The Fredrik Backman Collection: A Man Called Ove, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry, and Britt-Marie Was Here

by Fredrik Backman

  “I . . . I understand Harry Potter is important to you.”

  “Harry Potter is important for everyone!”

  The skin around the woman’s mouth cracks again. She takes another long, deep breath, looks into Elsa’s eyes and says:

  “I like him a lot too, that’s what I wanted to say. It’s been a long time since I had such an amazing reading experience. You almost never do, once you grow up, things are at their peak when you’re a child and then it’s all downhill from there . . . well . . . because of the cynicism, I suppose. I just wanted to thank you for reminding me of how things used to be.”

  Those are more words than Elsa has ever heard the woman say without stuttering. The woman offers her what’s in the bag. Elsa takes it. It’s also a book. A fairy tale. The Brothers Lionheart, by Astrid Lindgren. Elsa knows that, because it’s one of her favorite stories that doesn’t come from the Land-of-Almost-Awake. She read it aloud to Granny many times while they were driving around in Renault. It’s about Karl and Jonatan, who die and come to Nangijala, where they have to fight the tyrant Tengil and the dragon Katla.

  The woman’s gaze loses its footing again.

  “I used to read it to my boys when their granny died. I don’t know if you’ve read it. You probably have.”

  Elsa shakes her head and holds the book tightly.

  “No,” she lies. Because she’s polite enough to know that if someone gives you a book, you owe that person the pretense that you haven’t read it.

  The woman in jeans looks relieved. Then she takes such a deep breath that Elsa fears her wishbone is about to snap.

  “You know . . . you asked if we met at the hospital. Your granny and I. After the tsunami I . . . they . . . they had laid out all the dead bodies in a little square. So families and friends could look for their . . . after . . . I . . . I mean, she found me there. In the square. I had been sitting there for . . . I don’t know. Several weeks. I think. She flew me home and she said I could live here until I knew where I was . . . was going.”

  Her lips open and close, in turn, as if they’re electric.

  “I just stayed here. I just . . . stayed.”

  Elsa looks down at her own shoes this time.

  “Are you coming today?” she asks.

  In the corner of her eye she can see the woman shaking her head. As if she wants to run away again.

  “I don’t think I . . . I think your grandmother was very disappointed in me.”

  “Maybe she was disappointed in you because you’re so disappointed in yourself.”

  There’s a choking sound in the woman’s throat. It takes a while before Elsa understands it’s probably laughter. As if that part of her throat has been in disuse and has just found the key to itself and flicked some old electrical switch.

  “You’re really a very different little child,” says the woman.

  “I’m not a little child. I’m almost eight!”

  “Yes, sorry. You were a newborn. When I moved in here. Newborn.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with being different. Granny said that only different people change the world.”

  “Yes. Sorry. I . . . I have to go. I just wanted to say . . . sorry.”

  “It’s okay. Thanks for the book.”

  The woman’s eyes hesitate, but she looks straight at Elsa again.

  “Has your friend come back? Wolf— what was it you called him?”

  Elsa shakes her head. There’s something in the woman’s eyes that actually looks like genuine concern.

  “He does that sometimes. Disappears. You shouldn’t worry. He . . . gets scared of people. Disappears for a while. But he always comes back. He just needs time.”

  “I think he needs help.”

  “It’s hard to help those who don’t want to help themselves.”

  “Someone who wants to help himself is possibly not the one who most needs help from others,” Elsa objects.

  The woman nods without answering.

  “I have to go,” she repeats.

  Elsa wants to stop her but she’s already halfway down the stairs. She has almost disappeared on the floor below when Elsa leans over the railing, gathers her strength, and calls out:

  “Did you find them? Did you find your boys in the square?”

  The woman stops. Holds the banister very hard.

  “Yes.”

  Elsa bites her lip.

  “Do you believe in life after death?”

  The woman looks up at her.

  “That’s a difficult question.”

  “I mean, you know, do you believe in God?” asks Elsa.

  “Sometimes it’s hard to believe in God,” answers the woman.

