Pirjo’s Rivalry with Wanda and Murder of Her

Pirjo Abanshamash Dumuzi’s rivalry with Wanda Phinn is shaped by their opposing claims on a shared world: Wanda comes to Öland hoping to serve Atu Abanshamash Dumuzi, while Pirjo wants to preserve her own position at his side. What begins as a contest over belonging becomes an attempted killing, a pursuit, and finally murder. Their conflict is marked by a sharp imbalance: Wanda tries to control her response and imagine a future at the Academy, while Pirjo treats her arrival as a danger to be removed.

Rivalry and Wanda’s Arrival

Pirjo’s hostility is already active as she drives Wanda across the Öland Bridge. She tells her about the island’s windmills and the history of land parcels divided so extensively within families that people eventually had to leave rather than starve. The account gives Wanda something to listen to, but Pirjo regards it as a useful distraction: she is thinking about where she might shake Wanda off, with a fall that could kill her. If the fall did not, Pirjo considers helping it along. The landscape and its history thus become part of her practical calculation, not simply a tour offered to a visitor.

Wanda does not arrive without a purpose of her own. As they travel through the grazed moorland, she understands that Pirjo does not welcome her and feels the impulse to strike back, but decides to control herself. She recalls having once been a woman with only a wall to look at and resolves not to return to that position or let anyone stand in her way. Her immediate aim, however, is not to fight Pirjo: she plans how to approach Atu when she sees him again. She means to thank him for caring for her in London, remind him of the looks they exchanged, and explain that she has come to serve him without expecting payment. She also intends to offer her sports training as a way to help the Academy’s course participants, hoping she might secure a permanent place.

That hope sharpens the rivalry. Wanda sees a possible role for herself within Atu’s community; Pirjo sees an unwanted arrival whose presence may unsettle her own standing. Pirjo points out the areas called Mysinge Alvar and Gynge Alvar, saying Atu is probably somewhere nearby. Her guidance sounds more believable than before, but Wanda’s growing plans depend on reaching the person Pirjo is determined to keep close.

The Slope and the Reversal

Pirjo’s plan to make Wanda disappear takes physical form on the road. As she condemns the island’s former inhabitants for failing to work together to feed themselves, she pulls Wanda’s arm and drives her hip into Wanda’s lower back. The speech about the island’s supposed egotism occupies the moment in which Pirjo attacks. Its apparent subject is collective selfishness; its immediate function is to distract Wanda while Pirjo tries to send her down a slope among vegetation, stumps, and rocks, where a fall could prove fatal.

Wanda does fall, but Pirjo’s intended separation fails. At the instant she loses her balance, Wanda instinctively grabs Pirjo around the waist with her free arm. The two women tumble together, their bodies striking tree trunks, and the fall stops before the slope becomes much steeper. They end up entangled among twigs and rotting leaves, staring at one another. The reversal matters to their relationship: Pirjo has tried to turn the terrain into a weapon against Wanda, but Wanda’s reflex makes the attack dangerous to both of them and prevents the clean, solitary fall Pirjo intended.

The failed attempt does not settle the conflict. On the road through the moorland, Wanda takes control of the speed and refuses to behave as though Pirjo’s welcome determines whether she can remain. She still feels the impulse to retaliate, yet holds herself back because she believes there are other ways to win. That restraint contrasts with Pirjo’s escalation: Wanda imagines a future through service and usefulness, while Pirjo answers the threat she perceives with increasingly direct violence.

Pursuit and Murder

The apparent pause in hostilities proves deceptive. Wanda waves to Pirjo and briefly feels compassion, thinking Pirjo may simply not know how to get rid of her. When she is close enough to see Pirjo’s face clearly, she understands that the danger is deliberate. She runs. The discovery turns uncertainty into immediate flight: the woman who had seemed unable to act has, in Wanda’s recognition, already decided what to do.

Pirjo pursues her on the scooter. Wanda jumps aside and stops, raising her arm to strike as the vehicle reaches her. In that final instant she sees Pirjo’s expression and the compact spade being swung at her face; that is the last thing she sees. The scene completes the movement from concealed intention to open attack. Wanda’s efforts to preserve her independence and approach Atu are ended not by a conversation or a contest for a place in the Academy, but by Pirjo’s pursuit with a weapon.

Concealment and the Meaning of the Conflict

Afterward, Pirjo washes her boots and hoses down her trouser legs, the spade, and the scooter at the Academy’s Stable of Senses, a place where new disciples usually tend ponies and seek relief from their troubles. The contrast between that ordinary setting and the violence she has just committed underscores how carefully she tries to fold the murder back into daily life. She tells herself that Wanda forced her way into her world despite warnings and that, as the Academy’s high priestess, she has stopped her and preserved her position beside Atu. The justification does not erase the cost: Pirjo’s forearms are red, her heart is still pounding, and she admits to herself that the act has disturbed her inner peace.

Her concern then shifts to discovery. She worries that Atu might find out if she has handled matters badly, and reviews the scene for mistakes. She believes Wanda’s naked body will not be found soon, if ever, because it is in a remote place. In Alvaret, Pirjo has dug into soft ground beneath the deepest puddles so that heavy rain will not expose the grave, and she has erased tracks that could lead a botanist or tourist away from the path. The burial and the removal of traces extend the rivalry beyond the attack itself: Pirjo attempts to make Wanda not only absent from the Academy, but absent from the landscape and from any account that might threaten her standing.

The relationship therefore turns on rival understandings of belonging. Wanda hopes that service, physical training, and the memory of her encounter with Atu will earn her a place; Pirjo treats closeness to him as a position that must be defended. The island’s divided land and Pirjo’s talk of people failing to cooperate form an ironic backdrop to a conflict in which she refuses any shared future with Wanda. Her violence is deliberate, but her control is imperfect: the first fall entangles them both, and the later murder leaves evidence she must labor to conceal. Pirjo’s own self-justification reveals what the rivalry has become—an attempt to preserve intimacy and status by destroying the person she sees as a rival.