Pinderup wasn’t a town, nor was it just a village. It was full of single-story houses with uneven buds of garages, living rooms, family rooms with high vaulted ceilings, raised attics and sparkling new bathrooms. The walls were freshly plastered and painted in blue, rusty red and Skagen’s yellow, and the planed lawns were neatly framed by tightly cut hedges and wooden fences. Where there had once been a commune was now a long, low-rise farmhouse with a newly tiled roof. Its stone walls were plastered and painted a dazzling white. The windows were new, too, and the little band of front yard was trimmed and neat, with pink flowers in baskets and a row of lush peonies along the white picket fence. The outhouse with the old toilet had been leveled to the ground and replaced with a lawn and a plastic swing set. The old trees had been felled, and an aggressive edge trimmer had left the flowers in the ditch with bleeding, open stems.

What was I doing here?

The doorbell sounded like I’d just walked into a bakery, and the door was opened after a few seconds by a young woman with a two-year-old boy sitting firmly on her hip. She seemed to have all the time in the world, and was calm and perfumed in an organized way that you associated with the provincial middle class. Fabric softener, plank floors, new electrical installations and children who were pudgy and scoured clean, drank fruit juice and ate white bread.

She smiled.

“Yes?”

“Yeah, sorry if I’m disturbing you,” I said. “But I lived in Tostrup as a child and had a friend who used to live here. In the commune. I was just curious about whether you know what’s become if it.”

“In the commune. That was a long time ago—a lot has happened.”

She was young and beautiful and tall. Broad-shouldered, with solid hips, baggy jeans and a lace undershirt that bulged unevenly over her stomach. Her hair was long and brown and straightened, like in a low-budget American television series. Without doubt, she’d been in the disco in Rønde four years ago with a bunch of Bacardi Breezers, tapping her foot while her boyfriend—now husband—danced, his upper body bare under the disco ball light. That was then, and this was now. She looked like the type who’d become an adult early on, and with fitting seriousness.

“I was hoping you could help me with the names of the people who used to live here.”

I couldn’t tell if she had any concerns about inviting me in, but I looked exactly like what I was. A middle-aged, well-groomed academic with grayed temples. There was no residue of Jutland in my dialect, and I was quite sure that I possessed the comportment of a big city, making me the most civilized of white men.

She showed me into the hall with her free arm and swung the child down to the floor with impressive ease. Clearly a woman who’d retained both shape and composure after giving birth. Kirsten had turned into a stick insect, working herself lopsided and gaunt and smoking neurotically during the five years we had small children.

“Well, come on in, then. I actually grew up here in the town. My parents live just over there.” She nodded toward the house on the other side of the road. “Grandpa and Grandma lived on a farm a little farther out. Frederikslund, if you know it?”

I nodded and looked around. Walls had been knocked down and rebuilt elsewhere; new layers covered the old. Everything was painted white. Children’s squiggly drawings on the wall and pictures of happy families on the refrigerator, just like in every other Danish home. Ordered and clean, the opposite of mine and Kirsten’s house in Valby, where everything had been ruled by Kirsten’s love for vintage and wear and tear and academic antiestablishment. She’d spent enormous amounts of energy not to resemble her orderly parents in Slagelse. Listened to loud jazz and cleaned to the overture from Carmen. She was still able to sit down with a glass of red wine and stare defiantly at the gardens of Valby and the newly built carports, saw herself as an agent of chaos in a regular suburb, but when it came down to it, she was like her mother and most other women in everything that was essential. Classic mildness, which had been her most distinguishing characteristic as a young girl, had long been replaced with the blunt pragmatism that my father consistently referred to as women’s “postloveliness period.”

“As soon as they’re no longer beautiful enough to pull you around by the dick, they put a ring in your nose instead. You fall asleep next to a gentle honey-scented creature and wake up beside a witch.”

I could see my own warlike Valkyrie in front of me at home in the house. Her loose, tangled jewelry in a box out on the street for five kroner apiece. The dining chairs in a dark photograph on a secondhand website, going for nothing. The children’s drawings and bead plates in the garbage. Our marriage and family life wiped out in the time it took others to cut their hedges.

