Grens visits the grave in North Cemetery

Ewert Grens’s visit to Anni Grens’s grave in North Cemetery is a delayed act of mourning that brings grief into direct contact with a decision about further death. He arrives after months of keeping a cemetery map at arm’s length, follows its markings to a small, temporary grave, and waters the bush there. The visit does not undo his loss; instead, it makes him acknowledge that the death he fears has already occurred, while leaving the threatened decision that follows it unresolved.

The Long-Delayed Visit

The episode begins with Ewert Grens walking through a mild night as though he were following someone else. He moves along Vanadisvagen, Gavlegatan, and Solnabron without thinking or feeling, until he stops on Solna Kyrkvag at Gate 1, one of the entrances to North Cemetery. The route matters less as a purposeful journey than as a passage out of numbness: he has reached a place he has not managed to enter before.

In his jacket he carries a map whose edges he recognizes. For months it had lain at arm’s length on his desk. Only the day before, without knowing why, he had taken it home. The map makes the visit possible, but it also represents the distance he has kept between himself and the grave. His arrival is therefore not the completion of an ordinary errand. It is the breaking of a delay that had lasted long enough for even a short walk through the cemetery to become difficult.

Finding the Grave

Inside, Ewert Grens crosses Section I5B, where the restrained gravestones prompt a bitter thought about the people buried there and the fuss made after death. He moves onward through the numbered sections, first toward 16A and then 19E, increasing his pace until he is breathless. A green watering can stands near a tap. He fills it and carries it with him as the paved path gives way to gravel, a practical task accompanying the effort to reach the grave.

At Section 19B, he tries to stop and stand still. The fading light limits what he can see, and he leans forward to read the signs as he proceeds. The sequence of grave numbers narrows the search: 601, 602, then 603. The numbering gives the approach a deliberate, step-by-step form, but it does not make the final recognition easy. He shakes, struggles to breathe, and nearly turns back. The grave is not presented through a monument or a finished headstone. It is a patch of overturned earth, a temporary flowerbed with something green, and a small white wooden cross.

Acknowledging the Loss

Ewert Grens waters the bush, which has no flowers. This modest act is the visit’s clearest gesture of care: he cannot restore what has been lost, but he can attend to the living thing placed at the grave. The contrast between the absent flowers and the water he brings keeps the scene spare. Its emotional force comes not from ceremony but from his having reached this place after failing to do so for a year and a half.

At the grave, his thoughts distinguish the woman buried there from the woman in a wheelchair at a nursing home who does not recognize him. He recalls the dead woman as the girl who held his hand during walks through Stockholm at dawn, struggled beside him on skis among the snow-covered chestnut trees in Vasaparken, and later moved with a young man into a flat on Sveavägen. These memories give the grave a history of shared life rather than leaving it as an anonymous burial place. They also clarify the difference between the woman he remembers and the living figure whose failure to recognize him belongs to another kind of loss.

Death and the Decision Ahead

The scene’s opening establishes that this visit is bound to a decision about more death. At the grave, Ewert Grens’s thoughts turn to whether he killed the person whose fate has been weighing on him, and then to the woman he has come to visit. He does not cry; that grief has already been lived through. Instead, his response includes a smile and an insistence, directed inwardly toward both the other person and the dead woman, that he did not kill them. The passage does not resolve the decision announced at its outset. It shows the personal reckoning that precedes it.

The recognition that what he fears has already happened changes the meaning of the walk. Ewert Grens has feared death and its consequences, but at North Cemetery he stands before a death that is no longer hypothetical: Anni Grens is buried beneath the small cross. The visit does not offer release from grief or certainty about what he must do next. Its significance lies in making him face the grave he had been unable to reach, and in bringing his private bereavement into the same frame as the possibility of causing another death.