Victoria Bergman and Birgitta Bergman

Victoria Bergman and Birgitta Bergman’s relationship is forged in a household where violence and care coexist, and where a daughter is made to carry responsibilities belonging to adults. Birgitta turns to Victoria for comfort after fights with Bengt Bergman, but her silence in the face of his abuse becomes, in Victoria’s later judgment, a form of complicity. The relationship’s defining reversal is stark: Victoria tries to shelter her mother, yet eventually treats that failure to act as a debt that must be repaid.

A childhood organized around conflict

The memories present Birgitta as living under Bengt’s verbal and physical intimidation. Victoria recalls a single occasion when Bengt raised his arm as if to strike her; she hit him on the head with a saucepan, and he backed off, later complaining of headaches for months. The incident establishes that Victoria could resist him, but it does not make her mother’s situation safer or alter the pattern of the household. Birgitta, Victoria remembers, never struck back. She cried and curled up beside her daughter, seeking consolation instead.

That comfort ran in one direction: Victoria did her best to soothe Birgitta and stayed awake until her mother fell asleep. The child’s care is not described as a single exceptional gesture, but as a response to recurring distress. Birgitta’s need for solace gives the mother–daughter bond genuine tenderness, while also exposing its imbalance. Victoria is a daughter, yet she is placed in the position of watching over an adult who cannot or will not protect herself.

The violence also disrupts ordinary childhood. On days after the fights, Victoria sometimes stayed away from school and cycled around for hours. When absence notes arrived, her parents signed them without asking questions. She later remembers that these days had offered some advantages: the arguments could leave her with time and a private sense of freedom. That recollection complicates the harm without diminishing it. The household’s disorder gives Victoria a secret space of her own, but the freedom arises from neglect rather than from care.

The daughter between her parents

Birgitta’s departure after one fight briefly changes the family’s arrangement. She drove away and stayed in a hotel for several days; Bengt did not know where she was and became worried. Victoria then had to comfort her father as he sobbed against her chest. The reversal is especially revealing: the same daughter who has supported her mother is recruited to steady the man whose behavior has made the home frightening. Victoria is made to contain both parents’ distress, even when their needs and actions are opposed.

Her imagined questions about the explanations Birgitta might give her friends—how often someone could split an eyebrow on a cupboard, slip in a bath, or fall on the stairs—show Victoria considering how domestic harm might be concealed in everyday excuses. These are her questions and suspicions, not confirmation that Birgitta told those particular stories. Their importance lies in the gap they expose between what might be visible to others and what remains unspoken inside the family.

As Victoria revisits the friendship she once shared with two others, she recognizes that they had trusted her and believed the best of people. That recognition sharpens the contrast with her mother: Birgitta’s silence is not treated as innocence or naïveté. In Victoria’s understanding, the difference is that the friends were unsullied, while her mother’s silence helped leave the abuse unchallenged.

Silence becomes a charge

Years later, the narrative presents Sofia Zetterlund hearing Bengt’s voice in person for the first time in several years, as he shouts at Birgitta in the basement sauna. His remarks target Birgitta’s body and dependence; she does not answer. Sofia imagines that Bengt has pulled her mother from the sauna by the hair and wonders whether he will scald her or force her under icy water. The imagined possibilities convey the danger she associates with his routine of torment, but they are not presented as events that have already occurred in this scene.

Sofia watches the time and expects the abuse to continue for at least another half-hour because Bengt is a creature of habit. The waiting matters: the violence is not only a sudden outburst but a repeated domestic pattern, anticipated by someone who knows its rhythms. When she moves toward the basement, she avoids the stairs that creak, takes a plank from the workshop, and hears Bengt continuing to speak while Birgitta remains silent. His words ask whether Birgitta can survive without him; her lack of reply echoes the silence Victoria has remembered from childhood.

At first, Sofia hesitates over whether Bengt alone should die. She then decides that Birgitta must also pay, reasoning that her mother’s silence and acquiescence helped make what happened possible. The judgment is crystallized in the thought, “Keeping quiet means consent.” It marks a decisive break in the relationship’s earlier pattern of daughterly protection: the mother who once curled beside Victoria for comfort is now held responsible for failing to intervene.

Care, complicity, and the limits of protection

The relationship holds two truths in tension. Birgitta sought comfort from Victoria, and Victoria stayed awake beside her; yet the daughter’s compassion does not erase her anger at her mother’s failure to resist or speak. Likewise, Birgitta’s silence is presented within a household dominated by Bengt, but Victoria interprets it as consequential rather than neutral. The novel makes the cost of that interpretation visible in the way care turns into accusation.

The remembered family scenes also show how the roles of protector and dependent shift without resolving the underlying danger. Victoria strikes Bengt when he raises his arm, comforts Birgitta after fights, and later comforts Bengt when Birgitta is gone. These acts make her indispensable to both parents while leaving her own childhood exposed to their conflict. In the later sauna scene, the quiet daughter is no longer simply keeping watch until her mother falls asleep: she approaches with a plank and wedges it against the sauna door. The passage ends with that action and the decision behind it, not with a narrated outcome. Its significance lies in the reversal itself, as a history of unreturned protection becomes the basis for Victoria’s condemnation of Birgitta.