  “Because you wonder why God didn’t stop the tsunami?”

  “Because I wonder why there are tsunamis at all.”

  Elsa nods.

  “I saw someone in a film once say, ‘Faith can move mountains,’ ” Elsa goes on, without knowing why, maybe mainly because she doesn’t want to lose sight of the woman before she has time to ask the question she really wants to ask.

  “So I hear,” says the woman.

  Elsa shakes her head.

  “But you know that’s actually true! Because it comes from Miamas, from a giant called Faith. She was so strong it was insane. And she could literally move mountains!”

  The woman looks as if she’s trying to find a reason to disappear down the stairs. Elsa takes a quick breath.

  “Everyone says I may miss Granny now but it’ll pass. I’m not so sure.”

  The woman looks up at her again. With her empathic eyes.

  “Why not?”

  “It hasn’t passed for you.”

  The woman half-closes her eyes.

  “Maybe it’s different.”

  “How?”

  “Your granny was old.”

  “Not to me. I only knew her for seven years. Almost eight.”

  The woman doesn’t answer. Elsa rubs her hands together like Wolfheart does.

  “You should come today!” Elsa calls out after her, but the woman has already disappeared.

  Elsa hears the door of her flat closing and then everything is silent until she hears Dad’s voice from the door at the bottom.

  She collects herself and wipes her tears and forces the wurse to hide in the wardrobe again with half of the moo-gun ammunition as a bribe. Then she closes the door of Granny’s flat without locking it and runs down the stairs, and a few moments later she’s lying in Audi with the seat reclined as far as it’ll go, staring out of the glass ceiling.

  The cloud animals are soaring lower now. Dad is wearing a suit and is also silent. It feels strange, because Dad hardly ever wears a suit. But today is the day.

  “Do you believe in God, Dad?” asks Elsa, in the way that always catches him unaware like water balloons thrown from a balcony. Elsa knows that because Granny loved water balloons and Dad learned never to walk right beneath her balcony.

  “I don’t know,” he answers.

  Elsa hates him for not having an answer but she loves him a bit for not lying. Audi stops outside a black steel gate. They sit for a while, waiting.

  “Am I like Granny?” says Elsa without taking her eyes off the sky.

  “You mean in physical appearance?” asks Dad hesitantly.

  “No, like, as a person,” sighs Elsa.

  Dad looks as if he’s fighting his hesitation for a moment, like you do when you have daughters aged about eight. It’s almost as if Elsa has just asked him to explain where babies come from. Again.

  “You must stop saying ‘like’ and ‘sort of’ all the time. Only people with a bad vocabulary—” he begins to say instead, because he can’t stop himself. Because that’s the way he is. One of those who find it very important to say “one of those” and not “one of them.”

  “So bloody leave it then!” Elsa snaps, much more vehemently than she means to, because she’s not in the mood for his corrections today.

  Usually it’s their thing,
correcting one another. Their only thing. Dad has a word jar, where Elsa puts difficult words she has learned, like “concise” and “pretentious,” or complex phrases like “My fridge is a taco sauce graveyard.” And every time the jar is full she gets a gift voucher for a book to download on the iPad. The word jar has financed the entire Harry Potter series for her, although she knows Dad is ridiculously dubious about Harry Potter because Dad can’t get his head around a story unless it’s based on reality.

  “Sorry,” mumbles Elsa.

  Dad sinks into his seat. They compete at seeing who can feel most ashamed. Then he says, slightly less tentatively:

  “Yes. You’re very much like her. You got all your best qualities from her and your mother.”

  Elsa doesn’t answer, because she doesn’t know if that was the answer she wanted. Dad doesn’t say anything either, because he’s unsure whether that was what he should have said. Elsa wants to tell him she wants to stay with him more. Every other weekend is not enough. She wants to yell at him that once Halfie comes along and is quite normal, George and Mum won’t want to have Elsa at home anymore, because parents want normal children, not different children. And Halfie will stand next to Elsa and remind them of all the differences between them. She wants to yell that Granny was wrong, that different is not always good, because different is a mutation and almost no one in X-Men has a family.

