Character: Astrid Magnussen

My mother once wrote a poem about rivers. They're like women, it said. They begin with little girls, streams in bright flowers. Then they grow up, turn into rapid streams, pave paths in granite, throw themselves from the rocks, fearless, unstoweet. Then they are distributed, become calm and businesslike, goods and different garbage float along wide smooth turns. But in the dark depths of the unconscious grow huge som, reaching the size of a barge. Once every hundred years, storms occur, rivers take back their words, change marriage vows and flood the banks. Finally they exhale, devastated by childbirth, and turn into vast swamps adjacent to the sea.

Why do people kill those who leave them? Because they are suffocated by pain and anger, and they cannot bear these feelings.

If a poet utters beautiful words, this does not mean that they are true.

That's what I would write about if I were a poet– those who work at night. About guys unloading cars, about nurses on duty with their affectionate hands, about night employees in hotels, about taxi drivers, about waitresses in round-the-clock cafes. They understand a lot. They know how valuable it is that someone remembers your name, they know the comfort of the usual rhetorical questions - "How is life? Like children?" They know how long a night can be. They know what sound the departing life makes - it quietly clicks like a glass door closed in a draft. Night workers live without illusions - wipe other people's dreams from the tables, load weights, return to the airport for the last remaining passenger.

What does beauty give if you're not going to use it as a key or as a hammer? Just a toy for other people, an object of use or admiration. Or contempt and envy. A pretext for a dream, like a picture on a white wall.

Only footmen should apologize, she taught me. Never apologize, never explain anything.

Beauty was my mother's law, her religion. You can do whatever you want if you're beautiful, if you do it beautifully. If not, you just don't exist.

In the round wall mirror flashed our long white hair, blue eyes. Ancient Scandinavian women. When I looked at me and my mother like this, I could easily remember fishing in the deep cold seas, the smell of cod, the coal of our fires, leather shoes and our strange alphabet, rough runes, a language similar in sound to plowing a field.

Even sitting next to her, she was so often out of reach.

Two years later, after we moved to new York, I received from my mother a letter. She sent the journal "Los Angeles times" with his photo on the cover. <...> In the times on seven pages of printed pictures of her eerie prison collages. She looked at me from the cover, standing on the background grids. Beautiful, dangerous, proud... And exhibition of works became my mother's triumph!

- Did you love him?
- We had bright wild sex. In this case, not much to see.
- You idolised him. I read in the diary!
- "Worshipped" is too strong a word for this feeling...

- Why did you kill Barry?
- Self-defense. He tried to kill me.
Clare did not touch you. Why you destroyed it?
Claire wanted to go. I just pointed out a shortcut.

- I haven't said that all ready.
- What do you want?
- To make a deal with you. Sharing: I the court - a lie, and you tell me - the truth.

- I understand you have had a tough time: three adoptive family for three years, injury, suicide of miss Lucy...
- And your client talked about his role in these events?