Fyris River

The Fyris River is where Martin disappears during a visit to a fair in Uppsala in 1986, and where his body is found the following day. The river’s banks, jetty, and motionless water form the physical setting for a childhood loss that returns in fragments of memory and remains fixed in Victoria Bergman’s repeated reading of a newspaper report.

Setting and appearance

The route to the river begins away from the fair’s crowds. Victoria and Martin walk around the main barrack building and follow a path down a ravine-like slope to the water. The jetty where children had been swimming is now empty; a forgotten towel hangs over one of its posts, while houseboats sit dark and unoccupied on the murky river. These ordinary traces of recent activity make the place feel briefly abandoned rather than dramatically dangerous.

Victoria walks out along the jetty and feels the water. The setting changes in meaning when Martin vanishes: the same shore that had been part of an outing becomes the place where she calls for him and searches the bushes and reeds. She falls and cuts herself on a sharp stone, but cannot find him. When she runs back onto the jetty, the water is completely still. The narrative’s contrast between her urgent movement and the river’s lack of movement makes the scene’s absence—no answer, no visible sign—its defining feature.

Martin’s disappearance and the search

At first, Martin’s family is not especially alarmed. The fair covers a wide area, and they suppose that someone may be looking after him. After about half an hour, their concern grows; when he is still missing after another thirty minutes, his father calls the police. The search then shifts from the fairground to the surrounding area, but Martin is not found that evening.

The following day, searchers drag the river and recover Martin’s body. His injuries suggest that he drowned, possibly after striking his head against a rock. The body is also badly damaged, with boat propellers given as the presumed cause of that damage. The account distinguishes these findings from a single certain explanation: drowning appears likely from the injuries, while the severe damage is attributed to propellers. The river is therefore both the place where the search finally locates Martin and the setting for an unresolved distinction between the apparent cause of death and the damage to his body.

A memory that returns

The river recurs when a previously indistinct part of Victoria’s memory opens up. Images become fragments of a film: Martin on the Ferris wheel, the jetty beside the Fyris River, and the shame of having lost him. The recollection connects the outing to what followed at the hospital in Uppsala, including medication and therapy. In this sequence, the river is not an isolated landscape recalled for its own sake; it is one image in a chain that brings a painful past into the present.

A second remembered scene returns Victoria to the jetty. She moves her hand through the water and tells Martin that it is not very cold, though she is lying. He does not want to come out to her. The detail gives the earlier disappearance a quiet, intimate circumstance: before the loss is understood as an irreversible event, the scene holds a small exchange between the children at the water’s edge. The remembered gesture does not settle what happened in the interval before Martin went missing, but it makes the river a recurring point of contact with that unanswered moment.

The newspaper record and the river’s significance

A clipping from Upsala Nya Tidning preserves the public account of the death under the headline that a nine-year-old boy was found dead in the Fyris River. By the time Sofia looks at it, the paper has become extremely yellow after almost thirty years. She has read it every day for several years and knows it by heart, making the clipping a fixed record of an event that her own memory has not held steadily.

On this occasion, reading the familiar report brings unease rather than the sadness she usually feels. Her guilt gradually subsides as she concludes that Martin’s death had been an accident. The river thus carries two different kinds of evidence: the newspaper’s concise account of a body recovered from the water, and Victoria’s fragmentary personal recollection of the jetty and the loss. Their recurrence ties place to the changing understanding of the past without making the river itself explain what the available evidence leaves uncertain.