Balthazar's Killing

Balthazar’s Killing is the sudden killing of the family’s rabbit by Eva at her bedside. Witnessed by David, Magnus, and Sture, the act transforms an already fragile family scene into a confrontation with the violence and estrangement of Eva’s condition.

The Killing

Magnus is beside Eva’s bed, pointing out Balthazar, who has crawled onto her belly. As the adults talk nearby, David hears Magnus’s cry inside his head a second before it reaches his ears. The apparent source shifts: the scream in David’s mind came from Balthazar. When Magnus’s spoken cry dies against the walls, another sound follows, like a bird’s call, and then a light crack. David lunges toward the bed, but he is too late.

The Killing’s Aftermath

Eva keeps Balthazar’s head in one hand and raises it to eye level, turning it to examine it. The rabbit’s nose still twitches, and its terrified eyes stare back at her; in her lap, the headless body continues kicking. Blood runs along a fold in the blanket and drops to the floor. The final movement is small and definite: Balthazar’s legs jerk once more, then freeze. Eva studies the rabbit’s eye at close range, the two black pools reflecting one another.

Magnus’s response is immediate and physical. He screams that he hates Eva, strikes her arm and shoulder, and flails hard enough to tear the cables attached to her head. David restrains him from behind, holding him tightly and carrying him out of the apartment while whispering comfort that has no effect. Before the cables go dark, David catches the EEG’s tightly clustered spikes. The scene joins Magnus’s terror and grief to a clinical signal, but that measurement offers no way to make sense of what has happened.

Roy twists his hands and sways, unable to understand how Eva could have done this; he hesitates to approach the bed. Eva, meanwhile, continues inspecting Balthazar, putting a finger into the bloody, mucus-filled throat as tendons and ligaments hang in threads. Her attention to the body is not presented as ordinary grief or an attempt to help it: the scrutiny itself deepens the witnesses’ sense that she is no longer responding as they expect her to.

Sture gently takes the rabbit’s head from Eva’s dark-red hands, sets it on the nightstand, and places the two wooden dolls in her hands instead. He identifies them as the dolls of Eva and David. Eva says they are nice, but the sound of her voice frightens Sture more than the killing: it resembles his daughter’s voice and yet seems like an imitation. Unable to bear listening, he leaves her sitting with the dolls in her lap. The substitution of the familiar toys for the mutilated rabbit briefly changes what Eva is holding, but does not restore the familiar presence Sture longs to hear.

Outside the apartment, David carries Magnus while Sture carries what remains of Balthazar, reduced to tufts of blotchy fur. A policeman confronts them, waves them toward the exit, and orders them to leave the area immediately. The family’s private horror thus ends in forced removal: Magnus is carried away from his mother, the rabbit’s remains are taken out, and Eva is left behind with the dolls and a voice her father can scarcely recognize.

The Earlier Near-Drowning

Immediately before the killing, David tells Sture that Eva has spoken of the Fisher, though David and the others do not know what it is. Sture recognizes the reference as belonging to an event from Eva’s childhood. She was seven when she came very close to drowning, and Sture remembers blaming himself for not watching her closely enough. Her mother knew what to do, and Eva was brought back to life.

The account gives the bedside scene a history of near-death and return, but it does not explain why Eva kills Balthazar. Instead, it establishes what Sture knows about his daughter—and what remains obscure to the people around her. The Fisher is something Eva has mentioned, linked in Sture’s memory to the moment she nearly died; the rabbit’s death now unfolds beside her bed, while her family struggles to recognize the person she has become.

Perception and Estrangement

The scene’s deeper rupture lies in how little its witnesses can trust the signs by which they recognize one another. A cry first arrives inside David’s head and only afterward as sound in the room; the EEG registers tightly grouped activity but supplies no interpretation. Likewise, Eva’s voice remains recognizably hers to Sture while sounding to him like an imitation. These failures of recognition connect an inexplicable mental signal to a familiar voice made strange: instruments can register activity, and family members can identify a voice, but neither can restore a shared understanding of Eva. Balthazar’s Killing therefore turns not only on the loss of the rabbit, but on the collapse of ordinary confidence in what the people closest to Eva are hearing and seeing.