Фредрик Бакман - Anxious People

She woke up in the hospital. Everything had happened so quickly that she had only caught a glimpse of the boy rushing toward her out of the corner of her eye. When the nurses asked what had happened she wasn’t even sure of that herself, but the back of her head was bleeding, so she said she’d climbed up onto the railing to take a photograph of the sunset, then fell backward and hit her head. She was so used to saying what she knew other people wanted to hear, so they wouldn’t worry, that she did it without thinking. The nurses still looked worried, suspicious, but she was a good liar. She’d spent her whole life practicing. So in the end they said: “Climbing up on that railing, what a silly thing to do! It’s sheer luck you didn’t slip off the other side instead!” She nodded, dry-lipped, and said yes. Luck.

She could have gone straight back to the bridge from the hospital, but she didn’t. It was impossible to explain why, even to herself, because she would never know for sure what she would have done if that boy hadn’t pulled her down. Would she have taken a step forward or back? So every day after that she tried to understand the difference between herself and the man who had jumped. That drove her to choose a profession, a career, a whole life. She became a psychologist. The people who came to her were the ones who were in so much pain that it felt like they were standing on a railing with one foot over the edge, and she sat in her chair opposite them with eyes that said: I’ve been here before. I know a better way down.

Of course sometimes she couldn’t help thinking about the reasons why she had wanted to jump, all the things she thought were missing from her reflection. Her loneliness at the dinner table. But she found ways to cope, to tunnel her way out of herself, to climb down. Some people accept that they will never be free of their anxiety, they just learn to carry it. She tried to be one of them. She told herself that was why you should always be nice to other people, even idiots, because you never know how heavy their burden is. Over time she realized that deep down almost everyone asks themselves the same sort of questions: Am I good? Do I make anyone proud? Am I useful to society? Am I good at my job? Generous and considerate? A decent shag? Does anyone want me to be their friend? Have I been a good parent? Am I a good person?

People want to be good. Deep down. Kind. The problem of course is that it isn’t always possible to be kind to idiots, because they’re idiots. That’s become a lifelong project for Nadia to grapple with, as it is for all of us.

She never met the boy from the bridge again. Sometimes she honestly believes that she made him up. An angel, maybe. Jack never saw Nadia again, either. He never went back to the bridge. But that was the day his plan to become a police officer became unshakable, when he realized that he could be the difference.

Ten years later Nadia will move back to the town, after training to become a psychologist. She will acquire a patient named Zara. Zara will go to an apartment viewing and get caught up in a hostage drama. Jack and his dad, Jim, will interview all the witnesses. The apartment where it happened has a balcony, from which you can see all the way to the bridge. That’s why Zara is there. Ten years ago she found a letter on her doormat, written by a man who jumped. His name was written neatly on the back of the envelope, she remembered their meeting, and even though the newspapers never published the name of the person the police found in the water, the town was too small for her not to know.

Zara still carries the letter around with her in her handbag, every day. She’s only been down to the bridge once, the week after he climbed onto the railing, she saw a girl climb up onto the same railing, and a boy who rescued her. Zara didn’t even move, she just stood hidden in the darkness, shaking. She was still standing there when the ambulance arrived and took the girl to the hospital. The boy vanished. Zara walked out onto the bridge and found the girl’s wallet and ID card with her name on it. Nadia.

Zara has spent ten years following Nadia’s life and education and the start of her career in secret, from a distance, because she’s never dared approach her. She has spent ten years looking at the bridge, also from a distance, from the balconies of apartments that are for sale. For the same reason. Because she’s afraid that if she goes down to the bridge again, maybe someone else will jump, and if she seeks out Nadia and discovers the truth about herself, perhaps it will be Zara who does it. Because Zara is human enough to want to hear what the difference is between that man and Nadia, even though she realizes that she doesn’t really want to know. That she bears the guilt. That she’s the bad person. Maybe everyone says they’d like to know that about themselves, but no one does really. So Zara still hasn’t opened the envelope.

The whole thing is a complicated, unlikely story. Perhaps that’s because what we think stories are about often isn’t what they’re about at all. This, for instance, might not actually be the story of a bank robbery, or an apartment viewing, or a hostage drama. Perhaps it isn’t even a story about idiots.

Perhaps this is a story about a bridge.

28

The truth? The truth is that that damn real estate agent was a damn poor real estate agent, and the apartment viewing was a disaster right from the start. If the prospective buyers couldn’t agree about anything else, they could at least agree on that, because nothing unites a group of strangers more effectively than the opportunity to come together and sigh at a hopeless case.

The advertisement, or whatever you want to call it, was a poorly spelled disaster, with pictures so blurred that the photographer seemed to believe that a “panoramic shot” was something you achieved by throwing your camera across the room. “The HOUSE TRICKS Estate Agency! HOW’S TRICKS?” it said above the date, and who on earth would get it into their head to hold an apartment viewing the day before New Year’s Eve? There were scented candles in the bathroom, and a bowl of limes on the coffee table, a brave effort by someone who seemed to have heard about apartment viewings but had never actually been to one, but the closet was stuffed with clothes, and there was a pair of slippers in the bathroom that looked like they belonged to someone who had spent the past fifty years shuffling around without ever lifting their feet. The bookcase was packed, and not even color-coordinated, and there were even more books piled up on the windowsills and the kitchen table. The fridge was covered with yellowing drawings produced by the owner’s grandchildren. Zara had been to enough viewings by this point to be able to spot an amateur: a viewing should make it look as if no one lives in the apartment, because otherwise only a serial killer would want to move in. A viewing should make it look as if anyone could potentially live there. People don’t want to buy a picture, they want to buy a frame. They can handle books in a bookcase, but not on the kitchen table. Perhaps Zara could have gone up to the real estate agent and pointed that out, if only the real estate agent hadn’t been a human being, and if only Zara hadn’t hated human beings. Especially when they spoke.

Instead Zara did a circuit of the apartment, trying to look interested, the way she had seen people who actually wanted to buy apartments look. That was quite a challenge for her, seeing as only someone on drugs who collected fingernail clippings could possibly be interested in living in this particular apartment. So when no one was looking in her direction, Zara went out onto the balcony, stood by the railing, and stared off toward the bridge until she started to shake uncontrollably. The same reaction as always, time after time for the past ten years. The letter she had never opened lay in her handbag. She had learned to cry almost without tears now, for practical reasons.