The wurse closes its eyes. It almost looks as if it’s smiling. Elsa doesn’t know if it can hear her. Doesn’t know if it can feel her heavy tears dropping into its pelt. “You can’t die. You can’t die, because I’m here now. And you’re my friend. No real friend would just go and die like that, do you understand? Friends don’t die on each other,” Elsa whispers, trying to convince herself more than the wurse.
It looks as if it knows. Tries to dry her cheeks with the warm air from its nose. Elsa lies next to it, curled up on the treatment table, as she lay in the hospital bed that night when Granny didn’t come back with her from Miamas.
She lies there forever. With her Gryffindor scarf buried in the wurse’s pelt.
The policewoman’s voice can be heard between the wurse’s breaths as they grow slower and the thumping on the other side of the thick black fur gets more and more drawn out. Her green eyes watch the girl and the animal from the doorway.
“We have to take your friend to the police station, Elsa.” Elsa knows she’s talking about Wolfheart.
“You can’t put him in prison! He did it in self-defense!” Elsa roars.
“No, Elsa, he didn’t. He wasn’t defending himself.”
And then she backs away from the door. Checks her watch as if pretending to be disoriented, as if she has just realized there is something extremely important that she has to get on with in an entirely different place, and how crazy it would be if someone she was under very clear orders to bring to the police station would not be watched for a moment so that he could talk to a child who was about to lose a wurse. It would be crazy, really.
And then she’s gone. And Wolfheart is standing in the doorway. Elsa flings herself off the table and throws her arms around him and couldn’t give a crap about whether or not he has to bathe in alcogel when he gets home.
“The wurse mustn’t die! Tell him he mustn’t die!” whispers Elsa.
Wolfheart breathes slowly. Stands with his hands held out awkwardly, as if someone has spilled something acidic on his sweater. Elsa realizes she still has his coat at home in the flat.
“You can have your coat back, Mum has washed it really carefully and hung it up in the wardrobe inside a plastic cover,” she whispers apologetically and keeps hugging him.
He looks as if he’d really appreciate it if she didn’t. Elsa doesn’t care.
“But you’re not allowed to fight again!” she orders, her face thrust into his sweater, before she lifts her head and wipes her eyes with her wrist. “I’m not saying you can never fight, because I haven’t quite decided where I stand on that question. I mean morally, sort of thing. But you can’t fight when you’re as good at fighting as you are!” she sobs.
And then Wolfheart does something very curious. He hugs her back.
“The wurse. Very old. Very old wurse, Elsa,” he growls in the secret language.
“I can’t take everyone dying all the time,” Elsa weeps.
Wolfheart holds her by both her hands. Gently squeezes her forefingers. He’s trembling as if he’s holding white-hot iron, but he doesn’t let go, as one doesn’t when one realizes there are more important things in life than being afraid of children’s bacteria.
“Very old wurse. Very tired now, Elsa.”
And when Elsa just shakes her head hysterically and yells at him that no one else can die on her now, he lets go of one of her hands and reaches into his trouser pocket, from which he takes a very crumpled piece of paper and puts it in her hand. It’s a drawing. It’s obvious that it’s Granny who drew it, because she drew about as well as she spelled.
“It’s a map.” Elsa sobs as she unfolds it, the way one sobs when the tears have run out but not the crying.
Wolfheart gently rubs his hands together in circles. Elsa brushes her fingers over the ink.
“It’s a map of the seventh kingdom,” she says, more to herself than to him.
She lies down again on the table with the wurse. So close that its pelt pricks her through her sweater. Feels its warm breathing from the cold nose. It’s sleeping. She hopes it’s sleeping. She kisses its nose, so her tears end up in its whiskers. Wolfheart gently clears his throat.
“Was in the letter. Grandmother’s letter,” he says in the secret language and points at the letter. “Mipardonus.” The seventh kingdom. Your grandmother and I . . . we were going to build it.”
Elsa studies the map more carefully. It’s actually of the whole of the Land-of-Almost-Awake, but with completely the wrong proportions, because proportions were never really Granny’s thing.
