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

  “Oh, theeere! That’s where the shopping center is. Why didn’t you just say?”

  Alf says something that Elsa can’t quite make out and closes the door in her face.

  “I’ll keep the map!” Elsa hollers cheerfully into his mail slot.

  He doesn’t answer.

  “It’s the Christmas holidays, if you’re wondering! That’s why I’m not at school!” she calls out.

  He doesn’t answer that either.

  The wurse is lying on its side with two legs comfortably stretched up into the air when Elsa walks into the storage unit, as if it has very gravely misunderstood a Pilates exercise. The Monster is standing in the passage outside, rubbing his hands. He looks very uncomfortable.

  Elsa holds up the envelope to him.

  “Are you coming?”

  The Monster nods. The hood glides away a few inches from his face, and the big scar gleams momentarily in the fluorescent light. He doesn’t even ask where they’re going. It’s difficult not to feel a pang of affection for him.

  Elsa looks first at him and then at the wurse. She knows that Mum is going to be angry with her for playing hooky and going off without permission, but when Elsa asks her why she’s always so worried about her, Mum always says, “Because I’m so bloody afraid something may happen to you.” But Elsa is having a pretty hard time thinking that anything can happen to you when you have a monster and a wurse tagging along. So she feels it should be okay, given the circumstances.

  The wurse tries to lick The Monster when it walks out of the storage unit. The Monster jumps in terror and snatches back his hand and grabs a broom leaning up against another storage unit. The wurse, as if it’s teasing and having a bit of a laugh, sweeps its tongue back and forth in long, provocative movements.

  “Stop it!” Elsa tells it.

  The Monster holds out the broom like a lance and tries to force the wurse back by pushing the bristles into its nose.

  “I said stop it!” Elsa snaps at both of them.

  The wurse closes its jaws around the broom and crunches it to smithereens.

  “Stop i—” Elsa begins but doesn’t have time to finish the last “it” before The Monster has thrown both broom and wurse across the cellar with all his might, sending the heavy animal crashing hard into the wall several yards away.

  The wurse rolls up and flexes its body in one movement, and is in the middle of a terrifying spring before it has even landed. Its jaws are open, and rows of kitchen knife–size teeth exposed. The Monster faces it with a broad chest and the blood pumping in his fists.

  “CUT IT OUT, I SAID!” Elsa roars, throwing her little body right between the two furious creatures, unprotected between claws as sharp as spears and fists probably big enough to separate her head from her shoulders. She stands her ground, armed with nothing but the indifference of an almost-eight-year-old to her own physical shortcomings. Which goes a long way.

  The wurse stops itself midleap and lands softly beside her. The Monster takes a few steps back. Slowly, muscles relax and lungs release air. Neither of them meets her gaze.

  “The idea here is that you’re supposed to protect me,” Elsa says in a quieter voice, trying not to cry, which doesn’t go so terrifically well. “I’ve never had any friends and now you two try to kill the only two I’ve ever had, just after I’ve found you!”

  The wurse lowers its nose. The Monster rubs his hands, disappears into his hood, and makes a rocking motion towards the wurse.

  “Started it,” The Monster manages to say.

  The wurse growls back.

  “Stop it!” She tries to sound angry but realizes she mainly just sounds as if she’s crying.

  The Monster, concerned, moves the palm of his hand up and down along her side, as close as possible without actually touching her.

  “Sor . . . ry,” he mumbles. The wurse buffets her shoulder. She rests her forehead against its nose.

  “We have an important mission here, so you can’t keep messing about. We have to deliver this letter because I think Granny wants to say sorry to someone else. And there are more letters. This is our fairy tale: to deliver every single one of Granny’s sorries.”

  With her face in the wurse’s fur, she inhales deeply and closes her eyes.

  “We have to do it for my mum’s sake. Because I’m hoping that the last sorry will be to her.”

  16

  DUST

  It turns into an epic adventure. A monstrous fairy tale.

