Ostern

Ostern, the Easter holiday, returns in Harry Hole’s recollection as a yearly family season in Lesja and as the setting for a small, repeated deception by his father. The memory’s importance lies in its contrast between a sister who forgets from one holiday to the next and a son who retains what his father taught him—even when those lessons become urgently relevant in the snow.

A yearly journey to Lesja

When Harry Hole was a child, his family spent Ostern each year at his grandfather’s cabin in Lesja. His father was drawn repeatedly to a particular summit, and each time he persuaded Harry Hole and his sister, Søs, to keep climbing by telling them that a kiosk waited at the top, selling Pepsi-Cola, Søs’s favorite drink. The promise made the last stretch of the ascent seem to have a reward just beyond it; the annual return gave the same story another chance to work.

The recollection is prompted by Harry Hole’s old skis, which he says came from his father. The equipment links the present conversation to those childhood trips and to the mountain knowledge that accompanied them. The skis are still the old, broad mountain kind, a material remnant of the landscape and family routine in which the memories took shape.

Repetition and unequal memory

Søs forgot the promise between one Ostern holiday and the next, and each year fell for the same old trick. Harry Hole wishes he could forget in the same way. Instead, he has retained everything his father ever told him: rules for behaving in the mountains, ways of using nature as a compass, and instructions for surviving an avalanche. He has also kept quite different lists in memory, including the succession of Norwegian kings, Chinese dynasties, and American presidents.

The annual pattern therefore produces opposite experiences of time. For Søs, the interval resets the tale; for Harry Hole, the past accumulates. His father’s lesson and his father’s story are both preserved, but the practical guidance carries a weight the playful promise does not. Ostern marks a repetition that does not erase what came before for Harry Hole.

From remembered lessons to survival

Later, trapped beneath snow, Harry Hole struggles to make room and reach the fireplace’s protective screen. He pulls at it until it shifts, finds air, and keeps digging through the snow and half-burned wood until he can reach the chimney and breathe. The passage establishes the immediate fact of his survival; elsewhere in the same crisis, his father’s voice returns in remembered words about being afraid of the dark yet going in anyway.

The text does not make the Ostern journeys the direct cause of Harry Hole’s escape. It does, however, place his father’s mountain instruction within the same body of memory as the annual climbs, and identifies avalanche survival among the lessons Harry Hole kept. The childhood holiday thus acquires a lasting significance: what began as a repeated family outing also belongs to the store of knowledge and remembered voices that remains with him under the snow.