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

  Maud carefully places the photo album in front of Elsa, as if it were a small creature with feelings. Points at a photo of the boy with a syndrome’s mother. She’s standing between Lennart and Maud and wearing a bridal gown and they are laughing, all three of them.

  “I think Sam’s friend was in love with her. But he introduced her to Sam and they fell in love instead. I don’t think Sam’s friend ever said anything. They were like brothers, those two, can you imagine? I think his friend was just too kind to mention his own feelings, do you understand?”

  Elsa understands. Maud smiles.

  “He was always such a soft boy, Sam’s friend. I always thought he had the soul of a poet. They were so different, him and Sam. It’s so terribly difficult to imagine he would do all that he did to save Sam’s life. That the place they were in could have made him such a fearsome . . .”

  She is silent for a long time, overcome with sorrow.

  “Warrior,” she whispers, turning the page of the photo album.

  Elsa doesn’t need to see the photo to know who it’s of.

  It’s Sam. He is standing somewhere in a desert, wearing a uniform and supporting himself on crutches. Next to him stands Elsa’s granny with a stethoscope around her neck. And between them stands Sam’s best friend. Wolfheart.

  25

  SPRUCE

  It was the cloud animals that saved the Chosen One when the shadows came in secret to the kingdom of Mimovas to kidnap him. For while Miamas is made of fantasy, Mimovas is made of love. Without love there is no music, and without music there is no Mimovas, and the Chosen One was the most beloved in the whole kingdom. So if the shadows had taken him, it would eventually have led to the downfall of the Land-of-Almost-Awake. If Mimovas falls then Mirevas falls, and if Mirevas falls then Miamas falls, and if Miamas falls then Miaudacas falls, and if Miaudacas falls then Miploris falls. Because without music there can’t be any dreams, and without dreams there can’t be any fairy tales, and without fairy tales there can’t be any courage, and without courage no one would be able to bear any sorrows, and without music and dreams and fairy tales and courage and sorrow there would only be one kingdom left in the Land-of-Almost-Awake: Mibatalos. But Mibatalos can’t live alone, because the warriors there would be worthless without the other kingdoms, because they’d no longer have anything to fight for.

  Granny also stole that from Harry Potter, that bit about having something to fight for. But Elsa forgave her because it was quite good. You’re allowed to nick stuff if it’s good.

  And it was the cloud animals that saw the shadows stealing along between the houses in Mimovas, and they did what cloud animals do: they swept down like arrows and up again like mighty ships, they transformed themselves into dromedaries and apples and old fishermen with cigars, and the shadows threw themselves into the trap. Because soon they didn’t know who or what they were chasing. Then all at once the cloud animals disappeared, and one of them bore away the Chosen One. All the way to Miamas.

  And that was how the War-Without-End began. And if it hadn’t been for the cloud animals it would have ended there, that day, and the shadows would have won.

  Elsa is in the Land-of-Almost-Awake all night. She can get there whenever she wants now, as if it had never been a problem. She doesn’t know why, but assumes it’s because she has nothing to lose anymore. The shadow is in the real world now, Elsa knows who he is, and she knows who Granny was and who Wolfheart is and how it all hangs together. She’s not frightened anymore. She knows that the war will come, that it’s inevitable, and the mere fact of knowing it makes her strangely calm.

  The Land-of-Almost-Awake is not burning as it was in the dream. Wherever she rides, it’s as beautiful and tranquil as ever. Only when she wakes up does she realize that she has avoided venturing into Miamas. She rides to all five other kingdoms, even the ruins where Mibatalos used to be before the War-Without-End. But never to Miamas. Because she doesn’t want to know if Granny is there. Doesn’t want to know if Granny isn’t there.

  Dad is standing in the doorway of her bedroom. At once she’s wide awake, as if someone had just squirted menthol up her nose. (Which, just as an aside, works insanely well if you want to wake someone up. You’d know that if you have the kind of granny Elsa had.)

  “What’s the matter? Is Mum ill? Is it Halfie?”

