“Don’t worry, favorite sister,” Benji says.
As though she has a choice. She looks beseechingly at him. “Finish your beer and then go home, okay? I just need to finish the accounts, I’ll be done in fifteen minutes.”
Benji leans over the bar and kisses her cheek. She feels like both hugging him and hitting him, the same as usual. She looks around the bar; it isn’t even a quarter full, and most of the people here are either too old or too drunk to worry about Benji’s tattoo. Katia hopes she can get him out of here before that changes.
* * *
When Amat’s legs have no strength left, he turns and runs back along the road more slowly. Halfway home he encounters a Volvo. It’s Peter Andersson’s. Maybe Amat should stop himself, maybe he should have more dignity, but he starts jumping up and down and waving frantically. The car slows down, almost unwillingly. Amat leans in through the wound-down window, and the words bubble out of him breathlessly: “Hi, P—Peter, I just wanted to ask . . . all the talk about the club, is there going . . . I mean, is there going to be a junior team in the autumn? I want to play, I have . . .”
Peter shouldn’t have stopped the car, should have known himself better than to take out his feelings on a sixteen-year-old boy. For a moment he forgets what Amat did back in the spring, that the reason why the junior player can’t go to Hed now is that he testified on behalf of Maya. Saved Peter’s job. But sometimes grief and rage can consume a grown man so completely that he can’t actually consider the fact that other people have feelings too.
“Amat, I’ve got a lot on my mind, we’ll have to talk about another time.”
“When? I’ve got nowhere to play!” Amat blurts out breathlessly.
He may not have meant to sound angry, but he’s frightened. Peter’s guilty conscience threatens to suffocate him, and at times like that sometimes the right places in our hearts don’t get enough oxygen, so he snaps back, “Are you having trouble hearing me, Amat? I DON’T GIVE A DAMN ABOUT THE JUNIOR TEAM! I don’t even know if I’ve got a CLUB!!!”
* * *
Only then does Amat see that Peter’s been crying. The boy backs away slowly from the car. Peter drives away, utterly crushed. In the rain he didn’t see the tears running down the boy’s cheeks as well.
* * *
A man is sitting in the bar of the Barn, twenty-five, maybe twenty-seven. Blue jeans, polo shirt. He’s drinking beer and has a book open in front of him. When Katia goes back to the office, he raises an eyebrow in Benji’s direction and asks, “Should I move?”
Benji turns toward him with the sort of carefree little quiver of the corners of his lips that people find very hard not to find infectious. “What for?”
The man in the polo shirt smiles. “Your sister seems to think you’re going to get in trouble. So I’m wondering if I should move.”
“That depends how much you like trouble,” Benji replies and drinks some of his beer.
The man in the polo shirt nods. He glances at Benji’s hand and sees the blood on his knuckles. “I’ve lived here for four hours. How quickly is it reasonable to get into trouble?”
“Kind of depends how long you’re thinking of staying. What’s the book?”
The question comes so out of the blue that the man momentarily doesn’t know what to say; then he realizes that perhaps that was the point. Benji has many ways of making other people feel uncertain.
“It was . . . I mean, it is a . . . it’s a biography of Friedrich Nietzsche,” the man in the polo shirt says and clears his throat.
“The guy with the abyss?” Benji asks.
The man in the polo shirt looks surprised. “?‘If you look long into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.’ Yes, that’s Nietzsche.”
“You look surprised,” Benji observes.
“No . . . ,” the man lies.
Benji drinks his beer. For many years his mother had a way of punishing him for fighting in school by forcing him to read the newspaper. He wasn’t allowed to go to hockey practice until she’d tested him on everything: the editorial, the foreign news, culture, politics. After a few years that got too easy for him, so his mother started to use literary classics instead. She could hardly read them herself, but she knew her son was smarter than he let anyone believe. So his punishment for misbehavior was also a reminder: you’re better than this.
Benji sniggers at the man in the polo shirt. “Were you expecting me to trot out ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ when you mentioned Nietzsche? Or maybe ‘In heaven, all the interesting people are missing’? Or . . . how does it go? ‘And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who couldn’t hear the music’?”
“I don’t think that last one is Nietzsche,” the man replies cautiously.
Benji drinks his beer in a way that makes it impossible for the man to know if it was a mistake or a test. Then he says, “You still look surprised.”
“I . . . no . . . okay, to be honest, you don’t look like someone who’d quote Nietzsche,” the man says, laughing.
“There are lots of things I don’t look like,” Benji says.
The corners of his mouth are dancing again.
* * *
Bobo and his mother go for a long walk in the forest that evening. She wants to tell him how hard is it to be an adult, how complex the world is, but she doesn’t know how. All the while Bobo was growing up, she tried to teach him that violence was wrong, but this spring he found himself in the worst fight of his life and came close to being seriously injured, and she’s rarely been as proud of him as she was then. Because he defended Amat. Got beaten up for his sake. He stood up for something.
For many years she was pleased that Bobo was such a softie. Other boys were embarrassed when their mothers kissed them on the forehead in front of their friends, but not hers. He was the sort of boy who would say, “Your hair looks nice today, Mom.” Now she wishes he was tougher. Colder. Maybe he’d have been able to handle it better.
“I’m not well, Bobo . . . ,” she whispers.
Bobo cries when she tells him, but she cries more. Bobo isn’t the little boy who used to jump up into her arms anymore; he’s big enough now to have space in his chest for the greatest sorrow and tall and strong enough to pick his mother up and carry her home after she’s told him she’s going to die. She whispers against his neck, “You’ve always been the best big brother in the world. You’re going to have to be even better now.”
That evening she hears him read Harry Potter to his little brother and sister. That night Hog makes some weak tea and Bobo comes into the bathroom and holds his mom’s hair when she throws up. When she’s lying on her bed, her son wipes her cheeks and says, “Do you want to hear something silly? You know you’re always telling me I’ll never find a girlfriend because my demands are too high? That’s your fault. Because I want someone who looks at me the way you and Dad look at each other.”
Ann-Katrin presses Bobo’s big, dumb lummox’s head tight to her forehead. She would have loved to see him get married. Become a dad. Life is so damn, damn, damn tough sometimes that it’s almost unbearable. Even if that’s the way it’s supposed to be.
* * *