The Origin of Species by Nino Ricci Page A

August.”
    “Ah.” There was a pause he didn’t want to read. “I thought older. Perhaps because of the beard.”
    She had some errands to do in Helsingborg. Alex followed her around like her attendant, oddly comfortable with her, with the way she had annexed him. In the large central square just up from the ferry terminal, a band in traditional garb was playing a polka-like march to a scattered audience of passersby who stood as grave as mourners.
    “You see how the Swedes are, so serious,” Ingrid said. “And then they go home and drink until they are very drunk.”
    Her town, Engelström, was just inland from Landskrona down the coast. To Alex it looked like something out of
Brigadoon
, with its timbered houses and thatched barns and spired church. Ingrid’s house was at the far end of the town, off a little side road, a small white bungalow shrouded in shrubbery and trees. Alex expected some sort of domestic scene to greet them when she opened the door, her children, a blond-haired husband perhaps, but there was only silence.
    “The children are with their father in these days,” she said, reading his look, “so we are alone.”
    She pointed out the little cabin at the back of her garden, a steep-roofed confection with two shuttered windows and a little door low enough that Alex would have to stoop to get through it.
    “So you see, it’s true,” she said. “You will be better there than all night by the expressway.”
    But she did not take him out to it, and his backpack remained parked by the front door where he’d first set it.
    “Perhaps you would like to clean yourself.”
    He could not believe his good luck in having been taken into this place. The bathroom was small, pristine, just slightly cluttered; there was a shower stall, no bath, with a white curtain trimmed with lace. It was three days since he’d last showered, at the house of a professor in Utrecht who had taken him in; since then he’d slept in Lübeck in a kind of squat, then on the beach in Denmark after the ferry crossing from Puttgarden. He’d done the last three or four miles to Puttgarden on foot, toting a backpack laden with useless books like the
Bhagavad Gita
and
The Genealogy of Morals
that he hadn’t been able to get through in his first-year reading lists.
    In the shower he felt like he was scrubbing away all the grit of the past several weeks. The truth was he wasn’t sure he liked traveling much, having to start every day from scratch, meet new people, make his way. It had all begun to seem a bit pointless. Yet here he was in Ingrid’s house, in her shower, just because he’d been lucky enough to be standing there at the rail of the Helsingborg ferry.
    Ingrid was sitting in the sun in her garden with a sketchbook and a box of pastels when he came out.
    “It’s only something I started since the divorce,” she said. “In the way of doing something new.”
    They walked into town to get some things for their supper. At the butcher’s shop, the butcher, a lean, stoop-shouldered man with a crew cut that made his hair look singed, gave Alex a furtive glance but then scrupulously avoided his gaze. Ingrid carried on in her usual way, forthright, polite.
    “You mustn’t mind this place,” she said outside. “They are not so used to it here. To strangers.”
    They made supper together in Ingrid’s kitchen, which was modern and bright, all whites and blond wood, and ate in the garden. It wasAlex’s first real meal in weeks. He couldn’t quite shed the terror that he’d commit some gaffe, but somehow he found things to say. Out on the road, staying in the hostels with cocky Americans and Aussies and the career backpackers who traded travel stories like currency, he often felt a pariah.
    Ingrid had opened some wine.
    “It’s nice to have company,” she said, though he still couldn’t quite believe there might be something in it for her, that all this wasn’t just some prize she was bestowing on him.
    They stayed