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

  “Promise,” Elsa insists.

  And then Granny leans forward and whispers into her ear, in their secret language:

  “I promise, my beloved, beloved knight. I promise that it will get better. I promise that everything will be fine.”

  Because that is what Granny always says. That it will get better. That everything will be fine.

  “But I still think that Spider-Man fellow would have wiped the floor with this Harry,” Granny adds with a grin. And, in the end, Elsa grins back at her.

  They eat more cinnamon buns and play more Monopoly. And this makes it much more difficult to stay grumpy.

  The sun goes down. Everything goes silent. Elsa lies very close to Granny in the narrow hospital bed. And they mainly just close their eyes, and the cloud animals come to fetch them, and they go to Miamas together.

  And in an apartment block on the other side of town, everyone wakes up with a start when the hound in the first-floor flat, without any warning, starts howling. Louder and more heartrendingly than anything they have ever heard coming out of the primal depths of any animal. As if it is singing with the sorrow and yearning of an eternity of ten thousand fairy tales. It howls for hours, all through the night, until dawn.

  And when the morning light seeps into the hospital room, Elsa wakes up in Granny’s arms. But Granny is still in Miamas.

  5

  LILIES

  Having a grandmother is like having an army. This is a grandchild’s ultimate privilege: knowing that someone is on your side, always, whatever the details. Even when you are wrong. Especially then, in fact.

  A grandmother is both a sword and a shield. When they say at school that Elsa is “different,” as if this is something bad; or when she comes home with bruises and the headmaster says she “has to learn to fit in,” this is when Granny backs her up. Won’t let her apologize. Refuses to let her take the blame. Granny never says to Elsa that she shouldn’t let it get to her because “then they won’t enjoy teasing you as much.” Or that she should “just walk away.” Granny knows better than that.

  And the lonelier Elsa gets in the real world, the larger her army in the Land-of-Almost-Awake. The harder the lashes of rolled-up towels in the day, the more astounding the adventures she gets to ride into in the night. In Miamas, no one says she has to learn to fit in. That’s why Elsa wasn’t especially impressed when Dad took her to that hotel in Spain and explained that it was “all-inclusive” there. Because if you have a granny, your whole life is all-inclusive.

  Her teachers at school say that Elsa is having “concentration issues.” But it isn’t true. She can recite more or less all of Harry Potter by memory. She can outline the exact superpowers of all the X-Men and knows exactly which of them Spider-Man could and could not take out in a fight. And she can draw a fairly okay version of the map at the start of The Lord of the Rings with her eyes closed. Unless Granny is standing next to her, tugging at the paper and moaning about how this is insanely boring and how she’d rather take Renault out and “do something.” She’s a bit restless, Granny. But she has shown Elsa every corner of Miamas and all the corners of the other five kingdoms in the Land-of-Almost-Awake. Even the ruins of Mibatalos, which was sacked by the shadows at the end of the War-Without-End. Elsa has stood with Granny on the rocks by the coast, where the ninety-nine snow-angels sacrificed themselves; she has looked out over the sea, where one day the shadows will come back. And she knows all about the shadows, because Granny always says one should know one’s enemies better than oneself.

  The shadows were dragons in the beginning, but they had an evil and a darkness of such strength within themselves that it made them into something else. Something much more dangerous. They hate people and their stories; they have hated for so long and with such intensity that in the end the darkness enveloped their whole bodies until their shapes were no longer discernible. That is also why they are so difficult to defeat, because they can disappear into walls or into the ground or float up. They’re ferocious and bloodthirsty, and if you’re bitten by one you don’t just die; a far more serious and terrible fate lies in store: you lose your imagination. It just runs out of your wound and leaves you gray and empty. You wither away year by year until your body is just a shell. Until no one remembers any fairy tales anymore.

  And without fairy tales, Miamas and the whole Land-of-Almost-Awake die a death without imagination. The most repellent kind of death.

  But Wolfheart defeated the shadows in the War-Without-End. He came out of the forests when the fairy tales needed him most and drove the shadows into the sea. And one day the shadows will come back, and maybe that is why Granny tells her all the stories now, thinks Elsa. To prepare her.

