Åke Kihlberg

Åke Kihlberg is Jeanette Kihlberg’s husband, later living apart from her, and the father of their son, Johan. His presence in the novel is often indirect: he appears in Jeanette’s thoughts about the shared house and their marriage, in remembered domestic details, and in calls about their son. These fragments make him a figure of unresolved separation—associated both with a stale life Jeanette no longer wants and with responsibilities that neither parent can simply leave behind.

Identity and Domestic Traces

A vivid remnant of Åke Kihlberg’s life in the family home is the H, F, and C that show through the white paint on the ceiling: the initials of Hammarby IF. He had painted them green while drunk, then painted over them the next day. The cover-up did not erase the letters, and Jeanette notes that the unfinished repair resembles other things he had promised to sort out but never did. The house thus preserves his actions more stubbornly than his attempts to conceal or correct them.

His connection with painting also lingers in Jeanette’s account of the household. After he moves out, she notices the absence of the smell of oil paint, linseed oil, and turpentine, and realizes that she misses it. She wonders whether she had been too intolerant or had failed to encourage him when he doubted his talent. These are her retrospective questions, not a settled account of why their marriage ended; they show that even after imagining a future apart, she can still reconsider her part in their shared history.

Marriage and Separation

Jeanette imagines what signing divorce papers would mean, but the couple have not yet taken that step. Sweden’s six-month waiting period makes the prospect feel like a limbo: a legal interval before a final decision, followed by the practical strain of dividing their assets. She recognizes that she would have a right to half of what they own together and briefly considers pretending to demand her share to see how Åke would react. The thought is wry, but it also shows how emotional uncertainty has become entangled with the finances and administration of ending a marriage.

In one private imagining, Jeanette expects that Åke would leave for Poland, drink champagne, and sell old paintings—works she believes he might have destroyed years earlier if she had not stopped him. This is not a reported plan or an event; it is her frustrated prediction of how he might behave while she faced paperwork and estate agents discussing how to prepare the house for sale. Her fantasy sets his presumed escape against the labor she expects to inherit. Yet her later thought that he no longer depends on her to do anything for him marks a change: whatever her lingering concern about his work, she recognizes that their lives are becoming separate.

Fatherhood and Family Conflict

Johan remains the point around which the separated parents’ obligations converge. When Jeanette is worried about what to do for him, she considers contacting the psychiatric unit and wonders why Åke has not been in touch or taken some responsibility. Her resentment is sharpened by the impression that he is busy pursuing his own dreams. In this moment, separation is not merely an adult decision: it raises the immediate question of how both parents will be present for their son.

The family strain becomes concrete when Jeanette tells Jens Hurtig that Johan is having trouble accepting Alexandra Kowalska. Johan called Alexandra a whore, and the confrontation that followed became a major row. The exchange gives a glimpse of a household relationship under pressure, but does not establish the full circumstances of the argument or what Åke did during it. Jeanette also interrupts a call from Åke while she is with Hurtig, telling him she cannot talk and expects to be home in about an hour. Hurtig asks whether Åke is making things difficult for her; Jeanette cannot say that he is, and suspects the call concerns Johan. Her uncertainty conveys how family matters intrude into her work without making the call’s purpose known.

Attempts at Contact

A later call suggests a more deliberate effort by Åke to spend time with their son. He tells Jeanette that he wants to take Johan to London for a football match, just the two of them, and describes it as a chance to be a father. Johan, Jeanette understands, is enthusiastic about the London derby. The plan stands in contrast to her earlier feeling that Åke had not assumed enough responsibility, though the evidence records the proposed trip rather than its outcome.

Åke also asks Jeanette to have lunch before he and Johan set off. She hesitates and questions whether he has time; he answers that this is why he is asking and proposes the following day. The invitation does not resolve the marriage, and Jeanette’s response remains cautious. Still, it creates a small opening for contact between the estranged spouses, alongside his effort to spend time with Johan. Their exchanges therefore carry two distinct possibilities at once: practical co-parenting and a tentative attempt to speak to each other beyond the logistics of separation.

The Marriage in Retrospect

Jeanette remembers evenings when she and Åke watched television, ate chips, and laughed at bad films. The memory does not make her long for their marriage. She describes that period as a sterile wait for something better, an emotionally stunted existence that consumed evenings over months and years. The contrast matters: shared rituals had once supplied the shape of ordinary life, but in retrospect she sees them as a prolonged postponement rather than intimacy.

Åke is consequently presented less through an independent account of his inner life than through the changing meanings Jeanette assigns to their shared objects, habits, and responsibilities. The faint football-club letters, the missing smell of paint, the imagined sale of paintings, and the proposed London trip each register a different aspect of their separation. Her reflections can be resentful, nostalgic, or self-questioning; none alone settles what Åke intends. Together, they show Jeanette beginning to imagine a life no longer organized around waiting for the marriage to improve, while the question of how she and Åke will care for Johan remains unresolved.