Lacke’s stamp collection

Lacke’s stamp collection is an inheritance from his father that, in a quiet domestic scene, becomes the financial basis for Lacke’s imagined departure from Blackeberg with Virginia. Its four connected stamps carry a precise history and an uncertain but substantial present value; after Virginia’s crisis and Lacke’s disillusionment with his acquaintances, he sees the collection not merely as something inherited, but as a way out.

Provenance and Physical Presence

The album belonged to Lacke’s father, and Lacke had inherited it from him. Bringing it back to Blackeberg had been difficult enough to feel like a burden: the narrative notes that transporting it had been hell. The collection is therefore both a material possession and an obligation carried into Lacke’s present from his family past. It remains put away in the sideboard until he deliberately retrieves it, wipes the kitchen table, and opens it there.

That small act takes place after Lacke returns to Ibsengatan, cooks quick macaroni, eats directly from the pan with a spoon, and hears something fall through the mail slot. The sound proves to be advertisements, which he dismisses because he has no money anyway. The collection enters this ordinary sequence as a contrast to the unwanted mail: rather than another claim on his attention, it offers a resource he can inspect and calculate. Moving the album from the sideboard to the table makes the inheritance present and usable.

The Stamps and Their Appraisal

Inside are four unmarked specimens of the first stamp ever issued in Norway. Each shows a lion raised on its hind legs against a light-blue background. Lacke leans over the album and squints at the image before recognizing what the stamps may be worth. They had cost four shillings when issued in 1855; now, he estimates, they are worth more, though the narrative does not give a precise valuation at this moment.

Their arrangement matters as much as their number. The four specimens are connected in two pairs, and Lacke understands that this connection makes them more valuable. The album thus yields not an abstract promise of wealth but a particular asset whose condition and grouping affect its price. The scene follows his attention from the lion on the stamps to the fact of their connection, then from their original cost to their present market value. Appraisal turns looking into a possible decision.

From Inheritance to a Plan

Lacke’s resolve to sell the stamps had formed the previous night, while he lay awake in his smoke-saturated sheets. The immediate context is not simply financial: his rupture with Virginia has been the last straw, and he has also recognized the incomprehension of the men around him and concluded that they are not worth spending time with. In that unsettled moment, he decides that he will leave Blackeberg and that Virginia will leave with him.

The collection supplies one half of the plan’s projected finances. Despite the depressed market, Lacke expects to get about three hundred thousand for the stamps, as well as two hundred for the apartment. The story gives no currency for these figures and no sale occurs in this scene; they are Lacke’s estimates, not confirmed proceeds. He imagines using the money to buy a house in the country—or, revising the idea, two houses, or a small farm. His plan depends on Virginia recovering first, after which he intends to present it to her, believing she will agree and may even love the idea.

The turn from a painful night to an orderly future is marked by the collection’s conversion into a number. Once Lacke has reckoned with what it might bring, he feels calmer and thinks he can see clearly what he will do that day and in the future. He rests on top of the bed for five minutes and falls asleep, carried by the pleasant thoughts the plan has produced. The collection does not itself secure the move or Virginia’s agreement; it allows Lacke, for the moment, to imagine them as attainable.

History Against the Present

The stamps’ age sets them against the setting in which Lacke hopes to leave. Blackeberg is described as a carefully planned suburb, built where forest had stood, with playgrounds and green spaces but little history connected to the lives of its residents. Its children cannot undertake meaningful school projects about the suburb’s past, and the place has no church despite its nine thousand inhabitants. Against this designed, comparatively recent environment, the 1855 stamps preserve a concrete trace of an earlier time: a date of issue, an original price, a pictured lion, and a pairwise arrangement that matters in the present.

That contrast gives the collection a role beyond its projected sale price without making it a guarantee of escape. Lacke has brought his father’s album into a place whose past is described as largely absent, and now reads the old objects through the value they can command in the future. Its history becomes usable capital. Yet the scene closes not with a completed transaction or a move, but with Lacke asleep and the plan still dependent on uncertain valuations and Virginia’s recovery. The collection gives his hope a concrete form while leaving its fulfillment unresolved.