Sigrid decides to hold off on her soup awhile and instead butters a slice of crusty bread, she can’t wait to taste it, it’s one of her favorite things, fresh bread with butter, only butter, and she manages to get the bread to her mouth without any problem, because she can do it so fast that her arm doesn’t have a chance to freeze up and start back in with those concentration-shakes, since there’s no soup to be spilled. She perhaps lifts the bread to her mouth a little too fast, but so what! She takes a bite and chews. It’s really good. She tries to think that she’s having a good time, she’s in a café eating delicious bread and butter and it doesn’t matter that neither of them is saying anything, that Kåre is sitting looking down at his soup with a grim, grim expression on his face. She tries to think that this will all be amusing to them in retrospect, when they’ve gotten over the first shock of their first meeting, and that she will laugh when she tells how she struggled to get the soup to her mouth because she was so tense. And now she wonders if perhaps seeing the whole situation from outside like that might have helped her arm to relax, so once again she picks up the spoon, dips it in the soup, and tries to guide it to her mouth. It’s simply not possible. It’s like her arm has a lock that makes it impossible to get it up to her mouth. She takes a piece of bread and holds it under her spoon, moves it up toward her mouth, maybe that’s how she has to eat the soup, with bread at the ready as soon as the soup reaches her mouth? People eat soup and porridge in so many different ways. Some people run the spoon around and around the bowl, from the edge inward, others go at it at an angle. She tries to cheer herself up with the thought that this is all at least allowing her to experience herself in an extreme situation, as in “extremely tense”; she tries to cheer herself with the thought that she’s experiencing just how tough it can be, those few inches from the supporting bread to her mouth, when the spoon is alone; she tries to cheer herself with the thought that she’ll just close her eyes and make a final, desperate attempt to get the spoon in her mouth. When she opens her eyes again, she sees that Kåre is sitting there with tears in his eyes; he laughs, puts his hand around the wrist of the hand that’s holding the bread, and lowers it to the table. Sigrid, he says, you can relax, I don’t bite. Mmh, Sigrid blows through her nose. I regret ordering the soup, I forgot that my arms stop working when I’m nervous, she says. It always happens; for example, when I’ve got an oral exam, I can’t drink the glass of water that’s in front of me. Just be yourself, Kåre says. You don’t need to be nervous.