princess could have lifted it alone. She and Group Captain Townshend must
have lifted the stone together, and even so it must have been heavy.
Gazing at the photograph, Takako tried to imagine the princess as she
would have looked hoisting a stone onto the mound with the group captain,
but the image that came was simply an image. Takako felt no connection to
it. Her reading of the articles in the previous day’s paper had left her feeling
sorry for the princess, who had after all been forced by church law and by
certain customs of the English royal family to abandon her love, but that
feeling was now gone. In some ways yesterday’s empathy itself seemed
like a foreign story.
Takako was unable to read one of the other stories in “This Country, That
Country” with so much detachment, however. The story described two
actual cases of “spouse swapping.”
The first incident had occurred in Sweden. Two married couples, the
Polsens and the Petersons, lived in adjacent apartments in a single building
in Egresund, a town near Stockholm. Mr. Polsens and Mr. Peterson were
friends of long standing, and they and their wives had grown so close that
they lived essentially as a single family. Then, on the twenty-ninth (the
article ran on November second, so it must have been October twenty-
ninth), the two husbands swapped wives—or to look at it from the other
point of view, the wives swapped husbands. In short, the couples were
divorced and remarried simultaneously. Neither the Petersons nor the
Polsens are at all worried about the shock they’ve given the world, and all
four of them are getting along as well as ever, it was reported.
“There are so many marriages that just aren’t happy, where the couple
would be better off getting divorced,” Peterson stated. “There’s really
nothing strange about our marrying each other’s wives. In the end it seemed
it’d be better for the children— that’s basically why we did it.”
The Petersons have one child, the Polsens two infants. Al three children
accompanied their respective mothers when they moved, each into the