  Dad looks dubious. And slightly nonplussed. Elsa blinks away her sleep and remembers that Mum is at a meeting at the hospital, because she tried to wake Elsa up before she left, but she pretended to be asleep. And George is in the kitchen, because he came in a bit earlier to ask if she wanted any eggs, but she pretended to be asleep. So she looks at her father with confusion.

  “It’s not your day for you to be with me, is it?”

  Dad clears his throat. Looks like dads do when it suddenly dawns on them that something they used to do because it was important to their daughters has now become one of those things their daughters do because it’s important to their dads. It’s a very thin line to cross. Neither dads nor their daughters ever forget when they do cross it.

  Elsa counts the days in her head, instantly remembers, and instantly apologizes. She was right, it isn’t Dad’s day. But she was wrong, because today’s the day before Christmas Eve, which is a terrible thing to forget. Because the day before Christmas Eve is her and Dad’s day. Christmas-tree day.

  As the name subtly suggests, this is the day that Elsa and Dad buy their Christmas tree. A plastic one, obviously, because Elsa refuses to buy a real tree. But because Dad enjoys the annual tradition so much, Elsa insists on buying a new plastic tree every year. Some people find it a bit of an odd tradition, but Granny used to say that “every child of divorce has the right to get a bit bloody eccentric now and then.”

  Mum, of course, was very angry at Granny about the whole plastic tree thing, because she likes the smell of a real spruce tree and always said that the plastic tree was something Granny had duped Elsa about. Because it was Granny who had told Elsa about the Christmas tree dance in Miamas, and no one who’s heard that story wants to have a spruce tree that someone has amputated and sold into slavery. In Miamas, spruce trees are living, thinking creatures with—considering that they’re coniferous trees—an unaccountably strong interest in home design.

  They don’t live in the forest but in the southern districts of Miamas, which have become quite trendy in recent years, and they often work in the advertising industry and wear scarves indoors. And once every year, soon after the first snow has fallen, all the spruce trees gather in the big square below the castle and compete for the right to stay in someone’s house over Christmas. The spruce trees choose the houses, not the other way around, and the choice is decided by a dance competition. In the olden days they used to have duels about it, but spruce trees are generally such bad shots that it used to take forever. So now they do spruce dancing, which looks a bit unusual, because spruce trees don’t have feet. And if a non–spruce tree wants to imitate a dancing spruce tree, they just jump up and down. It’s quite handy, particularly on a crowded dance floor.

  Elsa knows that because when Dad drinks a glass and a half of champagne on New Year’s Eve, he sometimes does the spruce dance in the kitchen with Lisette. But for Dad it’s just known as “dancing.”

  “Sorry, Dad, I do know what day it is!” Elsa yells, hopping into her jeans, getting into her sweater and jacket, and running into the hall. “I just have to do one thing first!”

  Elsa hid the wurse in Renault last night. She brought it down a bucket of cinnamon buns from Maud and told it to hide under the blankets in the backseat if anyone came down into the garage. “You have to pretend you’re a pile of clothes or a TV or something!” suggested Elsa, though the wurse didn’t look entirely convinced. So Elsa had to go and get a sack of dreams from Maud, after which the wurse gave in and crept under the blankets. It didn’t look much like a TV, though.

  Elsa said good night, sneaked back up the stairs, and stood in the dark outside the flat
where the mother and the boy with a syndrome live. She was going to ring at the door, but she couldn’t quite make herself do it. Didn’t want to hear any more stories. Didn’t want to know about shadows and darkness. So she just put the letter in the slot in the door and ran away.

  Their door is locked and shut today. All the other doors too. Anyone who’s awake has left the house; everyone else is still asleep. So Elsa hears Kent’s voice several floors up, even though he’s whispering, because that’s how the acoustics of stairwells work. Elsa knows that because “acoustics” is a word for the word jar. She hears Kent whispering, “Yes, I promise I’ll be back tonight.” But when he comes down the last flight of stairs, past the wurse’s and Wolfheart’s flats and the boy and the mother’s flat, Kent suddenly starts talking in a loud voice and calling out, “Yes, Klaus! In Frankfurt! Yez, yez, yez!” And then he turns around and pretends that he’s only just noticed Elsa standing behind him.