“This seventh kingdom is exactly where the ruins of Mibatalos lie,” she whispers.
Wolfheart rubs his hands together.
“Can only build Mipardonus on Mibatalos. Your grandmother’s idea.”
“What does Mipardonus mean?” asks Elsa, with her cheek pressed to the wurse’s.
“Means ‘I forgive.’ ”
The tears from his cheeks are the size of swallows. His enormous hand descends softly on the wurse’s head. The wurse opens its eyes, but only slightly, and looks at him.
“Very old, Elsa. Very, very tired,” whispers Wolfheart.
Then he tenderly puts his fingers over the wound that Sam’s knife cut through the thick pelt.
It’s hard to let go of someone you love. Especially when you are almost eight.
Elsa crawls close to the wurse and holds it hard, hard, hard. It manages to look at her one last time. She smiles and whispers, “You’re the best first friend I’ve ever had,” and it slowly licks her on the face and smells of sponge cake mix. And she laughs out loud, with her tears raining down.
When the cloud animals land in the Land-of-Almost-Awake, Elsa hugs it as hard as she can, and whispers: “You’ve completed your mission, you don’t have to protect the castle anymore. Protect Granny now. Protect all the fairy tales!” It licks her face one final time.
And then it runs off.
When Elsa turns to Wolfheart, he squints at the sun as you do when you haven’t been to the Land-of-Almost-Awake for an eternity of many fairy tales. Elsa points down at the ruins of Mibatalos.
“We can bring Alf here. He’s good at building things. At least he’s good at making wardrobes. And we’ll also need wardrobes in the seventh kingdom, won’t we? And Granny will be sitting on a bench in Miamas when we’re ready. Just like the granddad in The Brothers Lionheart. There’s a fairy tale with that name, I read it to Granny, so I know she’ll wait on a bench because it’s typical of her to nick something like that from other people’s fairy tales. And she knows The Brothers Lionheart is one of my favorite fairy tales!”
She is still crying. Wolfheart as well. But they do what they can. They construct words of forgiveness from the ruins of fighting words.
The wurse dies on the same day that Elsa’s brother is born. Elsa decides that she will tell her brother all about it when he’s older. Tell him about her first best friend. Tell him that sometimes things have to clear a space so something else can take its place. Almost as if the wurse gave up its place on the bus for Halfie.
And she thinks about how she will be very particular about pointing out to Halfie that he mustn’t feel sad or have a bad conscience about it.
Because wurses hate traveling by bus.
33
BABY
It’s difficult ending a fairy tale. All tales have to end sometime, of course. Some can’t finish soon enough. This one, for example, could feasibly have been rounded off and packed away long ago. The problem is this whole issue of heroes at the ends of fairy tales, and how they are supposed to “live happily to the end of their days.” This gets tricky, from a narrative perspective, because the people who reach the end of their days must leave others who have to live out their days without them.
It is very, very difficult to be the one who has to stay behind and live without them.
It’s dark by the time they leave the vet’s. They used to make snow-angels outside the house on the night before
Elsa’s birthday. That was the only night of the year Granny didn’t say crappy things about the angels. It was one of Elsa’s favorite traditions. She goes with Alf in Taxi. Not so much because she doesn’t want to go with Dad, but because Dad told her Alf was furious with himself for being in the garage with Taxi when the whole thing with Sam happened. Angry because he wasn’t there to protect Elsa.
Alf and Elsa don’t talk very much in Taxi, of course; this is what happens when you don’t have so much to say. And when Elsa at last says she has to do something at home on their way to the hospital, Alf doesn’t ask why. He just drives. He’s good in that way, Alf.
“Can you make snow-angels?” asks Elsa when Taxi stops outside the house.
“I’m bloody sixty-four years old,” grunts Alf.
“That’s not an answer.”
Alf turns off Taxi’s engine. “I may be sixty-four years old, but I wasn’t sixty-four when I was born! Course I can make bloody snow-angels!”
