Bedbugs

Bedbugs are a recurring creature in the novel, first established as a fact of life in the servants’ quarters at Nybacken and later made into silent witnesses to Robert and Arvid’s plans to emigrate. Their role is both material and structural: they belong to the crowded, exhausting conditions of hired service, yet the narrative repeatedly gives their movements a knowing presence as human conversations unfold around them.

Life in the Stable Room

At Nybacken, the two farmhands live in a stable room beside the horses’ stalls. The room contains a deal table, a bench for each man, two straw-filled beds, and a horse blanket apiece. Bedbugs inhabit the walls and beds in such numbers that they multiply undisturbed in the cracks and holes. They are not an isolated nuisance but part of the setting Robert enters when he becomes Aron of Nybacken’s younger hired man.

Robert is woken at four in the morning by Aron and, exhausted by the chores assigned to him, usually sleeps through the bedbugs’ bites. The contrast is pointed: the younger farmhand’s sleep is so deep that even a persistent irritation cannot rouse him, while the workday begins early and places him at everyone’s command. The pests thus register the physical terms of service without becoming the focus of a separate episode.

Witnesses to Work and Authority

The stable room also becomes a place where Robert and Arvid talk about the farm and the rules governing their lives. In one late-night conversation, Robert explains the hierarchy of authority and the seven figures he says hold fatherly power over the farmhands, beginning with King Oskar I. After Robert grows sleepy and gets under the horse blanket, Arvid remains awake with the keg; the lantern hangs on the wall as the bedbugs emerge from their hiding places.

That recurring image makes the room’s human and insect life run on different schedules. Robert sleeps after the conversation, while Arvid stays awake and the bedbugs set out in the night. The scene places the discussion of authority inside the very quarters where the men endure its consequences: cramped accommodation, hard labor, and little control over their time.

Emigration Plans and Secrecy

When Robert and Arvid decide to cross the ocean together, their deliberations take place in the stable room after dark. The lantern burns late, and the bedbugs in the rotten walls are the only witnesses to their secret. Robert has worked out that they might use Aron’s timber wagon to travel to Karlshamn, making their employer contribute indirectly toward the journey. They expect to negotiate with a captain in the harbor town, but the cost of passage—two hundred riksdaler—soon exposes how difficult their plan will be.

The pests return as the men fall silent over the price. Believing their nightly victims have gone to sleep, the bedbugs cautiously emerge from their holes and corners. The detail adds an ironic counterpoint to the men’s predicament: they are awake, weighing whether their shared decision can survive the cost, while the creatures that have inhabited their room proceed as if the night has resumed its ordinary course. Robert has an inheritance to draw on; Arvid has no savings, and the two hundred riksdaler amount to five years’ wages. Their plan to travel together is therefore threatened by the same economic dependence that has kept them in service.

Narrative Significance

The bedbugs give a physical shape to the confinement of farmhand life. They occupy the beds and walls where Robert and Arvid sleep, listen to conversations about work and authority, and remain present when the men make plans for a life beyond Nybacken. The room is both shelter and enclosure: its pests are woven into the routine of service, but its nighttime conversations create a small space for imagining departure.

By returning to the bedbugs at moments of secrecy and hesitation, the narrative makes them more than background detail without turning them into humanlike characters. Their quiet emergence accompanies the men’s private deliberations and underscores how little privacy the farmhands possess: even their plans are made in a room shared with the creatures in its cracks. The contrast between this stable room and the ocean journey ahead gives the bedbugs a final, indirect significance—as witnesses to the first fragile steps of a departure from the conditions they have come to inhabit.