  So the teachers are wrong. Elsa has no problems concentrating. She just concentrates on the right things.

  Granny says people who think slowly always accuse quick thinkers of concentration problems. “Idiots can’t understand that non-idiots are done with a thought and already moving on to the next before they themselves have. That’s why idiots are always so scared and aggressive. Because nothing scares idiots more than a smart girl.”

  That is what she often says to Elsa when Elsa has had a particularly concentration-challenged day at school, and they lie on Granny’s gigantic bed under all the black-and-white photographs on Granny’s ceiling, and close their eyes until the people in the photographs start dancing. Elsa doesn’t know who they are, Granny just calls them her “stars,” because when the streetlight comes through the blinds they glitter like the sky at night. Men in uniforms stand there and other men in doctors’ coats and a few men with hardly any clothes on at all. Tall men and smiling men and men with moustaches and heavyset men wearing hats, and they all stand next to Granny and they look as if she just told them a cheeky joke. None of them are looking into the camera, because none of them can tear their eyes away from her.

  Granny is young. She is beautiful. And immortal. She stands by road signs whose letters Elsa can’t read; she stands outside tents in deserts between men with rifles in their hands. And everywhere in the photos are children. Some of them have bandages around their heads and some lie in hospital beds with tubes inserted into their bodies, and one of them only has one arm and a stump where the other arm should have been. But one of the boys hardly looks hurt at all. He looks like he could run fifty miles in his bare feet. He’s about the same age as Elsa, and his hair is so thick and tangled that you could lose your keys in it, and there’s something in his eyes as if he’d just found a secret stash of fireworks and ice cream. His eyes are big and perfectly round and so black that the surrounding white is like chalk on a blackboard. Elsa doesn’t know who he is, but she calls him the Werewolf Boy, because that is what he looks like to her.

  She always thinks about asking Granny more about the Werewolf Boy. But the minute the thought occurs to Elsa, her eyelids start drooping and in the next moment she is sitting on a cloud animal and Granny is next to her on her own and they’re gliding over the Land-of-Almost-Awake and landing by the city gates of Miamas. And then Elsa thinks that she’ll ask Granny in the morning.

  And then one morning there is no morning anymore.

  Elsa is sitting on the bench outside the big window. She’s so cold that her teeth are chattering. Her mum is inside talking to the woman who sounds like a whale, or, at least, the way Elsa imagines a whale would sound. Which is difficult to know, admittedly, when you have never happened to run into a whale, but she sounds like Granny’s record player after Granny tried to build a robot out of it. It was slightly unclear what sort of robot she was intending to build, but whatever the case it wasn’t a very good one. And then it sounded like a whale after that whenever you tried to play a record on it. Elsa learned all about LPs and CDs that afternoon. That was when she worked out why old people seem to have so much free time, because in the olden days until Spotify came along they must have used up almost all their time just changing the track.

  She tightens her coat collar and her
Gryffindor scarf around her chin. The first snow came in the night. Gradually, almost reluctantly. Now it’s so deep you can make snow-angels. Elsa loves doing that.

  In Miamas there are snow-angels all year round. But as Granny constantly reminds Elsa, they are not especially polite. They’re quite arrogant and self-important, in fact, and always complain about the service when they’re eating out at one of the inns. “There’s a right fuss, smelling the wine and all that crap,” snorts Granny.

  Elsa holds out her foot and catches the snowflakes on her shoe. She hates sitting on benches outside, waiting for Mum, but she still does it, because the only thing Elsa hates more is sitting inside waiting for Mum.

  She wants to go home. With Granny. It’s as if the whole house is missing Granny now. Not the people living in it, but the actual building. The walls are creaking and whining. And Our Friend has been howling without pause in its flat for two whole nights.

  Britt-Marie forced Kent to ring the doorbell of Our Friend’s flat, but no one answered. It just barked so loudly that Kent stumbled into a wall. So Britt-Marie called the police. She has hated Our Friend for a long time. A couple of months ago she went round the house with a petition, to get everyone to sign it so she could send it to the landlord and demand “the eviction of that horrendous hound.”

