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 told you it likes dreams, didn’t I?” says Elsa cheerfully.

  Maud nods mutely. Lennart sits on the other side of the table, with an immeasurably terrified-looking Samantha on his lap. The wurse eats dreams, a dozen at a time.

  “What breed is that?” says Lennart very quietly to Elsa, as if he’s afraid the wurse may take offense.

  “A wurse!” says Elsa with satisfaction.

  Lennart nods like you do when you don’t have a clue what something means. Maud opens a new tin of dreams and carefully pushes it across the floor with the tips of her toes. The wurse empties it in three slavering bites, then lifts its head and peers at Maud with eyes as big as hubcaps. Maud takes down another two tins and tries not to look flattered. It doesn’t go so very well.

  Elsa looks at the letter from Granny. It’s lying unfolded and open on the table. Lennart and Maud must have read it while she was in the cellar getting the wurse. Lennart notices her looking, and he puts his hand on her shoulder.

  “You’re right, Elsa. Your grandmother says sorry.”

  “For what?”

  Maud gives the wurse some cinnamon buns and half a length of sweet cake.

  “Well, it was quite a list. Your grandmother was certainly—”

  “Different,” Elsa interjects.

  Maud laughs warmly and pats the wurse on the head.

  Lennart nods at the letter.

  “First of all she apologizes for telling us off so often. And for being angry so often. And for arguing and causing problems. It’s really nothing to apologize about, all people do that from time to time!” he says, as if apologizing for Granny apologizing.

  “You don’t,” says Elsa and likes them for it. Maud starts giggling. “And then she apologized about that time she happened to shoot Lennart from her balcony with one of those, what are they called, paint-bomb guns!”

  Suddenly she looks embarrassed.

  “Is that what it’s called? Paint-bomb?”

  Elsa nods. Even though it isn’t. Maud looks proud.

  “Once your grandmother even got Britt-Marie—there was a big pink stain on her floral-print jacket, and that’s Britt-Marie’s favorite jacket and the stain wouldn’t even go away with Vanish! Can you imagine?”

  Maud titters. And then she looks very guilty.

  “What else does Granny apologize about?” Elsa asks, hoping for more stories about someone shooting that paintball gun at Britt-Marie. But Lennart’s chin drops towards his chest. He looks at Maud and she nods, and Lennart turns to Elsa and says:

  “Your granny wrote that she was sorry for asking us to tell you the whole story. Everything you have to know.”

  “What story?” Elsa’s about to ask, but she suddenly becomes aware of someone standing behind her. She twists round in her chair, and the boy with a syndrome is standing in the bedroom doorway with a cuddly lion in his arms.

  He looks at Elsa, but when she looks back at him he lets his hair fall over his brow, like Elsa sometimes does. He’s about a year younger, but almost exactly as tall, and they have the same hairstyle and almost the same color too. The only thing that sets them apart is that Elsa is different and the boy has a syndrome, which is a very special kind of difference.

  The boy doesn’t say anything, because he never does. Maud kisses his forehead and whispers, “Nightmare?” and the boy nods. Maud gets a big glass of milk and a whole tin of dreams, takes his hand, and leads him back into the bedroom, while robustly saying: “Come on, let’s chase it away at once!”

  Lennart turns to Elsa.

  “I think your grandmother wanted me to start at the beginning.”

  And that was the day Elsa heard the story of the boy with a syndrome. A fairy tale she’d never heard before. A tale so terrible it makes you want to hug yourself as hard as you can. Lennart tells her about the boy’s father, who has more hatred in him than anyone could think would be possible to fit into one person. The father used narcotics. Lennart stops himself, and seems worried about frightening Elsa, but she straightens her back and buries her hands in the wurse’s fur and says it doesn’t matter. Lennart asks if she knows what narcotics are, and she says she’s read about them on Wikipedia.

