A FEW WORDS BEFORE THE REST OF THE WORDS
This is a short story about what you would be prepared to sacrifice in order to save a life. If it was not only your future on the line, but also your past. Not only the places you are going, but the footprints you have left behind. If it was all of it, all of you, who would you give yourself up for?
I wrote this story late one night shortly before Christmas in 2016. My wife and children were sleeping a few arm lengths away. I was very tired; it had been a long and strange year, and I had been thinking a lot about the choices families make. Everyday, everywhere, we go down one road or another. We play around; we stay at home; we fall in love and fall asleep right next to each other. We discover we need someone to sweep us off our feet to realize what time really is.
So I tried to tell a story about that.
It was published in the local newspaper of my hometown, Helsingborg, in the southernmost part of Sweden. All the locations in the story are real—I went to school around the corner from the hospital, and the bar where the characters drink is owned and run by childhood friends of mine. I’ve gotten very drunk there on several occasions. If you’re ever around Helsingborg, I highly recommend it.
I live six hundred kilometers further north now, in Stockholm, with my family. So, in retrospect, I think this story was not just about how I felt about love and death that night I was sitting on the floor next to the bed my wife and our kids were sleeping in, but also about my feelings for the place where I grew up. Maybe all people have that feeling deep down, that your hometown is something you can never really escape, but can never really go home to, either. Because it’s not home anymore. We’re not trying to make peace with it. Not with the streets and bricks of it. Just with the person we were back then. And maybe forgive ourselves for everything we thought we would become and didn’t.
Maybe you will find this to be a strange story, I don’t know. It’s not very long, so at least it will be over quickly in that case. But I hope my younger self would have read it and found it to be . . . well . . . not horrible. I think he and I could have gone for a beer. Talked about choices. I would have shown him pictures of my family and he would have said, “Alright. You did alright.”
Anyway, this is the story. Thank you for taking the time to read it.
With love,
Fredrik Backman
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Hi. It’s your dad. You’ll be waking up soon, it’s Christmas Eve morning in Helsingborg, and I’ve killed a person. That’s not how fairy tales usually begin, I know. But I took a life. Does it make a difference if you know whose it was?
Maybe not. Most of us so desperately want to believe that every heart which stops beating is missed equally. If we’re asked, “Are all lives worth the same?” the majority of us will reply with a resounding “Yes!” But only until someone points to a person we love and asks: “What about that life?”
Does it make a difference if I killed a good person? A loved person? A valuable life?
If it was a child?
She was five. I met her a week ago. There was a small red chair in the hospital TV room, it was hers. It wasn’t red when she arrived, but she could see that it wanted to be. It took twenty-two boxes of crayons but that didn’t matter, she could afford it, everyone here gave her crayons all the time. As though she could draw away her illness, color away the needles and the drugs. She knew that wasn’t possible, of course, she was a smart kid, but she pretended for their sakes. So she spent her days drawing on paper, because it made all the adults happy. And at night, she colored in the chair. Because it really wanted to be red.
She had a soft toy, a rabbit. She called it “Babbit.” When she first learned to speak, the adults thought she was calling it “Babbit” because she couldn’t say “Rabbit.” But she called it Babbit because Babbit was its name. That shouldn’t be so hard to understand, really, even for an adult. Babbit got scared sometimes, and then it got to sit on the red chair. It might not be clinically proven that sitting on a red chair makes you less scared, but Babbit didn’t know that.
The girl sat on the floor next to Babbit, patting its paw and telling it stories. One night, I was hidden around a corner in the corridor and I heard her say: “I’m going to die soon, Babbit. Everyone dies, it’s just that most people will die in maybe a hundred thousand years but I might die already tomorrow.” She added, in a whisper: “I hope it’s not tomorrow.”
Then she suddenly looked up in fear, glanced around as though she had heard footsteps in the corridor. She quickly grabbed Babbit and whispered good night to the red chair. “It’s her! She’s coming!” the girl hissed, running toward her room, hiding herself under the covers next to her mother.
I ran too. I’ve been running all my life. Because every night, a woman in a thick, grey, knitted jumper walks the hospital’s corridors. She carries a folder. She has all our names written inside.
It’s Christmas Eve, and by the time you wake up the snow will probably have melted. Snow never lasts very long in Helsingborg. It’s the only place I know where the wind comes at an angle from below, like it’s frisking you. Where the umbrellas protect you better if you hold them upside down. I was born here but I’ve never gotten used to it; Helsingborg and I will never find peace. Maybe everyone feels that way about their hometown: the place we’re from never apologizes, never admits that it was wrong about us. It just sits there, at the end of the motorway, whispering: “You might be all rich and powerful now. And maybe you do come home with expensive watches and fancy clothes. But you can’t fool me, because I know who you really are. You’re just a scared little boy.”
