October 23, 1981

Friday, October 23, 1981, places Hakan between two versions of a good deed: the life he hopes to save with 10,000 kronor and the murder for which he later sees public mourning in the newspaper. Across the day, money, books, and a newspaper connect his wish to do good with the loss and violence already shaping his life.

The money and the unanswered question

Hakan is again on a subway train, heading downtown with 10,000 kronor secured in his pocket by a rubber band. He intends to use it for something good, specifically to save a life. The amount seems substantial beside a Save the Children campaign’s claim that 1,000 kronor can feed a family for a year; by that comparison, he reasons, 10,000 kronor ought to be enough to save someone even in Sweden. But the purpose has no recipient or destination yet. His thoughts arrive at the questions of whose life he might save and where.

The library and the life left behind

Before carrying out his intended deed, Hakan goes to the Stockholm Public Library. The visit is tied to what he lost in a fire three years earlier: his life as he knew it and his collection of books. He looks for The Queen’s Diadem by Almquist, a book he had loved and used in his teaching, and reads its opening before putting it back. The passage stirs a painful sense of a former life rather than offering him a way back into it.

Hakan imagines that earlier life in concrete terms: a reading chair in a house of his own, books around him, and a job again. Yet he understands that love now dictates how he lives, and the imagined reading chair is unavailable to him. He rubs his hands together as if to erase the book he has just held, then walks into an adjacent reading room. The gesture makes his loss tangible: the book is briefly within reach, but the home, work, and settled identity associated with it remain out of reach.

The murder in the evening paper

By evening, Hakan has returned to the subway and spends his last few kronor on a newspaper. Four pages are devoted to the murder he committed, including a photograph of the hollow where he did it. In the picture, candles and flowers fill the place, turning it into a public site of mourning. Hakan studies the image and feels little; his muted response stands against the visible tributes and the attention the killing has attracted.

The day’s sequence leaves his proposed rescue unresolved while making the consequences of his own act impossible to mistake. He has carried money with the hope of saving a life, then encountered the murder as a story in the paper and as a candlelit place in a photograph. His appeal for forgiveness remains private, set against a public image of grief that cannot show what he knows about the crime.