Anxious People - first english edition cover
Anxious People by Fredrik Backman is a poignant, darkly comedic, and deeply human novel. On the surface, it’s a story about a failed bank robbery and a bizarre hostage situation. At its core, however, it is an exploration of empathy, mental health, parenting, and the invisible battles every person fights.
The Premise: A Farcical Crime
The story takes place in a small Swedish town the day before New Year’s Eve. A desperate woman, facing eviction and the threat of losing custody of her daughters after her husband cheated on her, decides to rob a bank using what she thinks is a toy gun. She demands exactly 6,500 kroner (her rent money).
Unfortunately, she inadvertently chooses a cashless bank. Panicking, she flees the building and bursts into an open-house apartment viewing across the street, accidentally taking the prospective buyers hostage.
The “Hostages”
The hostages are an eccentric group of deeply anxious individuals, none of whom take the robber particularly seriously:
• Zara: A wealthy, cynical bank director who attends apartment viewings just to look at balconies. She is deeply haunted by guilt after denying a loan to a man who subsequently jumped off a bridge ten years ago.
• Roger and Anna-Lena: A retired couple who flip apartments. Roger prides himself on his negotiation skills, unaware that Anna-Lena secretly hires disruptions to artificially lower prices just to make him feel successful.
• Julia and Ro: A young lesbian couple expecting their first child. Julia is heavily pregnant and stressed, while Ro is deeply anxious that she isn't ready to be a parent.
• Estelle: An elderly woman who seems completely unbothered by the gun and just wants to chat.
• Lennart: A man hired by Anna-Lena who spends a large portion of the hostage situation locked in the bathroom wearing nothing but underwear and a bunny head.
What Happens Inside
Instead of a terrifying ordeal, the hostage situation morphs into an involuntary group therapy session. Trapped together, the strangers begin to lower their defences. They bicker, order pizza, and gradually share their deepest vulnerabilities, fears, and regrets.
They realise they are all flawed, overwhelmed adults just trying to figure out how to survive. Recognising the bank robber’s desperate plight, the group collectively decides to help her rather than fear her. Estelle reveals she actually owns the apartment and gives the robber a key to the empty apartment next door to hide in.
Police officer Jim hails hostages on megaphone
The Investigation & The Twist
Outside, the situation is being handled by a father-and-son police duo, Jim and Jack. Jim is empathetic and laid-back, while Jack is rigid and desperate to prove himself. Jack is haunted by the same bridge tragedy from a decade ago—he tried and failed to save the man who jumped, though a week later he successfully saved a young girl named Nadia (who grew up to become Zara's therapist).
When the hostages are finally released, a gunshot rings out from the apartment. The police storm in, only to find the room empty but splattered with blood.
During the subsequent interrogations, the hostages deliberately play dumb, giving highly frustrating, contradictory, and unhelpful statements to protect the robber. Eventually, Jim confesses to Jack that he discovered the robber when he delivered the pizzas, felt bad for her, and helped her hide. The "gunshot" was a complete accident caused by a vibrating phone knocking the gun off a table.
The Resolution
Realising that no one was hurt and no money was stolen, Jack and Jim decide to drop the case. The characters' lives are beautifully transformed by the experience:
• The bank robber moves into the apartment with Estelle, securing a safe home and keeping custody of her children.
• Julia and Ro buy a neighbouring apartment and welcome their baby boy.
• Roger and Anna-Lena find peace in their marriage and pick up a new hobby.
• Zara finally opens the 10-year-old letter from the man on the bridge. It reads, "It wasn't your fault," allowing her to finally let go of her guilt and open her heart to a relationship with Lennart.
The Takeaway: Backman uses this whimsical narrative to remind us that everyone we meet is dealing with their own private anxieties, and that a little bit of grace, empathy, and human connection can save a life.
(Supplied by Google Gemini)
Fredrik Backman - the author says “I’m a pretty anxious person. That’s one of the basic traits needed to become a writer”
Fredrik Backman author Bio from the Publishers Weekly by Jen Doll
In fall 2017, something odd happened to Fredrik Backman, the bestselling Swedish author of 2012’s A Man Called Ove. He was scheduled to be at a book fair in Copenhagen, but suddenly nothing made sense. “All the dates were confused, I didn’t know where I was supposed to be,” the 39-year-old says via WhatsApp from his home in Stockholm. “There’s an expression in Swedish when you’re burned out. They say, ‘This person hit the wall.’ That’s what happened to me.”
Backman’s wife and his agent, he explains, “shut everything down.” He took a break from book promotion and started working with a psychiatrist. “I’ve always struggled with anxieties,” he says. “I’m a pretty anxious person. That’s one of the basic traits needed to become a writer.”
In fact, Backman had turned to therapy 15 years before, after he was shot in the leg during a robbery, which left him on crutches and “scared of everything,” he says. “My wife would look at me and say, ‘Strange things happen to you. These things happen to you a lot.’ ”
Backman extracted from both of those moments for Anxious People, his latest novel, which is set for a September 2021 release in the U.S. from Atria Books, his longtime American publisher. The story involves a failed bank robber who takes hostage a disparate group of people—including a young lesbian couple, a wealthy bank director, an elderly woman, and two middle-aged, married house-flippers—at an open house. The cops who investigate the situation, a father and son duo, soon realise all is not what it seems.