  She wants to yell out the whole thing. But she doesn’t. Because she knows he’d never understand. And she knows he wouldn’t want her to live with him and Lisette because Lisette has her own children. Undifferent children.

  Dad sits in silence like you do when you don’t feel like wearing a suit. But just as Elsa opens Audi’s door to jump out, he turns to her hesitantly and says in a low voice:

  “. . . but there are moments when I sincerely hope that not ALL your best traits come from Granny and Mum, Elsa.”

  And then Elsa squeezes her eyes together tightly and puts her forehead against his shoulder and her fingers into her jacket pocket and spins the lid of the red felt-tip pen that he gave her when she was small, so she could add her own punctuation marks, and which is still the best present he’s ever given her. Or anyone.

  “You gave me your words,” she whispers.

  He tries to blink his pride out of his eyes. She sees that. And she wants to tell him that she lied to him last Friday. That she was the one who sent the text from Mum’s phone about how he didn’t have to pick her up from school. But she doesn’t want to disappoint him, so she stays quiet. Because you hardly ever disappoint anybody if you just stay quiet. All almost-eight-year-olds know that.

  Dad kisses her hair. She raises her head and says as if in passing, “Will you and Lisette have children?”

  “I don’t think so,” Dad replies sadly, as if it’s quite self-evident.

  “Why not?”

  “We have all the children we need.”

  And it sounds as if he stops himself from saying “more than we need.” Or at least that’s how it feels.

  “Is it because of me you don’t want more children?” she asks, and hopes he’ll say no.

  “Yes,” he says.

  “Because I turned out different?” she whispers.

  He doesn’t answer. And she doesn’t wait. But just as she’s about to slam the door of Audi from the outside, Dad reaches across the seat and catches her fingertips, and when she meets his eyes he looks back tentatively, like he always does. But then he whispers:

  “Because you turned out to be perfect.”

  She’s never heard him so nontentative. And if she’d said that aloud, he would have told her that there’s no such word. And she loves him for that.

  George stands by the gate looking sad. He’s also wearing a suit. Elsa runs past him and Mum catches hold of her, her mascara running, and Elsa presses her face against Halfie. Mum’s dress smells of boutique. The cloud animals are flying low.

  And that’s the day they bury Elsa’s granny.

  21

  CANDLE GREASE

  There are storytellers in the Land-of-Almost-Awake who say we all have an inner voice, whispering to us what we must do, and all we must do is listen. Elsa has never really believed it, because she doesn’t like the thought of someone else having a voice inside her, and Granny always said that only psychologists and murderers have “inner voices.” Granny never liked proper psychology. Though she really did try with the woman in the black skirt.

  But, in spite of all, in a moment Elsa will hear a voice in her head as clear as a bell. It won’t be whispering, it will be yelling. It will be yelling, “Run!” And Elsa will run for her life. With the shadow behind her.

  Of course, she doesn’t know that when she goes into the church. The quiet murmuring of hundreds of strangers rises towards the ceiling, like the hissing of a broken car stereo. The legions of smartasss point at her and whisper. Their eyes are oppressive.

  She doesn’t know who they are and it makes her feel tricked. She doesn’t want to share Granny with others. She doesn’t want to be reminded of how Granny was her only friend, while Granny herself had hundreds of others.

  She concentrates hard on walking straight-backed through the crush, doesn’t want them to see that she feels as if she’s going to collapse any moment and doesn’t even have the strength to be upset anymore. The church floor sucks at her feet, the coffin up there stings her eyes.

  The mightiest power of death is not that it can make people die, but that it can make the people left behind want to stop living, she thinks, without remembering where she heard that. On second thought, she decides it probably comes from the Land-of-Almost-Awake, although this seems unlikely when one considers what Granny thought about death. Death was Granny’s nemesis. That’s why she never wanted to talk about it. And that was also why she became a surgeon, to cause death as much trouble as she could.

