Victoria Bergman—Viggo Dürer

Victoria Bergman’s relationship with Viggo Dürer is shaped by a sharp imbalance of power: he is her parents’ lawyer and a family acquaintance, but he becomes the adult who transports her to an isolated farm and dictates the conditions of her life there. A move described as a beneficial change of scenery turns into a regime of separation, work, and discipline. Victoria’s eventual decision to prepare for departure shows how little choice the arrangement has left her.

Identity and Arrangement

Viggo Dürer is identified by Annette as the man Linnea drew behind a tree: not the coded figure the investigators had been considering, but her friend’s husband. Annette connects him to a house in Kristianstad, where he and his wife had visited the family while they lived in Denmark. Sofia immediately recognizes the name and registers its significance: Dürer is her parents’ lawyer. The disclosure joins a professional role to an older family familiarity, placing him within the trusted adult world around Victoria rather than introducing him as a stranger.

That familiarity reaches back to Victoria’s childhood. Her father asks whether she remembers Dürer, and she recalls a Danish man who made regular visits. The recollection carries a troubling qualification: he never came when her mother was home. The narrative does not explain those visits, but the detail complicates the appearance of an ordinary family friendship. Dürer is already a known presence in Victoria’s life, while her mother’s absence marks a boundary around that familiarity.

When Victoria is seventeen, her father presents the move to Dürer’s farm as a decision already made by her parents. He calls it a combination of work and pleasure and invokes her supposed current condition: she talks to herself, has imaginary friends, and behaves like a small child. Her mother says nothing during the announcement and serves her husband potatoes. The domestic meal gives the order a surface of family normality, while the father’s folded hands, directive manner, and insistence that the matter is settled leave Victoria little room to object. He promises that Dürer has contacts in Aalborg who can help her, and sets the move for spring.

The Farm as a Place of Discipline

Dürer’s farm lies outside Struer in a flat, bleak landscape, with windmills, fields reaching to the horizon, and a narrow view of Venø Bay. Its neglected half-timbered farmhouse is not presented as a temporary holiday setting. Victoria is nearly a thousand kilometres from Värmdö, brought there by Dürer in his old Citroën through Sweden and into Denmark. He collects her seven weeks before the farm passage, making the journey itself part of the separation her father arranged.

The stated reasons for Victoria’s presence are study and recreation; the operative ones are isolation and discipline. She is expected to keep to boundaries through housework, cooking, cleaning, and study. Her daily world is reduced to schoolbooks and the farm animals: thirty-four Danish-breed pigs, a bull, seven cows, and a neglected horse. She works with the pigs, and swine regularly enter her room. The contrast between the respectable language of recreation and these conditions exposes the coercive arrangement without making the farmhouse seem like a place of care.

Study offers Victoria a narrow, controlled connection beyond the farm. She chooses a correspondence course in psychology at the University of Aalborg, but her only contact with the outside world is an adviser whose written comments are occasional and disengaged. Distance is therefore both physical and institutional: she is far from other people, confined to a room for study, and reliant on sparse correspondence. Dürer’s academic qualifications are part of the irony of her situation, not evidence that the farm gives her meaningful independence.

Unease and Hidden Business

Victoria’s perception of Dürer is not softened by the family’s prior acquaintance. She finds him disgusting to look at and believes his interest in her diminishes as she grows older. He wants her to shave; she refuses. The passage makes the demand and her resistance concrete but leaves the nature of his interest unstated. That restraint matters: the relationship is plainly marked by his control and her wariness, while the text does not turn her suspicion into a more specific claim than the evidence supplies.

One conversation at the farm suggests that Dürer’s dealings extend beyond the household. He objects that something is too risky, while another man refers to a Russian whom he trusts and to Berglind’s assurance. Victoria does not understand what they are discussing. The exchange is significant less for what she can establish than for what it reveals about her position: adult men speak about consequential business within earshot of the isolated girl, yet she lacks the context to interpret it.

The conversation turns to a child and to arrangements in Aalborg. The other man asks whether everything has been settled with the child; Dürer replies that the final documents are being handled that week and reassures him that he will get his little girl. Victoria associates Aalborg with something that may have happened earlier, but her thought remains incomplete. The scene links Dürer to an unresolved matter involving a child and paperwork; it does not explain the child’s identity or the documents’ purpose. Victoria’s confusion preserves that uncertainty rather than resolving it for the reader.

Preparation to Leave

After the men go outside, Victoria takes her diary from the bedside cabinet and waits in the dark, wide awake. Her rucksack is packed on the floor, as it always is. When she hears the cars leave at half past four, she puts the diary in the bag’s outside pocket and checks the time: quarter to five. She expects Dürer not to return until at least ten and intends to be gone by then. The routine of keeping a packed bag, the diary placed where it can be carried, and the careful attention to his absence turn the earlier sense of confinement into a plan.

The relationship is therefore defined not by mutual trust but by successive forms of adult authority over Victoria: family familiarity, her father’s unilateral decision, Dürer’s custody of her daily circumstances, and the secrecy of business she can only overhear. Against that chain, her refusal to shave and her preparations to leave are small but distinct acts of resistance. The passage closes on intention rather than confirmed escape; what it establishes is that Victoria has begun to organize her own departure from the isolation Dürer administers.