And then they make snow-angels. Ninety-nine of them. And they never talk much about it afterwards. Because certain kinds of friends can be friends without talking much.
The woman in jeans sees them from her balcony. She laughs. She’s getting good at that.
Dad is waiting for them at the hospital entrance when they get there. A doctor goes past who, for a moment, Elsa thinks she might recognize. And then she sees George, and she runs across the entire waiting room and throws herself into his arms. He is wearing his shorts over his leggings and he has a glass of ice-cold water for Mum in his hand.
“Thanks for running!” says Elsa, with her arms around him.
Dad looks at Elsa and you can see he’s jealous but trying not to show it. He’s good like that. George looks at her too, overwhelmed.
“I’m quite good at running,” he says quietly.
Elsa nods.
“I know. That’s because you’re different.”
And then she goes with Dad to see Mum. And George stays behind for so long with the glass of water that in the end it’s back to room temperature.
There’s a stern-looking nurse standing outside Mum’s room who refuses to let Elsa inside, because apparently Mum has had a complicated delivery. That’s how the nurse puts it, sounding very firm and emphatic when she pronounces the “com” in “complicated.” Elsa’s dad clears his throat.
“Are you new here, by any chance?”
“What’s that got to do with anything?” the nurse thunders. “No visitors today!” she snaps with absolute certainty before spinning around and marching back into Mum’s room.
Dad and Elsa stay where they are, patiently waiting and nodding, because they suspect this will sort itself out. For Mum may be Mum, but she is also Granny’s daughter. Remember the man in the silver car, just before Elsa was born? No one should mess with Mum when she’s giving birth.
It takes maybe thirty seconds before the corridor reverberates until the pictures on the wall are practically rattling.
“BRING MY DAUGHTER IN HERE BEFORE I THROTTLE YOU WITH THE STETHOSCOPE AND LEVEL THE HOSPITAL TO THE GROUND, DO YOU UNDERSTAND?”
Thirty seconds was considerably longer than Elsa and Dad thought it would take. But in probably no more than another three or four seconds, Mum adds another roar:
“I COULDN’T GIVE A SHIT! I’LL FIND A STETHOSCOPE SOMEWHERE IN THIS HOSPITAL AND THEN I’LL THROTTLE YOU WITH IT!”
The nurse steps out into the corridor again. She doesn’t look quite as self-assured anymore. The doctor that Elsa thought she recognized turns up behind her and says in a friendly voice that they can “probably make an exception this time.” He smiles at Elsa. Elsa inhales determinedly and steps over the threshold.
Mum has tubes everywhere, all over her body. They hug as hard as Elsa dares without accidentally pulling one of them out. She imagines that one of them may be an electrical power cable, and that Mum will go out like a light if that happens. Mum repeatedly runs her hand through Elsa’s hair.
“I am so very, very sorry about your friend the wurse,” she says gently.
Elsa sits in silence for so long on the edge of her bed that her cheeks dry and she has time to think about an entirely new way of measuring time. This whole thing with eternities and the eternities of fairy tales is becoming a bit unmanageable. There must be something less complicated—blinking, for example, or the beating of a hummingbird’s wings. Someone must have thought about this. She’s going to Wikipedia it when she gets home.
She looks at Mum, who looks happy. Elsa pats her hand. Mum grabs on to it.
“I know I’m not a perfect mum, darling.”
Elsa puts her forehead against Mum’s forehead.
“Not everything has to be perfect, Mum.”
They sit so close that Mum’s tears run down the tip of Elsa’s nose.
“I work so much, darling. I used to be so angry at your grandmother for never being home, and now I’m just the same myself. . . .”
Elsa wipes both their noses with her Gryffindor scarf.
“No superheroes are perfect, Mum. It’s cool.”
Mum smiles. Elsa as well.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Of course you can,” says Mum.
“How am I like your father?”
Mum looks hesitant. As mums get when they are accustomed to being able to predict their daughters’ questions, and then suddenly find they were wrong about that. Elsa shrugs.
