Kuba

Kuba is an Oslo park where the city’s industrial past, Simon Kefas’s memories and a police investigation converge. The park’s bridges and river are more than scenery: they frame Simon’s reflections on love, risk and chance, then lead him back to the work of examining a body caught in the water.

Setting and history

The park’s popular name invites an incorrect explanation. Some people connect Kuba with Cuba, perhaps because political rallies were held there and Grünerløkka was once considered a working-class neighbourhood. The name instead recalls a large gas holder that once stood on the site, with a framework shaped like a cube.

A pedestrian bridge crosses toward an old factory that has since become an art college. The railings carry lovers’ padlocks marked with dates and initials, turning a public crossing into a small display of private commitment. From the bridge, the view reaches Åmodt Bro and the river dividing the modest capital into east and west. This layered landscape preserves reminders of industrial Oslo while remaining part of the city’s everyday life.

Simon’s memories at the bridges

Seeing the padlocks, Simon considers his decade-long love for Else. He has loved her every day of the more than three and a half thousand days they have been together, and knows he needs no lock as a token of that bond. He also hopes she will outlive him by many years and have time for other men; he regards that prospect as acceptable rather than as a threat to his devotion.

The river brings back a different intimacy: the youthful friendship of the troika, the three boys Simon once belonged to. He recalls himself as less intelligent, strong, socially capable or attractive to women than his friends, but braver—or, as he reframes it, more willing to take risks. As a young man, he balanced on a bridge railing while his friends urged him not to jump, then plunged into the polluted water. Simon remembers the act as a wager with fate, made when he felt he had less to lose than others, and connects it to the recklessness a broken heart could prompt. His return from the water left him with a vague disappointment, even as his friends cheered.

The body and the investigation

In the present, Simon turns from these memories to a figure suspended at the waterfall between two bridges. A crime-scene officer explains that the body is thought to have floated downstream before its clothes caught on something protruding from the water; the river is usually shallow enough to wade across. The officers work to free the body with a boat while Simon studies the scene.

The image recalls Else to him, but the investigation brings him back to practical observation. After leaving, Simon discards his snus in a green rubbish bin at the end of the bridge and scans the ground as he walks down to the riverbank. Kuba thus holds two kinds of attention at once: a place where memory briefly opens onto love and youthful risk, and a crime scene requiring close scrutiny.

A meeting on the riverbank

At the bridge, a tall blonde woman in a black skirt and short jacket initially looks to Simon like a bank clerk; her police warrant card identifies her as a colleague. She introduces herself as Kari Adel, newly assigned to the Homicide Squad, and says she has been told to find him because he is supposed to mentor her. Their meeting connects the park’s investigation to a developing working relationship, making Kuba the point where Simon’s private recollection gives way to his professional responsibility.