Malena's Miscarriage

Malena’s miscarriage is more than the end of her pregnancy with Atu Abanshamash Dumuzi: in Pirjo Abanshamash Dumuzi’s account, it exposes the danger beneath Atu’s desire for children and places Malena in the path of a repeated pattern of violence. The loss also becomes a temporal hinge in Valentina’s reconstruction of events, linking Malena’s hospitalisation to Pirjo’s movements and Wanda Phinn’s arrival.

The miscarriage and its meaning

Pirjo tells Malena that she is the third woman whose pregnancy with Atu has ended in miscarriage. She presents the loss not as an isolated tragedy but as the latest rupture in a history Malena did not know. Atu, she says, is both devastated and angry. Though he is over forty and has no children, Pirjo insists that he wants them more than anything; the miscarriages have left him feeling betrayed and let down. Her account makes the pregnancy carry an expectation far beyond the couple’s private hopes: Atu sees a child as a bodily mission, and the pregnancy’s end as a failure of that mission.

Pirjo describes Atu’s response in the language of spiritual danger. He sees the miscarriage as an opening into an abyss of negative energy and, she says, cannot tolerate what has happened. The language does not lessen the force of the loss; it reveals how Atu’s beliefs can turn it into an accusation against the woman who miscarried. Malena’s grief and physical vulnerability are therefore met not with reassurance from Pirjo, but with a warning about what Atu may do next.

Pirjo’s warning and the earlier pregnancies

Pirjo’s warning is explicit: if Malena returns to the center, Atu will sacrifice her. She says he will drown Malena and leave her naked on a distant beach, describing the threat as a repetition of what happened to the two women who lost his children. The scene shifts the miscarriage from a painful outcome into an immediate question of safety. Malena responds with disbelief and asks why Atu cannot tell her himself, but Pirjo maintains that the danger is real and that Malena must listen.

Pirjo gives the earlier cases different, incomplete outlines. She says Atu confided to her that he had sent the first woman back into the cycle of nature because she could not fulfil their bodily mission. About the second, named Lonny, Pirjo says she tried to give a warning, but Lonny would not listen. Pirjo does not know what ultimately happened to that woman and thinks she may never have been found. The uncertainty matters: Pirjo’s account is not a complete record of either woman’s fate, but it gives Malena reason to fear that disappearance and death may lie behind the language of sacrifice.

Pirjo also presents herself as personally exposed by speaking. She tells Malena that Atu might do the same to her if he knew she had revealed this history. Her disclosure thus carries two claims at once: that Malena is in danger, and that Pirjo herself risks punishment for warning her. Pirjo’s long attachment to Atu complicates the scene further. She says that she has been happy for Atu and Malena, while acknowledging that her own fondness for him has changed into something different over the years. She speaks as someone who knows him intimately, but that closeness does not make her account independently confirmed.

The hospital and the remembered date

The miscarriage is also the date around which Valentina later assembles a series of observations. She recalls that several people were looking for Pirjo during meditation hour because Atu wanted her to take Malena to the hospital. Valentina saw Pirjo arrive at the Academy’s Stable of Senses on her yellow scooter, and later saw her return. In Valentina’s memory, Pirjo’s return seemed to mean that events were as they should be and that Atu would be relieved; she expected Pirjo to help Malena in hospital.

Pirjo gives a different account of her movements. She says she remembers the day, had been feeling unwell, and rode to Nordodden to meditate. She says the meditation helped, and that she parked her scooter inside the building on a sudden impulse because she wanted to charge its battery. She also says she helped Malena in hospital, where Malena was allowed either to return quickly so the center could look after her or to remain until she had recovered. The recollection therefore establishes both the need for hospital care and Pirjo’s claimed involvement, while leaving Valentina alert to the gap between what she saw and what she had assumed.

Valentina connects the date to Wanda Phinn as well. After Shirley tells her the day Wanda left London, Valentina works out that Wanda must have arrived on the same day as Malena’s miscarriage, Pirjo’s scooter, and the visit to the Academy’s Stable of Senses. She says she will never forget that date. For Valentina, the coincidence gives the hospital episode a second significance: it aligns a private medical crisis with the arrival of a woman whose disappearance has become a mystery.

Narrative significance

The miscarriage is disclosed through competing forms of knowledge. Pirjo speaks from intimate experience of Atu and supplies a frightening history, yet her account of the earlier women is partly uncertain. Valentina reconstructs the day from memory, a dream, and details supplied by Shirley; her interpretation makes Pirjo’s scooter and the Stable of Senses ominous, although Pirjo offers ordinary explanations for her actions. The event is thus both a bodily fact and a point where testimony, spiritual language, and circumstantial clues meet.

That contrast also defines Malena’s position. She is recovering in hospital when Pirjo tells her that her pregnancy has placed her within a pattern of alleged sacrifice. The miscarriage does not itself prove what Atu has done to the earlier women, but Pirjo’s warning transforms Malena’s understanding of what may await her if she returns. At the same time, the remembered date draws the miscarriage into the wider investigation surrounding Wanda Phinn, making it a crucial marker in the chronology rather than an episode confined to Malena and Atu.