Susann

Susann is the junior doctor who once cared for Anni Grens and who confronts Ewert Grens about his repeated visits to the nursing home. Her significance lies in refusing to treat those visits as harmless routine: she sees Ewert holding himself inside grief and challenges him to recognize that his loss has already occurred. He resists her judgment, but the encounter follows him away from the nursing home and becomes part of his effort to reckon with the life and memories he has kept close.

Identity and connection to Anni

When Ewert encounters Susann again, she is no longer the medical student he remembers. Her white-coat name badge identifies her as a junior doctor, marking a change in her professional status since the time she accompanied him and Anni on a boat trip around the archipelago. The passage gives her history with the couple through both that outing and her care for Anni, whom she had looked after well. Her knowledge of their circumstances therefore comes from more than a passing observation of Ewert’s grief, though the text does not suggest that she claims to understand his private experience completely.

The meeting takes place at the nursing home, where Susann’s voice comes through a glass door that is usually left open in fine weather. Wheelchairs are arranged around a table on the terrace. Ewert has not seen her for a long time, not since Anni was alive. Those details place the encounter in a setting shaped by care and absence: Susann belongs to the place where Anni was looked after, while Ewert returns to it after her death. Her professional role and her earlier proximity to the couple make her challenge personal in its circumstances, even as she speaks from the position of a doctor.

Confronting Ewert’s grief

Susann asks Ewert why he keeps coming back. He looks toward the empty window before asking what she means. When she presses him, she argues that he is not merely experiencing grief but has made it something he holds on to, using it as a refuge. She urges him to let go and move forward without relying on the routine. Rather than offer consolation, she questions the pattern of his visits and the way he has organized his days around loss.

Ewert answers with a simple admission that he misses Anni intensely. The exchange puts the difference between their positions in view: Susann believes he must stop living by the habits that keep him attached to grief, while Ewert gives voice to the absence those habits may help him endure. The passage does not establish that her advice is a cure, or that his attachment is easily changed. Its force comes from the collision between her insistence that he move forward and his acknowledgment that he still longs for his wife.

The rupture and its aftermath

As Susann returns up the steps, she takes hold of the terrace door as if to close it, then stops halfway and calls out that she never wants to see Ewert there again. Her departure turns a difficult conversation into an explicit rupture. The gesture is connected to the very place around which their disagreement has formed: the nursing home and Ewert’s repeated return to it. The text gives no further explanation from Susann for the ultimatum, so its precise motive remains unstated.

Ewert does not leave the exchange behind. Later, while he is with Sven Sundkvist, he hears Sven enter the room but does not turn; instead he sighs in irritation. He recognizes that something has been bothering him since the nursing-home visit and recalls Susann’s criticism. In his private response, he dismisses her as a young woman dispensing wisdom and questions what she could know about loneliness. That reaction reveals his resistance, but it also confirms that her words have reached him: he continues to argue against them after the encounter is over.

Narrative role

Susann acts as a direct challenger to Ewert’s established way of enduring loss. Her earlier warning against hoping too much, mentioned alongside the boat trip, links her presence to the couple’s experience before Anni’s death; her later confrontation makes her a witness to what that loss has become for Ewert. The account does not make her grief an equivalent to his, nor does it establish that she can resolve it. Instead, it shows her naming a pattern that Ewert himself has not accepted and then leaving him to contend with it.

The scene also gives her advice an unsettled afterlife. Ewert’s immediate words express longing, while his later recollection is defensive and irritated; neither response erases the other. Susann’s brief appearance therefore matters less as a solution than as an interruption. She breaks into the routine Ewert has built around his absence, and although he questions her authority to speak about loneliness, the encounter remains on his mind after he has returned to the police headquarters.