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

  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.

  Elsa stands up. Mum takes her hand and kisses it.

  “We’ve decided what Halfie’s going to be called. It’s not going to be Elvir. It’ll be another name. George and I decided as soon as we saw him. I think you’re going to like it.”

  She’s right about that. Elsa likes it. She likes it a lot.

  A few moments later she’s standing in a little room, looking at him through a pane of glass. He’s lying inside a little plastic box. Or a very big lunchbox. It’s hard to tell which. He’s got tubes everywhere and his lips are blue and his face looks as if he is running against an insanely strong wind, but all the nurses tell Elsa it’s not dangerous. She doesn’t like it. This is the most obvious way of figuring out that it actually is dangerous.

  She cups her hands against the glass when she whispers, so he’ll be able to hear on the other side. “Don’t be afraid, Halfie. You’ve got a sister now. And it’s going to get better. Everything’s going to be fine.”

  And then she switches to the secret language:

  “I’ll try not to be jealous of you. I’ve been jealous of you for an insane length of time, but I have a pal whose name is Alf and he and his little brother have been at loggerheads for like a hundred years. I don’t want us to be at loggerheads for a hundred years. So I think we have to start working at liking each other right from the start, you get what I mean?”

  Halfie looks like he gets it. Elsa puts her forehead against the glass.

  “You have a granny as well. She’s a superhero. I’ll tell you all about her when we get home. Unfortunately I gave the moo-gun to the boy downstairs but I’ll make you another one. And I’ll bring you to the Land-of-Almost-Awake, and we’ll eat dreams and dance and laugh and cry and be brave and forgive people, and we’ll fly with the cloud animals and Granny will be sitting on a bench in Miamas, smoking and waiting for us. And one day my granddad will come wandering along as well. We’ll hear him from far away because he laughs with his whole body. He laughs so much that I think we’ll have to build an eighth kingdom for him. I’ll ask Wolfheart what ‘I laugh’ is in his mother’s language. And the wurse is also there in the Land-of-Almost-Awake. You’re going to like the wurse. There’s no better friend than a wurse!”

  Halfie looks at her from the plastic box. Elsa wipes the glass with the Gryffindor scarf.

  “You’ve got a good name. The best name. I’ll tell you all about the boy you got it from. You’ll like him.”

  She stays by the glass until she realizes that the whole hummingbird thing was probably basically a bad idea, in spite of all. She’ll stick to eternities and the eternities of fairy tales for a bit longer. Just for the sake of simplicity. And maybe because it reminds her of Granny.

  Before she goes she whispers through cupped hands to Halfie, in the secret language:

  “It’s going to be the greatest adventure ever having you as a brother, Harry. The greatest, greatest adventure!”

  Things are turning out as Granny said. Things are getting better. Everything is going to be fine.

  The doctor that Elsa felt she recognized is standing next to Mum’s bed when she comes back into the room. He’s waiting, without moving, as if he knows that it will take her a moment to remember where she saw him. And when the penny finally drops, he smiles as if there was never any other alternative.

  “You’re the accountant,” Elsa bursts out suspiciously, and then adds, “And the vicar from the church. I saw you at Granny’s funeral and you were dressed as a vicar!”

  “I am many things,” the doctor answers in a blithe tone of voice, with the sort of expression on his face that no one ever had when Granny was around.

  “Also a doctor?” asks Elsa.

  “A doctor first and foremost,” says the doctor, and offers his hand as he introduces himself:

  “Marcel. I was a good friend of your grandmother’s.”

  “I’m Elsa.”

  “So I understand,” Marcel says, smiling.

  “You were Granny’s lawyer,” says Elsa, as one does when remembering details of telephone calls from the beginning of a fairy tale, say around the end of chapter two.

  “I am many things,” Marcel repeats, and gives her a paper.

  It’s a printout from a computer, and it’s correctly spelled, so she knows it’s Marcel and not Granny who wrote it. But some of Granny’s handwriting can be seen on the bottom of it. Marcel folds his hands together on his stomach, not unlike the way Britt-Marie does it.

