Incubation

Incubation is both a medical interval and a governing image in Victoria Bergman’s reflections on illness, pregnancy, and the daughter she wants to see. It names the time an infection remains hidden before sickness breaks out, but also the brooding period before an egg hatches. The word’s force comes from holding these meanings together: waiting can signify life developing, danger gathering, or a painful arrival that cannot be controlled.

Definition and Double Meaning

The novel makes the term’s doubleness explicit. In a diary entry, Victoria Bergman wonders whether her incubation period is nearly over and whether she is waiting to become ill. She connects it to Sierra Leone: she had been carrying the illness when she left, she writes, but did not leave it behind when she returned. The infection remained inside her and made her mad. The entry ends with the terse phrase “His infection.” The identity of “his” is not clarified in this passage; its abruptness instead leaves the illness attached to a prior, unnamed source and makes the thought feel unresolved.

Later, Victoria Bergman defines incubation in both senses: the span between infection and an outbreak of illness, and the period of brooding before an egg hatches. Her question—whether waiting to have a baby and waiting for illness to break out might be the same thing—does not settle the comparison. It reveals how the word has become a way of thinking about her life: what is carried within may be a child, an infection, or a condition whose consequences have not yet appeared. The shared duration does not make these experiences identical, but it makes them difficult for her to separate.

The Diary and the Psychologist’s Eyes

The term first emerges in Victoria Bergman’s private record of therapy sessions. On 3 March, she writes that the old psychologist’s eyes make her feel safe. She does not prefer to call the psychologist by name; the eyes themselves become the therapist in her account, a presence in which she can also be herself. Within that sense of safety, she talks about incubation, asks whether she is becoming ill, and tells the psychologist that Solace Manuti has moved out of the wardrobe and now shares her bed. The stench from the sauna has followed them there. These details place the abstract word amid private fears, shared space, and an unsettling physical presence.

The diary form gives incubation a second, narrative function: the reader encounters Victoria Bergman’s reflections as a recorded return to earlier conversations, not as a detached definition. When the road’s poor condition and the driver’s speed make writing difficult, the letters become shaky; she puts away her pen and reads her session notes instead. A later stop, when the driver gets out to open a hatch, gives her the chance to resume writing. The interruptions make the act of recording feel contingent, while the diary preserves the thoughts that she cannot easily organize in the present.

Music, Motherhood, and the Egg

In Copenhagen, Victoria Bergman walks around the block to collect her thoughts. She knows a surname and has learned that the family lives in Hellerup, in a detached villa on Duntzfelts allé; her immediate purpose is to see her daughter. As she walks, she listens to a recently released Joy Division compilation on her Walkman. “Incubation” plays monotonously in her earphones, turning the idea into a repeated accompaniment to her approach. The song does not resolve her uncertainty about what she will do after seeing the child. Her attention returns instead to the urgent desire to see her daughter, followed by the question of what comes next.

The word’s bird imagery sharpens as she moves toward the child. Victoria Bergman thinks of brooding and hatching, of baby birds snatched away, then describes herself as “an egg-laying machine.” The phrase reduces motherhood to a bodily function while also registering how thoroughly her identity has been shaped by giving birth and separation. Its mechanical coldness clashes with the vulnerability of the image: an egg contains the promise of life, but it can also be removed from the one who laid it. In this sense, incubation names not only a period of waiting but a structure of loss—something developing or already born remains beyond her possession.

The Image at the Pram

The motif returns when Victoria Bergman sees a pram beside open glazed doors. Through them, she can see a couple watching television; her baby is in the pram. The match between the earlier image and the immediate scene is stark: “Incubation. Egg-laying machine.” She tells herself that she is not a bird of prey, but is taking back what is hers. Yet when she bends over the child, she does not recognize the baby. The face seems different from the one she remembers from the hospital in Aalborg: the hair is darker, the face thinner, and the lips fuller. The child now looks like a cherub.

That gap between the child Victoria Bergman claims as hers and the unfamiliar baby before her gives the metaphor its most painful consequence. The language of hatching suggests a clear transition from hidden development to visible life; the encounter offers no such certainty. When the Swede lunges toward her, she loses her hold on the baby, whose head turns heavily as it falls toward the stone floor. The earlier question about incubation therefore reaches beyond a neat parallel between pregnancy and illness. In both, an interval ends in an emergence, but emergence does not guarantee recognition, safety, or control. The recurring word carries the reader from illness concealed within the body to maternity marked by separation, and finally to the danger of a reunion that cannot restore what was lost.