Beartown (Beartown, #1)

by Fredrik Backman

when your desire to win is stronger than your fear of losing, you have a chance. No one wins when they’re frightened.

A simple truth, repeated as often as it is ignored, is that if you tell a child it can do absolutely anything, or that it can’t do anything at all, you will in all likelihood be proven right.

When Peter got injured in Canada and Kira started work, Peter was left at home alone with Isak. One day the child had a stomachache and wouldn’t stop screaming. Panic-stricken, Peter tried everything. He rocked him and took him out in the stroller and tried all the home remedies he had ever heard of, but nothing worked. Until he put a record on. Perhaps it was something about the old record-player—the crackle in the speakers, the voices filling the room—but Isak fell completely silent. Then he smiled. And then he fell asleep in Peter’s arms. That’s the last time Peter can remember really feeling like a good father. The last time he had been able to tell himself that he actually knew what he was doing. He’s never told Kira that, has never told anyone. But now he buys records in secret because he keeps hoping that feeling might come back, if only for a moment.

Kira has never told him, has never told anyone, but she’s never really recovered from that snowstorm. From the feeling she had in the car that she’d lost them too. So now she sometimes calls her husband and children several times a day just to complain to them. To reassure herself that they’re still there.

“And what do we want, Ramona? What can the sport give us? We devote our whole lives to it, and what can we hope to get, at best? A few moments… a few victories, a few seconds when we feel bigger than we really are, a few isolated opportunities to imagine that we’re… immortal. And it’s a lie. It really isn’t important.” Silence settles between them, untouched. Only when Peter pushes his empty cup back across the bar and stands up to leave does the old widow drain her glass and grunt: “The only thing the sport gives us are moments. But what the hell is life, Peter, apart from moments?”

Being a parent makes you feel like a blanket that’s always too small. No matter how hard you try to cover everyone, there’s always someone who’s freezing.

She slams the front door behind her and the night cold strokes her cheeks. Her breathing becomes easier immediately; her heartbeat calms. She grew up outside, and being stuck behind windows has always felt like being imprisoned. Social relationships, trying to make friends, be accepted, always starving and sandpapering herself smaller—it makes her feel claustrophobic. She takes the path through the forest in the darkness and feels infinitely safer there than in a house full of people. Nature has never done her any harm.

Never again do you find friends like the ones you have when you’re fifteen years old.

After Isak was born the slightest sound became deafening, the slightest worry became terror, all cars drove faster, and he couldn’t watch the news without going to pieces. When Isak died Peter thought he would be left numb, but instead it was as if all his pores opened up, so that the air itself started to hurt. His chest can be ripped open by a single unhappy glance from either of the children, particularly his daughter. All the time he was growing up, the only thing he wanted was for life to speed up, and now all he wants is for it to slow down. For the clocks to stop, for Maya never to grow up.

What an uncomfortable, terrible source of shame it is for the world that the victim is so often the one left with the most empathy for others. There will be days when Maya is asked if she really understood the consequences, and she will nod yes, and of all the feelings inside her then, guilt will be the greatest. Because of the unimaginable cruelty she showed toward the people who loved her the most.

Hate can be a deeply stimulating emotion. The world becomes much easier to understand and much less terrifying if you divide everything and everyone into friends and enemies, we and they, good and evil. The easiest way to unite a group isn’t through love, because love is hard. It makes demands. Hate is simple.

Peter said nothing. But in the car on the way home he turned to Leo and explained: “When I was little, my dad used to hit me if I spilled my milk, Leo. That didn’t teach me not to spill things. It just made me scared of milk. Remember that.”

“I don’t know,” David replies honestly. Sune lets those words sink in. Because in the end that’s all anyone can ask of another person. That we are prepared to admit that we don’t know everything. Sune steps aside and makes space in the hall. “Would you like coffee?”