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

  In retrospect, Elsa will recall that she paused briefly by the locked stroller in the stairwell. The notice with the crossword was still on the wall above it. And someone had solved it. All the squares were filled. In pencil.

  If Elsa had stopped and reflected a little on it, maybe things would have turned out differently. But she didn’t. So they didn’t. It’s possible that the wurse hesitated for a moment outside Britt-Marie’s door. Elsa would have understood if it had done that, just like she supposes that wurses hesitate sometimes when they’re unsure about who in this fairy tale they’ve really been sent to protect. Wurses actually guard princesses in normal fairy tales, and even in the Land-of-Almost-Awake, Elsa was never more than a knight. Yet if the wurse had any hesitation, it didn’t show it. It went with Elsa. Because that’s the sort of friend it is.

  If it hadn’t gone with Elsa, maybe things would have worked out differently.

  Alf convinces the police to make a pass around the block “to make sure everything is safe.” Elsa never finds out exactly what he says to them, but Alf can be quite persuasive when he wants to be. Maybe he says that he’s seen footprints in the snow. Or heard someone in the house on the other side of the street tell him something. Elsa doesn’t know, but she sees the summer-intern policeman get into the car, and sees Green-eyes do the same after lengthy deliberation. Elsa meets her gaze for a second, and if she had only told Green-eyes the truth about the wurse, then maybe everything would have ended up differently. But she didn’t. Because she wanted to protect the wurse. Because that’s the sort of friend she is.

  Alf goes back into the house and down into the garage to fetch Taxi.

  When the police car swings around the corner at the end of the street, Elsa and the wurse and the boy with a syndrome scurry out of the front entrance and across the street and into Audi, which is parked there. The children jump in first.

  The wurse stops midstep. Its hackles rise.

  Probably only a few seconds go by, but it feels like forever. Afterwards Elsa will remember that it felt both as if she had time to think a billion thoughts and as if she didn’t have time to think at all.

  There’s a smell inside Audi that makes her feel surprisingly peaceful. She doesn’t quite know why. She looks at the wurse through the open door, and before she has time to realize what is about to happen, she wonders if maybe it doesn’t want to jump into the car because it’s in pain. She knows it is feeling pain, pain the way Granny had pain everywhere in her body at the end.

  Elsa starts getting out a cookie from her pocket. Because no real friend of a wurse would leave home nowadays without at least one cookie for emergencies. But she doesn’t have time, of course, because she realizes what is causing that smell in Audi.

  Sam comes darting out from behind the backseat, Elsa feels the coldness against her lips when his hand closes over her mouth. His muscles tense around her throat; she feels the hairs on his skin scraping like gravel through the gaps in the Gryffindor scarf. She has time to see the brief confusion in Sam’s eyes when he sees the boy. It’s the moment when he realizes he’s been hunting the wrong child. She has time to understand that the shadows in the fairy tale didn’t want to kill the Chosen One. Only steal him. Make him their own. Kill whoever stood in their way.

  And then the wurse’s jaws close around Sam’s other wrist, just as he’s making a grab for the boy. Sam roars. Elsa has a split second to react, when he lets go of her. She sees the knife in the rearview mirror.

  And everything after that is black.

  Elsa can feel herself running, she feels the boy’s hand in hers, and she knows that they have to make it to the front entrance. They have to have time to scream so Dad and Alf can hear them.

  Elsa sees her feet moving, but she’s not guiding them herself. Her body is running by instinct. She thinks that she and the boy have had time to make half a dozen steps when she hears the wurse howling in horrendous pain, and she doesn’t know if it’s the boy who lets go of her hand or if she lets go of his. Her pulse is beating so hard that she can feel it in her eyes. The boy slips and falls to the ground. Elsa hears the back door of Audi opening and sees the knife in Sam’s hand. Sees the blood on it. She does the only thing she can do: picks the boy up as best she can and runs as fast as possible.