  “What are you doing?” asks Elsa suspiciously.

  Kent asks Klaus to hold the line, as you do when there is actually no Klaus at all on the line. He is wearing a rugby shirt with numbers and a little man on a horse on his chest. Kent has told Elsa that this sort of shirt costs more than a thousand kronor, and Granny always used to say that those sorts of shirts were a good thing, because the horse functioned as a sort of manufacturer’s warning that the shirt was highly likely to be transporting a muppet.

  “What do you want?” Kent sneers.

  Elsa stares at him. Then at the small red bowls of meat that he’s distributing down the stairwell.

  “What are those?”

  Kent throws out his hands so quickly that he almost throws Klaus into the wall.

  “That hound is still running around here, it reduces the value of the leasehold conversion!”

  Elsa backs away watchfully, without taking her eyes off the bowls of meat. Kent seems to realize that he has expressed himself a little clumsily, so he makes another attempt, in the sort of voice that men of Kent’s age think one must put on when talking to girls of Elsa’s age, so they’ll understand:

  “Britt-Marie found dog hairs on the stairs, you understand, darling? We can’t have wild animals roving around the building—it reduces the value of the leasehold conversion, you see?” He smiles condescendingly; she can see that he’s glancing insecurely at his telephone. “It’s not like we’re going to kill it! It’ll just go to sleep for a bit, okay? Now, why don’t you be a good girl and go home to your mummy?”

  Elsa doesn’t feel so very good. And she doesn’t like the way Kent makes quotation marks in the air when he says “go to sleep.” “Who are you talking to on the phone?”

  “Klaus, a business contact from Germany,” answers Kent as one does when doing no such thing.

  “Sure,” says Elsa.

  Kent’s eyebrows sink.

  “Are you giving me attitude?”

  Elsa shrugs.

  “I think you should run home to your mummy now,” Kent repeats, a touch more menacingly.

  Elsa points at the bowls. “Is there poison in them?”

  “Listen, girlie, stray dogs are vermin. We can’t have vermin running about here, and rust-heaps down in the garage, and all kinds of crap. It’ll lower the value, don’t you understand? It’s better for everyone this way.”

  But Elsa hears something ominous in his voice when he says “rust-heaps,” so she pushes past him and charges down the cellar stairs. Throws open the door to the garage and stands there with her hands shaking and her heartbeat thumping through her body. She knocks her knees against every step on the way back up.

  “WHERE’S RENAULT! WHAT THE HELL HAVE YOU DONE WITH RENAULT!?” she yells at Kent. She waves her fists at him, but only manages to grab hold of Klaus, so she throws Klaus down the cellar stairs so the glass display and plastic cover are smashed and tumble down in a miniature electronic avalanche towards the storage units.

  “Are you out of your fu— bloody . . . out of your bloody mind, you stupid kid? You know what that telephone cost?” yells Kent, and then he tells her it bloody cost eight thousand kronor.

  Elsa informs him that she couldn’t give a damn what it cost. And then Kent informs her with a sadistic gleam in his eye exactly what he did with Renault.

  She runs up the stairs to fetch Dad, but stops abruptly on the penultimate floor. Britt-Marie is standing in her doorway. She’s clasping her hands over her stomach, and Elsa can see that she’s sweating. The kitchen behind her smells of Christmas food, and she’s wearing her flower-print jacket with her large brooch. The pink paintball stain is hardly visible at all.

  “You mustn’t let Kent kill it,” pleads Elsa, wide-eyed. “Please, Britt-Marie, it’s my friend. . . .”

  Britt-Marie meets her eyes, and for a single fleeting second there’s some humanity in them. Elsa can see that. But then Kent’s voice can be heard, calling to Britt-Marie from the stairwell that she has to bring more poison, and then the normal Britt-Marie is back.

  “Kent’s children are coming here tomorrow. They’re afraid of dogs,” she explains firmly.

  She straightens out a wrinkle that isn’t there on her skirt, and brushes something invisible off her floral-print jacket.

  “We’re having a traditional Christmas dinner here tomorrow. With some normal Christmas food. Like a civilized family. We’re not barbarians, you know.”