I met death by the side of my wrecked car last night, after the accident. My blood was everywhere. The woman in the grey jumper was standing next to me with a disapproving look on her face and she said: “You shouldn’t be here.” I was so scared of her, because I’m a winner, a survivor. And all survivors are scared of death. That’s why we’re still here. My face was cut to shreds, my shoulder out of joint, and I was trapped inside 1.5 million kronors’ worth of steel and technology.
When I saw the woman, I shouted, “Take someone else! I can give you someone else to kill!”
But she just leaned forward, looked disappointed, and said: “It doesn’t work like that. I don’t make the decisions. I just look after the logistics and the transportation.”
“For who? For God or the Devil, or . . . someone else?” I sobbed.
She sighed. “I stay out of the politics. I just do my job. Now give me my folder.”
It wasn’t the car crash that brought me to the hospital, I was there long before that. Cancer. I’d met the girl for the first time six days earlier, when I was smoking on the fire escape so the nurses wouldn’t see me. They went on and on about smoking, as though it would have time to kill me.
The door to the corridor was ajar, and I could hear the girl talking to her mother in the TV room. They played the same game every night; when the hospital was so quiet that you could hear the snowflakes bouncing against the windows like good-night kisses, the mother whispered to the girl: “What are you going to be when you grow up?”
The girl knew the game was for her mother’s sake, but she pretended it was for hers. She laughed as she said, “doctor” and
“engineeeer,” plus her perennial favorite: “space hunter.”
Once the mother fell asleep in an armchair, the girl stayed where she was, coloring in the chair which wanted to be red and talking to Babbit whose name was that. “Is it cold on death?” she asked Babbit. But Babbit didn’t know. So the girl packed thick gloves in her backpack, just to be on the safe side.
She spotted me through the glass. She wasn’t scared, I remember being furious at her parents for that. What kind of adult doesn’t raise their kid to be terrified of a strange, forty-five-year-old, chain-smoking bloke who’s staring at her from a fire escape? But this girl wasn’t scared. She waved. I waved back. She grabbed Babbit’s paw, came over to the door and spoke through the crack.
“Do you have cancer too?”
“Yes,” I replied. Because that was the truth.
“Are you famous? You’re in a picture in Mummy’s newspaper.”
“Yes,” I replied. Because that was also the truth. The papers wrote about my money, no one knew I was ill yet, but I’m the kind of person whose diagnosis will make the news. I’m not an ordinary person, everyone will hear about it when I die. When five-year-old girls die, no one writes about that, there aren’t any memorials in the evening papers, their feet are still too small, they haven’t had time to make anyone care about their footsteps yet. But people care about me because of what I’ll leave behind, what I’ve built and achieved, businesses and properties and assets. Money isn’t money to me, not like it is to you. I save and calculate and don’t worry about it. It’s nothing but points for me, just a measure of my success.
“It’s not the same cancer you have,” I said to the girl. Because that was my only consolation in the diagnosis. That the doctor had apologetically explained: “You have a very, very unusual type of cancer.”
I don’t even get cancer like you people.
The girl blinked firmly and asked: “Is it cold on death?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
I should have said something else. Something bigger. But I’m not that man. So I just dropped my cigarette and mumbled: “You should stop drawing on the furniture.”
I know what you’re thinking: what a bastard I am. And you’re right. But the vast majority of successful people don’t become bastards, we were bastards long before. That’s why we’ve been successful.
“You’re allowed to draw on the furniture when you have cancer,” the girl suddenly exclaimed with a shrug. “No one says anything.”
I don’t know what it was about that, but I started to laugh. When had I last done that? She laughed too. Then she and Babbit ran off to their room.
It’s so easy to kill someone, all a person like me needs is a car and a few seconds. Because people like you trust me, you drive thousands of kilos of metal at hundreds of kilometers an hour, hurtling through the darkness with the people you love most sleeping in the backseat, and when someone like me approaches from the opposite direction, you trust that I don’t have bad brakes. That I’m not looking for my phone between the seats, not driving too fast, not drifting between lanes because I’m blinking the tears from my eyes. That I’m not sitting on the slip road to the 111 with my headlights out, just waiting for a lorry. You trust me. That I’m not drunk. That I’m not going to kill you.
The woman with the grey sweater pulled me out of the wreckage this morning. She wiped my blood from her folder.
“Kill someone . . . else,” I begged.
She took a resigned breath through her nose.
“It doesn’t work like that. I don’t have that kind of influence. I can’t just swap a death for a death. I have to swap a life for a life.”
“Do it, then!” I screamed.
The woman shook her head sadly, reached out and pulled a cigarette from my breast pocket. It was bent, but not broken. She smoked it in two long drags.
“I’ve actually given up,” she said defensively.
I lay bleeding on the ground and pointed to the folder.
