Manitoba is a Canadian province that functions in the novel as more than a point on the map. In Gorefield, Delphine and Cyprian’s touring life brings intimacy and revelation into the same landscape; elsewhere, Manitoba is tied to Cyprian’s Métis ancestry, the earthworks that draw Markus into grief and danger, and the camp where Erich learns that Germany has lost the war. Across these episodes, place gathers private feeling and public history without making them the same story.

Gorefield and Delphine’s discovery

Delphine and Cyprian travel as far as Gorefield, Manitoba, before Delphine understands what Cyprian meant by having been nowhere. At a hotel, she has chosen the bridal suite out of curiosity about whether the two of them can fall in love. Their first attempt at intimacy feels awkward and unresponsive; later, looking into each other’s eyes, they experience an unexpected bond. The closeness is intense but not something they discuss afterward, and they cannot reproduce it.

Two days later, after Cyprian leaves following their performance without telling Delphine where he is going, she walks alone to the river. She hides in the brush when two men approach the bench where she is sitting. From concealment, she realizes that one of them is Cyprian and understands that he is intimate with a man. The discovery gives meaning to the earlier, painful reference to nowhere: Delphine has encountered a part of his life she had not known existed. She eventually steps out of hiding and greets them, turning an accidental observation into a direct encounter.

Métis history and belonging

When Delphine comments on Cyprian’s light skin, he explains that his father was half French and his mother partly French, and asks whether she has heard of the Michifs or Métis. He identifies himself as descended from Louis Riel, whom he describes as a martyr to a vision of a Métis nation with defined territory and government in Manitoba. Cyprian says that people still dream of that political vision, making his ancestry a living connection to a history of collective belonging rather than a mere family distinction.

His account also contrasts his appearance with that of his relatives: he says that his lighter side came through in him, while his cousins and two brothers are brown. He jokes that Riel was an excellent balancer but was hanged anyway, linking his own performance identity to the history he has just invoked. Manitoba is thus both the setting of Cyprian’s personal history and the imagined ground of a larger political homeland.

Earthworks, grief, and danger

A mile or two behind the butcher shop, beyond pine and oak woods, Markus discovers an abandoned construction site where a planned grand house has left an excavated basement and a large pile of earth. The owner ran out of money before construction began. Markus explores the hole, struggles to climb out, searches a derelict shed, and carries away a broken ax head. On the mound, he lies beneath the sky and senses the earth shifting. During the first year after his mother’s death, he often begins crying without realizing it; alone at the site, he can let the tears run without worrying that classmates will see.

A year after his mother’s death, Markus’s fascination with excavation becomes a project: he and the other boys work to make a room beneath the mound. While Markus stays inside to reinforce the passage, the boys outside leave to retrieve another board. They feel something that makes them turn toward the hill; its top sags, and they realize only after several minutes that Markus is still inside. The abandoned building project has become a place of play and refuge, then a site of sudden danger, where the earth that had seemed to comfort Markus threatens to bury him.

Hidden spaces and remembered deaths

In another Manitoba episode, Delphine and Cyprian work to open a hatch in the floor. They chip through a seal made of broken peach jars, dog waste, and red beads set into peach juice, then use a crowbar and can opener to pry at the hatch. When the concealed odor finally reaches them, they flee through the back door and collapse in the yard. The hidden space turns an ordinary house into a threshold to something they cannot calmly approach; the scene makes the opening itself, and the force of what lies below, central to the experience of place.

Years later, Roy’s account connects a cellar tragedy to the Chavers family. He says that he cannot remember exactly what happened, but that he may have shut the hatch while Ruthie and her mother were below. He recalls calling down to Mr. Chavers to come up after he stopped singing over him in practice. The confession makes the cellar’s concealed boundary consequential: Roy’s recollection suggests that a personal rivalry and an act whose details remain uncertain may have helped trap the family. Manitoba’s domestic spaces hold memories that surface belatedly, through the people who survived them.

The prisoner camp and the end of the war

In Manitoba’s woods, Erich arrives at a prisoner-of-war camp enclosed by pine logs and wire. The camp is guarded, but its setting among trees and under a blue sky seems less forbidding than its barriers suggest. Prisoners receive work clothes marked PW, coats, shoes, socks, underclothes, blankets, and basic toiletries; they are assigned forestry work. Erich feels uneasy about the satisfaction he takes in the fresh air, physical labor, and provisions.

The meal is especially revealing. Baked beans seasoned with molasses, mustard, and smoked pork recall food from Erich’s childhood. The prisoners also receive creamed corn, a baked potato, cornbread with syrup, and other filling portions. They eat in silence, some quickly pocketing food, while Erich eats slowly, both reverently and with shame. The quality and abundance of the meal make the implication clear to the prisoners: Germany has lost the war. Manitoba’s camp is therefore not only a place of confinement, but the setting where food, work, and unfamiliar security deliver the news of defeat.