  Elsa decides they should begin by taking the bus, like normal knights on normal quests in more or less normal fairy tales when there aren’t any horses or cloud animals available. But when all the other people at the bus stop start eyeing The Monster and the wurse and nervously shuffling as far away from them as it’s possible to be without ending up at the next bus stop, she realizes it’s not going to be quite so straightforward.

  On boarding the bus it becomes immediately clear that wurses are not all that partial to traveling by public transport. After it has snuffled about and stepped on people’s toes and overturned bags with its tail and accidentally dribbled a bit on a seat a little too close to The Monster for The Monster to feel entirely comfortable, Elsa decides to forget the whole thing, and then all three of them get off. Exactly one stop later.

  Elsa pulls the Gryffindor scarf tighter around her face, pushes her hands into her pockets, and leads them through the snow. The wurse is so delighted about escaping the bus that it skips in circles around Elsa and The Monster like an overexcited puppy. The Monster looks disgusted. He doesn’t seem used to being outdoors by daylight, Elsa notices. Maybe it’s because Wolfheart is used to living in the dark forests outside Miamas where the daylight doesn’t dare penetrate. At least, that is where he lives in Granny’s fairy tales, so if there is any sort of order to this story, this must surely be the logical explanation.

  People who see them on the pavement react as people generally do when they catch sight of a girl, a wurse, and a monster strolling along side by side: they cross the street. Some of them try to pretend that it has nothing to do with the fact that they are scared of monsters and wurses and girls, by demonstratively pretending to be having loud telephone conversations with someone who suddenly gives them different directions and tells them to go the opposite way. That is also what Elsa’s dad does sometimes when he’s gone the wrong way and he doesn’t want strangers to realize he’s one of those types who go the wrong way. Elsa’s mum never has that problem, because if she goes the wrong way she just keeps going until whoever she was supposed to be meeting has to follow her. Granny used to solve the problem by shouting at the road signs. It varies, how people deal with it.

  But others who run into the adventuring trio are not as discreet, and they watch Elsa from the other side of the road as if she’s being abducted. Elsa feels that The Monster would probably be good at many things, but a kidnapper who can be put out of action by sneezing at him would probably not be a particularly effective kidnapper. It’s a curious sort of Achilles’ heel for a superhero, she feels. Snot.

  The walk takes more than two hours. Elsa wishes it were Halloween, because then they could take the bus without scaring normal people, everyone would just assume they were dressed up. That’s why Elsa likes Halloween: on Halloween it’s normal to be different.

  It’s almost lunchtime by the time they find the right address. Elsa’s feet hurt and she’s hungry and in a bad mood. She knows that a knight of Miamas would never whine or be afraid of a grand adventure when sent out on a treasure hunt, but whoever said a knight can’t be hungry or ill-tempered?

  There’s a high-rise at the address, but also a hamburger restaurant across the street. Elsa tells the wurse and The Monster to wait, and she goes across even though she has firm moral objections to hamburger chains, as every almost-eight-year-old should. But even almost-eight-year-olds can’t eat their principles, so she grudgingly buys ice cream for the wurse, a hamburger for The Monster, and a veggie burger for herself. And as
she leaves she sneaks out her red felt-tip pen and crosses out the dash between “Lunch” and “menu” on the sign outside.

  Despite the below-freezing temperature clawing at their faces, they sit on a bench opposite the high-rise building. Or rather, Elsa and the wurse sit, because The Monster looks at the bench as if it’s also about to lick him. He refuses to even touch the greaseproof paper around his hamburger, so the wurse eats that as well. At one point the wurse drops a bit of ice cream on the bench and licks it up without concern, and The Monster looks close to asphyxiation. After the wurse takes a bite of Elsa’s burger and she carries on eating it regardless, she has to help him breathe from a paper bag.