  She’s good at running. But she knows it won’t be enough. She can hear Sam straining behind her, feels the tug at her arm as the boy is torn from her grasp; her heart lurches, she closes her eyes, and the next thing she remembers is the pain in her forehead. And Maud’s scream. And Dad’s hands. The hard floor in the stairwell. The world spins until it lands, swaying upside down in front of her, and she thinks that this must be how it is when you die. Like falling inwards, towards who-knows-what.

  She hears banging without understanding where it comes from. Then the echo. Echo, she has time to think, and realizes she is indoors. She feels as if she’s got gravel under her eyelids. She hears the light feet of the boy running up the stairs as a boy’s feet can run only when they have known for many years that this could happen. She hears the terrified voice of the boy’s mother, trying to keep herself calm and methodical as she runs after him, as only a mother can do and only when she has grown accustomed to fear as the natural state of things.

  The door of Granny’s house closes and locks behind them. Elsa feels that Dad’s hands aren’t holding her up, they’re holding her back. She doesn’t know from what. Until she sees the shadow through the glass in the entrance door. Sees Sam on the other side. He’s standing still. And something about his face is so deeply uncharacteristic of him that, at first, Elsa can’t quite shake off the feeling that she is imagining the whole thing.

  Sam is afraid.

  In the blink of an eye another shadow descends over him, so enormous that Sam’s shadow is engulfed in it. Wolfheart’s heavy fists rain down with fury, with a violence and a darkness no fairy tale could describe. He doesn’t hit Sam, he hammers him into the snow. Not to make him harmless. Not to protect. To destroy.

  Elsa’s dad picks her up and runs up the stairs. Presses her against his jacket so she can’t see. She hears the door flung open from inside and she hears Maud and Lennart pleading with Wolfheart to stop hitting, stop hitting, stop hitting. But judging by the dull thumping sounds, like when you drop milk cartons on the floor, he isn’t stopping. He doesn’t even hear them. In the tales Wolfheart fled into the dark forests long before the War-Without-End, because he knew what he was capable of.

  Elsa tears herself free of Dad and sprints down the stairs. Maud and Lennart stop screaming before she has reached the bottom. Wolfheart’s mallet of a fist is raised so high above Sam that it brushes the stretched-out fingers of the cloud animals before it turns back and hurtles down.

  But Wolfheart freezes in the middle of the movement. Between him and the blood-covered man stands a woman who looks so small and frail that the wind should be able to pass right through her. She has an insignificant ball of blue tumble-dryer fluff in her hand, and a thin white line on her finger where her wedding ring used to be. Every ounce of her being seems to be yelling at her to run for her life. But she stays where she is, staring at Wolfheart with the resolute gaze of someone who has nothing left to lose.

  She rolls up the tumble-dryer fluff in the palm of one hand and puts that hand against her other hand and clasps them together on her stomach; then she looks with determination at Wolfheart and says, with authority:

  “We don’t beat people to death in this leaseholders’ association.”

  Wolfheart’s fist is still vibrating in the air. His chest heaves up and down. But his arms slowly fall down at his sides.

  She is still standing between Wolfheart and Sam, between the monster and the shadow, when the police car comes skidding into their street. The green-eyed policewoman jumps out, her weapon drawn, long before the car has stopped. Wolfheart has dropped on his knees in the snow.

  Elsa shoves the door open and charges outside. The police roar at Wolfheart. They t
ry to stop Elsa, but it’s like holding water in cupped hands: she slips through their fingers. For reasons she won’t understand for many years, Elsa has time to think about what her mother said to George once when she thought Elsa was sleeping. That this is how it is, being the mother of a daughter who is starting to grow up.

  The wurse lies immobile on the ground halfway between Audi and the front entrance. The snow is red. It tried to get to her. Crawled out of Audi and crept along until it collapsed. Elsa wriggles out of her jacket and the Gryffindor scarf and spreads them over the animal’s body, curling up in the snow next to it and hugging it hard, hard, feeling how its breath smells of peanut cake, and she whispers, “Don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid” over and over again into its ear. “Don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid, Wolfheart has defeated the dragon and no fairy tale can end until the dragon has been defeated.”

