Wooden Figure of Atu

The Wooden Figure of Atu is a carved likeness whose appearance in Pirjo’s final confrontation with Atu Abanshamash Dumuzi overturns her account of the past. She treats it as Alberte Goldschmid’s attempt to bewitch and control him; Atu recognizes it instead as a rejected gift from Bjarke Habersaat. The figure is at once a physical clue and a trigger for recollection: its presence makes visible the distance between Pirjo’s certainty and what Atu remembers.

Appearance and First Interpretation

The figure is described as a wooden carving made many years earlier, with an uncanny resemblance to Atu. Pirjo sees it after it has fallen from a Danish policeman’s pocket. Its arrival in the room is not explained to her, and she wonders why one of the policemen had it and whether they meant to put it before Atu as a surprise, hoping its likeness would unsettle him. In her imagining, the object is an instrument of interrogation: the officers could ask whether he denied being its model or knowing whoever had seen him closely enough to carve it.

Pirjo’s interpretation is emphatic but mistaken. She is certain Alberte carved the figure, and recasts it as Alberte’s special kind of voodoo doll, meant to bewitch Atu and hold him in a web of demands from which he could not escape. She believes that Alberte’s influence has been broken and that getting rid of her prevented something worse. The carving therefore carries, for Pirjo, not simply a likeness but an entire explanation of the past: it becomes evidence of Alberte’s supposed hold over Atu, and a reason to hate those who have brought the memory back.

Recognition and Recollection

When Atu approaches, he notices the figure beside Pirjo’s hand. His smile vanishes; he stares between the carving and Pirjo, then picks it up and examines it close. The sight appears to cause him physical pain. He says, “I recognize this figure,” and asks where it came from. Pirjo answers that he must know, since the figure is there, but his reaction makes plain that he does not understand why it has resurfaced.

At first, Atu remembers a young man on Bornholm who carved the figure and wanted to give it to him because he was in love with him. He says he refused it: the young man’s advances irritated him, and he could not stand him. Pirjo says she does not know who he means and that he has never told her about him. Atu, in turn, insists the figure did not come from him because he refused to accept it, and asks Pirjo not to deny that the young man had been there. The exchange leaves the object’s route to the present moment unresolved, even as it establishes the history attached to it.

Bjarke’s Gift and the Buried Past

As Pirjo’s blood loss drains her strength, the room seems to grow light and warm; she notices sunlight breaking through the window. Atu takes hold of the figure again and whispers, “It was him.” Recognition has given way to a more specific memory: the young man was Bjarke Habersaat, whom Atu describes as a big Boy Scout, devoted to everything he did. Atu had allowed him to help with excavations at Knarhøj, after which Bjarke offered the carving and declared his love. Atu says he did not want the gift and told Bjarke they were leaving. Bjarke blamed Alberte for their departure.

The recollection also reconnects the figure to the end of Atu’s relationship with Alberte. Atu remembers breaking up with her and never seeing her again, while acknowledging that the sequence had not made sense to him before. Pirjo is shocked and does not know what to believe. Her former certainty about Alberte’s role is confronted by Atu’s memory of Bjarke: the carving she had understood as Alberte’s device was instead made by a rejected admirer and carried a different history.

Significance

The figure changes from an unexplained object in a policeman’s pocket into a prompt that restores a missing episode. Its resemblance to Atu first seems, to Pirjo, to confirm her theory of Alberte’s influence; once Atu recognizes the carving, that same resemblance points toward Bjarke’s intimacy with him and his unreturned love. The object does not explain how it reached the room, but it provokes Atu to remember who carved it, why he refused it, and what Bjarke said about Alberte.

Its force lies in that contrast between physical presence and disputed meaning. Pirjo reads the carving through her hostility toward Alberte, while Atu’s recognition opens a past neither of them has fully understood. At the moment Pirjo is losing the strength to speak clearly, the figure gives Atu a route into memory. It does not settle every question around its appearance, but it overturns Pirjo’s account and brings Bjarke’s role in the earlier history into view.