The thing is, Kåre says, he’s going to write a novel in which George W. Bush will be one of the main characters. It’s based on a photograph of Bush Senior and Junior on a golf course that he found in Vanity Fair, in which the father has a comforting hand on the son’s shoulder. They’re both wearing black golfing caps and stripy golf shirts, and Bush Junior’s mouth is a narrow line, pulling toward one cheek, as though he’s thinking damn, and the expression in his eyes is one of exasperation. He has, Kåre says, that man, one of the most expressive faces in international politics, I’ll give him that. Kåre imitates the facial expression. Sigrid laughs. Sigrid likes this, she likes the way he’s interpreted this picture, she feels it cascade through her, she likes it! And the text underneath explains it all, Kåre says, it says “Father and son at the Cape Arundel Golf Club, in Kennebunkport, on the son’s 55th birthday, July 6, 2001. The handshake follows George W.’s missed putt on the 18th hole.” Kåre laughs, having quoted the caption, a complicit laugh that Sigrid feels embarrassed that she can’t quite emulate; she tries, only doesn’t quite manage it, though she does think that in isolation, at least, it’s amusing, that he missed a putt on the eighteenth hole, but if there’s some big political allusion here then it’s passed her by, and she hopes her laughter caused by the eighteenth hole and the word “putt” covers it! She’s impressed, she says, that Kåre can remember the whole caption, and Kåre smiles, he likes things like that, remembering things like that and saying them in an American movie-trailer voice. He thinks it adds a little something extra to whatever he’s talking about, the fact that he can quote word-for-word from memory gives his subject extra weight, he doesn’t just sit there and mumble “Eh, what did it say again, something about…” thus making the quote (which doesn’t actually need to be a quote, but could equally well be a description of a situation) sound clumsy and flat and boring to listen to. Better by far, when you come across things like that, to learn whatever it is by heart, so you can quote it with authority on a suitable occasion. And suitable occasions always popped up, no need to worry about that. But, naturally, he doesn’t say any of this, he just says, in his deep, American movie-trailer voice: “Memory, that warder of the brain,” and explains that he has to remember things like that to avoid going senile. He’s an old man, you see. You’re not that old, Sigrid says, and looks at the table, because she shouldn’t really have even remotely implied that he might be anywhere near “old,” so she saves the situation by saying—I mean: seventy-four, you’re still young! Kåre laughs. He looks at her. Forty-three, he says, as though it’s a warning. I’m forty-three. Twenty-three, Sigrid says. I’m twenty-three. Their ages meet in the air, perhaps largely due to the perfect symmetry in the numbers forty-three and twenty-three, but for other reasons as well, as though they were bodies and not numbers. And they too tremble.