Bjerketun

Bjerketun is a housing estate outside Bjerkås where the Sundelin family’s home and garden stand at the edge of a dense grove. The setting first promises a contained, neighborly family life, but the grove and the pram behind the house expose how little that appearance of security can guarantee. After an unknown person places blood on the sleeping infant Margrete, Bjerketun becomes the setting for the family’s changed sense of safety as well as its earlier ease.

Setting and Layout

Bjerketun was built in the early 1990s and comprised sixty homes, most with gardens, double garages, and large verandas at the back. It lay four kilometres from the center of Bjerkås, a town of about five thousand people. The Sundelins had chosen not to extend their house, unlike some residents closest to the woods, because they wanted to preserve their garden. They imagined Margrete playing there when she was older: splashing in a small pool, bouncing on a trampoline, or reading on a blanket. That planned use gives the garden an intimate, forward-looking place in the family’s life, though the grove immediately behind the house makes the boundary of that domestic world less secure than it appears.

Beyond the grove lay Askeland, a larger estate of seventy-four homes built in the 1960s. Its square, faded houses contrasted with Bjerketun’s well-maintained homes. A third of Askeland’s homes had been assigned by the local authority to welfare recipients, a policy associated with an increasing sense of decay in the older estate. When investigating the attack on Margrete, Konrad Sejer traced a possible route from Askeland through the trees to the Sundelins’ property. He imagined that the person responsible might have carried blood beneath a jacket, watched the pram from behind a tree, and returned through the grove. This was a working possibility, not a confirmed identification of the attacker or the blood’s source; the investigation was still awaiting laboratory results.

Family Life and Exposure

The Sundelins’ home sits within a community where residents know and speak to their neighbors every day. Lily described knowing the neighbors’ children too: they played in the street, and older children pushed Margrete in her pram along the pavement in front of the house. From the window, Lily could see them. This visible, shared street life made the estate seem both familiar and reassuring, with other children gathered around the baby’s ordinary outings.

The pram’s position behind the house offered a different kind of exposure. Margrete, eight months old, slept under a crocheted blanket in a Brio pram beneath a maple tree, wearing a matching bonnet tied under her chin. The forest stood behind the tree like a dark wall. Lily was in the kitchen and could not see the pram through the window, yet she was not worried. The distance between the visible pavement and the unseen space behind the house matters: the estate’s neighborly routine did not mean that every part of the family’s surroundings was under watch.

After the Attack

Once the nurse confirmed that Margrete was unharmed and that the blood was not hers, Lily wanted to leave and return to the house and bedroom. Her immediate wish was to retreat with Karsten and their child into the familiar privacy of their home. But the attack had altered what that privacy meant. She resolved never again to let Margrete sleep in the pram beneath the maple without supervision, or to shut the baby out of her mind. Bjerketun’s garden, once imagined as a place for carefree play, now carried the memory of how close danger had come to the infant while Lily was indoors.

Later, Lily pushed Margrete’s pram out of the estate toward the main road while Karsten walked beside her. They held on to one another—the pram in Lily’s hands, her arm in Karsten’s—but could not get closer. The scene places the family in motion through the neighborhood rather than safely enclosed at home: they stop as a car speeds past, in the burning afternoon sun. Bjerketun thus marks both the setting of their former confidence and the point from which they step back into the world after that confidence has been broken.