1986

The 1986 episode in Uppsala is the turning point in which Victoria Bergman kills Martin: at the water’s edge, an attempt to manage guilt gives way to an assault she experiences through a frightening collapse of perception. The scene ends with Martin’s body sinking and Victoria insisting that the violence was not hers.

Uppsala and the jetty

The passage places the events in Uppsala in 1986. At first, Victoria feels calm spreading through her body as her guilt subsides; she understands what happened as an accident, “Nothing else.” Down on the jetty, she moves her hand through the water and says, “It’s not that cold,” while the narration makes clear that she is lying. The water is already part of the scene before it becomes the place where Martin’s body disappears.

Her effort to take Martin away from there and back home is interrupted by a sudden change in perception. Her vision blurs, she feels sick, and a crow seems to cry directly into her ears. Looking at Martin, she sees instead his father’s eyes and wet lips, while the crow becomes an image inside her head, its black wings passing over her eyes. The passage presents the violence as emerging amid this sensory and mental rupture, without making the resulting actions less concrete.

The assault and the body in the water

The passage names the acting presence as Crow Girl as Victoria grabs Martin by the hair, hard enough to pull out large clumps, and strikes his head, face, and body. Blood pours from his ears and nose. In his eyes she first sees fear, then something else; the narration marks that change without explaining it, keeping the moment’s meaning unsettled even as the assault itself is described in stark physical detail.

Giddy and weighed down, Victoria rises as if through fog, leaves the jetty, and fetches a large stone from the riverbank. Her vision spins as she returns to Martin. When the stone hits his head, the sound is compared to a foot stamping on an apple. She says, “It isn’t me,” and lets his body sink into the water, then tells him, “Now you’ve got to swim …” The sequence moves from a plea to protect him, through repeated blows and a deliberate return with a weapon, to the body’s disappearance beneath the water. Her denial does not undo the actions: it stands beside them as the scene’s final fracture between the person acting and the self who claims not to be responsible.

The Fracture Between Action and Agency

The episode’s decisive tension lies in the gap between what Victoria does and what she can acknowledge as hers. The scene gives the violence a bodily sequence, but its perception fractures: Martin’s face is overlaid with his father’s, and the crow shifts from an external cry to an image inside her head. The narration then names Crow Girl as the one who seizes and strikes him, while Victoria’s own denial separates the acting presence from the self who speaks. This change in naming does not erase the material events; instead, it makes responsibility and identity the scene’s unresolved problem.

That fracture also unsettles the earlier effort to contain the episode as an accident. Victoria’s words offer a story of diminished guilt, but the passage does not let that account settle the matter: the actions continue, and the final denial arrives only after the fatal blow. The scene thus holds incompatible explanations side by side—accident and deliberate movement, protection and harm, bodily action and disavowal—without resolving them into a single, reassuring account.

The Scene’s Narrative Turn

“Then something happens” marks a sharp change in the scene’s pace and register. The sentence withholds an explanation at the instant Victoria’s vision blurs and nausea overtakes her; the crow’s cry then shifts from a sound she hears to an image inside her head. This progression makes the reader experience the rupture through successive sensory changes rather than through an external explanation. The date and place anchor the episode, but the narration does not settle what the crow signifies or offer a diagnosis for the altered perception. Instead, the sudden turn leaves the scene’s account of agency unsettled: its events are narrated concretely, while the consciousness through which they are experienced remains fractured.