  Lennart describes how the father became a different creature when he used drugs. How he became dark in his soul. How he hit the boy’s mother while she was pregnant, because he didn’t want to become anyone’s father. Lennart’s eyes start blinking more and more slowly, and he says that maybe it was because the father feared the child would be as he was. Filled with hatred and violence. So when the boy was born, and the doctors said he had a syndrome, the father was beside himself with rage. He couldn’t tolerate that the child was different. Maybe it was because he hated everything that was different. Maybe because, when he looked at the boy, he saw everything that was different in himself.

  So he drank alcohol, took more of that stuff on Wikipedia, and disappeared for entire nights and sometimes for weeks on end, without anyone knowing where he was. Sometimes he came home utterly calm and withdrawn. Sometimes he cried, explaining that he’d had to keep out of the way until he’d wrung his own anger out of himself. As if there were something dark living in him that was trying to transform him, and he was struggling against it. He could remain calm for weeks after that. Or months.

  Then one night the dark took possession of him. He hit and hit and hit them until neither of them was moving anymore. And then he ran.

  Maud’s voice moves gently through the silence that Lennart leaves behind him in the kitchen. In the bedroom the boy with a syndrome snores, which is one of the first sounds Elsa has ever heard him make. Maud’s fingertips scramble about among the empty cookie tins on the kitchen counter.

  “We found them. We’d been trying, for such a long time, to make her take the boy and leave, but she was so afraid. We were all so afraid. He was a terribly dangerous man,” she whispers.

  Elsa grips the wurse tighter.

  “Then what did you do?”

  Maud crumples up by the kitchen table. She has an envelope in her hand, just like the one Elsa arrived with.

  “We knew your grandmother. From the hospital. We ran a café back then, you see, for the doctors, and your grandmother came there every day. A dozen dreams and a dozen cinnamon buns, every single day! I don’t know how it started, really. But your grandmother was the sort of person one told things to, if you see what I mean? I didn’t know what to do about Sam. I didn’t know who to turn to. We were so terribly frightened, all of us, but I called her. She arrived in her rusty old car in the middle of the night—”

  “Renault!” Elsa exclaims, because for some reason she has a sense that he deserves his name in the fairy tale if he’s the one who came to their rescue. Lennart clears his throat with a sad smile.

  “Her Renault, yes. We took the boy and his mother with us and your grandmother drove here. Gave us the keys to the flats. I can’t think how she got her hands on them, but she said she’d clear it with the owners of the building. We’ve been living here ever since.”

  “And the father? What happened when he realized everyone was gone?” Elsa wants to know, although she actually doesn’t want to know.

  Lennart’s hand seeks Maud’s fingers.

  “We don’t know. But your grandmother came here with Alf, and said this is Alf and he’s going to fetch all the boy’s things. And she went back there with Alf and the boy’s father turned up and he was . . . nothing but darkness then. Darkness from deep inside. He hit Alf something terrible—”

  Lennart stops himself the way one does when suddenly reminding oneself that one is talking to a child. Fast-forwards through the story.

  “Well, of course, he was already gone by the time the police came. And Alf, gosh, I don’t know. He was patched up at the hospital and drove home by himself and never said a word about it again. And two days later he was driving his cab again. He’s made of steel, that man.”

  “And the father?” Elsa persists.

  “He
disappeared. Disappeared for years. We thought he’d never give up trying to find us, but he was gone for so long that we hoped—” says Lennart, interrupting himself as if the words are too heavy for his tongue.

  “But now he’s found us,” Maud fills in.

  “How?” asks Elsa.

  Lennart’s eyes creep along the tabletop.

  “Alf thinks he found your grandmother’s death notice, you see. And using that he found the undertaker’s. And there he found—” he starts to say, then looks as if he’s reminding himself of something once again.

  “Me?” Elsa gulps.

  Lennart nods and Maud lets go of his hand and runs around the table and embraces Elsa.

  “Dear, dear Elsa! You have to understand, he hasn’t seen the boy in many years. And you’re about the same size and you have the same hair. He thinks you’re our grandchild.”

