Gröna Lund Amusement Park is a Stockholm fairground associated with two sharply contrasting moments in Victoria Bergman’s life: a return to the landscape of Martin’s disappearance and her abduction of a boy whom she later recognized as innocent. The park’s roller coaster appears first as a distant landmark in a scene of memory; elsewhere, the fairground is where Victoria takes the boy, an act she comes to regret.

Setting and memory

As a train passes Gamla stan and crosses the bridge over Riddarfjärden, Victoria sees the Djurgård ferries and, farther away, the roller coaster at Gröna Lund Amusement Park. The view prompts her to realize that she has not been to a fair for three years—not since the day Martin went missing. She does not know precisely what happened to him, though she thinks he fell into the water. The park’s distant outline therefore brings a private absence into the present without resolving it: the memory is specific enough to mark the passage of time, but what happened to Martin remains uncertain.

After the journey, Victoria enters a garden and finds the elderly Sofia Zetterlund asleep beneath a cherry tree. Victoria wraps a blanket around Sofia Zetterlund’s feet because it is chilly. The fairground is not the site of this reunion, but the train’s view of it frames the approach, joining Victoria’s return to an ordinary act of care with the memory of the last fair she associates with Martin.

The boy at the fairground

Gröna Lund Amusement Park is also connected to Victoria’s taking of a boy from the fairground. She later distinguishes him from the sick people she has been dealing with and recognizes that taking him was a mistake. When she understood that he was not her half-brother, she regretted what she had done and let him live.

Her recognition follows a night at Waldemarsudde. After injecting the boy with pure alcohol, she watched him pass out and put a pig mask on him; she then spent the night out with him before realizing her mistaken belief about their relationship. The boy was innocent, and Victoria’s regret contrasts with her judgment of the women waiting for her in the car: unlike him, she considers them deserving of what she plans to do.

Narrative significance

The park links memory and action without making them equivalent. In the train scene, its roller coaster is a distant visual cue that revives the unresolved loss of Martin. In the account of the boy, the fairground marks the beginning of a new wrong, one Victoria partially recognizes and reverses by allowing him to live. The contrast makes Gröna Lund a recurring point of reference for the difference between an act that cannot be undone and a mistaken act that can still be interrupted.