Riga

Riga is central to Kurt Wallander’s recollection of Baiba: it is where they met, and the starting point of a relationship that briefly promised him companionship and a different future. The city is evoked through personal memory rather than a description of its streets or landmarks; what matters is what Wallander’s life there came to mean, and what he lost when the relationship ended.

Meeting Baiba

Wallander met Baiba in Riga after an earlier investigation had led him to Latvia. She was the widow of a Latvian police officer whom Wallander had known and liked. He and Baiba began seeing each other, and for a long time Wallander believed the relationship might last. His memory of Riga thus belongs both to police work and to the private life that grew out of it.

Hopes and Separation

Wallander and Baiba had even looked at houses as they considered a future in Sweden. But Baiba began to draw back. Wallander first suspected that she had met someone else; he flew to Riga without warning her, hoping to surprise her. His suspicion proved mistaken: there was no other person. Baiba’s doubts concerned marrying another policeman and leaving Latvia, where she had a rewarding, if underpaid, job as a translator. The relationship ended not through the rival Wallander had imagined, but because their hopes for where and how to live did not align.

Riga in Wallander’s Memory

A year had passed since Wallander last spoke to Baiba when he revisited these memories. She still appeared in his dreams, but whenever he tried to approach or touch her, she disappeared. His jealousy had faded; what he recognized as missing was companionship. Riga therefore carries the outline of a relationship whose future once seemed possible, while Wallander’s later recollection makes its absence newly clear. The city’s significance in this passage is intimate and retrospective: it marks both a meeting and the life together that never came to be.