Margareta

Margareta, Flora’s mother and the daughter of a man who returns among the returned dead, is defined by a painful gap between the problems she believes can be worked through and the loss she cannot face. She tries to make family life orderly and psychologically legible, but her father’s vacant stare defeats that effort. When he appears at Danderyd Hospital, the crisis gives bodily form to the lucid, accusing presence she had once imagined trapped inside his silent mind.

Family life and familiar routines

Margareta returns from a trip to London with Goran and Viktor to a kitchen crowded with shopping bags bearing English boutique logos. The scene presents her through the reassuring mechanics of homecoming: she greets Flora, continues unpacking, and attends to the expected exchange of gifts. She hands Flora a boxed iPod as something her daughter is supposed to have; Flora returns it, explaining that she already owns one. The small refusal interrupts a family script in which gifts, gratitude, and predictable habits are meant to keep conversation on familiar ground.

Margareta also manages Viktor’s present, prompting him to say thank you. These gestures establish her in the ordinary role of a parent arranging the household and directing its courtesies. Yet the domestic scene is shadowed by the knowledge that she has been told about the dead. Elvy has called to say that Margareta received the news from London, and Flora listens for how her mother will respond. The shopping bags and gifts do not disclose that response; instead, they set the ordinary family routine beside a crisis that routine cannot explain away.

Flora’s question about her grandfather breaks through the expected conversation. For Margareta, the subject is not new: six months earlier, after Flora had been made to attend a talk at the Youth Psychiatry Service, Margareta herself had opened up about her father. The present question therefore reactivates a fear already articulated in private, rather than introducing a feeling she has only now begun to have.

The father she could not visit

Margareta had not visited her father for several months before that earlier confession. She said that she could not bear his vacant stare or the fact that he sat without speaking. Her distress was sharpened by an imagined contradiction: she pictured a small, lucid man somewhere inside her father’s head, looking out at the world and wondering why his daughter did not come to see him. In this imagined scene, his silence did not cancel his awareness; it made the possibility of his awareness more accusing.

That fear makes her absence from his bedside more than a simple failure of duty. Margareta imagines the judgment she cannot verify, then finds herself unable to endure the outward appearance that gives rise to it. The text does not resolve whether the imagined inner witness is real. It shows instead how the possibility governs her: she can neither comfortably visit nor dismiss the thought that her father may still understand what is happening to him.

Her father had become a recurring subject in conversations with the psychologist she saw once a week. During periods when Flora was doing the most self-cutting, Margareta attended twice a week. The detail links her efforts to understand her father with a household already marked by Flora’s distress, without suggesting that therapy solved either problem. Flora had thought it might have been better simply to go out to Täby, while Margareta believed that conscientious psychological work could make a person whole. Her belief offers a method and a hope: problems can be addressed one by one until harmony is reached.

The return of what could be denied

Margareta’s confidence in psychological repair has a limit. Flora observes that she treats some problems as having no solution and therefore as not being problems at all. This is not merely an abstract contradiction in her outlook: the father she could not bear to visit has now returned with the vacant eyes she had described. At Danderyd Hospital, the little man she once imagined hidden inside him has, in Flora’s perception, come out into the open. The finger of accusation that Margareta feared is no longer confined to her private fantasy.

The reversal is severe because the return appears to confirm the emotional force of her earlier imagining without making it possible for her to master what she sees. The imagined lucid witness had made her father’s silence morally charged; his returned body makes that charge immediate. Flora frames this as the arrival of an insoluble problem Margareta had previously managed by refusing to recognize it. The passage does not show Margareta’s eventual response to the question about her father, so her present feelings remain unresolved rather than neatly converted into either acceptance or rejection.

Narrative role and limits

Margareta’s characterization is mediated largely through Flora, whose attention moves between her mother’s gestures and the remembered confession behind them. That perspective creates a contrast between visible competence—unpacking, giving presents, enforcing thanks—and the private helplessness Flora recalls. It also means that Margareta’s interior life is not presented as fully known: her imagined picture of her father is reported through what she once said, while her reaction to his return is what Flora wonders about and interprets.

Her conflict gives the returned dead a familial consequence distinct from public alarm. The crisis does not invent Margareta’s fear; it turns an existing fear into a fact of daily life, bringing the vacant stare and the imagined accusation into the same frame. Against her belief that careful work can produce wholeness, her father’s return exposes a loss that cannot be solved simply by naming it, discussing it, or treating it as nonexistent.