Silence and complicity

Silence and complicity are bound together in the scenes of childhood abuse surrounding Sofia Zetterlund and Victoria Bergman. The mother’s silence is not presented simply as a lack of speech: it persists alongside visible harm, submission to the father’s demands, and the daughter’s effort to comfort her. Later, the daughter makes the silence itself part of the charge against her mother. The concept’s force lies in that difficult progression, from silence as a response to violence to silence as something the survivor believes helped violence continue.

Silence in the household

The remembered household is marked by injuries that can be explained away one at a time. Sofia wonders what her mother tells her friends: how often can an eyebrow be split on a kitchen cupboard, or a fall in the bath or on the stairs be passed off as an accident? The detail that the mother has supposedly fallen down the stairs four times in six months makes the pattern legible even as each incident is given a separate excuse. The question is not whether the signs exist, but whether anyone around the family notices what they add up to.

At home, the mother’s silence is more direct. During the sauna scene, the father speaks while she says nothing; the daughter expects her to obey without protest and recalls that she stopped crying long ago. The narration’s blunt description of her state as indifference marks a change from visible distress to resignation. Silence here has a history: it accompanies not one isolated exchange, but a domestic arrangement in which the father insults and controls her and she does not answer him.

The daughter’s response also shows how violence organizes care inside the family. The mother never hits back; after fights, she comes to lie beside her daughter for comfort, and Victoria stays awake until her mother falls asleep. That tenderness does not undo the surrounding harm. Instead, the child is placed in the role of comforting a parent while remaining a witness to the conditions that make such comfort necessary. The scenes reveal both the intimacy between mother and daughter and the burden imposed on the child by an adult world that does not protect either of them.

From silence to complicity

The daughter’s judgment becomes explicit when she considers whether only the father should die. She rejects that possibility because, in her reasoning, her mother must also answer for her silence and acquiescence: without her, nothing could have happened. The conclusion is expressed as a maxim, “Keeping quiet means consent.” Its starkness matters. It turns a complicated history of submission and abuse into a moral rule, making silence not merely a sign of fear or defeat but an act with consequences.

That rule belongs to the daughter’s understanding of the past; it does not make the mother and father’s actions equivalent. The father is the one heard taunting and directing the mother in the sauna, while the mother is the person being subjected to his demands. Yet the daughter’s accusation insists that the mother’s refusal to speak or resist cannot be separated from the conditions in which the abuse continued. The scene preserves this tension rather than resolving it: the mother is shown as harmed and as someone the daughter holds responsible for failing to prevent further harm.

The daughter’s reasoning also changes the meaning of an earlier memory. On one occasion, the father raised his arm as if to strike Victoria, but she hit him over the head with a saucepan, after which he withdrew and complained of headaches for months. The mother, by contrast, never struck back. The contrast supplies a concrete point of comparison for the daughter’s later judgment: resistance appears possible in one remembered encounter, while the mother’s persistent silence becomes, in the daughter’s account, an enabling condition. The passage does not establish that the mother could safely have acted as Victoria did; it shows how the daughter interprets the difference.

Witnessing, concealment, and consequence

The narration makes the daughter a witness to what is said and what is withheld. In the sauna, she hears the father’s voice in person for the first time in several years and imagines what he may be doing to her mother. She watches the time and predicts that, because he is a creature of habit, the torment will continue for at least another half-hour. Her attention to the duration of the abuse gives the silence a practical dimension: she is not unaware of what may be happening, but measuring its likely course from outside the room.

The mother’s silence extends beyond the immediate scene into the social cover surrounding the household. The imagined explanations for repeated injuries suggest how violence can be obscured by ordinary accounts of accidents. The daughter wonders whether her mother’s friends must suspect something, but the evidence does not establish what those friends know or do. What it does establish is the daughter’s awareness that private violence leaves public signs, and that those signs can remain unchallenged when each is treated as a separate mishap.

The concept therefore operates on two connected levels. Within the family, the mother’s silence is read by the daughter as permission and complicity; outside it, the possibility of familiar excuses suggests how abuse can remain hidden in plain sight. The daughter’s maxim is not a detached moral observation. It emerges from memories of her mother seeking comfort, her father’s insults, injuries that invite explanation, and the girl’s own prolonged witnessing. By making silence part of the remembered harm, the narrative shows how a survivor can understand not only the violence itself but also the failures that allowed it to persist.