  “Your grandmother owned the house you live in. Maybe you already worked that out. She says she won it in a game of poker, but I don’t know for certain.”

  Elsa reads the paper. Pouts her lips.

  “And what? Now it’s mine? The whole house?”

  “Your mother will act as your guardian until you’re eighteen. But your grandmother has ensured that you’ll be able to do what you want with it. If you want to, you can sell the flats as leaseholds. And if you don’t want to, you don’t have to.”

  “So why did you tell everyone in the house that it would be turned into leaseholds if everyone agreed?”

  “If you don’t agree then, technically, you’re not all agreed. Your grandmother was convinced you would go with what the neighbors wanted if they were all agreed about it, but she was also certain you wouldn’t do anything with the house that might bring anyone who lived in it to harm. That was why she had to make sure you’d got to know all your neighbors by the time you saw the will.”

  He puts his hand on her shoulder.

  “It’s a big responsibility, but your grandmother forbade me to give it to anyone but you. She said you were ‘smarter than all those other lunatics put together.’ And she always said that a kingdom consists of the people who live in it. She said you’d understand that.”

  Elsa’s fingertips caress Granny’s signature at the bottom of the paper.

  “I understand.”

  “I can run through the details with you, but it’s a very complicated contract,” says Marcel helpfully.

  Elsa brushes her hair out of her face.

  “Granny wasn’t exactly an uncomplicated person.”

  Marcel belly-laughs. You’d have to call it that. A belly-laugh. It’s far too noisy to be a laugh. Elsa likes it a great deal. It’s quite impossible not to.

  “Did you and Granny have an affair?” she asks suddenly.

  “ELSA!” Mum interrupts, so distressed that the tubes almost come loose.

  Offended, Elsa throws out her arms.

  “What’s wrong with ASKING?” She turns demandingly to Marcel. “Did you have an affair or not?”

  Marcel puts his hands together. Nods with sadness, also happiness. Like when one has eaten a very large ice cream and realizes it is now gone.

  “She was the love of my life, Elsa. She was the love of many men’s lives. Women as well, actually.”

  “Were you hers?”

  Marcel pauses. He doesn’t look angry. Or bitter. Just slightly jealous.

  “No,” he says, “That was you. It was always you, dear Elsa.”

  Tenderly he reaches out and pats Elsa’s cheek, as you do when you see someone you have loved in the eyes of their grandchild.

  Elsa and Mum and the letter share the silence for seconds and eternities and hummingbird wingbeats. Then Mum touches Elsa’s hand and tries to make the question sound as if it’s not so terribly important, just something she just thought of spontaneously:

  “What do you have from me?”

  Elsa stands in silence. Mum looks despondent.

  “I was just, well, you know. You said you had inherited certain things from your grandmother and from your father, and I was just thinking, you know . . .”

  She goes silent. Ashamed of herself as mothers are when they realize they have passed that point in life when they want more from their daughters th
an their daughters want from them. And Elsa puts her hands over Mum’s cheeks and says mildly:

  “Just everything else, Mum. I just have everything else from you.”

  Dad gives Elsa a lift back to the house. He turns off the stereo in Audi so Elsa doesn’t have to listen to his music, and he stays the night in Granny’s flat. They sleep in the wardrobe. It smells of wood shavings and it’s just big enough for Dad to be able to stretch out and touch the walls on both sides with his fingertips and the tips of his toes. It’s good in that way, the wardrobe.

  When Dad has gone to sleep, Elsa sneaks down the stairs. Stands in front of the stroller, which is still locked up inside the front entrance. She looks at the crossword on the wall. Someone has filled it in with a pencil. In every word is a letter, which, in turn, meshes with four longer words. And in each of the four words is a letter written in a square that’s bolder than the others. E-L-S-A.

  Elsa checks the padlock with which the stroller is fixed to the stair railing. It’s a combination lock, but the four rolls don’t have numbers. They have letters.