  When she feels Dad’s soft hands picking her up off the ground, she calls out loudly, so the wurse will hear her even if it’s already halfway to the Land-of-Almost-Awake:

  “YOU CAN’T DIE! YOU HEAR?! YOU CAN’T DIE BECAUSE ALL CHRISTMAS TALES HAVE HAPPY ENDINGS!”

  32

  GLASS

  It’s hard to reason about death. Hard to let go of someone you love.

  Granny and Elsa used to watch the evening news together. Now and then Elsa would ask Granny why grown-ups were always doing such idiotic things to each other. Granny usually answered that it was because grown-ups are generally people, and people are generally shits. Elsa countered that grown-ups were also responsible for a lot of good things in between all the idiocy—space exploration, the UN, vaccines, and cheese slicers, for instance. Granny then said the real trick of life was that almost no one is entirely a shit and almost no one is entirely not a shit. The hard part of life is keeping as much on the not-a-shit side as one can.

  Once Elsa asked why so many not-shits had to die everywhere, and why so many shits didn’t. And why anyone at all had to die, whether a shit or not. Granny tried to distract Elsa with ice cream and change the subject, because Granny preferred ice cream to death. But Elsa was capable of being a bewilderingly obstinate kid, so Granny gave up in the end and admitted that she supposed something always had to give up its own space so that something else could take its place.

  “Like when we’re on the bus and some old people get on?” asked Elsa. And then Granny asked Elsa if she’d agree to more ice cream and another topic of conversation if Granny answered “Yes.” Elsa said she could go for that.

  In the oldest fairy tales from Miamas they say a wurse can die only of a broken heart. Otherwise, they’re immortal. This is why it became possible to kill them after they were sent into exile from the Land-of-Almost-Awake for biting the princess: because they were sent away by the very people they had protected and loved. “And that was why they could be killed in the last battle of the War-Without-End,” Granny explained—for hundreds of wurses died in that last battle—“because the hearts of all living creatures are broken in war.”

  Elsa thinks about that while sitting in the waiting room at the veterinary clinic. It smells of birdseed. Britt-Marie sits next to her with her hands clasped together in her lap, watching a cockatoo sitting in its cage on the other side of the room. Britt-Marie doesn’t seem so very keen on cockatoos. Elsa isn’t wholly conversant with the exact emotional utterances of cockatoos, but she reckons the feeling is mutual.

  “You don’t have to wait here with me,” says Elsa, her voice clogged with sorrow and anger.

  Britt-Marie brushes some invisible seeds from her jacket and answers, without taking her eyes off the cockatoo, “It’s no trouble, dear Elsa. You shouldn’t feel like that. No trouble at all.”

  Elsa understands that she doesn’t mean it unpleasantly. The police are interviewing Dad and Alf about everything that has happened, and Britt-Marie was the first to be questioned, so she offered to sit with Elsa and wait for the veterinary surgeon to come out and say something about the wurse. So Elsa does understand that there’s nothing unpleasant about it. It’s just difficult for Britt-Marie to say anything at all without it sounding that way.

  Elsa wraps her hands in her Gryffindor scarf. Inhales deeply.

  “It was very brave of you to step between Wolfheart and Sam,” she offers in a low voice.

  Britt-Marie brushes some invisible seeds and possibly some invisible crumbs from the table in front of her into the palm of her hand. Sits there with her hand closed around them, as if looking for an invisible wastepaper bin to throw them in.

  “As I said, we don’t beat people to death in this leaseholders’ association,” she replies quickly, so Elsa can’t hear how her emotion is overwhelming her.

  They are silent. As you are when you make peace for the second time in two days, but don’t quite want to spell it out to the other person. Britt-Marie fluffs up a cushion at the edge of the waiting-room sofa.

  “I didn’t hate your grandmother,” she says without looking at Elsa.

  “She didn’t hate you either,” says Elsa, without looking back.

  “And actually, I’ve never wanted the flats to be converted to leaseholds. Kent wants it, and I want Kent to be happy, but he wants to sell the flat and make money and move. I don’t want to move.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s my home.”

  It’s hard not to like her for that.