The young woman threw out her arms and spun around once.

“Well, this is how it looks now. Do you recognize it?”

I shook my head. “I was only here a couple of times. Do you know how long they lived here?”

“The people from the commune?” She frowned. “They were here when my mom was older, maybe into the late seventies. Grandpa and Grandma had a little to do with them, just after they moved here, but it was a wild place. My mother wasn’t allowed to go in.”

She crossed her arms so her breasts were pushed together a little in her loose undershirt, and I wondered if it was on purpose. Whether standing in front of a man would make any woman consider what position her breasts should be presented in. It was a real bra with a lace trim, not one of the soft-elasticated, unbleached cotton ones for breastfeeding women. This one had thin, black straps and provided a significant boost to the soft attributes, and I appreciated her gesture. There was comfort in a woman’s bosom, but luckily she wasn’t my type. It was a relief.

She brushed a hair from her forehead with her fingers. Moderately long nails, femininely painted, like they should be everywhere except in academia.

“Who is it you’re looking for?”

“A woman named Ellen. Or someone who knows her.”

“Your mother or sister or something like that? Just like in Without a Trace.” She gave me a cheeky look.

“Too young to be my mother and too old to be my sister,” I said. “I’m trying to track her down for a friend.”

“Okay. I can probably find some names in the papers we have on the house. If you give me your number, I can call you.”

“Thanks. Your grandmother and grandfather—are they still alive?”

“My grandfather is Åge Jensen. He still lives on the farm. You can visit him if you want—his memory is still sharp.”

She got her cell phone from the windowsill and let her fingers run over the screen. She tapped in my number while we walked out to the hall together, the baby tottering after us.

“You wouldn’t like a glass of water before you go?” She looked at me with a slightly furrowed brow.

“No, thanks.”

“You don’t look the best, which is why I offered. It’s easy to feel unwell in this heat.”

I turned and caught an unwelcome glimpse of myself in the hallway mirror. Unfortunately, it was one of those moments where you haven’t gotten to prepare yourself for meeting with your own reflection. Where you can’t straighten your posture, lift the edges of your mouth and call forth the sparkle in your eye. And I immediately understood her concern. Despite the heat, I was paler than usual, my skin thin and fatigued in the light from the open door.

I remembered Frederikslund well.

It was one of the larger properties on the road to Auning, built around a graveled square courtyard with an arched entryway.

Several of the windows in the barn buildings were broken, and the property was empty, if you didn’t count the pickup from Auning Carpentry Company and some Rockwool fiber balls pushed into the rearmost corner. There had once been dairy cattle here, I guessed. A daily, lively stream of cows being driven out to pasture and back again for milking three times a day. A clatter of heavy milk cans and clumsy, cloven hooves.

Now the buildings lay like a collapsed foreign object in the middle of a cornfield that was growing all the way in to the flaky stable walls and stretching for as far as the eye could see on the other side of the huge farmhouse.

I let the door knocker fall heavily against its brass plate, and shortly thereafter a shadow appeared through the patterned green glass in the door. Åge Jensen. He led me into a dim room and pulled the curtains aside, then pointed toward the farm’s old boundary to the south. I couldn’t see anything other than the withering corn plants and a hot-tempered rotating sprinkler, which breathed steam and fog to the farthest corner. He drew them closed again.

His grandchild had called and warned him of my arrival.

“They were some bastards, especially the two chaps. Communists or something, they reminded me of. Came and told us everything we did was wrong, but what did they know? Nothing. Couldn’t poke a stick in shit without destroying both.”

Åge Jensen sat on the sofa with his hands in his lap and a pained expression on his lips that seemed chronic and unsolvable. Neither the bottle of schnapps nor the filled chocolates I’d picked up in Brugsen evoked anything but tired grunts. He couldn’t remember much and hadn’t had anything to do with them. Not after the incident with the sheep. Three animals had died of thirst in the summer of ’76 in the commune’s miserable fencing at the back of the stable.