“Is my name in there?”
“Everyone’s is.”
“What do you mean, a life for a life?”
She groaned.
“You really are an idiot. You always have been.”
At one point in time, you were mine. My son.
The girl at the hospital reminded me of you. Something happened when you were born. You cried so loudly, and it was the first time it had happened to me: the first time I’d felt pain for someone else. I couldn’t stay with someone who had that kind of power over me.
Every parent will take five minutes in the car outside the house from time to time, just sitting there. Just breathing and gathering the strength to head back inside to all of their responsibilities. The suffocating expectation of being good, coping. Every parent will take ten seconds in the stairwell occasionally, key in hand, not putting it in the lock. I was honest, I only waited a moment before I ran. I spent your entire childhood travelling. You were the girl’s age when you asked what I did. I told you I made money. You said everyone did that. I said, “No, the majority of people just survive, they think their things have a value but nothing does. Things only have a price, based on expectation, and I do business with that. The only thing of value on Earth is time. One second will always be a second, there’s no negotiating with that.”
You despise me now, because I’ve devoted all my seconds to my work. But I have, at least, devoted them to something. What have your friends’ parents devoted their lives to? Barbecues and rounds of golf? Charter holidays and TV shows? What will they leave behind?
You hate me now, but you were once mine. You once sat on my lap and were terrified of the starry sky. Someone had told you that the stars aren’t really above us but below, and that the earth spun so quickly that if you were small and light you could easily fall off, straight into all that darkness. The porch door was open, your mother was listening to Leonard Cohen, so I told you that we actually lived deep in a cozy grotto and that the sky was like a stone covering the opening. “Then what are the stars?” you asked, and I told you they were cracks, through which the light could trickle in. Then I said that your eyes were the same thing, to me. Tiny, tiny cracks, through which the light could trickle out. You laughed so loudly then. Have you ever laughed like that since? I laughed too. I, who had wanted to live a life high above everyone else, ended up with a son who would rather live deep beneath the surface.
In the living room, your mother turned up the volume and danced, laughing, on the other side of the window. You crawled higher in my lap. We were a family then, albeit fleetingly. I belonged to you both, for a moment or two.
I know you wished you had an ordinary father. One who didn’t travel, wasn’t famous, one who would have been happy with just two eyes on him: yours. You never wanted to say your surname and hear, “Sorry, but is your dad . . . ?” But I was too important for that. I didn’t take you to school, didn’t hold your hand, didn’t help you blow out your birthday candles, I never fell asleep in your bed, halfway through our fourth bedtime story, with your cheek on my collarbone. But you’ll have everything that everyone else longs for: Wealth. Freedom. I abandoned you, but at least I abandoned you at the top of the hierarchy of needs.
But you don’t care about that, do you? You’re your mother’s son. She was smarter than me, I never quite forgave her for that. She also felt more than me, that was her weakness, and it meant I could hurt her with words. You might not remember when she left me, you were still so small, but the truth is that I didn’t even notice. I came home after a trip and it took me two days to realize that neither of you was there.
Several years later, when you were eleven or twelve, the two of you had a huge argument about something and you took a bus to my house in the middle of the night and said you wanted to live with me. I said no. You were completely beside yourself, sobbing and crying on the rug in my hallway, screaming that it wasn’t fair.
I looked you in the eye and said: “Life isn’t fair.”
You bit your lip. Lowered your eyes and replied: “Lucky for you.”
You might have stopped being mine that day, I don’t know. Maybe that’s when I lost you. If that’s the case, I was wrong. If that’s the case, life is fair.
Four nights ago, the girl knocked on the window again.
“Do you want to play?” she asked.
“What?” I said.
“I’m bored. Do you want to play?”
I told her she should go to bed. Because I’m the person you think I am, the kind of person who says no when a dying five-year-old wants to play. She and Babbit went off towards her room, but the girl turned around and looked at me and asked: “Are you brave too?”
“What?”
“Everyone always says I’m so brave.”
Her eyelids fluttered. So I replied honestly: “Don’t be brave. If you’re scared, be scared. All survivors are.”
“Are you? Of the woman with the folder?”
I took a calm drag on my cigarette, nodded slowly.
“Me too,” said the girl.
She and Babbit walked towards her room. I don’t know what happened then. Maybe I cracked, making all the light spill out. Or in. I’m not evil, even I understand that cancer should have an age limit. So I opened my mouth and said: “Not tonight. I’ll stay here and keep watch, so she doesn’t come tonight.”
The girl smiled then.
The next morning, I was sitting awake on the floor in the corridor. I heard the girl and her mother playing a new game. The mother asked, “Who do you want to invite to your next birthday party?” even though there wouldn’t be a next one. And the girl played along, reeled off the names of everyone she loved. It’s a long list when you’re five. That morning, I was on it.