  She spells her name and unlocks it. Pushes the stroller away. And that is where she finds Granny’s letter to Britt-Marie.

  34

  GRANNY

  You never say good-bye in the Land-of-Almost-Awake. You just say “See you later.” It’s important to people in the Land-of-Almost-Awake that it should be this way, because they believe that nothing really ever completely dies. It just turns into a story, undergoes a little shift in grammar, changes tense from “now” to “then.”

  A funeral can go on for weeks, because few events in life are a better opportunity to tell stories. Admittedly on the first day it’s mainly stories about sorrow and loss, but gradually as the days and nights pass, they transform into the sorts of stories that you can’t tell without bursting out laughing. Stories about how the deceased once read the instructions “Apply to the face but not around the eyes” on the packaging of some skin cream, and then called the manufacturer with extreme annoyance to point out that this is precisely where the face is positioned. Or how she employed a dragon to caramelize the tops of all the crème brûlées before a big party in the castle, but forgot to check whether the dragon had a cold. Or how she stood on her balcony with her dressing gown hanging open, shooting at people with a paintball gun.

  And the Miamasians laugh so loudly that the stories rise up like lanterns around the grave. Until all stories are one and the tenses are one and the same. They laugh until no one can forget that this is what we leave behind when we go: the laughs.

  “Halfie turned out to be a boy-half. He’s going to be called Harry!” Elsa explains proudly as she scrapes snow from the stone.

  “Alf says it’s lucky he turned out to be a boy, because the women in our family are ‘so bonkers they’re a safety hazard.’ ” She chuckles, making quotation marks in the air and grumpily dragging her feet through the snow, Alf-style. The cold is nipping at her cheeks. She nips it back. Dad digs away the snow and scrapes his spade along the top layer of earth. Elsa tightens her Gryffindor scarf around her neck. Scatters the wurse’s ashes over Granny’s grave and a thick layer of cinnamon bun crumbs over the ashes.

  Then she hugs the gravestone tight, tight, tight, and whispers:

  “See you later!”

  She’s going to tell all their stories. She’s already telling him the first few as she wanders back to Audi with Dad. And Dad listens. He turns down the volume of the stereo before Elsa has time to jump in. Elsa scrutinizes him.

  “Were you upset yesterday when I hugged George at the hospital?” she asks.

  “No.”

  “I don’t want you to be upset.”

  “I don’t get upset.”

  “Not even a little?” says Elsa, offended.

  “Am I allowed to be upset?” wonders Dad.

  “You can be a little bit upset,” mutters Elsa.

  “Okay . . . I am a bit upset,” Dad tries, and actually does look upset.

  “That looks too upset.”

  “Sorry,” says Dad, beginning to sound stressed.

  “You shouldn’t be so upset that I feel guilty about it. Just upset enough so it doesn’t feel like you’re not bothered!” explains Elsa.

  He tries again.

  “Now you’re not looking at all upset!”

  “Maybe I’m upset on the inside?”

  Elsa scrutinizes him before conceding:

  “Deal.” She says it in English.

  Dad nods dubiously and manages to stop himself from pointing out that she should avoid using English words when there are perfectly good alternatives in her own language. Elsa opens and shuts the glove compartment as Audi glides up the highway.

  “He’s quite okay. George, I mean.”

  “Yes,” says Dad.

  “I know you don’t mean that,” Elsa protests.

  “George is okay.” Dad nods as if he means it.

  “So why don’t we ever have Christmas together, then?” mutters Elsa with irritation.

  “How do you mean?”

  “I thought you and Lisette never came to us at Christmas because you don’t like George.”

  “I have nothing at all against George.”

  “But?”

  “But?”

  “But there’s a ‘but’ coming here, isn’t there? It feels like there’s a ‘but’ coming,” mumbles Elsa.

  Dad sighs.

  “But I suppose George and I are quite different in terms of our . . . personalities, perhaps. He’s very . . .”