“From Granny I have the thing about being different. And I’m a know-it-all like Dad, and I always end up rowing with everyone, which I have from Granny. So what do I have from your dad? Granny never told me any stories about him.”
Mum can’t quite bring herself to answer. Elsa breathes tensely through her nose. Mum lays her hands on Elsa’s cheeks and Elsa dries Mum’s cheeks with the Gryffindor scarf.
“I think she talked about your grandfather without your noticing,” whispers Mum.
“How am I like him, then?”
“You have his laugh.”
Elsa retracts her hands into her sweater. And slowly swings the empty sleeves in front of her.
“Did he laugh a lot?”
“Always. Always, always, always. That was why he loved your grandmother. Because she got him to laugh with every bit of his body. Every bit of his soul.”
Elsa climbs up next to Mum in the hospital bed and lies there for probably a billion wingbeats of a hummingbird. “Granny wasn’t a complete shit. She just wasn’t not a complete shit either,” she says.
“Elsa! Language!” And then Mum laughs out loud. Elsa as well. Grandfather’s laugh.
And then they lie there talking about superheroes for quite a while. Mum says now that Elsa has become someone’s big sister, she has to bear in mind that big sisters are always idols to their younger siblings. And it’s a great power to have. A great force.
“And with great power comes great responsibility,” whispers Mum.
Elsa sits bolt upright in the bed.
“Have you been reading Spider-Man?!”
“I Googled him,” Mum says with a proud grin.
And then all the guilty feelings rush over her face. As they do with mothers who have realized that the time has come to reveal a great secret.
“Elsa . . . my darling . . . the first letter from Grandmother. It wasn’t you who got it. There was another letter before yours. Grandmother gave it to me. The day before she died. . . .”
Mum looks as if she’s standing on the edge of a high diving board with everyone watching and has just decided she can’t go through with it.
But Elsa just nods calmly, shrugs, and pats Mum on the cheek, as you do with a small child who has done wrong because it doesn’t know any better.
“I know, Mum. I know.”
Mum blinks awkwardly at her.
“What? You know? How do you know?”
Elsa sighs patiently.
“I mean, yeah, okay, it took me a bit of time to figure it out. But it wasn’t exactly, li
ke, quantum physics. First of all, not even Granny would have been so irresponsible as to send me out on a treasure hunt without telling you first. And secondly, only you and I can drive Renault, because he’s a bit different, but I drove him sometimes when Granny was eating kebab and you drove him sometimes when Granny was drunk. So it must have been one of us who parked him in the garage in Britt-Marie’s space. And it wasn’t me. And I’m sort of not an idiot. I can count.”
Mum laughs so loudly and for so long about it that Elsa starts getting seriously worried about the hummingbird.
“You’re the sharpest person I know, do you know that?”
And she thinks, Well, that’s nice and all that, but Mum really needs to get out there and meet a few more people.
“What did Granny write in your letter?” asks Elsa.
Mum’s lips come together.
“She wrote sorry.”
“For being a bad mother?”
“Yes.”
“Have you forgiven her?”
Mum smiles and Elsa wipes her cheeks again with the Gryffindor scarf.
“I’m trying to forgive us both, I think. I’m like Renault. I have a long braking distance,” whispers Mum.
Elsa hugs her until the hummingbird gives up and just goes off to do something else.
“Your grandmother saved children because she was saved herself when she was small, darling. I never knew that, but she wrote it in the letter. She was an orphan,” whispers Mum.
“Like the X-Men.” Elsa nods.
“You know whereabouts the next letter is hidden, I take it?” says Mum with a smile.
“It’s enough to say ‘where,’ ” says Elsa, because she can’t stop herself.
But she does know, of course she knows. She’s known all along. She’s not stupid. And this isn’t exactly the most unpredictable of fairy tales.
Mum laughs again. Laughs until the evil nurse comes stamping in and says there’s got to be an end to this now, or she’ll have problems with the tubes.
The Fredrik Backman Collection_A Man Called Ove, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry, and Britt-Marie Was Here Page 59