Фредрик Бакман - Anxious People

She rubbed her hands carefully with sanitizer, counted the windows of the building on the other side of the street over and over again, tried to take deep breaths. She had been in the apartment too long, these people had shrunk her customary distance, and she wasn’t used to that. Out on the balcony she pressed herself up against the wall of the building so no one down in the street could see her over the railing. She clamped the headphones over her ears and turned the volume up until the shrieking noise of the music drowned out the shrieking noise inside her head. Until the bass was thudding harder than her heart.

And just there, perhaps she found it. A truce with herself.

She could see winter making itself comfortable across the town. She liked the silence of this time of year, but had never appreciated its smugness. When the snow arrives autumn has already done all the work, taking care of all the leaves and carefully sweeping summer away from people’s memories. All winter had to do was roll in with a bit of freezing weather and take all the credit, like a man who’s spent twenty minutes next to a barbecue but has never served a full meal in his life.

She didn’t hear the balcony door open, but she felt a furry ear on her hair as Lennart stepped out and stood beside her. He tapped gently on one of the earphones.

“What?” she snapped.

“Do you smoke?” Lennart asked, because even though he hadn’t managed to remove the rabbit’s head, there was a small hole in the snout that he was fairly certain he’d be able to smoke through.

“Certainly not!” Zara said, putting the headphone back over her ear.

Lennart was surprised, even if that wasn’t visible through the unchanging ambivalence of the rabbit’s head. Zara looked like someone who smoked, not because she liked it so much as to make the air worse for other people. The rabbit tapped on the headphone again and she removed it with the utmost reluctance.

“What are you doing out on the balcony, then?” he wondered.

Zara took a long, hard look at him, starting from his white socks, via his bare legs and his nonelasticated underpants, to his bare torso, where the chest hair had started to go gray.

“Do you really think you’re in any position to question other people’s life choices?” she asked, but didn’t sound anywhere near as annoyed as she had hoped, which was annoying.

He scratched his big, lifeless rabbit’s ears and replied: “I don’t smoke, either, not really. Just at parties. And when I’m being held hostage!”

He laughed, she didn’t. He fell silent. She put the headphone back on her ear, but of course he tapped on it again immediately.

“Can I stand out here with you for a while? I’m worried Roger might hit me again if I go back in there.”

Zara didn’t answer, just put the headphone back in place, and the rabbit tapped on it at once.

“Are you here on safari, then?”

She glared at him in surprise.

“What does that mean?”

“Just an observation. There’s always someone like you at every apartment viewing. Someone who doesn’t want the apartment, but is just curious. On safari. Test-driving a lifestyle. You get to recognize that sort of thing in my job.”

The look in Zara’s eyes was poisonous, but her mouth remained closed. Being seen through isn’t pleasant, you tend to pull your clothes a little tighter when it happens, especially if you’re usually the one who sees through other people. Her instinct was to say something cruel to put a bit of distance between them, but instead she found herself asking: “Aren’t you cold?”

He shook his head and she had to duck to avoid one of his ears. Then he patted his furry face and chuckled: “Nope. They say seventy percent of your body heat gets lost through your head, so seeing as I’m stuck in here, I suppose I’m only losing thirty percent right now.”

That isn’t the sort of thing a man dressed in tight underwear usually boasts about in freezing temperatures, Zara noted. She put the headphones back on again, hoping that would be enough to get rid of him, but even before he tapped on the headphone again she had already guessed that his next sentence was going to start with the word “I.”

“I’m really an actor. This business of disrupting apartment viewings is only a sideline.”

“How interesting,” Zara said in a tone that only the child of a telesales operative would interpret as an invitation to go on talking.

“Times are tough for people in the cultural sector,” the rabbit nodded.

Zara pulled the headphones down around her neck in resignation and snorted.

“So that’s your excuse for exploiting the fact that times are tough for people selling apartments, too? How come you people in the ‘cultural sector’ never think capitalism is any good except when you’re the ones profiting from it?”

It just slipped out, she didn’t really know why. Between his ears she caught a glimpse of the bridge. The ears wavered thoughtfully in the December wind.

“Sorry, but you don’t strike me as the sort of person who feels sorry for people trying to sell apartments,” he said.

Zara snorted again, more angrily.

“I don’t care about sellers or buyers. But I do care about the fact that you don’t seem to appreciate that your ‘sideline’ is manipulating the economic system!”

The rabbit’s head was stuck in a rictus grin while Lennart was thinking hard inside it. Then he said what Zara considered to be the stupidest thing that could ever come out of anyone’s mouth, rabbit or human: “What have I got to do with the economic system?”

Zara massaged her hands. Counted the windows.

“The market is supposed to be self-regulating, but people like you spoil the balance between supply and demand,” she said wearily.

Of course the rabbit responded at once by saying the most predictable thing possible: “That’s not true. If I wasn’t doing this, someone else would. I’m not breaking the law. An apartment is the largest investment most people make, and they want the best price, so I’m just offering a service that—”

“Apartments aren’t supposed to be investments,” Zara replied gloomily.

“What are they supposed to be, then?”

“Homes.”

“Are you some sort of communist?” the rabbit chuckled.

Zara felt like punching him on the nose for that, but instead she pointed between his ears and said: “When the financial crisis hit ten years ago, a man jumped off that bridge because of a property market crash on the other side of the world. Innocent people lost their jobs and the guilty were given bonuses. You know why?”

“Now you’re exaggerat—”

“Because people like you don’t care about the balance in the system.”

Lennart chuckled superciliously inside the rabbit’s head. He still hadn’t realized who he’d embarked on a discussion with.

“You need to calm down, the financial crisis was the banks’ fault, I don’t make the—”

“The rules? Is that what you were about to say? You don’t make the rules, you just play the game?” Zara interrupted wearily, seeing as she’d rather drink nitroglycerin and go on a trampoline than have to listen to yet another man lecturing her about financial responsibilities.

“Yes! Well, no! But…”

Zara had spent enough of her life in committee rooms with the target market for cuff links to be able to predict the rest of this guy’s monologue, so she decided to save her time and his larynx: “Let me guess where you’re going with this: you don’t care about the seller of this apartment, you don’t care about Roger and Anna-Lena, either, you only care about yourself. But you’re going to try to defend yourself by saying that it isn’t possible to cheat the housing market, because the market doesn’t really exist, it’s a construct . Just numbers on a computer screen. So you don’t have any responsibility, do you?”