  “Why were you and Granny always fighting?” Elsa asks, although she already knows the answer.

  “She thought I was a . . . a nagging busybody,” says Britt-Marie, not revealing the actual reason.

  “Why are you like that, then?” asks Elsa, thinking about the princess and the witch and the treasure.

  “Because you need to care about something, Elsa. As soon as anyone cared about anything in this world, your granny always dismissed it as ‘nagging,’ but if you don’t care about anything, you’re actually not alive at all. You’re only existing. . . .”

  “You’re quite deep, you know, Britt-Marie.”

  “Thanks.” She clearly has to resist the impulse to start brushing something invisible from Elsa’s coat's arm. She satisfies herself with fluffing up the sofa cushion again, even though it’s been many years since there was last any stuffing in it to fluff up. Elsa threads the scarf around each of her fingers.

  “There’s this poem about an old man who says he can’t be loved, so he doesn’t mind, sort of, being disliked instead. As long as someone sees him,” says Elsa.

  “Doctor Glas,” says Britt-Marie with a nod.

  “Wikipedia,” Elsa corrects.

  “No, it’s a quote from Doctor Glas,” insists Britt-Marie.

  “Is that a site?”

  “It’s a play.”

  “Oh.”

  “What’s Wikipedia?”

  “A site.”

  Britt-Marie puts her hands together in her lap.

  “In fact, Doctor Glas is a novel, as I understand. I haven’t read it. But they put it on in the theater,” she says hesitantly.

  “Oh,” says Elsa.

  “I like theater.”

  “Me too.”

  They both nod.

  “ Doctor Glas would have been a good superhero name,” Elsa says.

  She thinks it would actually have been a better name for a superhero nemesis, but Britt-Marie doesn’t look like she reads quality literature on a regular basis, so Elsa doesn’t want to make it too complicated for her.

  “ ‘We want to be loved,’ ” quotes Britt-Marie. “ ‘Failing that, admired; failing that, feared; failing that, hated and despised. At all costs we want to stir up some sort of feeling in others. The soul abhors a vacuum. At all costs it longs for contact.’ ”

  Elsa is not quite sure what this means, but she nods all the same. “What do you want to be, then?”

  “It’s complicated being a grown-up sometimes, Elsa,” Britt-Marie says evasively.

  “It’s not, like, easy-peasy being a kid either,” Elsa replies bel
ligerently.

  The tips of Britt-Marie’s fingers wander carefully over the white circle on the skin of her ring finger.

  “I used to stand on the balcony early in the mornings. Before Kent woke up. Your grandmother knew this, that’s why she made those snowmen. And that’s why I got so angry. Because she knew my secret and it felt as if she and the snowmen were trying to taunt me for it.”

  “What secret?”

  Britt-Marie clasps her hands together firmly.

  “I was never like your grandmother. I never traveled. I was just here. But sometimes I liked to stand on the balcony in the mornings, when it was windy. It’s silly, of course, everyone obviously thinks it’s silly, they do, of course.” She purses her mouth. “But I like to feel the wind in my hair.”

  Elsa thinks about how Britt-Marie may, despite everything, not be a total shit after all.

  “You didn’t answer the question—what do you want to be?” she says, winding her scarf through her fingers.

  Britt-Marie’s fingertips move hesitantly over her skirt, like a person moving across a dance floor to ask someone to dance. And then, cautiously, she utters the words:

  “I want someone to remember I existed. I want someone to know I was here.”

  Unfortunately Elsa doesn’t hear the last bit, because the veterinary surgeon comes through the door with a look on his face that creates a surging noise inside Elsa’s head. She has run past him before he has even had time to open his mouth. Elsa hears them shouting after her as she charges down the corridor and starts throwing doors open, one after the other. A nurse tries to grab her, but she just keeps running, throws more doors open, doesn’t stop until she hears the wurse howling. As if it knows she’s on her way and is calling for her. When she finally storms into the right room, she finds it lying on a cold table, a bandage round its stomach. There’s blood everywhere. She buries her face deep, deep, deep in its coat.