Oslo

Oslo is both home and a measure of distance in Trond Sander’s story: the place from which he leaves for the summer of 1948, the city to which he returns without his father, and a familiar landscape that no longer feels familiar after the separation. Its streets and shoreline hold the family’s prewar life and the memory of occupation, while its railway station becomes the place where hope of reunion persists and finally ebbs.

Family Home and Departure

Before the summer journey, Trond Sander and his family live in Oslo, beside the Oslo fjord. Their rented home is three rooms and a kitchen on the second floor of a large three-storey Swiss chalet next to Ljan Station, with a view of the inner Oslofjord and the Bunnefjord. This domestic setting contrasts with the remote cabin his father has established by the river: in Oslo, the father has little time or freedom for the practical work he enjoys, while the cabin offers room to repair, build, and maintain things.

In 1948, Trond Sander and his father travel from Oslo by train to Elverum, then continue by bus for hours into the countryside. The long ride gradually carries them away from the city and its familiar home. Trond Sander watches fields, farms, cows, and the forested ridge pass the window; his father spends much of the journey reading technical books about subjects such as house-building and machines. At the bus’s final stop, the two take their bags and fishing rods and walk toward the river. Oslo is now not merely behind them but the starting point of a summer whose closeness and eventual parting will reshape the boy’s understanding of his father.

The City Under Occupation

Oslo also enters the narrative through the memory of the German invasion. Three weeks after German soldiers arrive in the city, Trond Sander recalls standing in the crowd with his father as troops march down Karl Johan. The street is cold and silent; the synchronized crash of boots strikes the walls near the university, and Messerschmitts sweep low over the rooftops. The boy and his father exchange a look and slowly shake their heads, but say nothing. His father takes his hand and leads him out of the crowd, past the parliament house and toward Østbane Station, to find out whether the bus on Mosseveien is running or the southbound train is on time. The memory gives Oslo the force of a threshold: the familiar city is suddenly occupied, and ordinary travel is uncertain.

The invasion also stands behind the father’s repeated absences. While Trond Sander remains at home and imagines journeys they might make together after the Germans have been defeated, his father searches for a place from which to think, hide, and carry papers—and sometimes films—across the border to Sweden for the Resistance. He finds the riverside cabin through Franz and makes its necessary repairs serve as cover for his movements. The contrast between the family’s Oslo home and the father’s second life in the village is therefore not simply a contrast between city and country. It marks the split between the life his family sees and the work he undertakes away from them.

Return and the Journey That Does Not End

At the close of the 1948 summer, Trond Sander boards a bus at the village shop to travel back to Oslo, changing to the train at Elverum. His father gives him detailed instructions about the connection and assures him he will follow once he has finished his work. The boy is fifteen and feels older than his father’s careful directions imply, yet he does not challenge them. As the bus pulls away, he watches his father beneath the oak tree until dust and the bend in the road hide him. The departure has the familiar shape of a farewell, but Trond Sander does not yet know that it will be their last meeting.

Back in Oslo, familiar streets and coastal landmarks appear altered. In the late summer light, Trond Sander rides his bicycle from Ljan down Nielsenbakken and along Mosseveien toward the centre of the city. The route passes Bekkelaget, with the railway line and fjord to one side and the steep rocky slope of the Ekeberg ridge to the other. He notices the gulls, the smell of creosote from the sleepers, and the salt air; the heat allows him to pedal at speed or coast beneath the sun. Yet the places he has always known—including the Bunnefjord, Nesodden, and the approaches toward Ingierstrand—seem changed. The city has not moved; the summer has altered the person returning to it.

His bicycle, a gift from his father the previous year, makes this changed city traversable. New bicycles are unavailable in the country, and the father gives him one he has kept for years, explaining that it no longer fits his own plans. Trond Sander maintains it carefully, taking it apart and reassembling it as his father taught him, washing, polishing, and oiling its joints and cogwheels. On the journey into Oslo, the bicycle carries both practical freedom and a trace of the father’s instruction. It lets the boy return repeatedly to the railway station, where he waits for the train from Elverum.

Waiting, Absence, and Changed Familiarity

During the late summer, Trond Sander makes the ride to Østbane Station again and again, tense and expectant, almost happy as he sets off because his father might be arriving. He waits in the station’s strange half-light beneath the roof, among echoes of footsteps and voices and rows of pigeons nesting in the ironwork. Each time, his father does not come. The station turns the connection from the countryside into a suspended promise: trains arrive from Elverum, but none brings the person the boy expects.

When the rain comes, Trond Sander continues cycling into Oslo in waterproofs and Wellington boots, watching water pour down beneath Ekeberg and the buildings fade into the rain. Then he stops going. The repeated journeys end not with an explanation but with the collapse of expectation. In the weeks after leaving the cabin, he experiences happiness and anticipation alongside restlessness and difficulty concentrating; even well-known views across the fjord and harbour seem unfamiliar. Oslo thus becomes the landscape through which absence is lived: first as a route back to his father, then as a city whose sights remain recognizable while their meaning has changed. Its decisive significance is not that it reunites the family, but that it holds the boy’s return, his waiting, and the unanswered question of whether his father ever intended to follow.