  “We can’t have dogs in the leaseholders’ association. It’s a question of safety! It’s dangerous for the children, and one must think of the children!” Britt-Marie explained this to everyone in the manner of someone who is concerned about children, although the only children in the house are Elsa and the boy with a syndrome, and Elsa is pretty sure that Britt-Marie is not massively worried about Elsa’s safety.

  The boy with a syndrome lives opposite the terrifying dog, but his mother lightheartedly told Britt-Marie she believed the hound was more bothered by her son than the other way around. Granny couldn’t stop herself laughing when she heard this, but it made Elsa worry about Britt-Marie trying to prohibit children as well.

  Elsa jumps off the bench and starts traipsing around in the snow, to warm up her feet. Next to the big window where the whale-woman is working there’s a supermarket with a sign outside: MINCEBEEF 49.90. Elsa tries to control herself because her mum is always telling her to control herself. But in the end she takes her red felt-tip pen from her jacket pocket and adds a neat “D” and a slash, to show that it should be two words.

  She looks at the result and nods slightly. Then puts the pen back in her pocket and sits down again on the bench. Leans her head back and closes her eyes and feels the cold little feet of the snowflakes landing on her face. When the smell of smoke reaches her nostrils she thinks she’s imagining it. At first it’s even wonderful to feel that acrid smell at the back of her throat and, though Elsa can’t think why, it makes her feel warm and secure. But then she feels something else. Something thumping behind her ribs. Like a warning signal.

  The man is standing a distance away. In the shadow of one of the high-rise apartment buildings. She can’t see him clearly, only pick out the red glow of his cigarette between his fingers and the fact that he’s very thin. As if he’s lacking in contours. He stands partially turned away from her, as if he hasn’t even seen her.

  And Elsa doesn’t know why she gets so scared, but she finds herself fumbling around the bench for a weapon. It’s very odd; she never does that in the real world. In the real world, her first instinct is always to run. Only in Miamas would she reach for her sword, as a knight does when sensing danger. But there are no swords here.

  When she looks up again the man is still turned away from her, but she could swear that he’s moved closer. And he’s still in the shade, although he’s moved away from the high-rise. As if the shadow isn’t cast by the house, but by the man himself. Elsa blinks, and when she opens her eyes she no longer thinks the man has moved closer.

  She knows he has.

  She slips off the bench and reverses towards the big window, fumbling for the door handle. Stumbles inside. Stands there panting, gasping, trying to calm down. Only when the door closes behind her with a little friendly pling does she understand what she found reassuring about the cigarette smoke.

  The man smokes the same tobacco as Granny. Elsa would recognize it anywhere, because Granny used to let her help out with the cigarette rolling, because Granny says that Elsa has “such small fingers, and they’re perfect for these little sods.”

  When she looks out the window she no longer knows where the shadows begin and end. One moment she imagines the man is still standing there on the other side of the street, but then she starts wondering if she actually saw him at all.

  She jumps like a startled animal when Mum’s hands alight on her shoulders. She spins round with wide-open eyes, before her legs give way. Tiredness disarms all her senses once she is in her mother’s arms. She has not slept for two days. Mum’s distended belly is big enough to rest a teacup on. George says it is nature’s way of giving a pregnant woman a break.

  “Let’s go home,” Mum whispers softly in her ear.

  Elsa stares, forcing her tiredness away and sliding out of her mother’s grip.

  “First I want to talk to Granny!”

  Mum looks devastated. Elsa knows that because “devastated” is a word for the word jar.

  (We’ll get to the word jar later in this story.)

  “It’s . . . darling . . . I don’t know if it’s a good idea,” whispers Mum.

  But Elsa has already run past the reception desk and into the next room. She can hear the whale-woman yelling behind her, but then she hears her mother’s composed voice asking her to let Elsa go inside.

  Granny is waiting for her in the middle of the room. There’s a fragrance of lilies, Mum’s favorite flower. Granny doesn’t have any favorite flowers because no plant lives for longer than twenty-four hours in Granny’s flat, and in a fairly rare instance of compliance, possibly also because of the enthusiastic encouragement of her favorite grandchild, Granny has decided it would be bloody unfair to nature for her to have any favorite flowers.

