The Survivors

by Alex Schulman

  “You can’t eat nothing but pierogi,” said Nils.

  “Sure I can,” said Mom.

  They came home with three bags full of pierogi, and as they loaded it all into the freezer Mom stood alongside, saying “Delicious” and “Fantastic” with every new box they stuffed in. And he remembers the messages she sent each evening, when she reported her intake—“A two-pierogi day!”—in little attacks of wanting to reassure them. But just as often, she wanted to get them worked up. She used her health as a way to control them. “I weigh eighty-eight pounds!”

  Like a baby pig.

  “There’s quite a bit of food here,” Benjamin calls into the apartment, and Nils and Pierre get up and come to the kitchen.

  “Wow,” Nils says. “Should we split it in thirds?”

  “What do you mean?” Pierre says.

  “Should we divide up the pierogi?” Nils asks.

  “You mean you want to take Mom’s food home and eat it?” Pierre says. “Are you serious?”

  Nils takes a box and shows it to Pierre.

  “There’s forty pounds of food in the freezer,” he says. “All of it new and fresh. Do you want us to just toss it because it reminds us of Mom, or something?”

  “No, fine, but you can have all of it,” says Pierre.

  “I’m saying I don’t want it all. We can divide it up.”

  “I’m good.”

  Pierre walks off, Nils watching him as he enters the bathroom. Nils and Pierre have made small piles on the living room floor. Some porcelain, a bowl, and a small framed picture. In Pierre’s pile Nils can see Mom’s piggy bank, which is a jam jar she cleaned out and set on the hall table and filled with spare change. The jar is full of coins and the occasional bill. The idea was for the brothers to gather here and take items of sentimental value. Pierre is taking cash.

  “Can I have this?” Pierre says from the bathroom. He holds up a blister pack of Mom’s sleeping pills.

  “Go for it,” says Nils.

  He drops the packet onto his pile. Benjamin looks at the jar of money again. A feeling from his childhood, something unfair between the brothers. He wants to point out to Pierre that it isn’t an artifact he wants to take home, it’s money. It’s their inheritance. But he can’t predict Pierre’s reaction, it’s been a long time since he knew his brother inside and out. He looks at his brothers as they walk around the apartment. All the years they’ve spent a minimal amount of time together, and now this intensive contact, with a constant strain at the base of it. He doesn’t know what his brothers are really like, beyond the practical level. He can’t picture them outside the context of Mom’s death. He remembers one time when he arranged to meet up with them, on the anniversary of Dad’s death. They had stood by his grave for a moment, in silence, and then they sat down at a café for coffee and a pastry. Benjamin asked if his brothers were doing all right, and they gave curt and unengaged replies, quick affirmatives between bites, and Benjamin told them for the first time that he wasn’t doing all right. They expressed sympathy, of course, but it was clear they didn’t want to talk about it. Benjamin said he thought he was sad as an adult because of things that had happened to all of them in their childhood. At that, Pierre laughed and said, “I whistle my way to the shower each morning.” Maybe it was true, maybe Pierre does do that. Maybe he’s the only one of the brothers who hasn’t recovered. Maybe that’s why being around them makes him feel so awful these days? And somehow, they’ve exchanged roles. When they were kids, it was always him and Pierre—Nils off to the side, or three yards behind. He remembers one time when they were little, sitting in the car, all three of them, and Nils found a piece of gum one of the brothers had grown tired of and stuck to the back of the front seat. He took a pen and started digging at it, he pried it off the seat and popped it into his mouth. Benjamin and Pierre looked on in disgust, and then they looked at each other, made discreet faces, as they’d done so many times before, and Nils said calmly, “Don’t you think I can see what you’re doing?” Maybe he was imagining it, but for the past week he’s felt like his brothers have made him a victim of the same thing, that they’ve been exchanging glances that weren’t meant for him.

  “Oh my God!”

  It’s Nils, shouting from the bedroom.

  Pierre and Benjamin go to him. He’s standing at Mom’s little desk, which faces the window. He’s pulled out the top drawer. In his hand is an envelope, and he holds it out to them, Mom’s unmistakable handwriting on it. It says: If I die.

