Beartown (Beartown, #1)

by Fredrik Backman

Late one evening toward the end of March, a teenager picked up a double-barreled shotgun, walked into the forest, put the gun to someone else’s forehead, and pulled the trigger. This is the story of how we got there.

The town wakes early, like it does every day; small towns need a head start if they’re going to have any chance in the world.

Sometimes the entire community feels like a philosophical experiment: If a town falls in the forest but no one hears it, does it matter at all?

If you are honest, people may deceive you. Be honest anyway. If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfishness. Be kind anyway. All the good you do today will be forgotten by others tomorrow. Do good anyway.

What you create, others can destroy. Create anyway. Because in the end, it is between you and God. It was never between you and anyone else anyway.

As long as Amat can remember, the two of them have been alone in the world. When he was little he used to collect empty beer cans from the stands at the end of the month to get the deposit back on them. Sometimes he still does.

If he does everything that’s demanded of him. One day he’ll take his mom away from here, he’s sure of that. One day he’ll stop adding and subtracting income and expenditures in his head all the time. There’s an obvious difference between the children who live in homes where the money can run out and the ones who don’t. How old you are when you realize that also makes a difference.

He kept quiet at first. But late one night he told her the truth: “I know it’s only a game, Kira. I know. But we’re a town in the middle of the forest. We’ve got no tourism, no mine, no high-tech industry. We’ve got darkness, cold, and unemployment. If we can make this town excited again, about anything at all, that has to be a good thing. I know you’re not from round here, love, and this isn’t your town, but look around: the jobs are going, the council’s cutting back. The people who live here are tough, we’ve got the bear in us, but we’ve taken blow after blow for a long time now. This town needs to win at something. We need to feel, just once, that we’re best. I know it’s a game. But that’s not all it is. Not always.”

Maya can’t help both laughing and sighing when she thinks of that. You never want to get away from home as much as you do when you’re fifteen years old. It’s like her mom usually says when the cold and darkness have worn away at her patience and she’s had three or four glasses of wine: “You can’t live in this town, Maya, you can only survive it.”

Sometimes it feels as if the people of Beartown love the fact that the climate is so inhospitable, because not everyone can handle it: that reminds them of their own strength and resilience.

They carry on living in their little house in the middle of town out of sheer politeness.

“I’m no good as a coach,” but Sune gave him a whistle and said: “Anyone who thinks they’re a good coach never is.”

Other people call him a “problem child,” but all the characteristics that make him a problem off the ice are what make him so special on it.

Kevin replied: “My parents aren’t interested in hockey.” When Benji asked what they were interested in, Kevin replied: “Success.” They were ten years old at the time. When Kevin is top of the class in history tests, which he almost always is, and goes home and says he got forty-nine out of fifty questions right, his dad merely asks in an expressionless voice: “What did you get wrong?” Perfection isn’t a goal in the Erdahl family, it’s the norm.

“If David finds out, you’ll get kicked off the tea—” “No, I won’t.” Leaning on his stick, Kevin says nothing and just looks at him. Of all the things in the world you can be envious of your best friend for, this is what Kevin would most like to have: the ability that Benji has always had to not give a shit about anything, and to get away with it. Kevin shakes his head and laughs in resignation.

It’s only a game. Everyone who plays it gets told that from time to time. A lot of people try to tell themselves that it’s true. But it’s complete nonsense. No one in this town would have been the same if that game hadn’t existed.

They weren’t old enough to know their multiplication tables, but they knew that a team didn’t mean anything if you couldn’t depend on each other. That’s both a big and a small thing. Knowing that there are people who will never abandon you.

It’s only a game. It only resolves tiny, insignificant things. Such as who gets validation. Who gets listened to. It allocates power and draws boundaries and turns some people into stars and others into spectators. That’s all.

David thinks Sune should let him do his job. Sune thinks David has misunderstood what his job actually is. The two men are stuck in their own trenches, buried too deep even to see each other anymore.

One of the hardest things about getting old is admitting mistakes that it’s too late to put right. The worst thing about having power over other people’s lives is that you sometimes get things wrong.

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

When Peter got his contract with the NHL and was about to move to Canada, his dad told him in no uncertain terms not to think he was “anything special.” It’s possible that the old man meant it more gently than it came out, that he intended to say that humility and hard work would take the boy just as far over there as they had here. It’s possible that drink made his words sharper. It’s possible that Peter didn’t mean to slam the door quite as hard as he did. It doesn’t matter now. A young man left Beartown in silence and when he came home again it was too late for words. You can’t look a gravestone in the eye and ask its forgiveness.

So why does he carry on? Because he’s never considered any alternatives.

Robbie started to doubt himself every time he stepped out onto the ice, while nothing scared Peter. He went off to the NHL the same year Robbie started work at the factory. There are no almosts in hockey. One player achieved his dreams while the other now finds himself stamping his feet in the snow until the pub door finally opens.

adults have days when we feel completely drained. When we no longer know quite what we spend so much time fighting for, when reality and everyday worries overwhelm us and we wonder how much longer we’re going to be able to carry on. The wonderful thing is that we can all live through far more days like that without breaking than we think. The terrible thing is that we never know exactly how many.

you’re either a competitive person or you aren’t. Like they say in Beartown: Some people have the bear in them.