  But it might also come from Miploris, realizes Elsa. Granny never wanted to ride to Miploris when they were in the Land-of-Almost-Awake, but sometimes she did it anyway because of Elsa’s nagging. And sometimes Elsa rode there on her own when Granny was at some inn in Miamas playing poker with a troll or arguing about wine with a snow-angel.

  Miploris is the most beautiful of all the kingdoms of the Land-of-Almost-Awake. The trees sing there, the grass massages the soles of your feet, and there’s always a smell of fresh-baked bread. The houses are so beautiful that, to be on the safe side, you have to be sitting down when you look at them. But no one lives there, they are only used for storage. For Miploris is where all fairy creatures bring their sorrow, and where all leftover sorrow is stored. For an eternity of all fairy tales.

  People in the real world always say, when something terrible happens, that the sadness and loss and aching pain of the heart will “lessen as time passes,” but it isn’t true. Sorrow and loss are constant, but if we all had to go through our whole lives carrying them the whole time, we wouldn’t be able to stand it. The sadness would paralyze us. So in the end we just pack it into bags and find somewhere to leave it.

  That is what Miploris is: a kingdom where lone storytelling travelers come slowly wandering from all directions, dragging unwieldy luggage full of sorrow. A place where they can put it down and go back to life. And when the travelers turn back, they do so with lighter steps, because Miploris is constructed in such a way that irrespective of what direction you leave it, you always have the sun up ahead and the wind at your back.

  The Miplorisians gather up all the suitcases and sacks and bags of sorrow and carefully make a note of them in little pads. They scrupulously catalogue every kind of sadness and pining. Things are kept in very good order in Miploris; they have an extensive system of rules and impeccably clear areas of responsibility for all kinds of sorrows. “Bureaucratic bastards” was what Granny called the Miplorisians, because of all the forms that have to be filled out nowadays by whoever is dropping off some sorrow or other. But you can’t put up with disorder when it comes to sorrow, say the Miplor
isians.

  Miploris used to be the smallest kingdom in the Land-of-Almost-Awake, but after the War-Without-End it became the biggest. That was why Granny didn’t like riding there, because so many of the storehouses had her name on signs outside. And in Miploris people talk of inner voices, Elsa remembers now. Miplorisians believe that the inner voices are those of the dead, coming back to help their loved ones.

  Elsa is pulled back into the real world by Dad’s gentle hand on her shoulder. She hears his voice whispering, “You’ve arranged everything very nicely, Ulrika,” to Mum. In the corner of her eye she sees how Mum smiles and nods at the programs lying on the church pews and then replies: “Thanks for doing the programs. Lovely font.”

  Elsa sits at the far end of the wooden pew at the front of the chapel, staring down into the floor until the mumbling dies down. The church is so packed that people are standing all along the walls. Many of them have insanely weird clothes, as if they’ve been playing outfit roulette with someone who can’t read washing instruction tags.

  Elsa will put “outfit roulette” in the word jar, she thinks. She tries to focus on that thought. But she hears languages she can’t understand, and she hears her name being squeezed into strange pronunciations, and this takes her back to reality. She sees strangers pointing at her, with varying degrees of discretion. She understands that they all know who she is, and it makes her mad, so that when she glimpses a familiar face along one of the walls she has trouble placing him at first. Like when you see a celebrity in a café and instinctively burst out,“Oh, hi there!” before you realize that your brain has had time to tell you, “Hey, that’s probably someone you know, say hi!” but not, “No, wait, it’s just that guy from the TV!” Because your brain likes to make you look like an idiot.

  His face disappears behind a shoulder for a few moments, but when he reappears he’s looking right at Elsa. It’s the accountant who came to speak about the leasehold conversion yesterday. But he’s dressed as a priest now. He winks at her.

  Another priest starts talking about Granny, then about God, but Elsa doesn’t listen. She wonders if this is what Granny would have wanted. She’s not sure that Granny liked church so very much. Granny and Elsa hardly ever talked about God, because Granny associated God with death.