Beartown (Beartown, #1)

by Fredrik Backman

He’ll never be able to explain it properly to a journalist, but when it really comes down to it, a coach can never create a player like that. Because what makes Kevin the best is his absolute desire to win. Not that he hates losing, but that he can’t even begin to conceive of trying to accept not winning. He’s merciless. You can’t teach someone that.

“What about culture, then?” Sune looked more serious, choosing his words carefully. In the end he said: “For me, culture is as much about what we encourage as what we actually permit.” David asked what he meant by that, and Sune replied: “That most people don’t do what we tell them to. They do what we let them get away with.”

Peter has learned one thing about human nature during all his years in hockey, it’s that almost everyone regards themselves as a good team player, but that very few indeed understand what that really means. It’s often said that human beings are pack animals, and that thought is so deeply embedded that hardly anyone is prepared to admit that many of us are actually really rubbish at being in groups. That we can’t cooperate, that we’re selfish, or, worst of all, that we’re the sort of people other people just don’t like. So we keep repeating: “I’m a good team player.” Until we believe it ourselves, without actually being prepared to pay the price.

just a cliché for people who don’t understand sports; for those who do, it’s a painful truth because it hurts to live in accordance with it. Submitting to a role you don’t want, doing a crap job in silence, playing on defense instead of getting to score goals and be the star. When you can accept the worst aspects of your teammates because you love the collective, that’s when you’re a team player. And it was Sune who taught him that.

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

Maya smiles and wipes Ana’s tears, then looks her friend in the eye and whispers: “Right now, Kevin has only hurt me. But if I talk, I’ll be letting him hurt everyone I love as well. I can’t handle that.” They hold each other’s hands. Sit beside each other in bed and count sleeping pills, wondering how many it would take to end their lives. When they were children everything was different. It feels like only yesterday, because it was.

Jokes are powerful like that, they can be both inclusive and exclusive. Can create both an Us and a Them.

“Boys, how do you fit four gays on a chair at the same time? You turn it upside down!” Everyone laughed. Benji remembers glancing surreptitiously at David, and saw that he was laughing, too. It’s just as easy to be exclusive as it is to be inclusive, just as easy to create an Us as a Them. Benji has never been worried about being beaten up or hated if anyone finds out the truth about him; he’s been hated by every opposing team since he was a child. The only thing he’s scared of is that one day there will be jokes that his teammates and coach won’t tell when he’s in the room. The exclusivity of laughter. He stands by his father’s grave and weighs the puck in his hand. David has written a single word on it. Win.

Maya comes out onto the steps. Her parents turn toward her, and they will remember this moment. The very last moment of happiness and security.

The fifteen-year-old girl closes her eyes. Opens her mouth. Speaks. Tells them everything. When the words stop, there are avocados on the ground among the fragments of a dropped coffee cup. On one of the biggest pieces you can still see parts of the pattern from the front of the cup. A bear.

Words are small things. No one means any harm by them, they keep saying that. Everyone is just doing their job. The

Words are not small things.

When you grow up so close to death, you know that it can be many different things to many different people, but that for a parent, death, more than anything else, is silence. In the kitchen, in the hall, on the phone, in the backseat, on Friday evening, on Monday morning, wrapped in pillowcases and crumpled sheets, at the bottom of the toy box in the attic, on the little stool by the kitchen counter, under damp towels that no longer lie strewn across the floor beside the bath. Everywhere, children leave silence behind them.

They sat there in the police station. She told them everything. And she could see in her parents’ eyes how the story made the same terrible sentence echo through them, over and over again. The one every mom and every dad deep down most fear having to admit: “We can’t protect our children.”

“Kill them, bro. Win the final and turn professional and kill them all. Show them you’re one of us.”

Amat and Benji are the only ones who sit quietly in their seats on the bus. Words are difficult things.

you learn as a leader, whether you choose the position or have it forced upon you, is that leadership is as much about what you don’t say as what you do say.

And when even the toughest can’t handle it: Who’s going to be the leader then?

games are won as much in the head as they are on the ice,

“Do you want to hear the truth, guys? The truth is that no one believed you could get here. Not your opponents, not the association, not the national coaches, and certainly not any of the people out there in the stands. For them this was a dream, for you it was a goal. No one did this for you. So this game, this moment… it belongs to you. Don’t let anyone tell you what to do with it.”

A moment ago they were all atheists. None of them is now.

Benji played through the pain; the whole team hit the wall and smashed through it with their foreheads and just carried on. Every one of them overperformed. Every one of them was the very best version of themselves. They gave their all. No coach could possibly have asked for more. They did their absolute, absolute, absolute best. It wasn’t enough.

