In 1920 the police think Knud is still visiting his parents. In Vasby Kro, one imagines, the police were sometimes lied to. In 1921 they have given up and stamped his card “withdrawn.” As well they might, since he had been in New York since 1911.
Olav kept much to himself, and who can say whom he might have visited, living or dead, on his frequent, lone peripatetic jaunts around the city. Maybe he knew perfectly well where Josefine was buried, and what had happened to her husband.
These novels—and Luggas Wood, which has nothing at all to do with Brooklyn—seem to me ultimately about the possibility of action in the narrow space between the brute facts of human violence and cruelty, and an increasingly impotent and fragmentary religious culture.