  They sit next to each other on Mom’s bed, three brothers in a row, and read her letter.

  To my sons.

  As I write this letter, Molly is turning twenty. I’ve been to the memorial, I brought a flower. It’s always more apparent around her birthday, or when the anniversary of her death is approaching. I am living a parallel life with her. When she turned seven, I bought a cake and ate it in the park and I could picture her in front of me, making circles around me, happy and wobbly on a bike, the wind in her hair. When she became a teenager, I sometimes imagined that I could see her through the gap of the bathroom door. I was watching her in secret as she put on her makeup, bending toward the mirror, full of concentration. She was going out on the town with friends.

  I continue to be a parent in silence. I have read that it’s normal, so I allow myself this. It’s not sad; maybe it’s the opposite. I can re-create her in such detail that it becomes true. I can be the mother of my daughter again, for a little while.

  They told me grief is a process, with phases. And that life awaits me on the other side. Not the same life, of course, but a different life. It wasn’t true. Grief isn’t a process, it’s a state of being. It never changes, it sits there like a rock.

  And grief makes you mute.

  Pierre and Nils. So many times I have meant to talk to you, that in the end I thought I actually had. I must have. What kind of mother wouldn’t? I’m sorry for everything I never said.

  Benjamin. You had to carry the heaviest burden. I’m saddest for you. I’ve never blamed you, not once. I just haven’t been able to tell you that. If, in my muteness throughout the years, I could only manage to say one thing to you, it would have been: It wasn’t your fault.

  I watch you sometimes when we meet. You’re standing off to the side a little, often in a corner, observing. You’ve always been the observer and you still try to take responsibility for the rest of us. Sometimes I imagine things about you too, about who you would have become if this hadn’t happened. I often think about that afternoon when you came out of the forest with Molly in your arms. I have such clear memories of her, her cold cheek, her curls in the sun. But I can’t see you anywhere before me. I don’t know where you went, I don’t know who took care of you.

  I don’t have a will, because I have nothing to pass on. I don’t care about the details surrounding my death. But I do have one last wish. Take me back to the cottage. Spread my ashes down by the lake.

  But I don’t want you to do it for my sake—I know I have forfeited every right to ask you all for anything. I want you to do it for your sake. Get in the car, take the long way. That’s how I want to picture you, together. All those hours in the car, in the solitude down by the lake, in the sauna in the evenings, when it’s just you and no one else is listening in. I want you to do what we never did: talk to each other.

  I’m not letting you read this until I’m dead, because I’m afraid you’ll think what I did to you can’t be forgiven. I don’t know, but can we just pretend I’m able to be with her now. That I can hold her again. And that you’ll come later, and then I’ll have a fresh chance to love you.

  Mom

  Nils places the letter in his lap. Pierre stands up suddenly, walks to the balcony, searching his pockets for his cigarettes as he goes. His two brothers follow slowly. There they stand, side by side, the ones who remain, gazing out a
t the sleeping city. Pierre is smoking hard, the cigarette a glowing point in the darkness. Benjamin reaches for the cigarette and Pierre hands it to him. He takes a drag, passes it on to Nils. Pierre laughs. Nils’s gentle smile in the dim light. They let the cigarette wander and look at one another there on the balcony, and they don’t need to talk right now, a brief nod, or maybe just the thought of a nod. They already know, already have the journey inside them, as if it has already happened, the journey that must take them to the point of impact, step by step, backward through their story, in order to survive one last time.

  Acknowledgments

  Ever since I first began to write, my dream has been to one day have a book published in the United States. I have many people to thank for the fact that this far-fetched dream is now a reality.

  First and foremost, thank you to Daniel Sandström, my publisher at Albert Bonniers Förlag in Sweden. It is no small thing to meet a person with whom you feel such immediate kinship. There has been something almost mysterious about it. As though we have known each other much longer, as though we have bantered about reading and literature since we were young. I also want to thank my editor Sara Arvidsson, who has been a benign force throughout our work with this book. I have always been finicky when it comes to text; I like the thought that a piece of writing is never really finished, ever, that there is always something more that can be done. But I have met my match in Sara, who is even more fastidious than I am.