“I’ll never forget it, I can tell you that. The day they dragged over the dead animals and asked if they could still use the meat. They wanted them skinned and dismembered, despite it being clear that they’d been dead for at least a day. It was a warm summer, and they hadn’t sheared them or given them water.” Åge Jensen’s thin lips curled upward in contempt.

“And what then?”

“What then? I told them to go to hell with their dead animals. They were drunk. Or worse. Probably drugs. I didn’t talk to them after that.”

It was dark and stifling in the living room. I glanced at the dark shelves, which had no books, but a cemetery of capsized picture frames, dark silhouettes of what were probably children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

“Should I turn on the light?” I said, already standing up to do so.

“No.”

I sat back down. Studied the old man’s shadowy face, trying to discern how old he was. Eighty or maybe ninety? I couldn’t remember him, but there were farm owners you saw and others you didn’t. The most solid friendships from back then were built on borrowing one another’s machinery in a pinch and rounding up runaway livestock together. Frederikslund had been a big farm where they didn’t have to borrow anything.

“A girl named Ellen Høgh lived there once,” I said. “Do you remember her?”

He nodded.

“A happy girl,” he said. “Sweet, but like the others.” He twirled his index finger around at his temple. Leaned so far back that a ray of light from the window hit his face. A big nose, wide jaw and astute expression.

“You come from Svenningsens’, you say? Anton and Anders. They’re probably well on in years now.”

“Eighty-seven and ninety-three, yes. They’re still going strong.”

Åge Jensen grunted.

“Thanks, but I’m up to date on the living and the dead here. That’s what the obituaries are for.”

“They send their regards,” I said.

“Yes, well.”

He moaned again. Thin, frail arms and legs and a distended soccer-ball-sized stomach. Liver problems, cancer or some other malignant thing had filled his insides with fluid or tumors.

“May I ask how you know the two brothers?” He reached out for the bottle of schnapps and unscrewed the lid. Sniffed it.

“They’re my father’s uncles. Can I get you a glass?”

He shook his head and put the bottle down again. Waved an aggressively buzzing fly away from his forehead. He sized me up again. Whatever might be wrong with Åge Jensen, it wasn’t his mind.

“Anton and Anders. They were a pretty pair.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, they stood out after what happened. It was an awful story, and it only got worse and worse.”

I leaned forward a little to hear him better. “We’ve never had much contact with the rest of my father’s family.”

Åge Jensen shifted on the sofa in obvious physical discomfort. Something was hurting somewhere, and the movement apparently gave no relief. He clenched his teeth.

“Well, the mother . . . she had Anders too late. Forty-six, I think she was. Bit of a scandal back then, so it was talked about. My mother was still offended twenty years later. And then there was the boy himself.”

“Sorry?”

“Loopy. A bit off.”

I’d never known exactly what was wrong with Anders, and it had never occurred to me to ask anyone. He just was the way he was.

“And Anders was difficult in his young years. A little too fond of the girls, if you know what I mean. Cycled around to the farms in the evening and stood outside, staring. I had an older sister, Johanne, who was pretty. After he besieged us for two weeks, Father went up and spoke with Anton. Then it was over.”

I frowned.

“How?”

Åge Jensen shrugged his shoulders.

“He sorted it out, like how you usually sorted things out back then. Gave the lad a telling-off or maybe something a bit harsher. I don’t know if he was locked in, but we didn’t see Anders at Pinderup anymore after that. And Johanne certainly hadn’t been the first.”

I flashed to Anders and myself in the yard one day long ago. The smile as he bent down over Soffi and scratched behind her ears. Blew on the mucky muzzle. His collection of glass shards, the oldest of which had been worn round and dull by sand and waves from Følle Strand.

“I have to go,” I said, and Åge Jensen nodded.

“Karsten Villadsen,” he said calmly. “One of the boys down there was called Karsten Villadsen. And he’s not a communist anymore, that much I do know.”