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me, just sat there, tightly wrapped up in my blanket like a stuffed cabbage leaf and carefully held the cigarette in my hand. Thought I would save it, as a mark of . . . something. It was the fact that he had asked me that was important.
    This was something I would always remember. The only thing I wanted to wipe from my memory was the sound of the birds on fire, but that was hard when the smell of them hung over the field. The turkey sheds were already in flames when Mama managed to open the padlock, and the birds that were still alive flew out like blazing torches and set fire to the barley where they fell.
    The whole village was shrouded in a stench of the charred remains of living creatures. The pain in my lungs helped to keep me awake. To sit with a stranger and say nothing and feel cold and keep sneaking a look at him and then at the glow of his cigarette and know that our job was so important that we had to make sure that the whole village didn’t catch fire made everything easier to bear. Including the longing for home I felt when I saw the bats silently swoop after insects above the lake.
    â€”
    He didn’t ask what my name was. I told him anyway.
    â€œThat sounds like a boy’s name.”
    â€œNo, it’s the name of a beast of prey,” I said.
    â€œYes, yes. I know. I know all about beasts of prey,” he said and looked at me skeptically when I related what Mama had once told me. That one autumn when the ice froze earlier than usual up in the north, where my family came from, a she-bear walked out to one of the rocky islands and went into hibernation. When she woke up in spring the ice was gone and she was caught in a trap. Men went out in boats and looked at her in awe. In those days a bear was an exceptional sight up there, and she was a magnificent specimen. Then they shot her, because they were hungry that spring after the war, and everyone knew it was the same bear that had killed my great-grandfather, so his family received the biggest share of the meat.
    â€œA bear’s not a beast of prey,” he said.
    â€œI know, but that was the bear that killed my great-grandfather who gave Papa’s father the name Björn. And it was Papa’s father who gave Mama the name Karenina. And Mama who gave me the name Lo.”
    â€œOh, right,” he said, and looked at me quizzically. “Are you going to smoke it or can I have it back? It was my last one.”
    â€œI’m going to,” I said, “but not at the moment.”
    Lukács Zsolt. That was what he was called. Or rather, Zsolt Lukács—a misunderstanding that occurred long ago when he arrived here at the outset with his father. As far as he knew his father had written his name down on a piece of paper for the day-care staff the first time he left his son with them, not realizing that in Sweden the given name usually comes first. When he picked up his son later the same day everyone called him Lukas.
    And Lukas it remained. It was a funny story, but he didn’t tell it as if it were funny. He didn’t mind the mix-up, he said. Lukács had been his mother’s surname, that was why he liked it. And when he pronounced it in Hungarian it sounded like lo-cat.
    A number of times during the night he had to go off and throw up after all the smoke he had inhaled. He had gone nearer to the fire than anyone else, displaying a defiance that reminded me of that dangerous look in Mama’s and Papa’s eyes when they threw themselves into the surf at the sea. Again and again into the waves, into the flames, as if each time were the last.
    He knows all about beasts of prey, I thought, as I watched him dry his mouth and sit down again. I realized that he was the one who had started the fire. I didn’t understand why. Sitting on the burned-out field on the lookout for signs that it was starting up again, I was suddenly aware that he hoped it would.

    The sandy field, the heat under the