Manglerud, Bellman's Childhood District

Manglerud, Bellman's Childhood District is presented through Mikael Bellman’s memories as a suburb being built around him and as the setting for an early act of defiance that he later identifies as his first step toward police school. Its construction sites supplied both the noise of his childhood and the dynamite with which he rejected the drug culture surrounding some of his peers.

A Suburb Under Construction

Bellman says he grew up in Manglerud in the 1970s, when it was a satellite town in the midst of rapid growth. Land around the district was being cleared for development, and the sound of blasting became the soundtrack of his childhood. After work stopped for the day, he wandered through the blasting areas, collecting scraps of cable, red plastic caps, and paper from dynamite sticks. The district’s physical transformation was not distant background to him: its leftover materials became objects he handled and kept.

Drugs and the Lives Around Him

In recalling Manglerud, Bellman describes a narrow set of options for local young people: sport, gospel choir, or drugs. He says he was interested in none of them, and particularly rejected the prospect of moving from hashish through glue to heroin and dying as four of his classmates had. His account locates that threat in ordinary neighborhood space: he remembers sitting by the window of the post office in the shopping center as the kind of place where a young person might wait for life to carry him toward drugs.

The Dynamite and the Earth Bong

At fifteen, Bellman found an unused stick of dynamite on a construction site in Manglerud. He describes taking it behind the district’s church, where a group that smoked hashish had made an earth bong: a bottle with its bottom removed was set upside down in a hole, while buried hoses carried smoke to people lying in the grass. Bellman says he pulled out one of the plastic hoses and buried the dynamite in its place. The explosion sent dirt raining down for half a minute and destroyed the makeshift device.

Memory Recalled During the Investigation

Bellman tells this story to Harry Hole while the two search the snowy terrain where an avalanche had released, looking for traces connected to the investigation. Bellman’s account begins with a piece of detonator found after Harry and the others had been evacuated; the search itself yields no snowmobile tracks. The shift from the present search to his teenage memory makes Manglerud more than a biographical detail: the dynamite connects the evidence under examination to the material world in which Bellman first chose a direction away from drugs and toward police school.