  Elsa closes her eyes. Her temples are burning, and for the first time in her life she uses pure and furious willpower to go to the Land-of-Almost-Awake without even being close to sleeping. With all the most powerful force of imagination she can muster she calls up the cloud animals and flies to Miaudacas. Gathers up all the courage she can carry. Then she pries her eyes open and looks at Lennart and Maud and says:

  “So you’re his mother’s parents?”

  Lennart’s tears fall onto the tablecloth like rain against a windowsill.

  “No. We’re his father’s parents.”

  Elsa squints.

  “You’re the father’s parents?”

  Maud’s chest rises and sinks and she pats the wurse on the head and goes to fetch a chocolate cake. Samantha looks cautiously at the wurse. Lennart goes to get more coffee. His cup trembles so much that it spills onto the countertop.

  “I know it sounds terrible, Elsa, taking a child from his father. To do that to your own son. But when you become grandparents, then you are grandparents first and foremost. . . .” he whispers sadly.

  “You’re a grandmother and grandfather above all things! Always! Always!” Maud adds with unshakable defiance, and her eyes burn in a way that Elsa wouldn’t have believed was possible in Maud.

  Then she gives Elsa the envelope she got from the bedroom.

  It has Granny’s handwriting on it. Elsa doesn’t recognize the name, but she understands it’s for the boy’s mother.

  “She changed her name when we moved here,” Maud explains and, in the softest voice possible, adds: “Your grandmother left this letter with us months ago. She said you had to come for it. She knew you’d come.”

  Lennart inhales unhappily. His and Maud’s eyes meet again, then he explains:

  “But I’m afraid that first of all we have to tell you about our son, Elsa. We have to tell you about Sam. And that’s one of the things your grandmother apologizes for in her letter. She writes that she’s sorry she saved Sam’s life. . . .”

  Maud’s voice cracks until her words are like little whistles:

  “And then she wrote that she was sorry for writing to say she was sorry about it, sorry for regretting that she had saved our son’s life. Sorry because she no longer knew if he deserved to live. Even though she was a doctor . . .”

  Night comes to the streets outside the window. The kitchen smells of coffee and chocolate cake. And Elsa listens to the story of Sam.

  The son of the world’s kindest couple, who became more evil than anyone could understand. Who became the father of the boy with a syndrome, who, in turn, had less evil in him than anyone could have believed, as if his father took it all on his shoulders and passed none of it on. She heard the story of how Sam was once a little boy himself, and how Maud and Lennart, who had waited for a child for so long, had loved him, as parents love their children. As all parents, even the very, very worst possible, must at some point have loved their children. That is how Maud puts it. “Because otherwise one can’t be a human being, I just can’t imagine one could be a human otherwise,” she whispers. And she insists that it has to be her fault, because she can’t imagine that any child is born evil. It has to be the mother’s fault if a boy who was once so small and helpless grows up into something so terrible, she’s quite sure of that. In spite of Elsa saying that Granny always said some people are actually just shits and that it’s no one else’s fault other than the shit’s.

  “But Sam was always so angry, I don’t know where all that anger came from. There must have been a darkness in me that I passed over to him, and I don’t know where it came from,” Maud whispers, quite crushed.

  And then she talks about a boy who grew up and always fought, always tormented other children at school, always chased those who were different. And about how when he was an adult he became a soldier and went to far-off lands because he thirsted for war, and how he met a friend there. His first real friend. About how everyone who saw it said that it had changed him, brought out something good in him. His friend was also a soldier, but another sort of soldier, without that thirst. They became inseparable. Sam said his friend was the bravest warrior he had ever seen.

  They went home together and his friend introduced Sam to a girl he knew, and she saw something in Sam and for a brief moment Lennart and Maud also got to see a glimpse of someone else. A Sam beyond the darkness.

  “We thought she’d save him, we all hoped so much that she’d save him, because it would have been like a fairy tale, and when one has lived in the dark for so long it’s so very difficult not to believe in fairy tales,” Maud admits, while Lennart clasps her hand.

