Because a month from now, this will have happened: Sigrid and Kåre have kept in touch by email and phone, and the distance between them will in many ways have been beneficial. Whenever they’ve spoken together, they’ve been able to stand by their windows, gazing out, and the view, as is often the case from a window—particularly if there are trees outside, and particularly if those trees are slowly being covered by snow that lands falling on their branches (because: if we watch a snowflake land on a branch in slow motion, we see that the snowflake actually doesn’t stop falling until both ends of the flake have settled on the gentle curve of the branch, like a hand placed affectionately on an arm, a humble greeting from one natural phenomenon to another, in other words: snowflakes land falling), and particularly when it’s dusk, or in the glow of streetlamps—the view and the magic it invokes blends with the sense of the person one has just been speaking to—a marvelous consequence for those in love. The person one has spoken to and is in love with becomes, in a way, part of one’s sense of self, there by the window, with the snow falling onto the branches. Then, when one has stood by the window and nurtured this good feeling long enough, one can carry on with whatever one was doing, and one can hold on to this feeling because the other person isn’t there to disturb the image with things other than that magical falling onto trees. If the other person had been there, the image might have been spoiled by the things one does that have no magic about them, such as pulling off one’s woolen socks and dropping them on the floor rather than folding them together and putting them in the basket exclusively reserved for woolen socks, or putting the brown goat’s cheese back in the fridge after it’s been standing on the counter in the kitchen for hours and is all crumbly as a result, or picking one’s teeth with one’s nail at the same time as making sucking noises, trying to dislodge the food that’s stuck right by a wisdom tooth, or disturbing the other person who is, for example, watching TV, by having long telephone conversations with someone else. The distance meant one could avoid all this. One could finish the phone call, look out the window, watch the snow falling down onto the branches, get that magical feeling.
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And then, one day, a postcard arrived for Sigrid, with a picture of a chair on the front, an ordinary wooden chair, and on the back of the card it said: When are you coming?