November 20, 1997

November 20, 1997, marks the novel’s prologue and the day Alberte was killed in a traffic collision on Bornholm. The date binds an intimate, dreamlike opening to the ordinary school day that concealed a death, and to the discovery that drew Christian Habersaat into the case.

The Date in the Prologue

The date appears immediately before a dream in which an unnamed woman sees grey hues and imagines herself as a butterfly-like presence hovering between heaven and earth. The opening therefore places the reader in an altered, suspended experience before the narrative turns to a specific day on Bornholm. The evidence establishes the date and the dream’s imagery, but does not identify the dreamer in this passage.

An Ordinary Day at School

November 20 was a typical day for the approximately fifty students, aged eighteen and older, enrolled at Bornholm Folk High School for the winter half-year. They took courses in music, glasswork, painting, or pottery; according to Birkedal, the group was mostly happy, got along well, and felt no sense of danger. Their ordinary routine forms a stark counterpoint to what had happened that morning: Alberte, remembered as gentle, beautiful, and probably the school’s most popular girl, had been killed in a car accident.

The Delayed Discovery

Alberte was not found until a little more than a day after the collision. The impact had hurled her so far up into a roadside tree that she was almost impossible to see. The person who happened to look up as his car passed was Christian Habersaat, a uniformed police officer from Nexø. The sight of her limp body stayed with him, as did the inscrutable expression fixed on her face.

The sparse leads led investigators to conclude that Alberte had been thrown into the tree by a serious car accident, an episode unlike other recent hit-and-run cases on Bornholm. November 20 thus anchors both the initial understanding of her death as an accident and the beginning of the unresolved case that would occupy Christian Habersaat.