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Every day there is water on the table in a big glass jug. It is perfectly clear, perfectly transparent, and has no form of its own: if I pour it into the children’s glasses, it at once conforms to the new walls. If I spill it, it flows across the tabletop, faintly bulging, and perhaps it drips down to the floor, for that is the most characteristic property of water, it always seeks the lowest point in space. If it’s raining outside, the raindrops glide slowly down the windowpane and onto the ledge, where they gather in clusters, which loosen and fall towards the flagstone below, while the water in the children’s glasses, which they lift greedily to their lips, runs down their throats. That this liquid, with no colour of its own, no taste, no form, so easy to control, completely at the mercy of its surroundings, should have anything to do with the waves that every autumn and winter rise out of the ocean along the coast and strike the land with enormous force, this inferno of foam, roaring and booming, is as difficult to grasp as the fact that the tiny flame rising so quietly from the candle wick should have anything to do with the vast fires, many miles across, that occasionally ravage the forests and destroy everything in their path. But it does. Water is on the table, water runs from the tap. Water causes streets to glisten, fields to darken, meadows to glimmer. Water bubbles in brooks, cascades off cliffs, lies still in vast pools in the middle of the forest. Water encircles the continents. In childhood, when the world was still new, it was water we were drawn to. To the pond, to the stream, to the inlet. None of us thought then just what it was about water, but it filled us with something, a suspense, something singular and dramatic, a sort of darkness. Water was an edge, our world ended there, even if it only lay in a pool in the forest a few hundred metres from the lit-up houses, or beneath the concrete bridge down by the small boat marina, where on March evenings we would jump from ice floe to ice floe, strangely elated in the bluish dark, boots and trouser legs heavy with dampness, palms red with cold. More than thirty years later I went back and met my best friend from that time. I asked him if he remembered us jumping on the ice floes. He nodded and was as astonished as I was that we really had, we could easily have died there. And then he told me about something that had happened the year before. He had been walking down that same road, it was winter, late in the evening, it was snowing and visibility was poor, he crossed the bridge, and there, deep down in the black water, he saw light. He leaned over, what the hell could it be, shining down there on the bottom? It was a car that had gone off the road, it must have happened moments ago. He called an ambulance, it arrived, divers made their way down to the wreck, lifted the driver out, he had drowned. The car was hoisted up the next day, and even though I didn’t see it myself, I can picture it clearly in my mind, how water gushes from the openings in the suspended body of the car and, splashing, strikes the black surface, on which the whirling snowflakes melt and disappear.