  Elsa stands to one side with her hands pushed moodily into her jacket pockets. Defiantly she stamps snow from her shoes onto the floor.

  “I don’t want to be a part of this treasure hunt, it’s idiotic.”

  Granny doesn’t answer. She never answers when she knows that Elsa is right. Elsa stamps more snow off her shoes.

  “YOU are idiotic,” she says cuttingly.

  Granny doesn’t rise to that one either. Elsa sits on the chair next to her and holds out the letter.

  “You can take care of this idiotic letter yourself,” she whispers.

  Two days have gone by since Our Friend started howling. Two days since Elsa was last in the Land-of-Almost-Awake and the kingdom of Miamas. No one is being straight with her. All the grown-ups try to wrap it in cotton wool, so it doesn’t sound dangerous or frightening or unpleasant. As if Granny hasn’t been ill. As if the whole thing was an accident. But Elsa knows they’re lying, because Elsa’s granny hasn’t ever been laid low by an accident. Usually it’s the accident that gets laid low by Granny.

  And Elsa knows what cancer is. It says all about it on Wikipedia.

  She gives the edge of the coffin a shove, to get a reaction. Because deep down she’s still hoping this could be one of those occasions when Granny is just pulling her leg. Like that time Granny dressed the snowman so he looked like a real person who’d fallen from the balcony, and Britt-Marie got so furious when she realized it was a joke that she called the police. And the next morning when Britt-Marie looked out the window, she discovered that Granny had made another identical snowman, and then Britt-Marie “went loopy,” as Granny put it, and came charging out with a snow shovel. And then the snowman jumped up and roared, “WAAAAAAAAH!!!” Granny told her afterwards that she’d lain in the snow for hours waiting for Britt-Marie and at least two cats had weed on her in the meantime, “but it was well worth it!” Britt-Marie called the police again, of course, but
they said it wasn’t a crime to scare someone.

  This time, though, Granny doesn’t get up. Elsa bangs her fists against the coffin, but Granny doesn’t answer, and Elsa bangs harder and harder as if it’s possible to put right all the things that are wrong by banging. In the end she slips off the chair and sinks onto her knees on the floor and whispers:

  “Do you know that they’re lying, they say you’ve ‘passed away,’ or, that we’ve ‘lost you?’ No one says ‘dead.’ ”

  Elsa digs her nails into her palms and her whole body trembles.

  “I don’t know how to get to Miamas if you’re dead. . . .”

  Granny doesn’t answer. Elsa puts her forehead against the lower edge of the coffin. She feels the cold wood against her skin and warm tears on her lips. Then she feels Mum’s soft fingers against her neck, and she turns around and throws her arms around her, and Mum carries her out of there. When she opens her eyes again she’s sitting in Kia, Mum’s car.

  Mum is standing outside in the snow talking to George on the telephone. Elsa knows she doesn’t want her to hear them talking about the funeral. She’s not an idiot. She’s still got Granny’s letter in her hand. She knows you’re not supposed to read other people’s letters, but she must have read this one a hundred times these last two days. Granny must have known she’d do this, because she’s written the entire letter in symbols that Elsa can’t understand. Using the strange alphabet she saw on the road signs in Granny’s photographs.

  Elsa glares at it. Granny always said she and Elsa shouldn’t have any secrets from each other, only secrets together. She’s furious with Granny for the lie, because now Elsa sits here with the greatest secret of them all and she can’t understand a crapping thing. And she knows that if she falls out with Granny at this point, it will set a personal record that they can never beat.

  The ink smudges over the paper when she blinks down at it. Although there are letters that Elsa doesn’t know, Granny has probably misspelled things. When Granny writes, it’s as if she is just scattering words over the page while she’s already mentally on her way somewhere else. It’s not that Granny can’t spell, it’s just that she thinks so fast that the letters and words can’t keep up. And unlike Elsa, Granny can’t see the point of spelling things correctly; anyway she was always better at science and numbers. “You bloody understand what I mean!” she hisses when she passes Elsa secret notes while they’re eating with Mum and George and Elsa adds the dashes and spaces in the right places with her red felt-tip pen.