Norway serves as both a practical point of reference and the place to which the narrator returns after his Pacific journey. Its significance is clearest in the contrast between ordinary details of travel and the unresolved grief that follows him back to Europe.

A Point of Comparison in Fiji

At Maravu Plantation Resort on Taveuni, the narrator asks the German owner, Jochen Kiess, for a bottle of gin. Because Fijian law prohibits the bar from selling full bottles of alcohol, the narrator argues that the bottle should count as compensation for damage caused by one of the resort’s geckos, and offers to pay the same rate as individual drinks at the bar. He notes that the restriction is the same as the law in Norway, making his home country a matter-of-fact comparison in an otherwise improvised negotiation. Kiess’s good humor eventually lets the narrator leave with an unopened bottle of Gordon’s Dry Gin.

Return to Norway and Salamanca

After leaving Fiji, the narrator travels by Jumbo jet via Honolulu and Los Angeles. Back in Oslo, he begins work on a report and later arrives in Salamanca for a conference. He wonders whether Vera will appear and whether she knows he is also attending. His own registration had been provisional before he left for the Pacific; when he called from Taveuni to confirm, Vera was already listed among the participants. After his return, he is asked to present a paper on migration and biodiversity.

The conference brings their estrangement into the same place as their professional lives. The narrator cannot know whether Vera enrolled in hopes of seeing him or solely for work, but recognizes that she could have withdrawn if she had wanted to avoid him altogether. Their reunion is thus anticipated rather than assumed, shaped by the possibility of meeting and the memory of their last brief letter and phone conversation.

The Loss That Follows Them

In Salamanca, the narrator recalls how the couple’s renewed rapport had seemed to depend on their daughter Sonia. Vera had said that Sonia’s presence was the reason they had got along again; the narrator answers inwardly that Sonia had also been thinking of them. Vera then recounts that, as a newborn, Sonia had nearly been switched with another baby at the clinic. She concludes that if that had happened, it would not have been her child who disappeared: Sonia would still have been alive. The recollection turns the possibility of an accidental substitution into a painful counterfactual against the actual loss.

The couple had made the circumstances of Sonia’s death taboo, referring to them only as what happened. Vera had repeatedly told the story of the fatal day in slow motion, although the events themselves unfolded quickly, and had given statements to the police two or three times. In the narrator’s account, she had collected Sonia from daycare, buckled her into the car seat, then realized the child’s shoes were still in the entrance lockers. She switched off the engine and removed the key but forgot to engage the handbrake, leaving the car in neutral. When she returned with the shoes, the car began to roll. The narrator recalls Vera’s belief that fate had made her witness the movement while being powerless to stop it; the car reached a bend three hundred metres farther down. The passage also alludes to what happened three days later, without detailing it.

Forgiveness and Responsibility

The narrator’s written address to Vera distinguishes forgiveness from the couple’s continuing pain. He says she has been forgiven many times and that the question of forgiveness is over, while acknowledging that, in desperation, he insulted and shouted at her, once telling her to go to hell before breaking down in tears. He apologized for the destructiveness of his grief; Vera eventually chose to leave him. His repeated questions about the handbrake, the gear, the shoes, and the decision to return for them had echoed the police questioning and reopened the loss rather than resolving it.

The account also records that Vera had come from a departmental end-of-year celebration, where she drank three or four glasses of champagne; when she got into the car, her blood-alcohol level would have been 0.52. She was not charged. The police said she had already received enough punishment, a response the narrator describes as more humane than the treatment she received from those close to her. He admits that he deliberately kept pouring salt into her open wound, and argues that she has more reason to blame him for that cruelty than he has to blame her for forgetting the handbrake in a moment of distraction. Norway is therefore not merely the destination after travel: it is where the narrator resumes work, while the unresolved history of his family continues into his reunion with Vera abroad and is finally put into writing.