Kyiv

Kyiv is a place where separate strands of the novel converge: a police inquiry into missing boys reaches the city, while other characters travel there under assumed identities or toward the ravine of Babi Yar. It is at once a working city of stations, streets, rented rooms, and uneven economic fortunes, and a landscape made to bear the weight of earlier violence. The city’s significance lies in this overlap between the practical work of locating the missing and the much older question of who is remembered, who disappears, and what history leaves behind.

The city in the investigation

A connection to Kyiv gives new direction to Jeanette Kihlberg’s investigation. Iwan Lowynsky, an officer in the Ukrainian security police’s international-crime department, contacts her about a missing-person case. The call becomes consequential because a dossier Jeanette sent to Interpol six months earlier—on the dead immigrant boys—has produced a DNA match. Information from Kyiv is no longer a distant lead: it links the Swedish investigation to a specific disappearance and makes the evidence gathered there newly useful.

Lowynsky identifies Syrets Metro Station as the place in Kyiv where the boy used to spend time and was last seen. Jeanette clarifies that two boys, child prostitutes and brothers, had gone missing from the station: Itkul and Karakul Zumbayev. Their disappearance gives the station a double meaning in the investigation. It is an ordinary urban point of transit, but also the last known location of children whose lives had already placed them at the margins of protection. The match between the Swedish dossier and the Ukrainian case turns that remembered place into a bridge between jurisdictions and between the missing boys and the bodies found elsewhere.

The conversation also changes the immediate priorities of the Swedish team. Jens Hurtig listens as Jeanette takes the call, and the information is serious enough that the other work must be set aside. At her desk, Hurtig follows the speakerphone exchange while Schwarz and Åhlund listen from the doorway. Schwarz jokes about a boy vanishing from one metro station and being found in another part of the world; Jeanette’s glare silences him. The scene sets the human cost of the case against the casualness with which a colleague tries to treat it, while making clear that Kyiv is not merely background geography: it is where the trail of the missing boys begins.

Journeys under borrowed identities

Kyiv is also a destination reached through concealment. One traveler arrives with a French passport in the name of Duchamp and a one-way ticket to Kyiv. The border officer examines the documents briefly and returns them; the traveler notes the time and waits for the departure, planning to go to Babi Yar after arrival. The papers make the journey possible without revealing the traveler’s identity, and the one-way ticket gives the trip the character of a departure rather than a routine visit. Before boarding, the traveler takes medication and feels a scar beneath the hair, physical details that accompany the passage through border control without explaining away its unease.

The same Kyiv sequence includes a traveler whose documents bear a woman’s name, though the narration stresses that this is his real name; he has traveled under false names before, but this time is different. The detail makes identity itself part of the city’s narrative function. Kyiv is a place one can enter through paperwork and disguise, but the distinction between an assumed name and a true one is not simple. The novel places the border crossing and the later movement through the city alongside the investigation’s concern with people whose names, histories, or legal status have not protected them from vanishing.

Another arrival reveals how money shapes the city’s everyday arrangements. Gilah Berkowitz is treated by her driver and an estate agent as an affluent Swedish-Ukrainian woman interested in icons. She rents a five-room apartment on Michailovska, near Maidan Square, for seventy euros a day, with a four-wheel-drive SUV included. The vehicle is valuable not only as transport: it is the kind that local police do not stop, even when driven the wrong way down a one-way street. In Gilah’s assessment, the city’s systems function for those who can pay. The account situates private mobility and privilege against a population facing steep financial pressure, including salary cuts of thirty per cent.

A city made strange

The novel gives Kyiv a stark visual form through the image of black snow. A familiar account says that only Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk, two industrial cities in eastern Ukraine, have black snow; the scene corrects that belief as ash falls against the car windows in the capital. Madeleine sits in the back seat while the driver’s pale, unshaven face is reflected in the windscreen, with cranes, chimneys, and factory buildings behind him. The setting is not described as a neutral backdrop: industry, ash, and the enclosed car make the city seem coated by what it has produced and what it carries forward.

This altered view of snow also changes the meaning of the journey. The city is encountered through a moving vehicle, by someone looking at a driver’s reflection and at an industrial skyline rather than directly entering a public space. The scene’s delayed attention to the landscape makes the ordinary expectation of clean snow unfamiliar. Kyiv becomes perceptible through disruption: a capital where ash darkens the falling flakes, and where the past is not safely confined to monuments or history books.

Babi Yar and historical memory

Babi Yar, in Kyiv, is the destination that draws the city’s present-day journeys toward an older history. The ravine is described as having once marked the city boundary and as an inhospitable place. During the events recalled from nearly seventy years earlier, guards invited their wives and lovers there. The place had been associated with love, but that association cannot hold against the remembered autumn day and the sense that the ground itself was moaning. The narration places intimate human relations beside the ravine’s history of violence, without allowing the former to soften the latter.

For the traveler who plans an appointment at Babi Yar, reaching Kyiv is therefore more than a change of location. The visit is set alongside the intention to leave everything behind and the belief that an agreement with Viggo will bring matters to an end. The ravine makes that intended ending answer to a history much larger than the traveler’s private plans. Across the novel’s strands, Kyiv joins a present-day search for Itkul and Karakul Zumbayev to journeys shaped by secrecy, money, and personal reckoning; Babi Yar gives those journeys a historical depth that the city’s stations and streets alone could not provide.