. Margit had hardly said goodbye when a removal firm got in touch to say that they were to come and pack up all Minna’s belongings. There was not much: a table, a bed, a chest of drawers and a few old armchairs which Minna had had mended and reupholstered. The collective assumed that she would want her things to be delivered to a new address, but it turned out that the removal firm had been told to deposit everything in a self-storage unit, with the rent paid ahead for several years. Margit did not have any forwarding address for mail. Much later, in connection with the police investigation, I heard that Minna had decided to live in sheltered housing under her old name. It was utterly inexplicable to me why she kept that name even though she had broken with everything else in her past. She had also made a note of Johannes’s telephone number in a worn black notebook that was in her handbag. For many years, it pained me to think that I might have driven her to the brink of suicide with my constant proposals about how we should meet and talk (about Johannes and Kaufmann and Mr Carsten, and heaven knows who else). Perhaps she left the tram the last time I saw her simply to escape from me (and all the rest of them) for good. I no longer believe that to be true. I think she had completed a kind of cycle, moving on from the years of being the person people told her to be, and reverting to what she had been in the beginning – nobody or, rather, nobody’s. If she really had killed herself, it was an act she carried out the moment she decided to take off and move to a place that no one knew of, and where no one knew her. What happened later in the Tøyen pool only confirmed something that had already been completed a long time ago.