Pirjo Tries to Push Wanda off a Cliff at Gettlinge

At Gettlinge on Öland, Pirjo turns a guided look at the landscape into an attempted murder: she draws Wanda Phinn to a cliff, distracts her with a tale of the island’s past, and knocks her toward the slope. Wanda’s reflexive grip on Pirjo prevents the fall from becoming a solitary plunge. The attempt fails, but the danger becomes unmistakable, and Pirjo immediately has to improvise a story to keep Wanda from suspecting her further.

Background and Setting

Pirjo has already surveyed the ground behind the graveyard. A cliff drops away from it, and the slope is more heavily covered with trees and bushes than she remembers. To her, that overgrowth offers concealment: Wanda’s body need not be moved at once, and if it were discovered later, Pirjo reasons, no one would necessarily connect it either to Wanda or to her. She waits until she has checked that the highway between the moorland and the graveyard is empty. The setting is thus not incidental scenery; Pirjo has assessed it as both a place to make the attack and a place where its consequences might be hidden.

She calls Wanda over in a deliberately controlled voice, presenting the view as an explanation of how the island was formed and why its inhabitants disappeared. From the elevated ground she points toward cultivated fields in the lowlands and settlements along both shores of the Kalmar Strait. She identifies Kalmar, where Wanda has just come from, and recounts how farmers lived in the highlands for decades in the previous century, repeatedly dividing their land. The apparently casual geography lesson gives Pirjo time to position Wanda near the edge without openly announcing her purpose.

The Attempt

Pirjo shifts the focus to Stora Alvaret, saying that Atu Abanshamash Dumuzi might be there. She describes the area as fertile pasture less than a hundred years earlier, before excessive use and grazing by cattle stripped it away. Then she asks whether it is understandable that people could not find a way to feed one another in such a fertile place. Wanda shakes her head and appears calm and relaxed. Pirjo reads that calm not as alarm but as an opportunity: the highway is still deserted, and she judges that the moment to act has arrived.

Pirjo turns her historical account into an accusation, characterizing Öland as an island of egotism because many inhabitants ultimately had to leave to escape starvation when they could not cooperate. As she finishes, she pulls Wanda’s arm vigorously and drives her hip into Wanda’s lower back with full force. The story about shared failure and hunger is therefore more than exposition: it occupies Wanda’s attention while Pirjo converts the lesson into physical violence. The contrast is sharp—she condemns a community’s inability to help itself while using a fabricated tour to isolate and attack someone beside her.

The first part of the push works as Pirjo intends. Wanda’s upper body tips backward; her free arm flails, and she steps back without finding secure footing. Pirjo expects her to fall among vegetation, stumps, and large rocks, where the impact might kill her. If the fall did not, Pirjo has also considered using a spade to finish the killing. The attack is planned as a sequence rather than a single gamble: the drop is meant to do the work, with another means of killing available if it does not.

But Wanda does not fall alone. At the instant she loses her balance, she instinctively grabs Pirjo around the waist with her free arm. They tumble down the slope intertwined, their legs striking tree trunks. Because the two bodies take up more space than one, their fall stops before the slope becomes truly steep. They end up among twigs and rotting leaves, entangled and staring at one another. The bodily reflex that saves Wanda also overturns Pirjo’s plan, pulling the would-be killer into the same uncontrolled descent.

Exposure and Aftermath

Wanda throws an arm upward and secures her hand between low branches and exposed roots. She asks Pirjo whether she is trying to kill her. Pirjo is shocked not only by the blows and bruising of the failed attempt but by what the scene has made apparent: Wanda must now know that something is wrong and will be on guard. Pirjo’s immediate concern turns to the next danger—Wanda might see Atu and voice her doubts to the person Pirjo believes must not learn about them.

To account for the fall, Pirjo claims that she has epilepsy and says she has suffered a small attack. The explanation is improvised; she turns her face toward the ground and tries to make her body shake, then apologizes and says that she normally feels an attack coming but did not this time. The performance is designed to recast a deliberate shove as an involuntary medical episode and to make Pirjo appear remorseful. It does not undo what Wanda has experienced: the attack has failed, and Pirjo’s need to invent an excuse confirms the scene’s reversal, from a carefully arranged ambush to a precarious encounter with an alert survivor.