She will never understand how some people can prefer other people to animals.

Because they so desperately needed somewhere in the world where it felt as if nothing bad could happen. They’re not talking now. They don’t say a word all night long. Each of them knows what the other is thinking anyway. “We can’t protect our children.” We can’t protect our children we can’t protect our children we can’t protect our children.

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.

first thing that happens in a conflict is that we choose a side, because that’s easier than trying to hold two thoughts in our heads at the same time. The second thing that happens is that we seek out facts that confirm what we want to believe—comforting facts, ones that permit life to go on as normal. The third is that we dehumanize our enemy. There are many ways of doing that, but none is easier than taking her name away from her.

doesn’t take long to persuade each other to stop seeing a person as a person. And when enough people are quiet for long enough, a handful of voices can give the impression that everyone is screaming.

They wanted an enemy. Now they’ve got one. And now they don’t know if they ought to sit next to their daughter or hunt down the person who harmed her, if they ought to help her live or see to it that he dies. Unless they’re the same thing. Hate is so much easier than its opposite. Parents don’t heal. Nor do children.

Benji always sought out the strongest physical sensations because they displaced other feelings. Adrenaline and the taste of blood in his mouth and throbbing pain all over his body became a pleasant buzz in his head. He liked scaring himself, because when you’re scared you can’t think of anything else. He’s never cut his own skin, but he understands those who do. Sometimes he has longed so much for a pain he can see and focus on that he’s taken the train to a town several hours away, waited until dark, and then sought out the biggest bastards he could find to start a fight with, and then fought until they had no choice but to give him a serious beating. Because sometimes, when it seriously hurt on the outside, it hurt a little bit less in other places.

He says: “Big secrets turn us into small men.” Benji doesn’t answer. But he feels small.

and he’s been poor. All his life he has strived for perfection, not out of vanity, but as a survival strategy. He has never been given anything for free, he’s never cut himself any slack, the way men who are born rich can. He’s convinced that’s the reason for his success: the fact that he’s been prepared to work harder and fight more ruthlessly than everyone else. And continuing to hunt perfection in all things means never being satisfied,

He wishes someone had checked him. He wishes they’d thrown his clothes in the shower. He almost wishes that they’d shouted something horrible about his sister. Just to escape the silence.

Difficult questions, simple answers. What is a community? It is the sum total of our choices.

Sometimes, when she felt really bad, she counted scars. But mostly she just counted faults. She would stand in front of the mirror and point at them: all the things that were wrong about her. Sometimes that made it feel more bearable, when she had already said them out loud to herself before anyone at school did.

Ana calls Maya a hundred times that evening. She can understand why she’s not getting any answer. Knows Maya hates her. Because precisely what did Maya predict? This. If she hadn’t told the truth, Kevin would only have hurt her. But now he’s hurt everyone Maya loves too.

“I have no intention of settling down here,” he promises. “No one does. They just get stuck here,” Benji says,

They laugh, the pair of them. Even on a morning like this. Because they can, and because they must. They still possess that blessing.

Ramona slaps him so quickly and hard across his ear with the palm of her hand that the fat old man almost falls off his barstool. The angry old bag on the other side of the bar snarls: “Is that why you’re here? To talk about that? Sweet Jesus… you men. It’s never your fault, is it? When are you going to admit that it isn’t ‘hockey’ that raises these boys, it’s YOU LOT? In every time and every place, I’ve come across men who blame their own stupidity on crap they themselves have invented. ‘Religion causes wars,’ ‘guns kill people,’ it’s all the same old bullshit!” “I didn’t mea…,” Sune tries, but has to duck when she tries to slap him again. “Keep your trap shut when I’m talking! Fucking men! YOU’RE the problem! Religion doesn’t fight, guns don’t kill, and you need to be very fucking clear that hockey has never raped anyone! But do you know who do? Fight and kill and rape?” Sune clears his throat. “Men?” “MEN! It’s always fucking men!”

He turns sixteen today, and all his life he has been teased and rejected. About everything. His looks, thoughts, manner of speech, home address. Everywhere. At school, in the locker room, online. That wears a person down in the end. It’s not always obvious, because the people around a bullied child assume that he or she must get used to it after a while. Never. You never get used to it. It burns like fire the whole time. It’s just that no one knows how long the fuse is, not even you.

The only thing that’s stopped him from doing it earlier, several years ago, was Amat. One single friend like him—that can be enough.

