Pirjo and Wanda Phinn

Pirjo and Wanda Phinn’s relationship takes shape before their first face-to-face meeting, as Pirjo turns Wanda’s intended visit to the Nature Absorption Academy into a contest over access to Atu and Pirjo’s own standing. Wanda’s persistence unsettles her because Pirjo reads it as a challenge to a world she has spent years trying to protect. The relationship is therefore marked from the outset by Pirjo’s suspicion, jealousy, and willingness to use drastic measures; the recollection of an earlier rival makes that threat more than a passing anxiety.

The arrival as a threat

In September 2013, Pirjo has read Wanda’s message about her imminent arrival ten times. Each reading prompts her to imagine further consequences, but her conclusion does not change: Wanda is coming despite having been rejected for a course, and Pirjo interprets this persistence as an attempt to enter and conquer the life she shares with Atu. Although the teachings of nature absorption do not recognize gut instinct as a guide, Pirjo cannot disregard it. Her background, she believes, makes that instinct important precisely when her formal doctrine gives it no place.

The stakes are intimate and practical at once. Pirjo fears not only the disruption of the academy but also the possibility that Wanda will draw Atu’s attention. She thinks it fortunate that she, rather than Atu, has handled the requests: if he had seen Wanda’s message, his curiosity and libido might have been stirred. Pirjo regards her knowledge of Atu’s weaknesses as an advantage, and uses that knowledge to justify preventing Wanda from reaching him. The threat she perceives is thus bound to her position in the relationship: Wanda’s arrival could test the influence Pirjo believes she has over access to Atu.

Pirjo’s anxiety is sharpened by the pressure of time. She thinks of her biological clock as ticking quickly, making Wanda’s approach seem especially intolerable. The narration gives no grounds for treating Wanda’s intentions as established fact; the imagined conquest belongs to Pirjo’s interpretation of the message. That distinction matters. The conflict begins not with a demonstrated injury by Wanda, but with Pirjo’s certainty that the newcomer’s presence could endanger the future she wants with Atu.

A remembered rival

As Pirjo prepares to leave on her scooter, a weathered wooden pier and the seaweed moving around its supports bring back an earlier confrontation. Several years before, another female disciple had become, in Pirjo’s eyes, a dangerous rival. The woman spent increasing time in Atu’s quarters and gradually began to seek some of Pirjo’s responsibilities. Pirjo says she had sensed that change as it happened; the perceived encroachment culminated in a quarrel, with shouting, pushing, and slapping growing more forceful.

Pirjo describes the confrontation’s outcome as an accident in strict terms, yet also calls it the best thing that could have happened. The pairing of those judgments reveals how she accommodates violence within her account of defending her place. She presents the earlier incident not as a warning to avoid repeating the past, but as a precedent she can draw on when she considers Wanda’s arrival. The memory also links the pier to the threat in the present: a peaceful-looking setting carries an association with a previous crisis in which Pirjo crossed a boundary she believed could not be uncrossed.

That history does not prove what Pirjo will do to Wanda, but it changes the weight of her deliberations. Her fear is not merely that Wanda might compete for Atu’s attention; Pirjo has already experienced a rivalry in which competition over intimacy and responsibilities became physical. When she recognizes a similar danger in Wanda, the old incident makes extreme action seem available to her, even before the new relationship has been tested in person.

The first meeting

By October 2013, Wanda has arrived with a suitcase and is waiting outside the large yellow academy building. Pirjo, astride her scooter, briefly wonders whether she should turn around. She trembles inside, but decides that evasion will not work: Wanda has come too far to be prevented from finding her own way. Pirjo’s response is calculated rather than welcoming. Before resorting to extremes, she decides to try other methods.

She crosses the square and introduces herself as the person who has been corresponding with Wanda. She immediately repeats that Wanda has come in vain. Wanda appears briefly disappointed, then says she can wait at the nearby Frimurare Hotellet for a few days and asks Pirjo to call when Atu returns. Her calm persistence unsettles Pirjo further. The narration compares Wanda’s patient concentration to a predator waiting to strike, but this image reflects the danger Pirjo senses in her; it does not establish that Wanda has threatened her.

Pirjo’s reply turns refusal into controlled delay. Rather than let Wanda leave with the impression that she has been permanently turned away, Pirjo offers to try to arrange a short audience. She suggests that Atu may be at the southern end of the island or meditating on Stora Alvaret, while emphasizing that he dislikes being disturbed. The offer allows Pirjo to retain control of the encounter and of what Wanda is told about Atu’s whereabouts. It is at once a concession to Wanda’s persistence and a continuation of Pirjo’s effort to manage the access she fears losing.

The relationship’s defining imbalance

The relationship is initially narrated almost entirely through Pirjo’s perspective. Wanda’s persistence is observable: she travels to the academy after being refused admission and is prepared to wait for Atu. Her private motives, by contrast, are not confirmed in these scenes. Pirjo supplies the larger interpretation, imagining that Wanda intends to conquer her and Atu’s world and viewing Wanda’s attractiveness as an intensification of the danger. The imbalance between what Wanda does and what Pirjo believes she intends makes suspicion itself a central force in their relationship.

Pirjo’s position is also unstable in a way she both recognizes and tries to conceal. She believes she knows Atu’s weaknesses better than anyone, yet the need to keep Wanda from his attention suggests that this knowledge cannot guarantee security. Her management of messages, her initial refusal, and her carefully qualified offer of an audience are attempts to preserve control without openly acknowledging how vulnerable she feels. Against that vulnerability stands the memory of the former disciple, whose growing presence in Atu’s quarters preceded a violent confrontation.

At this point, the relationship is a rivalry in anticipation: Wanda’s arrival has made the threat immediate, but the decisive conflict remains ahead. Pirjo’s earlier experience supplies the pattern through which she reads the newcomer, while Wanda’s determination keeps that pattern from being contained by a simple rejection. Their first meeting therefore establishes both the personal stakes—Atu’s attention and Pirjo’s place in his world—and the dangerous gap between Wanda’s visible actions and the catastrophe Pirjo imagines behind them.