The Baltic Sea is recalled as the icy setting of the narrator’s daily hour-long swims during a brief visit to a small island in the Stockholm archipelago. The water’s physical severity makes the place more than scenery: it becomes the backdrop to an unhappy romantic exile and the narrator’s first direct sight of the enemy.

Setting and Daily Bathing

After learning that Brigitte was married, the narrator was sent to her aunt’s summer house on an island in the Stockholm archipelago. The landscape, associated with Swedish legends, surrounded his solitary walks among pine trees while Brigitte and her husband remained together. To calm the narrator’s nerves, Brigitte’s aunt required him to bathe in the Baltic Sea for a full hour each day, watching from shore with a timepiece in hand.

The swims are remembered through their bodily discomfort. The narrator describes himself emerging frozen and morose, then lying stretched on a rock to wait for the sun to warm him. The measured hour and the aunt’s unyielding vigil make the sea an imposed routine rather than a refuge.

First Sight of the Enemy

During one such interval on the rock, the narrator saw an airplane marked with a swastika cross the sky. He identifies this as his first encounter with the enemy. The scene brings the distant European crisis into the otherwise enclosed episode of romantic disappointment and cold-water bathing: the Baltic setting joins private misery to the first visible sign of the approaching war.