Fredrik Backman - Britt-Marie Was Here [Britt-Marie var här]

“Max! Huh! You’re such a, what’s-it-called?” Somebody says, overwhelmed with joy.

Bank taps her stick against Max’s shoes.

“He talks like one of them. But he plays like one of us.”

Max smiles and says something, but Britt-Marie can’t hear what.

The match resumes, and Britt-Marie finds, to her surprise, that she’s standing up. Her mouth is hanging open and she doesn’t even know how. On the pitch, three players have collided and the ball has bounced haphazardly towards the touchline, and suddenly it’s just lying there right at Ben’s feet with a clear shot at the goal. He stares at it. The entire crowd in the sports hall stares at him.

“Shoot,” whispers Britt-Marie.

“Shoot!” yells a voice from the stand.

It’s Sami. Next to him stands a red-faced woman. It’s the first time Britt-Marie has ever seen her wearing anything but a nurse’s uniform.

“ Shoooooooooooooot!!! ” cries Bank, waving her stick to and fro in the air.

So Ben shoots. Britt-Marie hides her face in the palms of her hands; Bank almost overturns Somebody’s wheelchair while she yells:

“What’s happening? Tell me what’s happening!”

The stands are silent as if no one can quite believe how this has happened. At first, Ben looks as if he’s going to burst into tears, then as if he’s looking for a hiding place. And he doesn’t have time to do much more than that before he finds himself at the bottom of a screaming pile of arms and legs and white shirts. Borg is in the lead by 1–0. Sami charges around in the stand with his arms held out, like an aircraft. Kent and Sven bounce up from their seats so abruptly that they accidentally start hugging each other.

A red-faced woman makes her way out of the chaos and runs down the stairs. A couple of officials try to get in her way when they see she’s going to run onto the pitch, but they can’t stop her. They couldn’t have stopped her even if they were carrying guns. Ben dances with his mum as if no one can take this away from him.

Borg lose the match 14-1. It makes no difference. They play as if it makes all the difference in the universe.

It does make a difference.

At a certain age almost all the questions a person asks him or herself are really just about one thing: how should you live your life?

If a human being closes her eyes hard enough and for long enough, she can remember pretty well everything that has made her happy. The fragrance of her mother’s skin at the age of five and how they fled giggling into a porch to get out of a sudden downpour. The cold tip of her father’s nose against her cheek. The consolation of the rough paw of a soft toy that she has refused to let them wash. The sound of waves stealing in over rocks during their last seaside holiday. Applause in a theater. Her sister’s hair, afterwards, carelessly waving in the breeze as they’re walking down the street.

And apart from that? When has she been happy? A few moments. The jangling of keys in the door. The beating of Kent’s heart against the palms of her hands while he lay sleeping. Children’s laughter. The feel of the wind on her balcony. Fragrant tulips. True love.

The first kiss.

A few moments. A human being, any human being at all, has so perishingly few chances to stay right there, to let go of time and fall into the moment. And to love someone without measure. Explode with passion.

A few times when we are children, maybe, for those of us who are allowed to be. But after that, how many breaths are we allowed to take beyond the confines of ourselves? How many pure emotions make us cheer out loud, without a sense of shame? How many chances do we get to be blessed by amnesia?

All passion is childish. It’s banal and naive. It’s nothing we learn; it’s instinctive, and so it overwhelms us. Overturns us. It bears us away in a flood. All other emotions belong to the earth, but passion inhabits the universe.

That is the reason why passion is worth something, not for what it gives us but for what it demands that we risk. Our dignity. The puzzlement of others and their condescending, shaking heads.

Britt-Marie yells out loud when Ben scores that goal. The soles of her feet are catapulted off the floor of the sports hall. Most people are not blessed with that sort of thing in the month of January. The universe.

You have to love soccer for that.

It’s late at night, the cup was over several hours ago, and Britt-Marie is at the hospital. She’s rinsing the blood out of a white soccer jersey in the sink while Vega sits on the toilet next to her, her voice still euphorically effervescent. As if she can’t sit still. As if she could have run vertically.

Britt-Marie’s heart is still beating so wildly that she still can’t understand how anyone could have the energy to live like this — that is, if it’s true what the children are saying, that it’s possible to have a soccer team that plays a match every week. Who would be willing to do this to themselves on a weekly basis?

“I absolutely can’t understand how you could get it into your head to behave in this sort of way,” Britt-Marie manages to whisper, because her voice no longer carries, having been yelled to shreds.

“They would have scored otherwise!” explains Vega for the thousandth time.

“You threw yourself right in front of the ball,” hisses Britt-Marie, with a reproachful gesture from the sink and the bloodstains on the jersey.

Vega blinks. It hurts when she does that, because half her face is dark purple and swollen from her lacerated eyebrow down across her bloodshot eye, her nose with coagulated blood in her nostrils, and her split lip at the bottom so big that it looks as if she’s tried to eat a wasp.

“I covered the shot,” she asserts.

“With your face, yes. For goodness’ sake, one doesn’t cover shots with one’s face,” but it’s unclear if she’s mainly angry because Vega got blood on her face or blood on her jersey.

“They would have scored.” Vega shrugs.

“I can’t for the life of me understand why you love soccer so much that you’re prepared to risk your life in that way,” hisses Britt-Marie as she furiously rubs baking soda on the jersey.

Vega looks thoughtful. Then hesitant.

“Have you never loved anything like that?”

“Ha. No. I… ha. I don’t know. I actually don’t know.”

“I don’t feel pain anymore when I’m playing soccer,” says Vega, her eyes fixed on the number on the back of the jersey soaking in the sink.

“What pain do you mean?”

“Any pain.”

Britt-Marie goes silent, ashamed of herself. Turns on the hot water. Closes her eyes. Vega leans her head back and peruses the ceiling of the bathroom.

“I dream about soccer when I’m sleeping,” she says, as if this is quite reasonable, and then she asks, with sincere curiosity, as if she cannot understand what else you could dream about:

“What do you dream about?”

It just slips out of Britt-Marie; she whispers instinctively:

“Sometimes I dream about Paris.”

Vega nods understandingly.

“In that case soccer for me is like Paris for you. Have you been there a lot?”

“Never.”

“Why not?”

“It’s one of those things that just… never happened. Come here now and wash your face—”

“Why not?”

Britt-Marie adjusts the tap so the water is not too hot.

Her heart is still thumping so hard that she can count the beats. She looks at Vega, tries to smooth away a few hairs from her forehead and gently probes the swelling at the edge of her eye, as if it is hurting Britt-Marie more than Vega. Then she whispers: