Norrköping

Norrköping is the former home of Hakan Bengtsson and Eli, and the place against which their new life in Blackeberg is measured. It is linked to the practical history of their flight, to a mistake Hakan remembers making there, and to Eli’s more intimate recollection of a family cottage and stream. The novel gives Norrköping no broad portrait of its own; instead, it emerges in fragments, as a place left behind but not entirely escaped.

A Former Home and a Point of Departure

Hakan Bengtsson first views Blackeberg from the subway as the place that is to become his new home. To him, Norrköping would have been nicer, though Blackeberg seems softer and rounder than the Stockholm suburbs he has seen on television. The comparison is subjective: Norrköping is not described in detail, but its brief appearance in Hakan’s judgment establishes that the move has brought him somewhere he finds less appealing. Blackeberg is a destination he must make work, not a place he has chosen with uncomplicated enthusiasm.

A moving-truck driver’s December recollection provides a second account of the departure. His records identify the journey as Norrköping to Blackeberg, dated 18 October. He remembers transporting a man and a pretty girl, with almost no furniture: a couch, an armchair, perhaps a bed. They insisted that the move take place at night, even after the driver explained the overtime surcharge. Only after police tell him what became of the people he carried does he understand the significance of that unusual request. His account makes the relocation concrete—a sparse load moved under cover of darkness—and gives the departure an unsettling secrecy without explaining more than the driver himself knew at the time.

The move thus links Norrköping to the concealed beginnings of Hakan and Eli’s life in Blackeberg. The driver can identify the route and date, but his records are otherwise meager. A routine entry in a work log becomes, in retrospect, a trace of people who had kept their arrival deliberately inconspicuous. Norrköping is the starting point of that trace, though the novel does not fill in a complete account of the pair’s life there.

A Place Marked by an Earlier Mistake

Norrköping also figures in Hakan’s recollection of a failed effort to avoid detection. Before going out to carry out his plan, he had studied a map in a telephone directory and selected a forested area that seemed suitable. He cut the Adidas logo from the bag he carried. The precaution did not solve the problem: someone remembered the brand, and police later found the bag in a garbage container not far from the pair’s apartment. Hakan regards this as one of the things that had gone wrong in Norrköping. The place is therefore associated not only with departure but with the earlier circumstances he is trying not to repeat; his intention now is to bring the bag home and dispose of it differently.

That recollection is sharply practical. The forest, the discarded bag, the remembered brand, and the apartment nearby form a chain of small details through which a past failure remains active in Hakan’s present decisions. The narrative does not turn Norrköping into a full crime-scene portrait. Instead, it makes the location legible through the consequences of one mistake: an object abandoned too close to home could be traced back to the people who used it.

Eli’s Remembered Landscape

For Eli, Norrköping holds a different kind of past. When imagining where he might go, he first sees the cottage where he lived with his parents and older siblings. But the cottage is gone. Outside Norrköping, a roundabout now occupies the site; the stream where his mother rinsed clothes has dried up and become an overgrown depression beside the intersection. The memory preserves both a family home and the ordinary work performed around it, while the present landscape offers only altered ground.

The scene gives Norrköping a depth of time absent from the newly built Blackeberg. Eli’s imagined refuge is not an abstract destination but a specific vanished place, recalled through the cottage and the stream. Yet memory cannot restore it: even the first place he sees when he tries to imagine somewhere to go has been physically changed. His possible journey away from Blackeberg therefore points back toward a home that no longer exists as he remembers it.

Contrast with Blackeberg

The novel sets these scattered recollections against Blackeberg’s planned, comparatively recent environment. Blackeberg has arranged apartment buildings, playgrounds, green spaces, and pedestrian paths, but its residents lack a living connection to local history. Norrköping, by contrast, enters the story through traces of prior life: an apartment associated with Hakan’s mistake and a childhood landscape Eli can still picture, even after its landmarks have disappeared.

This contrast does not make Norrköping an untouched refuge. Eli’s cottage has been replaced, and the stream has dried; Hakan’s recollection connects the town to exposure and error as well as home. Its significance lies instead in the uneven persistence of place. The moving route records where the pair came from, Hakan’s memory retains a practical lesson, and Eli’s memory preserves a family landscape that development has erased. Norrköping remains present in Blackeberg precisely as what Blackeberg cannot supply: a history carried in particular places, however damaged or inaccessible they have become.