Kaliningrad enters the novel not as a present-day destination but as a place held in family memory. Piet Hoffmann traces his parents’ origins there, and the city becomes a point where inherited history, childhood imagination, and the practical details of his adult life meet.

Family Origins

When a visitor asks whether Hoffmann’s surname is German, Hoffmann answers by locating his family in Kaliningrad and explaining that his parents came from there long ago. Asked what language he speaks, he says he was born in Sweden and speaks Swedish, as well as a fair amount of Polish. The exchange presents Kaliningrad as part of his ancestry rather than his own birthplace: his identity is shaped by several geographies, but the family connection to the city is explicitly his parents’.

A Childhood Memory in an Object

Kaliningrad returns in Hoffmann’s recollection of his grandmother. The small screwdriver he remembers from her home, kept in a drawer beneath her sewing machine, later becomes the tool he uses to take apart a SwissMiniGun. The memory is precise and domestic: the bedroom furniture seemed enormous to him at seven, while the screwdriver was small enough for delicate work. The object links his grandmother’s household to the controlled, practical actions of his adult life without turning the city into a mere biographical label.

The Story of His Father

At a neglected grave, Hoffmann imagines his father’s life as a fisherman whose boat left the border area between Kaliningrad and Poland and disappeared into the Baltic for weeks. In the scene he pictures, his mother waits for the boat and runs to meet his father when it returns. He recognizes that this reunion is his own invention. His mother had spoken instead of empty nights and long waiting; she had not described running feet or open arms. As a child, he supplied the more comforting ending, and as an adult he chooses to keep that image.

Narrative Significance

These references make Kaliningrad a location reconstructed through fragments rather than directly visited: a family origin, a grandmother’s remembered room, and a child’s imagined version of his parents’ past. The contrast between his mother’s account of absence and the reunion he invents gives the place an emotional dimension while preserving the uncertainty in the family history. Kaliningrad thus anchors Hoffmann’s sense of inheritance, but the story attached to it is partly something he has made for himself.