Фредрик Бакман - Anxious People

“I’m not going to have them put down, and I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” Ro said, sounding hurt and looking around the apartment with her hands deep in the pockets of her dress. Her dress had pockets because she appreciated looking nice, but still liked to have somewhere to put her hands.

“Okay, okay. So what do you think of the apartment, then? I think we should take it!” Julia said breathlessly, because the elevator was broken and every time Ro said, “We’re pregnant,” to family and friends as if it were a team sport, Julia felt like pouring molten wax in her ears when she was asleep. Not that Julia didn’t love Ro, because she did, so much that it was almost unbearable, but they had looked at more than twenty apartments in the past two weeks and Ro always found something wrong with every single one of them. It was as if she didn’t actually want to move. But Julia woke up every night in their current apartment to play every pregnant woman’s favorite game, “kick or gas?” and then she couldn’t get back to sleep because both Ro and the birds snored, so she was more than ready to move anywhere right now, as long as it had more than one bedroom.

“No signal,” Ro repeated morosely.

“Who cares? Let’s take it!” Julia persisted.

“Well, I’m not sure. I need to check the hobby room,” Ro said.

“That’s a walk-in closet,” Julia corrected.

“Or a hobby room! I’m just going to get the tape measure!” Ro nodded cheerfully, because one of her most charming and simultaneously most infuriating characteristics was that no matter what they’d just been arguing about, she could be in a wonderful mood in the blink of an eye if she thought about cheese.

“You know perfectly well that you’re not going to be allowed to store cheese in my walk-in closet,” Julia declared sternly, seeing as their current apartment had a storeroom in the basement that Julia referred to as the Museum of Abandoned Hobbies. Every third month Ro would become obsessed with something, 1950s dresses or bouillabaisse or antique coffee services or CrossFit or bonsai trees or a podcast about the Second World War, then she would spend three months studying the subject in question with unstinting devotion on Internet forums populated by people who clearly shouldn’t be allowed Wi-Fi in whatever padded cell they were locked up in, and then she would suddenly get fed up and immediately find a new obsession. The only hobby that had remained constant since they got together was that Ro collected shoes, and nothing could sum up a person more clearly than the fact that she owned two hundred pairs of shoes, yet always managed to have the wrong ones on when it was raining or snowing.

“No, I don’t know that perfectly well! Because I haven’t measured it yet, so I don’t know if there’d be room for the cheese in there! And my plants also need…,” Ro began, because she had just decided to start growing plants under heat lamps in the hobby room. Which was a walk-in closet. Or a…

In the meantime Anna-Lena was running her hand over a cushion cover and thinking about sharks. She’d been thinking about them a lot recently, because in their marriage, she and Roger had come to resemble sharks. That was a source of silent sorrow for Anna-Lena. She kept rubbing the cushion cover and distracted herself by thinking out loud: “Is this from IKEA? Yes, it’s definitely from IKEA. I recognize it. They do a floral version as well. The floral version’s nicer. Honestly, the things people do these days.”

You could have woken Anna-Lena in the middle of the night and asked her to recite the IKEA catalog. Not that there’d be any reason to, of course, but you could if you wanted to, that’s the point. Anna-Lena and Roger have been to every IKEA store in the whole country. Roger has many faults and failings, Anna-Lena knows people think that, but Anna-Lena is always reminded that he loves her in IKEA. When you’ve been together for a very long time, it’s the little things that matter. In a long marriage you don’t need words to have a row, but you don’t need words to say “I love you,” either. Once when they were at IKEA, very recently, Roger had suggested when they were having lunch in the cafeteria that they each have a piece of cake. Because he understood that it was an important day for Anna-Lena, and because it was important to her it was important to him as well. Because that’s how he loves her.

She went on rubbing the cushion cover that was nicer in the floral pattern and glanced over at the two women in a way Anna-Lena thought was discreet, the pregnant one and her wife. Roger was looking at them as well. He was holding the Realtor’s prospectus with the layout of the apartment in his hand, and grunted: “For God’s sake, darling, look at this! Why do they have to call the small room ‘child’s room’? It could just as well be a perfectly ordinary damn bedroom!”

Roger didn’t like it when there were pregnant women at apartment viewings, because couples expecting a baby always bid too much. He didn’t like children’s rooms, either. That’s why Anna-Lena always asks Roger as many questions as she can think of when they walk through the children’s section in IKEA. To help distract him from the incomprehensible grief. Because that’s how she loves him.

Ro caught sight of Roger and grinned, as if they weren’t really at war with each other.

“Hi! I’m Ro, and that’s my wife, Julia, over there. Can I borrow your tape measure? I forgot mine!”

“Absolutely not!” Roger snapped, clutching his tape measure, pocket calculator, and notepad so hard that his eyebrows started to twitch.

“Calm down, I only want to—” Ro began.

“We all have to take responsibility for our own actions!” Anna-Lena interrupted sharply.

Ro looked surprised. Surprise made her nervous. Nervousness made her hungry. There wasn’t much she could eat in the immediate vicinity so she reached for one of the limes in the bowl on the coffee table. Anna-Lena saw this and exclaimed: “Dear me, what on earth are you doing? You can’t eat those! They’re viewing limes!”

Ro let go of the lime and stuffed her hands in the pockets of her dress. She went back to her wife, muttering: “No. This apartment isn’t us, hon. It’s nice and all that, but I’m getting bad vibes here. Like we could never be our best selves here, yeah? Remember me saying I’d read about we-energies that month when I was thinking of becoming an interior designer? When I learned that we had to sleep facing east? And then forgot if it was your head or your feet that… well… never mind! I just don’t want this apartment. Can’t we just go?”

Zara was standing out on the balcony. She gathered the wreckage of her feelings into an expression of derision and went back into the apartment. Just as she walked in, the pregnant woman let out a yelp. At first it sounded like a roar of guttural rage from an animal that’s just been kicked, but eventually the words became clearer:

“No! That’s enough, Ro! I can take the birds and I can take your awful taste in music and I can take a whole load of other crap, but I’m not leaving here until we’ve bought this apartment! Even if I have to give birth to our child right here on this carpet!”

The apartment fell completely silent. Everyone was staring at Julia. The only person who wasn’t was Zara, because she was standing just inside the balcony door and staring at the bank robber. One second passed, then two, in which Zara was the only person in the room who had realized what was about to happen.

Then Anna-Lena also caught sight of the figure in the ski mask and cried out: “Oh, dear Lord, we’re being robbed!” Everyone’s mouths opened at the same time but no words came out. Fear can numb people at the sight of a pistol, switch off everything except the brain’s most important signals, silence all background noise. Another second passed, then one more, in which all they heard was their own heartbeats. First the heart stops, then it races. First comes the shock of not understanding what’s happening, then comes the shock of realizing precisely what’s happening. The survival instinct and fear of dying start to fight, making space for some surprisingly irrational thoughts in between. It’s not unusual to see a pistol and think: Did I switch the coffee machine off this morning? instead of: What’s going to happen to my children?