Pirjo Chases and Kills Wanda at Alvaret

Pirjo Chases and Kills Wanda at Alvaret is the turning point at which Pirjo Abanshamash Dumuzi’s rivalry with Wanda Phinn becomes murder. In Stora Alvaret, Pirjo uses a plausible excuse to separate Wanda from the scooter, then returns to attack her. Wanda briefly escapes the first charge, but Pirjo turns the scooter around and pursues her on foot with a spade. The killing removes a perceived rival to Pirjo’s position beside Atu; afterward, Pirjo treats the violence as necessary while acknowledging its cost to her composure.

Approach and False Reassurance

Wanda is eager to reach Atu. Her desire is personal as well as spiritual: she remembers his hands brushing her carefully braided dreadlocks in London and wants to feel that touch again. That longing is her immediate driving force, and it keeps her focused on the prospect of meeting him even when Pirjo’s behavior unsettles her. The scene thus sets Wanda’s hope against Pirjo’s calculated control of the encounter.

Pirjo tells Wanda to park beside a sign on the wall. She says that she has twisted her foot in their fall and cannot accompany Wanda along the stony path. She points Wanda toward a route extending a kilometer or two across the landscape, where, she claims, Atu is probably collecting energy. Her account of the area’s legends, weathered landscape, and seasonal orchids gives the directions the texture of ordinary conversation. The practical effect is more important: Wanda is being sent away alone, while Pirjo keeps control of the scooter and its keys.

As Wanda walks, she sees Pirjo’s unusually clear smile and wonders why it is there. Later, hearing the scooter’s ticking approach, she assumes Pirjo has changed her mind and is coming to explain that Atu cannot meet her. Wanda recognizes the possibility of another deception and decides to say plainly that she does not believe Pirjo. For a moment, she feels compassion for Pirjo, imagining that the other woman simply does not know how to get rid of her. The sight of Pirjo’s face at close range overturns that assumption: Wanda realizes that Pirjo knows exactly what she intends to do.

The Pursuit Across Stora Alvaret

Wanda runs as soon as she understands the danger. The ground turns swampy beneath her, and she hopes the wet earth will impede the scooter. Instead, its engine noise grows louder behind her. Pirjo drives directly at her; Wanda jumps aside at the last moment as the scooter roars past, close enough for its heat to reach her. Pirjo’s frustration and hard expression make clear that the failed charge has not stopped her.

Pirjo pivots the scooter around, throwing mud and earth from its rear wheel, and pursues Wanda again. Wanda proves faster on foot than Pirjo expects. She kicks off her shoes and accelerates barefoot, turning the landscape into an obstacle that she must negotiate through speed and bodily instinct rather than deliberation. The scene repeatedly makes danger physical before it can be fully understood: the approaching tick, the scooter’s heat, the soft ground, and the abrupt leap to safety. Wanda avoids the vehicle once, but that escape does not end the pursuit.

As the scooter reaches her again, Wanda turns her head only at the last second and jumps aside for a second time. She stops and raises an arm to strike. In that instant she sees Pirjo’s expression and a small, compact spade swinging toward her face. The account ends with Wanda’s vision of the attack, leaving the blow itself outside her final perception. Her death is confirmed by Pirjo’s later reflection that she has murdered someone for the third time in her life.

Murder and Immediate Aftermath

About an hour after the attack, Pirjo is in the rose-colored building known as the Academy’s Stable of Senses. She washes her boots and hoses down her trouser legs, the spade, and her scooter. The sequence shows practical efforts to clean the objects and clothing associated with the chase, while the secluded setting allows her to do so without interruption: the disciples are meditating in their rooms, and the stable is unusually quiet. The text does not describe what happens to Wanda’s body, so the immediate aftermath centers on Pirjo’s actions and self-accounting rather than on the disposal of the victim.

Pirjo recognizes that the murder has affected her physically. Her forearms are bright red and her heart is still thumping. She tells herself to stop, think, and regard what happened as insignificant in the larger scheme of things, but the bodily signs resist that minimization. Her effort to restore calm sits beside her admission that this is the third murder of her life and that such acts leave a mark.

She also supplies her own justification: Wanda, she reasons, forced her way into Pirjo’s world despite warnings. Pirjo casts herself as the high priestess who has rightly stopped Wanda and thereby preserved her position once again at Atu’s side. Yet this explanation does not erase the cost she registers. She describes her inner peace as attacked and her soul as unbalanced, then turns to the remaining practical danger: Atu must not find out if matters are to be handled properly.

Significance of the Encounter

The scene’s decisive reversal is that Wanda’s expectation of a meeting with Atu becomes a trap. She believes Pirjo may be coming to offer another excuse, and briefly reads her as confused rather than dangerous. Recognition arrives through Pirjo’s face, but it comes too late to prevent the pursuit. Wanda’s two evasive leaps establish that she is not passive: she runs, judges the terrain, removes her shoes, and tries to strike back. Those actions give her a narrow interval of agency without changing the outcome.

For Pirjo, the killing is both an act of rivalry and a defense of her place beside Atu. Her later language converts violence into an assertion of spiritual authority, but the scene’s concrete aftermath—the red forearms, pounding heart, and washing of the scooter, boots, trousers, and spade—exposes the strain beneath that account. The landscape that Pirjo had described as a place of legends and collected energy becomes the setting for a pursuit, while her language of inner peace coexists with an act she cannot treat as physically or morally weightless.