Peter's pistol

Peter's pistol is the material center of the final confrontation: Peter considers throwing it into the Waal, carries it to the cottage, and turns it from an imagined instrument of suicide into a weapon aimed at Steef and the people around him. Its presence makes his private fantasies of revenge physically consequential, and its last use leaves Peter alive to face what he has done.

Retention and Intended Use

Peter has kept the pistol, though while crossing the Waalbrug at Zaltbommel he thinks of throwing it into the river. He misses the turnoff and postpones the decision, telling himself that he has time; his immediate priority is reaching Eva. The missed exit therefore preserves the weapon for the confrontation ahead, even as Peter briefly imagines removing it from the story.

As he searches for Eva, Peter imagines using the pistol to kill himself in front of her and make her witness the consequences of their separation. In this fantasy, the weapon would turn his death into an act of revenge: he imagines staining Eva and Steef's future with the memory and forcing Eva to live with his accusation that she helped bring about his death. The plan is not yet an attack on Steef, but Peter's arrival at the cottage changes its target and purpose. Seeing Eva with Steef, he takes the pistol from his pocket, pulls back its slide, and aims at Steef's temple. He now threatens Steef directly, while ordering Eva to stay where she is; the pistol transforms Peter's grievance into immediate coercion, placing both of them under threat.

From Threat to Gunfire

With Peter's pistol trained on Steef, the threat reaches its limit at the trigger. Peter tightens his finger but cannot fire. The sight of Lieve dead in the hospital's glass container interrupts his assault, and he recognizes that a child is involved. For a moment, the pistol remains poised between intention and action: Peter has reached the cottage imagining death as revenge, but the memory of his dead child stops him from shooting Steef.

The pause ends when a shot rings out. Rebecca stands in the doorway, gripping a weapon, and Peter feels a bullet strike his flank. Wounded and unsteady, he interprets the movement around him as a renewed danger and fires before Rebecca can shoot again. She collapses; Eva runs to her and drags her to the sofa. The pistol has shifted from an instrument in Peter's fantasy of self-destruction to a weapon being used against him, and then, in his hands, to the means by which he answers that violence.

As Steef reaches for Peter's hands, Peter fires again. Steef falls against the wall. Eva screams, and Peter describes the room as a confusion of people, light, and noise that will stop only if he ends it. The pistol's successive shots mark the collapse of any remaining distinction between threat and execution: Peter no longer pauses as he did when he aimed at Steef, and the ease with which he pulls the trigger becomes part of the scene's terrible acceleration.

Eva turns with a weapon of her own. Both fire: her bullet strikes the ceiling, while Peter's hits her in the heart. She falls across Rebecca's body. Peter then turns back toward Steef, who is still alive and reaching for the pistol near his feet. Peter fires once more. The gun, which Peter had carried into the cottage as the instrument of an imagined personal reckoning, has now been used against Rebecca, Steef, and Eva; each shot makes his private grievance irreversible.

When the room finally falls quiet, Peter points the pistol at his own heart but cannot raise his hand high enough to fire. The wound in his side and the physical weakness it brings defeat his final attempt at suicide. Then he sees a young child hiding beneath the kitchen counter, clutching a stuffed rabbit. Peter understands that he has to live and face the child’s frightened gaze. The pistol's last consequence is therefore not the death Peter had planned for himself, but the possibility that he will remain alive to bear responsibility for the killings.

The Pistol and Peter’s Control

The pistol also charts Peter’s changing physical command of the situation. At first his hands are so wet that the weapon nearly slips from his grasp, and his aim wavers as Eva crawls away. Later, after the shots have begun, he describes himself as no longer trembling when he turns back toward Steef. The contrast makes the escalation bodily as well as moral: fear and instability give way to a cold, mechanical continuation of violence. Yet the weapon never grants Peter the control he imagines. When he finally tries to turn it on himself, pain and weakness keep his hand from rising, leaving him alive with the consequences.

The Pistol and the Sound of the Scene

Before any shot is fired, Peter imagines guitars drowning out the cries that would follow his suicide; at the cottage, the pistol makes violence audible in a different way. Its first discharge is described as deafening, with a flash and pain breaking through the music in his head. As the shooting continues, Peter experiences the room as light and noise that will stop only if he ends it. When the gunfire is over, the guitars fall silent, and the child’s crying becomes audible. The sequence shifts the pistol from a prop in Peter’s private, music-filled revenge fantasy into the source of an actual sound that cannot be taken back. In the final quiet, the child’s voice—not Peter’s imagined accusation or the music accompanying his rage—confronts him with the consequences of the weapon.