Amat was the reason he stayed alive. Amat was the one who told him, on all the darkest, hardest nights: “One day, Zach, you’ll have more money and influence than all those bastards. And then you’ll do great things. Because you know how much it hurts to have no power. So you won’t hurt them, even though you could. And that will make the world a better place.”

Never again do you have the sort of friends you have when you’re fifteen. Zacharias turns sixteen today. He breaks into the school without caring if he sets the alarm off. Puts the bucket down on the floor.

Girls aren’t allowed to like hockey even just a little bit in Beartown. Ideally they shouldn’t like it at all. Because if you like the sport you must be a lesbian, and if you like the players you’re a slut. Ana feels like pushing her neighbor up against the wall and telling him that the locker room where those boys sit telling their stupid jokes ends up preserving them like a tin can. It makes them mature more slowly, while some even go rotten inside. And they don’t have any female friends, and there are no women’s teams here, so they learn that hockey only belongs to them, and their coaches teach them that girls are a “distraction.” So they learn that girls only exist for fucking. She wants to point out how all the old men in this town praise them for “fighting” and “not backing down,” but not one single person tells them that when a girl says no, it means NO. And the problem with this town is not only that a boy raped a girl, but that everyone is pretending that he DIDN’T do it. So now all the other boys will think that what he did was okay. Because no one cares. Ana wants to stand on the rooftop and scream: “You don’t give a shit about Maya! And you don’t really give a shit about Kevin either! Because they’re not people to you, they’re just objects of value. And his value is far greater than hers!”

When a child learns to hunt, they are taught that the forest contains two different sorts of animal: predators and prey. The predators have their eyes close together, facing the front, because they only need to focus on their prey. Their prey, on the other hand, have their eyes wide apart, on either side of the head, because their only chance of survival is if they can see predators approaching from behind.

The room is silent enough for everyone to hear when his heart breaks.

“You’re nothing if you’re alone in this world, Mom!” She doesn’t answer. Just sits beside him until he starts to cry. He sobs: “It’s too hard, Mom. You don’t understand how much I… I can’t…” Fatima removes her hands from his. Stands up. Backs away. And says sternly: “I don’t know what you know. But whatever it is, there’s clearly someone out there who’s terrified that you’re going to reveal it. And let me tell you something, my darling boy: I don’t need any men. I don’t need a man to drive me in a big car to the rink each morning, and I don’t need a man to give me a new job that I don’t want. I don’t need a man to pay my bills, and I don’t need a man to tell me what I can think and feel and believe. I only need one man: my son. And you’re not alone. You’ve never been alone. You just need to

There will always be people who won’t understand his decision. Who will call him weak or dishonest or disloyal. They are probably people who live secure lives, who are surrounded by people who share their own opinions and only talk to people who reinforce their own worldview. It’s easy for them to judge him—it’s always easier to lecture other people about morality when you’ve never had to answer for anything yourself.

“This isn’t my town. You’re not my town. You should be ashamed of yourselves.” One man stands up and shouts: “Shut up, Ramona! You don’t know anything about this!” Three men in black jackets step silently out of the shadows by the wall, one of them takes several strides across the room, stops in front of the man, and says: “If you tell her to shut up again, I’ll shut you up. For good.”

“My name is Amat. I saw what Kevin did to Maya. I was drunk, I’m in love with her, and I’m telling you that straight so that you lying bastards don’t have to say it behind my back when I walk out of here. Kevin Erdahl raped Maya Andersson. I’m going to go to the police tomorrow, and they’ll say I’m not a reliable witness. But I’m going to tell you everything now, everything that Kevin did, everything that I saw. And you won’t ever forget it. You know that my eyes work better than anyone else’s in here. Because that’s the first thing you learn on the Beartown Ice Hockey Club, isn’t it? ‘You can’t teach that way of seeing. That’s something you’re born with.’ ” Then he tells them. Every detail. Everything that was in Kevin’s room. The posters on the wall, the exact arrangement of trophies on the shelves, the scratches on the floor, the color of the bedclothes, the blood on the boy’s hand, the terror on the girl’s face, the muffled screams, stifled beneath a heavy palm, the bruises, the violence, the incomprehensible, hideous, unforgiveable nature of it all. He tells them everything. And no one in the room will ever forget it.

He puts his headphones in, casts a last glance inside the rink, sees the ice shimmering beneath a single fluorescent light. He knows he’s put himself on the losing side—he’ll never win this. Maybe he’ll never get to play again. If anyone had asked him there and then if it was worth it, he would have whispered: “I don’t know.” Sometimes life doesn’t let you choose your battles. Just the company you keep.