Фредрик Бакман - Anxious People

“Active listening,” Jack muttered. Sure enough, he’d been on the course, but precisely what use that might be to him now was hard to imagine.

“Well, didn’t that teach you how to talk to hostage takers?” Jim said, nodding encouragingly.

“Sure, but in order to be able to listen, there has to be someone talking. How are we going to contact the bank robber?” Jack said, because they hadn’t received any kind of message, no ransom demand. Nothing. Besides, he couldn’t help thinking that if that course on active listening was as good as the tutor claimed, then surely Jack ought to have a girlfriend by now.

“I don’t know, I really don’t,” Jim admitted.

Jack sighed.

“You’ve been in the police your whole life, Dad, you must have some experience of this sort of thing?”

Naturally, Jim did his best to act like he definitely had experience, seeing as dads like teaching their sons things, because the moment we can no longer do that is when they stop being our responsibility and we become theirs. So the father cleared his throat and turned away as he took out his phone. He stood there for a good while, hoping he wasn’t going to be asked what he was doing. He was, of course.

“Dad…,” Jack said over his shoulder.

“Mmm,” Jim said.

“Are you seriously googling ‘what should you do in a hostage situation’?”

“I might be.”

Jack groaned and leaned over with his palms on his knees. He was growling silently to himself because he knew what his bosses, and his bosses’ bosses, would say when they called him in the very near future. The worst words Jack knew. “Perhaps we should call Stockholm and ask for help?” Sure, Jack thought, because how would it look if we actually managed to do something for ourselves in this town? He glanced up at the balcony of the apartment where the bank robber was holed up. Swore under his breath. He just needed a starting point, some way of establishing contact.

“Dad?” he eventually sighed.

“Yes, lad?”

“What does it say on Google?”

Jim read out loud that you have to start by finding out who the hostage taker is. And what he wants.

20

Okay. A bank robber robs a bank. Think about that for a moment.

Obviously, it has nothing to do with you. Just as little as a man jumping off a bridge. Because you’re a normal, decent person, so you would never have robbed a bank. There are simply some things that all normal people understand that you must never under any circumstances do. You mustn’t tell lies, you mustn’t steal, you mustn’t kill, and you mustn’t throw stones at birds. We all agree on that.

Except maybe swans, because swans can actually be passive-aggressive little bastards. But apart from swans, you mustn’t throw stones at birds. And you mustn’t tell lies. Unless… well, sometimes you have to, of course, like when your children ask: “Why does it smell like chocolate in here? ARE YOU EATING CHOCOLATE?” But you definitely mustn’t steal or kill, we can agree on that.

Well, you mustn’t kill people, anyway. And most of the time you mustn’t even kill swans, even if they are bastards, but you’re allowed to kill animals if they’ve got horns and are standing in the forest. Or if they’re bacon. But you must never kill people.

Well, unless they’re Hitler. You’re allowed to kill Hitler, if you’ve got a time machine and an opportunity to do it. Because you must be allowed to kill one person to save several million others and avoid a world war, anyone can understand that. But how many people do you have to save in order to be allowed to kill someone? One million? A hundred and fifty? Two? Just one? None at all? Obviously, you won’t have an exact answer to that, because no one does.

Let’s take a much simpler example, then: Are you allowed to steal? No, you mustn’t steal. We agree on that. Except when you steal someone’s heart, because that’s romantic. Or if you steal harmonicas from guys who play the harmonica at parties, because that’s being public spirited. Or if you steal something small because you really have to. That’s probably okay. But does that mean it’s okay to steal something a bit bigger? And who decides how much bigger? If you really have to steal, how much do you have to have to do it in order for it to be reasonable to steal something really serious? For instance, if you feel that you really have to and that no one will get hurt: Is it okay to rob a bank then?

No, it probably isn’t really okay, even then. You’re probably right about that. Because you’d never rob a bank, so you haven’t got anything in common with this bank robber.

Except fear, possibly. Because maybe you’ve been really frightened at some time, and so was the bank robber. Possibly because the bank robber had small children and had therefore had a lot of practice being afraid. Perhaps you, too, have children, in which case you’ll know that you’re frightened the whole time, frightened of not knowing everything and of not having the energy to do everything and of not coping with everything. In the end we actually get so used to the feeling of failure that every time we don’t disappoint our children it leaves us feeling secretly shocked. It’s possible that some children realize this. So every so often they do tiny, tiny things at the most peculiar times, to buoy us up a little. Just enough to stop us from drowning.

So the bank robber left home one morning with that drawing of the frog, the monkey, and the elk tucked away in a pocket without realizing it. The girl who had drawn it put it there. The little girl has an older sister, they ought to fight the way sisters are always said to do, but they hardly ever do that. The younger one is allowed to play in the older sister’s room without the older one yelling at her. The older one gets to keep the things she cares for most without the younger one breaking them on purpose. Their parents used to whisper, “We don’t deserve them,” when the girls were very small. They were right.

Now, after the divorce, during the weeks when the girls live with one of their parents, they listen to the news in the car in the morning. Their other parent is in the news today, but they don’t know that yet, they don’t know that one of their parents has become a bank robber.

During the weeks when the girls live with their bank robber parent they go on the bus. They love that. All the way they invent little stories about the strangers in the seats at the front. That man there, he could be a fireman, their parent whispers. And she might be an alien, the youngest daughter says. Then it’s the older daughter’s turn, and she says really loudly : “That one could be a wanted man who’s killed someone and has their head in his backpack, who knows?” Then the women in the seats around them shuffle uncomfortably and the daughters giggle so hard that they almost can’t breathe, and their parent has to put on a serious face and pretend that it really isn’t funny at all.

They’re almost always late to the bus stop, and as they run across the bridge and the bus stops on the other side, the girls always shriek with laughter: “The elk’s coming! The elk’s coming!” Because their bank robber parent’s legs are very long, out of proportion, and that means you look funny when you run. No one noticed that before the girls appeared, but children notice people’s proportions in a different way from adults, possibly because they always see us from below, and that’s our worst angle. That’s why they make such good bullies, the quick-witted little monsters. They have access to everything that’s most vulnerable in us. Even so, they forgive us, the whole time, for almost everything.

And that’s the weirdest thing about being someone’s parent. Not just a bank robber parent, but any parent: that you are loved in spite of everything that you are. Even astonishingly late in life, people seem incapable of considering that their parents might not be super-smart and really funny and immortal. Perhaps there’s a biological reason for that, that up to a certain age a child loves you unconditionally and hopelessly for one single reason: you’re theirs. Which is a pretty smart move on biology’s part, you have to give it that.