  I have also had the great fortune to be surrounded by friends who have offered to read my work in progress. I want to name one friend in particular: Fredrik Backman. I don’t know how many hours of his time I have hijacked during the writing of this novel. One hundred? Two hundred? That his next book is a tad bit delayed may be my fault. I also want to thank Sigge Eklund, Calle Schulman, Klas Lindberg, Josefine Sundström, Magnus Alselind, and Fredrik Wikingsson.

  I also want to thank my agent, Astri von Arbin Ahlander, at Ahlander Agency. All writers in Sweden want to work with Astri, but she hardly wants to work with anyone. Therefore, I am grateful that she believed in me and my writing. Astri also forever changed my view of what an agent does. I thought an agent hawked titles at book fairs and then that was the end of it. Well, Astri has indeed done that—that the book is now sold to so many countries is exclusively her and her team’s doing—but she is also one of the most perceptive readers I know and her thoughts on the novel throughout the writing process have been absolutely invaluable.

  I also want to thank Lee Boudreaux at Doubleday, who has taken the brothers to her heart and who has given them a home in the U.S. She possesses a kind of enthusiasm I have never before met in this otherwise rather reserved publishing industry. Personally, I have always enjoyed writing in all caps and adding a tail of exclamation points—but Lee out-enthuses me!!!

  And, finally, I want to thank my most important person, my wife, Amanda. She is my first reader and my last reader. I don’t deliver a single line into the world without her first having read it. I can’t manage without her, not in my life and not in my writing.

  About the Author

  Alex Schulman is a bestselling author and journalist and the co-host of Sweden’s most popular podcast. The Survivors, which has sold in more than thirty countries, is his fifth novel and marks his international debut. He lives in Sweden with his wife and their three children.

  Doubleday Reading Group Guide

  The Survivors

  A Novel

  By Alex Schulman

  As you were reading about the rage between Pierre and Nils (severe enough for Benjamin to call the police in the opening scene), what were your impressions of the reasons for that rage? Who else and what else did the boys seem to be angry at, besides each other?

  In chapter 2, “The Swim Race,” we learn about Dad’s attempts to instill competitiveness in his sons. What did he teach them about his definition of manhood?

  What personality distinctions did you observe in Benjamin, Pierre, and Nils? As they grow up, are their differences the result of nature or nurture, or a combination of both?

  Interwoven with idyllic images of the natural world are grim scenes, such as the moment in chapter 4 when Pierre fries the perch. How do the brothers each react to suffering? What are the limits of compassion and kindness in their boyhood?

  Discuss the contents of the time capsule and the process by which those items were obtained. Which aspects of the family dynamic are preserved in the time capsule? What artifacts would be the best representations of your childhood?

  The second half of the book, “Part Two: Beyond the Gravel Road,” describes Dad’s final illness, followed by Mom’s. As the gravel road transports the brothers to a place on the map, how does it also transport them to the past—and to their new lives in full adulthood?

  How does Nils’s experience of school compare to that of his brothers? How was he affected by his parents’ high expectations? For all three siblings, how did school reveal various truths about their home life?

  As a child, Benjamin was afraid of the hens known as the Larsson Sisters. As an adult, he confronts a red deer on the roadway but finds the courage to put his hand on the creature’s muzzle. In what way do his interactions with animals reflect his wavering sense of security?

  What is the effect of the novel’s timelines, which oscillate between present day and flashbacks? How does the author create a realistic portrait of a family’s shared (and sometimes conflicting) recollections?

  When Mom dances in chapter 19, “The Birthday Present,” what is she communicating about her true self? Based on their experiences with her, what might her sons believe about women and power?

  How did the revelations in Mom’s closing letter change your perception of her? What does the aftermath indicate about the nature of memory and the consequences of denial?

  Gathering to pay tribute to their mother, the brothers are of course her survivors. Who are the other survivors in the novel? What does this family’s story show us about the process of grief and the ability to endure?

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