Barcelona is a stage in Silvija’s account of displacement and survival, marking the years between her childhood amid war and her eventual recovery in Berlin. The city appears not as a settled home but as one part of a longer, precarious passage through captivity, homelessness, and trauma.

Place in Silvija’s History

Silvija’s story reaches the narrator in fragments, often told late at night. She describes her childhood amid war and violence, experiences the narrator struggles to imagine or fully process. After escaping abuse, she spends years moving through squats in Barcelona, part of a wider period in which safety and stability remain elusive.

Captivity and Homelessness

Barcelona is associated with one episode of captivity: in El Born, a Sudanese man holds Silvija against her will. The account places this episode within her broader experience of homelessness and repeated vulnerability, without presenting the city as the cause of what happened to her. Her subsequent passage through Genoa continues the pattern of instability before she reaches Berlin.

Aftermath and Narrative Significance

Berlin is where Silvija recovers, discovers her talents, and begins to build a protective resilience. In contrast, Barcelona belongs to the preceding years she recounts only in scattered pieces. The narrator acknowledges that he has forgotten much of what she told him, while recognizing his own earlier, selfish wish to appropriate her history for his writing. Barcelona consequently enters the novel through a mediated, incomplete account: a place in Silvija’s life whose significance is bound to what she endured and to the difficulty of turning another person’s suffering into a story.