Фредрик Бакман - Anxious People

She laughed at that, Jim’s wife and Jack’s mom, God, how she laughed. God, how they miss her. She’s still the one who makes them more understanding toward each other, even though she’s no longer here.

Jim aged badly after she died, became a lesser man, never quite able to breathe back in all the air that had gone out of him. When he sat in the hospital that night, life felt like an icy crevice, and when he lost his grip on the edge and slipped down into the darkness inside him, he whispered angrily to Jack: “I’ve tried talking to God, I really have tried, but what sort of God makes a priest this sick? She’s never done anything but good for other people, so what sort of God gives an illness like this to her ?!”

Jack had no answer then, and he has no answer now. He just sat quietly in the waiting room and held his dad until it was impossible to tell whose tears were running down his neck. The following morning they were angry at the sun for rising, and couldn’t forgive the world for living on without her.

But when it was time, Jack got to his feet, grown-up and straight-backed, walked through a series of doors, and stopped outside her room. He was a proud young man, certain in his beliefs, he wasn’t religious and his mom had never said a single stern word to him about that. She was the sort of priest who got shouted at by everyone, by religious people for not being religious enough, and by everyone else because she was religious at all. She had been to sea with sailors, in the desert with soldiers, in prison with inmates, and in hospitals with sinners and atheists. She liked a drink and could tell dirty jokes, no matter who she was with. If anyone even asked what God would think about that, she always replied: “I don’t think we agree about everything, but I have a feeling He knows I’m doing the best I can. And I think maybe He knows I work for Him, because I try to help people.” If anyone asked her to sum up her view of the world, she always quoted Martin Luther: “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.” Her son loved her, but she never managed to get him to believe in God, because although you might be able to drum religion into people, you can’t teach faith . But that night, all alone at the end of a dimly lit corridor in a hospital where she had held so many dying people by the hand, Jack sank to his knees and asked God not to take his mom away from him.

When God took her anyway, Jack went into her bed, held her hand too hard in his, as if he were hoping she might wake up and tell him off. Then he whispered disconsolately: “Don’t worry, Mom, I’ll take care of Dad.”

He called his sister afterward. She made promise after promise, of course, as usual. She just needed money for the flight. Obviously. Jack sent the money, but she didn’t come to the funeral. Naturally, Jim has never once called her an “addict” or “junkie,” because dads can’t do that. He always says his daughter is “ill,” because that makes it feel better. But Jack always calls his sister what she is: a heroin addict. She’s seven years older than him, and with that age gap you don’t have a big sister when you’re little, you have an idol. When she left home he couldn’t go with her, and when she tried to find herself he couldn’t help, and when she went under he couldn’t save her.

It’s been just Jack and Jim since then. They send her money every time she calls, every time she pretends she’s going to come home, only she just needs help with the airfare, this one last time. And maybe a bit extra to pay a few little debts. Nothing much, she’s going to sort it all out, if they could just… they know they shouldn’t, of course. You always know. Addicts are addicted to their drugs, and their families are addicted to hope. They cling to it. Every time her dad gets a call from a number he doesn’t recognize, he always hopes it’s her, whereas her younger brother is terrified because he’s always convinced this will be the call when someone tells him she’s dead. The same questions echo through both of them: What sort of police officers can’t even look after their own daughter and sister? What sort of family can’t help one of their own to help herself? What sort of god makes a priest ill, and what sort of daughter doesn’t show up for the funeral?

When both children were still living at home, when everyone was still tolerably happy, Jack asked his mom one evening how she could bear to sit beside people when they were dying, in their final hours, without being able to save them. His mom kissed the top of his head and said: “How do you eat an elephant, sweetheart?” He replied the way a child who’s heard the same joke a thousand times does: “One bit at a time, Mom.” She laughed just as loudly, for the thousandth time, the way parents do. Then she held his hand tightly and said: “We can’t change the world, and a lot of the time we can’t even change people. No more than one bit at a time. So we do what we can to help whenever we get the chance, sweetheart. We save those we can. We do our best. Then we try to find a way to convince ourselves that that will just have to… be enough. So we can live with our failures without drowning.”

Jack couldn’t help his sister. He couldn’t save the man on the bridge. Those who jump… they jump. The rest of us have to get out of bed the following day, priests walk out of the door to do their job, as do police officers. Now Jack is looking at the stage blood on the floor, the bullet hole in the wall, the little side table where the phone was lying, and the large coffee table with the discarded pizza boxes.

He looks at Jim, and his dad holds his hands up and smiles weakly.

“I give up. You’re the genius here, son. What have you come up with?”

Jack nods at the pizza boxes. Brushes the hair from the lump on his forehead. Counts out the names again.

“Roger, Anna-Lena, Ro, Jules, Estelle, Zara, Lennart, the bank robber, the real estate agent. Nine people.”

“Nine people, yes.”

“But when they dropped that lime on my head, the note only asked for eight pizzas.”

Jim thinks about this so hard that his nostrils quiver.

“Maybe the bank robber doesn’t like pizza?”

“Maybe.”

“But that’s not what you think?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Jack stands up, packs the witness statements away in his bag. He bites his tongue.

“Is the real estate agent still at the station?”

“She should be, yes.”

“Call and make sure no one lets her go anywhere!”

Jim frowns so hard that you could lose a paper clip in the wrinkles.

“But… why, son? What’s—?”

Jack interrupts his dad: “I don’t think there were nine people in this apartment. I think there were eight. There’s one person we’ve just assumed was here the whole time! Bloody hell, Dad, don’t you see? The perpetrator didn’t hide, and didn’t escape, either. She just walked right out into the street in front of us!”

47

The bank robber was sitting alone in the hall. She could hear the voices of the people she’d taken hostage, but they might as well have been in a different time zone. There were eternities between her and everyone else now, between her and the person she had been that morning. She wasn’t alone in the apartment, but no one in the world shared her prospects, and that’s the greatest loneliness in the world: when no one is walking beside you toward your destination. In a short while, when they all walked out of the apartment, the others would be victims the moment their feet reached the sidewalk. She would be the criminal. If the police didn’t shoot her on sight, she’d end up stuck in prison for… she didn’t even know how long… years? She’d grow old in a cell. She’d never see her daughters learn to swim.