The troika

The troika was the youthful circle formed by Ab Lofthus, Simon Kefas, and Pontius Parr, three friends who shared a flat in Oslo while attending the Police College. The name begins as a badge of intimate friendship, but its later recollection is inseparable from rivalry, separation, and the corruption that Simon and Parr conceal behind the appearance of a lone police mole.

Formation and shared life

Simon recalls that the three young men lived together because sharing a flat was cheaper. Else had found the room through a newspaper advertisement and became their housemate; Simon says all three fell in love with her and secretly competed for her affection. Their friendship was therefore already entangled with a romantic rivalry, even before its eventual breakup.

The recollection presents the troika as a close, socially and economically modest group at the beginning of adult life. Its members were training for police work together, while their shared home brought Else into the center of their friendship. The group’s name evokes unity, but the account also shows that the three did not experience their attachments in the same way.

Else and the breakup

Else chose Simon, who later describes her as the love of his life. She eventually left him and began a relationship with Ab; after she became pregnant, she and Ab moved out, bought the house in Berg, and began their family. Simon says that the separation and Ab’s happiness were difficult for him to bear, and that Ab and Parr grew closer as the old trio dissolved.

Ab’s diary gives the breakup a more domestic perspective. It records that he and Else had bought a house and that it was hard to manage on a policeman’s salary, particularly because neither set of parents was able to help. Later, when rising interest rates made the mortgage unaffordable, Ab wrote that he had to find a solution before the house was repossessed. The troika’s personal rupture thus sits alongside the financial pressure that would shape Ab’s choices and the family life he tried to protect.

Simon’s estrangement and the name’s afterlife

Simon’s memories connect the lost friendship to the beginnings of his gambling. He was already in debt when he began betting on horses in earnest. When Ab asked him to be Sonny’s godfather, Simon made an excuse, but secretly attended the christening. He remembers that Sonny was the only baby who did not cry, and that he placed 13,000 kroner on a horse named Sonny afterward. The episode links the breakup’s lingering emotional force to Simon’s private rituals and his developing gambling habit.

In Ab’s diary, the troika’s name reappears as a clue to the hidden structure of police corruption. Simon and Parr are not one traitor within the force but two officers acting together, each able to provide an alibi when the other is active. Ab’s account describes their complicity in turning a blind eye to drug dealing, human trafficking, and murder, and records his uncertainty about whether confession and forgiveness could be possible without ruining the people around him. The friendship’s name is therefore recast: once a sign of three friends’ closeness, it becomes part of the history against which Ab measures betrayal and his desire to get out.

Narrative significance

The troika links private and institutional histories. The three friends’ shared student life, their competition for Else, and their later division establish the personal context for Simon’s estrangement from Ab and Parr. In the diary’s revelations, the same circle points toward a concealed two-person alliance inside the police, complicating the assumption that corruption must have a single culprit.

The changing meaning of the name also sharpens the contrast between friendship and loyalty. Ab’s diary remembers a son who wants to follow his father into the police, even as it records the father’s awareness that he and Simon have betrayed what they once believed in. The troika is thus both a lost bond and a measure of how far its members have moved from the ideals that brought them together.