October 24, 1981

October 24, 1981, is a Saturday of ordinary work and sudden violence: Oskar spends the morning turning a chaotic stack of advertising catalogs into orderly delivery bundles, while Jocke’s imagined fresh start ends in a fatal attack. The date’s quiet domestic routine and abrupt death place the novel’s everyday labor beside its hidden danger.

The Saturday routine

Three thick bundles of catalogs wait outside Oskar’s apartment door that morning. His mother helps him fold them, and the task becomes a large kitchen-floor operation: disorder gradually gives way to two, three, and finally four overstuffed paper bags of neatly prepared packets. Oskar dislikes the work itself but enjoys the transformation he helps produce.

Each packet contains three different pages, and there are 480 packages in all. The pay varies with the number of pages: about fourteen öre per package in the ordinary case, seven if there is only one page, and as much as twenty-five if there are five. The best-paying packets also require the most preparation, making the favorable rate a mixed reward.

Work, time, and place

Oskar’s district includes large apartment buildings, where he can deliver as many as 150 packages in an hour. The entire round takes about four hours, including a return home to replenish his supply; on days with five papers in each packet, he needs to go back twice. Although delivery is not due until Tuesday, he usually finishes on Saturday so the job is done and out of the way.

The day’s epigraph, attributed to Johan Eriksson, reads, “The suburban mystique is the absence of riddles.” Against that observation, the catalogs and their precise counts make the morning conspicuously legible: packages, rates, routes, and hours can all be reckoned. The danger unfolding elsewhere in the day belongs to a different order.

Jocke’s fatal encounter

Jocke turns away to walk toward the restaurant, absorbed in fantasies of a new life and imagining the approval he will receive when he arrives carrying the girl. That anticipated beginning is interrupted by a sharp pain in his throat. Unable to put the child down, he tries to bend his head and discover what has happened, but her jaw is pressed against his chin and her grip tightens around his neck.

As the pain grows, Jocke understands that the girl is biting him. He protests and tells her to stop, but warm blood runs down his chest. The scene turns his hopeful vision of a fresh start into an attack from which the date’s ordinary Saturday routine offers no protection.