Victoria Bergman–Martin

Victoria Bergman–Martin is defined by a stark contradiction: Victoria Bergman learns to care for Martin, her young son, yet six years after they meet she leaves him alone beside the Fyris River. Their relationship is first shown through intimate, ordinary gestures—a warm body beside him at the jetty, a quiet question, and a shared encounter with an injured bird. Recalled later, those moments stand against the five minutes of separation that Victoria cannot confidently classify as accidental or deliberate, and that become bound to the emergence of Crow Girl.

A Bond Formed Through Care

Victoria Bergman first meets Martin when he is three. She remembers that she had been his Pippi Longstocking through a long, light summer: a child who was somehow also grown-up, someone already forced to look after herself. With Martin, she learns to care for someone else. The relationship therefore joins childhood to responsibility from the outset. Her own history of having to manage alone contrasts with the practical tenderness she comes to offer him.

Martin’s memories present Victoria as a source of physical comfort and reassurance. At the jetty, he curls close to her while water laps beneath them; he is puzzled that she can be warm when she is wearing only her underpants. She calls him her little boy and asks what he is thinking. The scene is affectionate without being idealized: its closeness is filtered through a child’s attention to warmth, boats, and the future he imagines for himself.

That future is expansive in Martin’s mind. He wants boats, cars, planes, land, garages, and people to drive or pilot them, though he recognizes that he cannot yet tie his shoelaces. Other children sometimes call him stupid, while his mother tells him he is developing slowly. These details place Victoria’s care within his everyday vulnerability: he is young, conscious of being behind other children, and reliant on her account of himself. Her presence offers reassurance, though the later rupture will show that care cannot guarantee his safety.

The Injured Bird at the Jetty

The bird encounter makes their differences visible without breaking their intimacy. A squeak and a sound like Victoria’s pinking shears draw her attention to the bushes. She turns to look, puts on her top, and asks Martin whether he can see what is there. A bird emerges on one leg, with the other missing and its wings apparently broken. Victoria approaches it; Martin, by contrast, sees a menacing creature and tries to hide beneath a towel.

Martin asks Victoria to make the bird go away. When she reaches toward it slowly and finally lifts it from the ground, he admires her bravery but still wants distance from what frightens him. He asks her to take it far away and then, more harshly, to put it in a bin so it will die. Victoria laughs at his fear and calls it only a bird. The exchange shows them occupying different positions in the same moment: she moves toward a visibly injured creature, while he experiences it as a threat and seeks protection from her.

The episode gives their bond its concrete shape. Martin expects Victoria to act when he is frightened; she does act, though not by carrying out his wish to destroy or discard the bird. Her response contains both attention to him and a limit to what she will do for him. Later, when she is gone, his appeal for her to come back reverses the scene’s arrangement: the child who once asked her to remove a frightening presence is left waiting for the person who made him feel safer.

The Five-Minute Separation

Six years after meeting Martin, Victoria leaves him alone by the Fyris River in Uppsala. Her later recollection fixes the absence at five minutes and stresses how little time it took for everything to fall apart. The account does not settle whether leaving him was an accident or not. That uncertainty matters: the relationship’s defining break is remembered through a small measure of time, but its meaning resists a simple verdict.

The earlier scenes sharpen the force of that interval. At the jetty, Martin is physically close to Victoria and asks her to intervene when he is scared; at the river, he is alone and waiting for her return. In the recalled thought, he pleads for Victoria to come back and wonders why she is taking so long or going so far. His fear can make his body go rigid, as if becoming still might help him avoid whatever threatens him. The contrast is not simply between affection and neglect: it is between a relationship built around her availability and a moment when that availability fails.

The narrative leaves the uncertainty intact rather than explaining the separation away. Victoria’s own later phrasing allows both possibilities—accident or intent—without resolving them. This keeps the relationship suspended between care and culpability. Her earlier tenderness remains real, but it cannot cancel the consequence of leaving Martin alone; conversely, the five minutes do not erase the years in which she had learned to look after him.

Memory, Crow Girl, and the Relationship’s Afterlife

Years later, beside a snow-covered lake, Victoria remembers swimming there as a child: four lengths between the jetty and the diving rock, each fifty metres, followed by sunbathing on the beach. One of those occasions was when she first met Martin. The memory returns through a place associated with shelter beneath dark water, which had once seemed to protect her from the outside world. It links her childhood landscape, her meeting with Martin, and the later memory of leaving him by the river without making those locations interchangeable.

Victoria identifies the river as the place where Crow Girl received her name. The presence that had been inside her before then, she recalls, was more like a nameless shadow. She now concludes that Crow Girl is not one of her personalities: the flickering beneath her eyelids and blind spots in her vision point instead to an immediate stress reaction to trauma, an epileptic disturbance that she had once mistaken for an alien being inside her. The relationship with Martin is thus connected not only to care and separation but also to the way Victoria understands the origin of this frightening experience.

Martin’s place in Victoria’s history remains sharply double. He is the three-year-old boy she remembers meeting during a bright summer, the child with whom she learned to care for another person, and the child she left alone for five minutes six years later. The book makes that bond consequential without making its central uncertainty disappear: tenderness explains what the separation broke, while the unresolved question of intent prevents the past from settling into a simple story of either innocent accident or deliberate abandonment.