Axel read the words he had written. He didn’t know where they had come from, he just wrote them all of a sudden, and for a short while he thought he was back. Such a long time had passed since the spirit of creativity had granted him a rewarding day of work. To fix the words to the paper had seemed like hard physical labour, since none of them voluntarily wanted to find their place. The story he was trying to tell faltered through thirty pages; stacked on the desk they constituted an insult if the time it had taken to write them were taken into account. None of his characters wanted to settle down in the life he was trying to give them. The delivery date he had rashly promised the publishers was fast approaching, and Gerda had informed him yesterday that someone from the bank had rung looking for him. He still hadn’t rung back, well aware of what they would tell him. With the money from the Society for the Promotion of Literature prize, the advance from the publishers, and the Swedish Church writers’ grants, he had kept the household running since the summer, but now the money was starting to run out.