  “Fun?”

  Dad looks stressed again.

  “I was going to say he seems very outgoing.”

  “And you’re very . . . ingoing?”

  Dad fingers the steering wheel nervously.

  “Why can’t it be your mother’s fault? Perhaps we don’t visit you at Christmas because Mum doesn’t like Lisette.”

  “Is that it?”

  Dad looks uncomfortable. He’s a terrible liar. “No. Everyone likes Lisette. I’m well aware of it.” He says it as people do when considering an extremely irritating character trait in the person they live with.

  Elsa looks at him for a long time before she asks:

  “Is that why Lisette loves you? Because you are very ingoing?”

  Dad smiles.

  “I don’t know why she loves me, if I’m to be quite honest.”

  “Do you love her?”

  “Incredibly,” he says without any hesitation.

  But then he immediately looks quite hesitant again.

  “Are you going to ask why Mum and I stopped loving each other?”

  “I was going to ask why you started.”

  “Was our marriage so terrible, in your view?”

  Elsa shrugs.

  “I mean, you’re very different, that’s all. She doesn’t like Apple, that sort of thing. And you kind of don’t like Star Wars.”

  “There are plenty of people who don’t like Star Wars.”

  “Dad, there’s NO ONE who doesn’t like Star Wars except you!”

  Dad seems unwilling to take issue with this.

  “Lisette and I are also very different,” he points out.

  “Does she like Star Wars?”

  “I have to admit I’ve never asked.”

  “How can you NOT have asked her that?!”

  “We’re different in other ways. I’m almost sure about that.”

  “So why are you together, then?”

  “Because we accept each other as we are, perhaps.”

  “And you and Mum tried to change each other?”

  He leans over and kisses her forehead.

  “I worry about how wise you are sometimes, darling.”

  Elsa blinks intensely. Takes a deep breath. Gathers her energy and whispers:

  “Those texts from Mum you got on the last day of school before the Christmas holiday. About not having to pick me up? I wrote them. I lied, so I could deliver one of Granny’s letters—”<
br />
  “I knew,” he interrupts.

  Elsa squints suspiciously at him. He smiles.

  “The grammar was too perfect. I knew right away.”

  It’s still snowing. It’s one of those magical winters when it never seems to end. After Audi has stopped outside Mum’s house, Elsa turns to Dad very seriously.

  “I want to stay with you and Lisette more often than every other weekend. Even if you don’t want that.”

  “You . . . my darling . . . you can stay with us as often as you like!” Dad stammers, quite overwhelmed.

  “No. Only every other weekend. And I get that it’s because I’m different and it upsets your ‘family harmony.’ But Mum is having Halfie now. And actually Mum can’t do everything all the time because no one’s perfect all the time. Not even Mum!”

  “Where . . . ‘family harmony’ . . . where did you get that from?”

  “I read things.”

  “We didn’t want to take you away from the house,” he whispers.

  “Because you didn’t want to take me away from Mum?”

  “Because none of us wanted to take you away from your granny.”

  The last words between them dissipate into the air and leave nothing behind. The snowflakes are falling so densely against Audi’s windshield that the world in front of them seems to have disappeared. Elsa holds Dad’s hand. Dad holds hers even tighter.

  “It’s hard for a parent to accept that you can’t protect your child from everything.”

  “It’s hard for a child to accept it too,” says Elsa, and pats him on the cheek. He holds on to her fingers.

  “I’m an ambivalent person. I know this makes me a bad father. I’ve always worried that my life should be in better order before you start living with us for longer periods. I thought it was for your sake. That’s what parents often do, I think, we persuade ourselves we’re doing everything for the sake of the child. It’s too painful to us to admit that our children won’t wait to grow up because their parents are busy with other things. . . .”

  Elsa’s forehead rests in the palm of his hand when she whispers: “You don’t need to be a perfect dad, Dad. But you have to be my dad. And you can’t let Mum be more of a parent than you just because she happens to be a superhero.”