Isabel (Isa)
Isabel is a solitary, obsessive woman who clings to her late mother’s house and its routines in 1960s Netherlands, treating preservation as both duty and shield. Her fixation on order masks deep loneliness and a fear of change, making her emotionally frozen and mistrustful of others. When Eva enters her life, Isabel’s carefully built control begins to erode, revealing repressed desire and the fragility beneath her composure. Her arc reflects the danger of living through maintenance rather than experience—of guarding history so tightly that one becomes its prisoner.
Eva
Eva, Louis’s girlfriend, is spontaneous, curious, and emotionally open—an unsettling presence in Isabel’s meticulously ordered home. Her liveliness and casual disregard for boundaries expose the rigidity and repression that define Isabel’s world. Beneath her charm, though, Eva carries her own scars, shaped by postwar displacement and loss. She functions as both a catalyst and a mirror: awakening Isabel’s buried desires while embodying the vulnerability and instability Isabel fears. Through Eva, the novel explores how freedom can be both liberating and deeply unsettling.
Louis
Louis, Isabel’s brother and the legal heir to the family house, represents entitlement and emotional detachment. Though outwardly easygoing, he moves through life without introspection or responsibility, leaving the burden of preservation and domestic care to Isabel. His decision to leave Eva at the house while he’s away sets the central tension in motion, indirectly forcing Isabel to confront her own desires and fears. Louis’s character underscores how patriarchal privilege can coexist with emotional negligence, shaping others’ confinement without conscious cruelty.
Hendrik
Hendrik, the younger brother, lives more freely with his partner Sebastian, yet remains constrained by social expectations of the era. His quiet defiance contrasts with Isabel’s repression and Louis’s indifference, showing a subtler negotiation between authenticity and conformity. Hendrik’s presence widens the novel’s scope, linking its domestic tensions to broader questions of identity and belonging in a society still haunted by war and moral rigidity. He is a reminder that personal freedom, though possible, often comes at the cost of isolation.
Sebastian
Hendrik’s partner, mostly offstage but thematically important. Their relationship represents a freer, though still socially constrained, form of love, providing a contrast to Isabel’s repression and the moral suffocation of the family home.
Isabel’s Mother (deceased)
Though dead before the story begins, her shadow dominates Isabel’s psyche. Her values — cleanliness, restraint, respectability — live on through Isabel’s obsessive routines. She represents the inherited voice of repression and guilt.
Neelke (the maid)
A quiet but charged presence in the household. Isabel views her with suspicion, convinced she moves or steals small objects — a projection of Isabel’s own growing paranoia. Neelke’s role exposes the class tension and control dynamics inside the house; she’s the unacknowledged witness to Isabel’s unraveling.
