Mourning and daily rituals

Mourning and daily rituals in the novel are practices that give grief a shape, but can also keep it in motion long after the loss itself. Ewert Grens’s weekly visits to the nursing home, his music-filled office, and the eventual packing of its objects show how routine can preserve a bond with Anni while postponing the recognition that she is gone. Beside this grief-centered pattern, Piet Hoffmann’s repeated prison habits offer a stark contrast: under confinement, a carefully repeated action is less a memorial than a means of staying alive. The two strands make routine both shelter and constraint, with change arriving not as a cure but as a small alteration in what a person can bear to do next.

Grens’s visits and the shape of grief

For twenty-nine years, Ewert Grens has driven to the nursing home once a week. He continues even though Anni’s former room now belongs to someone else. He goes to the window where she used to sit and where he once sat beside her, trying to understand what she was watching. The visit holds on to a place and a pattern after their shared life has ended: the room has changed occupants, but his appointment with it has not changed. His persistence is not presented as a simple act of remembrance. It is the structure through which he keeps encountering the absence.

The routine has become precise enough for Susann to notice its return. She tells him that she has seen him outside twelve Tuesdays in a row, at the same time as before. Grens asks whether there is a law against coming, treating the habit as a matter of permission rather than its emotional cost. Susann distinguishes living with grief from organizing one’s life around it; she tells him that he is holding on and hiding behind the loss, and that what he fears has already happened. Her intervention names the paradox of his visits: the repetition keeps Anni close in memory, yet also makes the continued return a way to avoid moving beyond the moment of loss.

Susann’s demand that he stop coming is severe. As she is about to close the terrace door, she tells him she never wants to see him there again. The exchange does not resolve his grief or make the routine disappear at once. Instead, it breaks the quiet arrangement in which Grens could revisit the same place without having to explain himself. Her words follow him from the nursing home to police headquarters, where the familiar office and its objects become the next setting in which he must confront what has changed.

Music, objects, and the difficult act of putting things away

Grens has used recorded music as part of his daily life for years. In his office are cassettes of Siw Malmkvist songs that he recorded and mixed himself, old record sleeves, and a photograph of Siw taken at Kristianstads Folkets Park. The objects belong to a time he associates with things being good. His attachment to them is not only private: Sven Sundkvist has spent years hearing the songs and seeing Grens dance alone to Siw’s voice, so the music has become part of their shared working life too.

After the visit to the nursing home, Grens takes three cardboard boxes from police headquarters’ stores and begins wrapping the records and related belongings in newspaper. He says that Anni no longer exists and insists that she will never sing in the room again. The packing gives material form to a recognition his habits have resisted. Yet it is not a clean break: he has not attended the funeral, although he paid for it, and kicking the boxes later betrays his wish that he had been there and his uncertainty that she is truly gone. The boxes carry both an effort to move forward and the anger and regret that make that effort difficult.

Sven sees more in the act than Grens can articulate. He recognizes that Grens has gone through adult life leaning on two supports, Anni and Siw Malmkvist, and is now attempting to walk alone. Grens stacks the boxes, tapes them carefully, and pushes them into the position he wants. Sven does not ask how he feels: the deliberate labor itself answers him. The scene makes change observable through a practical task rather than through a declaration of recovery. Grens is moving on, though he has not yet understood his own action that way.

The office does not immediately become peaceful when its music is removed. Grens finds the empty bookshelf marked by dust lines and pale squares where the cassette player and loudspeakers stood. He runs his fingers over those traces and finds the new silence oppressive. At night, he had opened the office window to listen to distant clocks, while the recordings had helped him fall asleep; without the familiar sound, even traffic outside becomes intrusive. When he returns to the boxes, he kicks them again. His response shows that removing the objects has changed his surroundings without instantly loosening their emotional hold.

Recurrence altered, not erased

A Tuesday morning offers a modest turn. Grens wakes on the floor with his back against the stacked boxes, having slept there instead of on the office sofa. He takes a blue marker and writes PI Malmkvist on each side. The label reframes what he has stored: rather than treating the music as something that must remain hidden or untouched, he gives it a place and a name. He laughs, feels more rested than he has in a long time, and takes a couple of dance steps without singing or music. The familiar movement returns in altered form. The ritual is no longer sustained by the recording, but neither is it simply abandoned.

That change remains compatible with grief. When Grens later hears Einarsson singing one of Siw Malmkvist’s songs among the seized property, he tells him not now, because he is disturbing his grief. The remark acknowledges grief as something he still has, while making the timing of its expression his own. He leaves feeling lighter and takes the stairs rather than the elevator. The song has not become meaningless or forbidden; its unexpected return can still affect him, but it no longer dictates the whole scene. The routine has shifted from a fixed return to the past toward a less controlled, more intermittent encounter with it.

Prison routine as a counterpoint

Piet Hoffmann’s prison routines are not grief rituals, but their repetition illuminates another function of daily habit: establishing a workable order inside a system designed to control space and time. On entering Aspsås Prison, he encounters the physical procedures of admission, receives prison clothes, and waits in silence. Ten days later he has spent twenty-three hours a day on a bunk behind a metal door, in a five-square-metre cell without visitors, newspapers, television, or radio. The restriction makes time itself part of confinement. Hoffmann recognizes that loneliness intensifies longing, a detail that places his separation from ordinary life beside Grens’s experience without making their circumstances equivalent.

When Hoffmann is moved into a unit, he learns its practical schedule and rules: where to use the toilet and why lock-in is at seven thirty rather than five minutes later. He then chooses the TV corner shortly before the other prisoners return. By sitting in a visible place, taking a familiar chair, and beginning solitaire with marked cards at another prisoner’s table, he deliberately makes his arrival conspicuous. The gestures are calculated performances within the unit’s social order, not private comfort. Stefan Lygas and Karol Tomasz Penderecki have already prepared other prisoners to expect him and have obtained copies of his fabricated records and judgment. Hoffmann’s ability to establish himself therefore depends on a combination of staged confidence and information others have arranged around him.

His habits also include immediate precautions. At night he checks the pillow beneath the covers, the chair in the doorway, and a sock placed between the door and its frame. He repeats the arrangement from one day to the next because it gives him only a brief warning if someone attacks when guards cannot see or hear. The routine is narrow and practical: it does not make him safe so much as give him a small measure of readiness. When exposure becomes a danger, he demands transfer to voluntary isolation. The prison response is organized through another repeated procedure, with guards assigned to secure the unit and escorts leading him to Block C. There, the arrangement of cells and shared spaces limits contact to the other people housed in the unit.

These prison repetitions throw Grens’s habits into relief. Grens returns to a place associated with a lost relationship; Hoffmann repeats precautions because each day may bring immediate danger. Grens’s music and visits hold memory in place, whereas Hoffmann’s routines help him manage a present shaped by confinement, suspicion, and the criminal identity he performs. Yet both narratives show how repetition can become a narrow form of control when the larger circumstances cannot be changed. For Grens, the boxes and the unaccompanied dance mark a tentative alteration in that pattern. For Hoffmann, even an established routine remains vulnerable: he learns that one of the people he regarded as protection and a possible means of escape has betrayed him. Habit can organize an uncertain day, but it cannot guarantee that the person or past it is built around will remain available.