  When they’re finally done, Elsa leans her head back and looks up the façade of the building. It must be fifteen floors high. She takes the envelope from her pocket, slides off the bench, and marches inside. The Monster and the wurse follow her in silence, surrounded by a strong smell of alcogel. Elsa quickly scans the board of residents on the wall and finds the name as written on the envelope, though preceded by the words “Reg. Psychotherapist.” Elsa doesn’t know what that means, but she’s heard a good deal about terropists setting off bombs and causing all sorts of trouble, so a psychoterropist must be even worse.

  She heads over to the lift at the other end of the corridor. The wurse stops when they get there, and refuses to take another step. Elsa shrugs and goes in. The Monster follows her, after a certain amount of hesitation, though he is careful not to touch any of the walls.

  Elsa evaluates The Monster as they’re going up. His beard sticks out of the hood like a large, curious squirrel, which makes him seem less and less dangerous the longer she knows him. The Monster clearly takes note of her examination of him, and he twists his hands uncomfortably. To her own surprise, Elsa realizes that his attitude hurts her feelings.

  “If it bothers you so much, you could just stay on guard downstairs with the wurse, you know. It’s not like something’s going to happen to me while I’m handing over a letter to the terropist.”

  She talks in normal language, because she refuses to speak in the secret language with him. Her jealousy about Granny’s language not even being Granny’s from the very beginning hasn’t gone away.

  “Anyway, you don’t have to be right beside me the whole time to be able to guard me,” she says, sounding more resentful than she means to. She’d started thinking of The Monster as a friend, but remembers now that he’s only here because Granny told him. The Monster just stands there in silence.

  When the elevator doors glide open Elsa marches out ahead of him. They pass rows of doors until they find the terropist’s door. Elsa knocks so hard she actually hurts her knuckles. The Monster backs off towards the wall on the other side of the narrow corridor, as if he realizes that the person on the other side of the door may peer through the spyhole. He seems to be trying to make himself as small and unfrightening as possible. It’s hard not to find this endearing, thinks Elsa—even if “unfrightening” is not a proper word.

  Elsa knocks on the door again. Puts her ear against the lock. Another knock. Another silence.

  “Empty,” says The Monster slowly.

  “No shit, Sherlock.”

  She really doesn’t mean to be angry with him, because it’s Granny she’s angry with. She’s just tired. So very, very tired. She looks around and catches sight of two wooden chairs.

  “They must be out for lunch, we’ll have to wait,” she says glumly, and drops despondently into one of the chairs.

  As far as Elsa is concerned, the silence goes from pleasant to hard work to unbearable in about one and a half eternities. And when she has occupied herself with everything she has been able to come up with—drumming her fingers against the tabletop, poking out all the stuffing from the chair cushion through a little hole in the fabric, and carving her name into the soft wood of the armrest with the nail of her index finger—she shatters the silence with one of those questions that sound much more accusing than she means it to be.

  “Why do you wear soldier’s trousers if you’re not a soldier?”

  The Monster breathes slowly under his hood.

  “Old trousers.”

  “Have you been a soldier?”

  The hood moves up and down.

  “War is wrong and soldiers are wrong. Soldiers kill people!”

  “Not that sort of soldier,” The Monster intones.

  “There’s only one sort of soldier!”

  The Monster doesn’t answer. Elsa carves a swearword into the wood of the armrest, using her nail. In actual fact she doesn’t want to ask the question that’s burning inside of her, because she doesn’t want The Monster to know how wounded she is. But she can’t stop herself. It’s one of Elsa’s big problems, they say at school. That she can never control herself.

  “Was it you who showed my granny Miamas, or was it Granny who showed you?”

  She spits out the words. The hood doesn’t move, but she can see him breathing. She’s just about to repeat the question when she hears, from the inside of it:

  “Your granny. Showed. As a child.”

  He says it the way he says everything in the normal language. As if the words come bickering out of his mouth.

  “You were about my age,” Elsa says, thinking of the photos of the Werewolf Boy.

  The hood moves up and down.

  “Did she tell you fairy tales?” she asks quietly, and wishes he’d say no, even though she knows better.

  The hood moves up and down.