She understands their love of the fight, she shares it. She knows that one of the funny things about fighting for success—and God knows, Kira fought her way through her legal training alongside kids from rich families who never had to do the washing up in the family restaurant in the evenings—is that you never really stop fighting. You never stop being scared of falling from the top, because when you close your eyes you can still feel the pain from each and every step of the way up.

Not a second has passed since she had children without her feeling like a bad mother. For everything. For not understanding, for being impatient, for not knowing everything, not making better packed lunches, for still wanting more out of life than just being a mother. She hears other women in Beartown sigh behind her back: “Yes, but she has a full-time job, you know. Can you imagine?” No matter how much you try to let words like that run off you, a few of them stick.

Her work may be demanding and tough, but it’s straightforward and logical. And being a parent is never like that. If she does everything right at work, things usually go as planned, but it doesn’t matter if she does absolutely everything in the universe correctly as a mother: the very worst can still happen.

You haven’t devoted all those hours to this team for ‘almost,’ you didn’t become GM for ‘almost.’ No one really cares if the guys put up a good fight, they’ll only remember the final result. David is completely inexperienced as an A-team coach, but we can overlook that if he wins. But if he doesn’t… well, you know the rules: either you win, or you’re an also-ran.”

One harsh lesson that Peter had to learn very quickly when he became GM was that everyone was always unhappy with him. That was hard to accept for someone who has always wanted to keep people happy. It was Sune who told him not to let it bother him, and that his talent for compromise would get him a long way. Then he was able to listen and make difficult decisions with his head rather than his heart.

“You adorable stupid idiot, don’t you realize that’s when I fell in love with you? You were a lost little kid from the backwoods, but I knew that someone who was second-best in the country but was still crying because he was worried about disappointing the people he loved, that person was going to turn out to be a good man. He’d be a good father. He’d protect his children. He’d never let anything happen to his family.”

The greatest terror of every parent, waking up and listening out for small breaths. And every night you feel so foolish when you hear them, as usual, for worrying about nothing. “How did I become someone like this?” you think. You promise yourself that you’ll relax, because of course you know that nothing’s going to happen. But the following night you still lie there wide awake, staring up at the ceiling and shaking your head, until you tell yourself, “Just tonight, then.” And you creep out of bed and put your palms to your children’s little chests to feel them rising and falling. And then one night one of them falls and doesn’t rise again as strongly.

They were happy, or at least as happy as a family can be when it’s burdened by a grief too large to be absorbed by time. But Kira still doesn’t know how to deal with it.

At night Kira still goes around the house, counting their children. One, two, three. Two in their beds. One in heaven.

Throughout their childhood Maya loved her best friend because she wasn’t like any other girl she had met, but life as a teenager seems to have acted like sandpaper on Ana. She’s getting smoother and smoother, smaller and smaller. Sometimes Maya misses her.

strikes a nerve because Kira recognizes the insinuation: you have a “job” so you can provide for your family, whereas a “career” is selfish. You have one of those for your own sake. So now she’s dangling somewhere between two worlds, and feels just as guilty when she’s in the office as she does when she’s at home.

Say what you like about Beartown, but it can take your breath away. In a single second.

Maya hates being a teenager, hates sandpaper, hates round holes. Misses the girl who pretended to be a knight in the forest. We become what we are told we are. Ana has always been told that she’s wrong.

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.

He was tired, that’s all he can remember. Tired of fighting, tired of everyone shouting at him, tired of dealing with so much crap and abuse, tired of the locker room, where the juniors snuck in during one training session to cut up his shoes and throw his clothes in the shower. Tired of trying to prove he was more than the things they called him: a zero from the Hollow. The cleaner’s son. Too small. Too weak.

“You might be playing with bears. But that doesn’t mean you have to forget that you’re a lion.”

That was the morning the boy realized that the only way to become better than the bears at their own game was to stop playing it their way.

Peter was so averse to conflict that he couldn’t even kill time.

“COLLECT THE PUCKS! DEFEND THE FORTRESS! DON’T GET FUCKED UP THE ASS! NO ASS-FUCKING ON MY ICE! HOLD ON… WHAT THE…? WHAT’S THIS? IN MY ASS?! IS IT A FUCK? IS IT A LITTLE FUCK? THERE’S A LITTLE FUCK IN MY ASS, AMAT! I ORDER YOU TO GET IT OUT AT ONCE!”

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.

He’s been told so many times that the boy ought to stop playing, that he doesn’t stand a chance, and now there he is, down on the ice. No one else has fought harder for this opportunity, and David is giving it to him today of all days. It’s a small dream, nothing less, and Peter could do with a dream today.

And there are no winners without losers, no stars are born without others in the collective being sacrificed.

But at a certain point in a person’s life you either sink or swim, and nothing really matters anymore. What else could they do to him now beyond this? Fuck them.

A lion among bears.