Solna is marked in the narrative by a precise time, 08:45, and by a journey toward the Medical Examiner's Department. Rather than a developed portrait of the municipality, it serves as the setting for David's anxious attempt to see Eva and for a taxi ride that brings the practical dangers of the dead into sharp contrast with his personal emergency.

Setting and Arrival

The Solna passage begins with David in a taxi after a night in which the driver had been transporting patients from Danderyd Hospital. The driver talks about public fear of the dead, dismissing the idea that ghosts are the real danger. His concern is bacterial contamination: corpses can pollute water, and contaminated rivers can cause deaths beyond those directly caused by violence. He invokes a dead dog in a well and the aftermath of mass death in Rwanda to make the point that the bodies themselves can create a wider public-health crisis.

David stops listening when the driver turns to a story about a meteorite from Mars and supposedly concealed test results. The exchange places Solna within a world crowded with explanations and fears, some grounded in material danger and others, in David's view, too fanciful to warrant attention. His distraction also reveals the narrowness of his attention at this moment: he is preoccupied with Eva and whether an autopsy has been performed on her.

The Medical Examiner's Department

When the taxi reaches the Karolinska Institute campus, David gives the driver a more specific destination: the Medical Examiner's Department. The driver asks whether he works there; David says he does not. The driver's parting wish of good luck lends the ordinary brick building an uncertain atmosphere before David even enters it.

At reception, David explains his business, but the receptionist initially does not seem to understand what he means. After making several calls, she finds the right person and asks him to wait. The waiting room offers little beyond a couple of vinyl-covered chairs. Its plainness does not reassure David: the surroundings intensify his anxiety, and he nearly leaves for the parking lot before someone comes through the glass doors into the public area.

David's Request

David's purpose is direct. Despite his determination, he grows nervous under the woman's scrutinizing gaze and folds his arms across his chest, as if shielding himself. He says that he wants to see Eva. The woman responds sympathetically but tells him that it is out of the question; when he asks why, the account leaves the answer unresolved at this point.

That refusal makes the department more than a destination on a map. It is the threshold between David and the person he wants to see, and the institutional process gives his private grief a concrete obstacle. His focus on whether Eva has been autopsied and his insistence on seeing her connect the clinical handling of a body to the emotional reality that she is still, for him, the person he loves.

Narrative Significance

Solna's scenes hold two kinds of urgency in the same frame. In the taxi, the driver describes the returned dead as a potential source of contamination, with consequences for water and public safety; at the department, David confronts the personal and institutional limits imposed around Eva's body. The shift from the driver's expansive examples to the small waiting room concentrates the crisis from a population-level threat into a single blocked request.

The location is therefore defined less by civic description than by sequence and contrast: a timed arrival, a ride from Danderyd Hospital, the approach to the Medical Examiner's Department, and a wait that David can barely endure. Solna marks the point at which his determination to see Eva meets a formal refusal, leaving both the reason for the denial and the outcome of his request still open.