  “Did you meet during a war? Is that why she called you Wolfheart?” She really doesn’t want to ask anymore, because she can feel her jealousy growing. But the hood continues to nod.

  “Camp. Camp for the one who flees.”

  “A refugee camp. Did Granny bring you here with her? Was she the one who arranged it so you could live in the flat?”

  There’s a long exhalation from the hood.

  “Lived in many places. Many homes.”

  “Foster homes?” He nods. “Why didn’t you stay there?”

  The hood moves from side to side, very slowly.

  “Bad homes. Dangerous. Your granny came to get me.”

  “Why did you become a soldier when you grew up? Was it so you could go to the same places as Granny?” He nods. “Did you also want to help people? Like she does?” Slowly, the hood moves up and down. “Why didn’t you become a doctor like Granny, then?” The Monster rubs his hands together.

  “Blood. Don’t like . . . blood.”

  “Smart idea to become a soldier. Are you an orphan?”

  The hood is still. The Monster is silent. But she notices that the beard withdraws even deeper into the darkness. Suddenly Elsa nods exuberantly to herself.

  “Like the X-Men!” she exclaims with more enthusiasm than she’s really willing to give away. Then she clears her throat, composes herself. “X-Men are . . . mutants. And many X-Men are sort of orphans. It’s quite cool.”

  The hood doesn’t move. Elsa pulls out some more stuffing from the chair cushion and feels stupid. She was about to add that Harry Potter was also an orphan, and to be like Harry Potter in any way at all is actually the coolest thing there is, but she’s starting to realize that The Monster probably doesn’t read as much quality literature as one might hope.

  “Is Miamas a word in the secret language?” she asks instead. “I mean, is it a word in your language? It doesn’t sound like other words in the secret language—I mean, your language.”

  The hood doesn’t move. But the words come more softly now. Not like all the other words from The Monster, which all seem to be on their guard. These sound almost dreamy.

  “Mama’s language. ‘Miamas.’ My . . . mama’s language.”

  Elsa looks up and gazes intently into the darkness inside the hood.

  “Did you not have the same language?”

  The hood moves from side to side.

  “Where did your mother come from?” asks Elsa.

  “O
ther place. Other war.”

  “What does Miamas mean, then?”

  The words come out like a sigh.

  “ ‘I love.’ ”

  “So it was your kingdom. That was why it was called Miamas. It wasn’t at all because I called pajamas ‘mjamas.’ ”

  Elsa pulls out the last bit of stuffing and rolls it into a ball to distract herself from her churning jealousy. Typical bloody Granny thing, making up Miamas for you so you’d know your mother loved you, she thinks, abruptly silencing herself when she realizes she is mumbling it aloud.

  The Monster shifts his weight from foot to foot. Breathing more slowly. Rubbing his hands.

  “Miamas. Not made up. Not pretend. Not for . . . a little one. Miamas. For real for . . . children.”

  And then, while Elsa closes her eyes to avoid showing her agreement, he goes on tentatively:

  “In letter. Grandmother’s apology. Was apology to mother,” he whispers from under his hood.

  Elsa’s eyes open and she frowns.

  “What?”

  The Monster’s chest heaves up and down.

  “You asked. About Granny’s letter. What Granny wrote. Wrote apology to mother. We never found . . . mother.”

  Their eyes meet halfway, on different terms. A tiny but mutual respect is created between them, there and then, as Miamasians. Elsa realizes that he is telling her what was in the letter because he understands what it’s like when people have secrets from you just because you’re a child. So she sounds considerably less angry when she asks:

  “Did you look for your mother?”

  The hood moves up and down.

  “For how long?”

  “Always. Since . . . the camp.”

  Elsa’s chin drops slightly.

  “So that’s why Granny was always going off on all these trips? Because you were looking for your mother?”

  The speed of The Monster’s hand-rubbing increases. His chest heaves. His hood moves down a fraction, then up again, infinitely slowly. And then everything is silent.