  Then she slams the door. Elsa stays where she is and realizes that Dad is not going to be able to solve this, because tentativeness is not a very useful superpower in this type of emergency situation. She needs reinforcements.

  She has been banging on the door for more than a minute before she hears Alf’s dragging footsteps. He opens it with a cup of coffee in his hand that smells so strong that she’s sure a spoon would get stuck in it.

  “I’m sleeping,” he grunts.

  “He’s killing Renault!” sobs Elsa.

  “Killing? Nothing’s going to be killed around here. It’s only a bloody car,” says Alf, swallows a mouthful of coffee and yawns.

  “It’s not just a car! It’s RENAULT!”

  “Who the hell has told you he’s going to kill Renault?”

  “Kent!”

  Elsa hasn’t even had time to explain what’s in Renault’s backseat before Alf has put down the coffee cup, stepped into his shoes, and set off down the stairs. She hears Alf and Kent roaring at each other so terribly that she has to cover her ears. She can’t hear what they’re saying, except that it’s a lot of swearwords, and Kent shouts something about leaseholds and how one can’t have “rust-heaps” parked in the garage because then people will think the house is full of “socialists.” Which is Kent’s way of saying “bloody idiots,” Elsa understands. And then Alf shouts, “Bloody idiot,” which is his way of saying exactly that, because Alf is not big on complicating things.

  And then Alf comes stamping up the stairs again, wild-eyed, muttering:

  “The bastard got someone to tow the car away. Is your dad here?”

  Elsa nods. Alf storms up the stairs without a word, and a few moments later Elsa and Dad are sitting in Taxi, even though Dad doesn’t want to at all.

  “I’m not sure I want to do this,” says Dad.

  “Someone has to bloody drive the damned Renault home,” grunts Alf.

  “How do we find out where Kent sent it, then?” asks Elsa, at the same time that Dad does his best not to look completely tentative.

  “I’ve been driving a damned taxi for thirty years,” says Alf.

  “And?” hisses Elsa.

  “And so I bloody know how to find a Renault that’s been towed away!”

  Twenty minutes later they’re standing in a scrapyard outside the city, and Elsa is hugging the hood of Renault in the exact same way you hug a cloud animal: with your whole body. She can see that the TV in the backseat is shuffling about, fairly displeased about not being the first to be hugged, but if you’re almost eight and forget to hug a wurse in a Renault, it’s because you’re l
ess worried about the wurse than the poor scrapyard worker who happens to find it.

  Alf and the fairly fat foreman argue for a short while about what it’s going to cost to take Renault away. And then Alf and Elsa argue for a fairly long time about why she never mentioned that she didn’t have a key to Renault. And then the fat man walks around mumbling that he was sure he left his moped here earlier and where the hell was it now? And then Alf and the fat man negotiate about what it’ll cost to tow Renault back to the house. And then Dad has to pay for it all.

  It’s the best present he’s ever given Elsa. Even better than the red felt-tip pen.

  Alf ensures that Renault is parked in Granny’s slot in the garage, not in Britt-Marie’s. When Elsa introduces them to each other, Dad stares at the wurse with the expression of someone preparing for a root canal. The wurse glares back, a bit cocky. Too cocky, thinks Elsa, so she hauls it over the coals about whether it ate the scrapyard foreman’s moped. Whereupon the wurse stops looking cocky and goes to lie down under the blankets and looks a bit as if it’s thinking that if people don’t want it to eat mopeds, then people should be more generous with the cinnamon buns.

  She tells Dad, to his immense relief, that he can go and wait in Audi. Then Elsa and Alf gather all the red food bowls from the stairwell and put them in a big black trash bag. Kent catches them and fumes that the poison bloody cost him six hundred kronor. Britt-Marie just stands there.

  And then Elsa goes with Dad to buy a plastic tree. Because Britt-Marie is wrong, Elsa’s family are no barbarians. Anyway the proper term is “baa-baa-rians,” because in Miamas that is what the spruce trees call those dumb sheep in the real world who chop down living trees, then carry them off and sell them into slavery.

  “I’ll give you three hundred,” says Elsa to the man in the shop.