Uppsala

Uppsala is the setting of a childhood loss that becomes central to Victoria Bergman’s story and to the way her memories return. In the summer of 1986, the city holds together two sharply different spaces: a travelling fair where she spends time alone with Martin, and the Fyris River, where his body is found the following day. Later, the fairground, riverbank, hospital, and a newspaper clipping anchor memories that had long remained incomplete.

Setting and summer in the city

The events are located in Uppsala in 1986. In early August, a travelling fair occupies the grass in front of the old barracks at Polacksbacken. Rides, carnival booths, and food stalls fill the area for a week, making the fair a conspicuous, busy place rather than an isolated setting. The contrast matters: the crowd and its many possible onlookers initially make Martin’s absence seem less alarming, but they cannot ensure that he is safe.

The fair is also part of Victoria’s life beyond the immediate tragedy. She is the only girl at her summer workplace, where fifteen teenage boys goad one another in a cramped shack when constant rain keeps them indoors. They play rummy to decide who will go with Crow Girl into another room. This detail places Victoria within a male group whose conduct turns her into the focus of a contest, while setting apart her more intimate connection with Martin. On the fairground, she is not simply one of the boys’ companions: Martin has come to trust her.

Martin’s parents go into the city centre for dinner, and Victoria is to take him around the fair. After summers spent together, she has become his best friend. He turns to her when he wants to discuss something important, when he is sad, or when he wants to do something exciting and forbidden. The fair thus gives their existing closeness a public, temporary setting: for a while, Martin has Victoria’s attention and company without his parents beside him.

From the fair to the river

Martin is last connected in the recovered account to the fair’s attractions, including its Ferris wheel. From high above Uppsala, the river and its boats become part of what the children see. In a later broken telling, the ride’s ascent, Martin’s fear, and the view across the city emerge in a run of details; he corrects Victoria’s identification of the boats, saying they are Stockholm’s Djurgård ferries. The account preserves the children’s exchange, but its fractured delivery also shows how the episode returns not as a smooth narrative but in pieces.

At first, Martin’s parents are not especially worried. The fairground is large, they reason, and there are plenty of people who might look after a child on his own. After about half an hour of searching, their anxiety grows because he is nowhere in the fairground. Another half-hour passes before his father calls the police, and the search then becomes more systematic in the area nearest the fair. Martin is not found that evening.

The following day, searchers drag the river and find his body. His injuries suggest that he drowned, possibly after striking his head on a rock. The body is also badly damaged; the presumed explanation is that boat propellers caused the injuries during the evening or night. The river therefore marks the change from a missing child in a busy city to a death whose circumstances remain painful and disturbing. Victoria is admitted to the hospital in Uppsala for observation. She says nothing during the first twenty-four hours, and doctors describe her as being in severe shock.

The city as a returning memory

The narrative later reopens Uppsala through Victoria’s recovered memory. What had been indistinct still images become fragments of film: her father’s hands, her mother’s judgemental expression, Martin on the Ferris wheel, the jetty by the Fyris River, and the shame of having lost him. The sequence also brings in the hospital, medication, and therapy. Instead of presenting the city as neutral background, these specific places and episodes return together as parts of an experience that had not been fully accessible to her.

A newspaper clipping gives that return a material form. Kept in her fridge, a cutting from Upsala Nya Tidning has yellowed after almost thirty years. Its headline reports that a nine-year-old boy was found dead in the Fyris River. Victoria has read it every day for several years, repeatedly enough to know it by heart. The daily repetition fixes a public account of Martin’s death in her private space; yet, when she looks at it again, she feels unease rather than the sadness she expects.

That change in feeling leads into a remembered scene at the jetty. Victoria moves her hand back and forth in the water and says it is not very cold, while the narration makes clear that she is lying. Elsewhere, as the clipping and the old guilt return, she reaches the thought that Martin’s death was an accident and feels calm spreading as her guilt subsides. The account presents this as her interpretation, not as an independent resolution of every uncertainty surrounding the death.

Narrative significance

Uppsala’s significance lies in the recurrence of its distinct locations across different moments of telling. The fair supplies the ordinary public setting in which Martin can initially seem easy to find; the river becomes the site of discovery and the focus of Victoria’s shame; the hospital records her immediate silence; and the clipping preserves the event as a headline revisited for years. Together, they make the city a map of both what happened and what Victoria can, at different times, bear to remember.

The return is not orderly. A Ferris-wheel view, a correction about boats, a jetty, a hospital stay, and a familiar headline surface in separate fragments before they gather into a more coherent memory. That form makes Uppsala more than a geographical backdrop: its places recur as prompts through which a buried childhood episode becomes present again. The city holds both the shared summer between Victoria and Martin and the lasting consequences of his disappearance and death.