  “But then those little circumstances of life came up,” Lennart sighs, “like in so many fairy tales. And maybe it wasn’t Sam’s fault. Or maybe it was entirely Sam’s fault. Maybe it’s for people much wiser than I to decide whether every person is completely responsible for their actions or not. But Sam went back to the wars. And he came home even darker.”

  “He used to be an idealist,” Maud interjects gloomily. “Despite all that hatred and anger, he was an idealist. That’s why he wanted to be a soldier.”

  And then Elsa asks if she can borrow Maud and Lennart’s computer.

  “If you have a computer, I mean!” she adds apologetically, because she thinks about the palaver she had with Wolfheart when she asked him the same thing.

  “Of course we have a computer,” says Lennart, puzzled. “Who doesn’t these days?”

  Quite right, thinks Elsa, and decides to bring it up with Wolfheart next time he turns up. If there is another time.

  Lennart leads her past the bedroom. In the little study at the far end of the flat, he explains that their computer is very old, of course, so she has to have a bit of patience. And on a table in there is the most unwieldy computer Elsa has ever seen, and at the back of the actual computer is a gigantic box, and on the floor is another box.

  “What’s that?” says Elsa, pointing at the box on the floor.

  “That’s the actual computer,” says Lennart.

  “And what about that?” asks Elsa and points at the other box.

  “That’s the monitor,” says Lennart and presses a big button on the box on the floor, then adds: “It’ll take a minute or so before it starts, so we’ll have to wait a bit.”

  “A MINUTE!” Elsa bursts out, then mumbles: “Wow. It really is old.”

  But when the old computer has eventually started and Lennart after many ifs and buts has gotten her onto the Internet and she has found what she is looking for, she goes back into the kitchen and sits opposite Maud.

  “So it means a dreamer. An idealist, I mean. It means a dreamer.”

  “Yes, yes, you could probably say that,” says Maud with a friendly smile.

  “It’s not that you could say it. It’s what it actually means,” Elsa corrects.

  And then Maud nods, even friendlier. And then she tells the story of the idealist who turned into a cynic, and Elsa knows what that means because a teacher at Elsa’s preschool once called Elsa that. There was an uproar when Elsa’s mum found out about it, but the teacher stood
his ground. Elsa can’t remember the exact details, but she thinks it was that time she told the other preschool pupils how sausages were made.

  She wonders if she’s thinking about these things as a kind of defense mechanism. For this tale really has too much reality in it. It often happens, when you’re almost eight, that there’s just too much reality.

  Maud describes how Sam went off to a new war. He had his friend with him, and for several weeks they had been protecting a village from attack by people who, for some reason unknown to Maud, wanted to kill all who lived there. In the end they received an order to abandon the place, but Sam’s friend refused. He convinced Sam and the rest of the soldiers to stay until the village was safe, and took as many injured children as they could fit into their cars to the nearest hospital, many miles away, because Sam’s friend knew a woman who worked as a doctor there, and everyone said she was the most skillful surgeon in the whole world.

  They were on their way through the desert when they hit the mine. The explosion was merciless. There was a rain of fire and blood.

  “Did anyone die?” asks Elsa, without really wanting to know the answer.

  “All of them,” says Lennart, without wanting to speak the words out loud. Except Sam’s friend and Sam himself. Sam was unconscious, but his friend dragged him out of the fire, Sam was the only one he had time to save. The friend had shrapnel in his face and terrible burns, but when he heard the shots and realized they’d been ambushed, he grabbed his rifle and ran into the desert and didn’t stop firing until only he and Sam lay there in the desert, panting and bleeding.

  The people who had been shooting at him were boys. Children, just like the children the soldiers had just tried to save. Sam’s friend could see that, as he stood over their dead bodies, with their blood on his hands. And he was never the same again.

  Somehow he managed to carry Sam through the desert and didn’t stop until he came to the hospital and Elsa’s grandmother came running towards them. She saved Sam’s life. He would always have a slight limp in one leg, but he would survive, and it was at that hospital that Sam started smoking Granny’s brand of cigarettes. Granny also apologizes about that in the letter.