Copenhagen

Copenhagen is a place of arrival, attempted escape, and later recognition in the novel’s account of Victoria Bergman. At seventeen, after a journey through Europe, she tried to kill herself in a hotel room there; the attempt failed, and the voice she struggled with fell silent. Years later, the memory returns through therapy recordings and a broken front tooth. Copenhagen also appears in a separate thread as the site of a promised art exhibition, making the city a point where private crisis and public possibility occupy very different narrative roles.

Arrival and failed escape

Victoria’s account places Copenhagen at the end of an exhausting journey with friends. She remembers arriving there in a severely distressed state and trying to hang herself in a hotel room. The attempt did not succeed: the ceiling hook came loose, and she woke on the bathroom floor with the belt still around her neck. The fall chipped one of her front teeth. She later showed the difference between that tooth and the other to Sofia Zetterlund, who was listening to her account.

The city is thus not presented as the cause of Victoria’s crisis, but as the place where her journey reached a breaking point. Her recollection links the attempt to her struggle with a voice that she believed stopped after she had finally dared to act. The promised finality of that moment is undercut by its failure: she survived, carrying a physical reminder and a history that would return in fragments.

A route reconstructed from memory

Copenhagen’s place in Victoria’s story becomes clearer when the account resurfaces on a therapy recording. The journey leading there is not remembered as a continuous itinerary. Victoria recalls travel through Greece, a border crossing, and a substantial gap covering much of Italy and France before she woke in the Netherlands. After her companions decided to go home, she continued alone, eventually reaching Amsterdam. Following an encounter there, she took money from the man and used it to pay for a hotel room in Copenhagen.

This sequence makes the city both a destination and the endpoint Victoria had assigned to her attempt. Her recollection also includes her earlier sexual assault by boys at Roskilde and her flight to Copenhagen. The novel gives these events as parts of a disrupted history rather than as a smooth travel narrative: places and incidents surface around gaps, and the account’s order is recovered through repeated listening. Copenhagen gathers these movements together without resolving them into a simple story of escape.

The recording and the returning tooth

The memory has already been heard many times before Sofia recognizes it on the particular tape. She realizes that she has listened to Victoria’s European journey repeatedly, perhaps ten times, yet has forgotten it. That lapse makes the recording more than a container of past information: it shows how a remembered event can remain inaccessible even when it has been heard before. The city returns through repetition, while the listener’s failure to recognize the account exposes a break in her own continuity.

Later, Sofia sees her reflection in the hall mirror and touches the front tooth that broke during the attempt in Copenhagen twenty years earlier. The gesture connects a present-day face to the adolescent event with unusual directness: the tooth is a trace that can be seen and touched even when the associated past has not remained steadily available to consciousness. Her reflection also prompts a problem of recognition. The familiar image does not feel fully like herself, and the old injury becomes evidence of a history that the present self must confront.

Other meanings of the city

Copenhagen has a distinct, less intimate association in the art news discussed by Jeanette Kihlberg and Åke. A curator who had promoted Åke’s paintings promised him another exhibition at her Copenhagen branch. Jeanette is pleased that his work is attracting attention, while privately suspecting that something about the situation is wrong and questioning whether the art is entirely his. The exhibition has not yet taken place in the evidence presented; Copenhagen matters here as the proposed venue of a possible next step in Åke’s career.

These two strands should not be collapsed into a single event. In Victoria’s history, Copenhagen is attached to a failed attempt to end her life and to the later recurrence of a memory. In Jeanette’s domestic life, it is an anticipated destination for an exhibition and a source of mixed hope and unease. The contrast gives the city a varied function in the novel: it can mark the point where a journey closes, the place from which a buried episode returns, or the setting of a future that remains only promised.