Sofia Zetterlund’s Apartment in Vita Bergen is the setting for Victoria Bergman’s final clearing-out in Stockholm: a domestic space being stripped of its papers, furnishings, and traces of captivity as she begins to act from a more integrated sense of herself. The apartment holds the remnants of the life she has lived under Sofia Zetterlund’s name, but it also becomes the place from which she decides to leave that life behind.

The Apartment as a Physical Setting

The apartment’s rooms register Victoria’s departure through concrete changes. The hall is crowded with black bin bags, and she intends to remove every scrap of paper. Gao Lian’s room is empty; the exercise bike has been moved into the living room, the mattresses carried up to the attic storage compartment, and the insulation is still to be torn out. These details make the cleanout more than a gesture: it is a deliberate dismantling of the apartment’s arrangement, room by room.

The scene gives the apartment a clear internal geography. The hall is the staging area for what must disappear, the former room is already cleared, the living room temporarily holds the exercise bike, and the attic compartment stores the mattresses. Later, Victoria sits on the broad kitchen windowsill with coffee and her mobile phone. From there, she watches the morning light cast sharp shadows on the street and considers the puzzle of her own identity. The movement between hall, cleared room, attic, and kitchen gives her inward reckoning a material setting: the space is changing as her understanding of herself changes.

Clearing the Past

At first, the papers and newspaper clippings in the apartment have served a purpose. They helped Victoria take the first steps toward answers about herself. Now she believes the answers are within her, and that her healing has advanced far enough for her to regain access to her memories. The notes and clippings are no longer necessary. Her decision to destroy them is therefore not a rejection of the past so much as a change in how she expects to reach it: she no longer needs to consult an external record to approach what she remembers.

The scale of the removal makes that decision tangible. Victoria ties the last bag and leaves it in the hall, but still has to work out how to transport everything. There are twelve bags, each with a capacity of 125 litres; she considers hiring a trailer or van so she can move them in one trip. The precise number and size turn a private resolution into a logistical burden. The apartment cannot be cleared by wishing its contents away: what she has accumulated must be carried out, and she herself must arrange to do it.

A Home Shaped by Two Identities

From the kitchen windowsill, Victoria sees the shadows below as a cubist puzzle, their edges like shards of glass. The image reflects her sense that her internal puzzle is nearly complete, but the scene does not present her identities as simply erased or exchanged. She understands that, for the time being, she must accept that she is Sofia Zetterlund, a psychotherapist with a private practice in rented premises on Mariatorget, while also recognizing Victoria Bergman as the person behind the official name. The distinction between the name on paper and the self she acknowledges remains present even as she begins to make decisions for herself.

The apartment also recalls the consequences of the separation between those selves. Victoria’s former memory lapses and nocturnal walks led to visits to bars and dark parks, where she sometimes staggered drunk. On one occasion she fell into the water near Norra Hammarbyhamnen. The next day, Sofia sat in the kitchen in wet clothes, trying to piece together what had happened. Victoria remembers the sequence: she went to the Clarion Hotel, accompanied someone to his room, had sex until she felt sick, then walked to the water carrying two bottles of wine, drank too much, and fell in. The kitchen is thus not only the place where she now examines the almost-complete puzzle; it is also connected to the bewilderment left by the earlier episodes. The contrast is between a past in which Sofia had to reconstruct events after the fact and a present in which Victoria says the Sleepwalker is dead and she is making the decisions, feeling, and acting.

Departure from Stockholm

After leaving the windowsill, Victoria puts her coffee cup on the draining board and returns to the hall to deal with the bags. She has now decided where to take them: the logical place, though its name is not given in this passage. The apartment’s cleared interior is joined to a practical plan for departure, not merely to an inward declaration that she is finished with the city.

She calls Ann-Britt and says she is considering closing her practice for the foreseeable future. She needs a holiday and wants to get away, but cannot say whether she will be gone for days or a month or two. The office rent has already been paid a year in advance, so it will not prevent her from leaving. A subsequent call is welcomed by the young man at the Audi centre in Smista, and when Victoria hangs up, everything feels lighter. The apartment is the point from which these decisions are set in motion: clearing its contents, suspending her professional routine, and arranging to go.

The scene’s decisive change is expressed as the end of her life in Stockholm. Victoria is not simply abandoning an apartment; she is leaving a city associated with the long division between her public identity and her hidden one. She is going somewhere that still means something to her, where the houses are empty at that time of year and the starry sky is as clear as it was when she was very small. The passage does not name that destination. Instead, it ends by setting the apartment’s crowded hall and bags against the remembered openness of the place she intends to reach: the cleared rooms are the threshold of an uncertain departure, but one Victoria has chosen for herself.