Zarah the bank executive who suffers from guilt that she denied a loan to the bridge-jumper
Each character has a story that slowly unrolls, revealing a complicated, heart-rending, tragic, hilarious, and interconnected truth. “I steal little things from a lot of people, and I pour that into a character until that character is real for me,” Backman says. “I care about this person, and at that point it works.”
Sometimes Backman steals from himself, like in the scenes where one character sees a therapist. “The psychiatrist being annoyed with this narcissistic person comes from me,” he says.
In Backman’s case, what came from hitting the wall was wanting to write about anxiety. “But not people in an extreme situation,” he says. “Normal people living with anxiety and trying to cope, people who are feeling like, ‘I’m just trying to get through the day here.’ ” He wanted to write about the feelings he himself had experienced—that sense of failure and futility that can happen regardless of success.
Backman knows about failure and success. After being rejected by multiple publishers in Sweden, A Man Called Ove went on to sell more than 2.8 million copies in the U.S. alone, and the paperback spent 90 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. According to Atria, his books have sold more than five million copies across all formats in the U.S., with 12 million copies sold globally.
Almost all of Backman’s books touch on suicide, and in Anxious People a man jumping off a bridge has a far-reaching effect. For Backman, who’s struggled with anxiety as well as depression, this is personal. “I had a very close friend who ended his life when I was about 20 years old, and that never stops affecting you,” he says.
Parenting is another recurring theme in Backman’s work. He’s fascinated by “the really stupid things you do for your kids because you’re a moron,” he says, adding, “We‘ve had kids since the beginning of human evolution, and we still don’t know how to interact with them.”
Anxious People grapples with both mental health and parenting, but at its heart it’s about how we are all connected. “A person standing on a bridge—that story affects a lot of other people,” Backman says. “That’s the furthest edge of the anxiety I’ve struggled with. I wanted to write about that and how what you do and don’t do actually matters. People will have to deal with your choices for the rest of their life.”
When Backman begins a book, he tries to create as small a world as he can—A Man Called Ove unfolds, basically, on one street—so he can delve into the human emotions there. In the case of Anxious People, he and his wife had been going to a lot of open houses, where he quickly found himself looking at the people attending, not the real estate.
Maria is the real estate agent responsible for the ill-fated showing, is anxious that she might not be very good at her job
“I had the idea that this would be a really fun setting for a hostage situation,” Backman says. “You walk in; you’re enemies with everyone. All of these people are in competition. And all of these people are very anxious.”
Backman notes that house hunting, after all, tends to bring out a host of existential questions: “Is this where I want to live? Is this how I view myself? Can I afford this? Do we want to have kids? What kind of parents would we be? In the next five, or 10, years, where do we see ourselves?” It’s a reflective take on the future from someone who says he never thought much about what he’d be when he grew up. “[I wanted to be] a soccer player when I was really little; then you get older and realise, ‘I have no talent at all for that!’ ”
In adulthood, Backman’s gigs included being a forklift driver and a blogger. “I still don’t feel, ‘Oh, I’m an author,’ ” he says. “If these were medieval times, I would be the guy wandering from village to village telling stories for coins.” It’s pretty much the only thing he’s been doing since the age of 25, but he still assumes it could all go away tomorrow. “The only thing that people have to decide is, ‘We’re done with this,’ and that part of my life is over. But I’ll still tell stories. I don’t have much in the way of hobbies. I don’t have a lot of friends. I don’t do a lot of things. I’m with my family, I write, and I read.”
And Backman prefers that, really. But in 2017, another strange thing happened: the movie adaptation of A Man Called Ove was nominated for an Academy Award for best foreign film. (Tom Hanks is starring in an English-language adaptation scheduled to be released in 2021.) Backman and his wife (who handles the business aspects of his career) flew to L.A. for the Oscars, but they’d only obtained one ticket, and Backman wasn’t keen to go to the event by himself. “There was no way I’d be there without my wife,” he says. “So she went with the film crew, which they were very happy about; they were like, ‘We get the fun one!’ ”
Backman, instead, went on a guided tour of Dodger Stadium, “which was great—me and a bunch of old men who didn’t even know the Oscars were going on.”
Maybe, at some point, everything will calm down. “It was never my intention to have this career,” he says. “I haven’t been comfortable with it at all. We’ve slowed it down on purpose. Most of the weird things now, I think, will happen in my kids’ lives, and I’ll just tag along. I’m looking forward to that way more.”
Arundhaty Fredrik Backman Bio presented at the reading.
Arundhaty was not prepared for this session, so she read out whatever she could find about the author.
Fredreik Bachman was born in 1981; he's comparatively young for the fame of his novels. He is a Swedish author, known for his heartwarming, witty, and deeply empathetic storytelling.
He skyrocketed to international fame with his 2012 novel, A Man Called Ove, that has been made into a movie, starring Tom Hanks. He lives in Stockholm with his wife and two children. He had a career as a journalist, before becoming a full-time novelist; Backman worked as a blogger and columnist also.
His works are frequently described as odysseys of the ordinary. He is celebrated for exploring mental health, family, and everyday courage through numerous overlapping and poignant perspectives. His books have been published in over 40 countries and adapted into major films and TV series.
Backman has written numerous bestsellers. The breakout hit, A Man Called Ove, was adapted into an Oscar-nominated Swedish film and a Hollywood movie starring Tom Hanks. Other bestsellers, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry, and Britt Murray Was Here, the sports drama, Beartown Trilogy; In the category of non-fiction he wrote Things My Son Needs to Know About the World.
Anxious People was published in 2019, and it's a humorous and moving psychological fiction novel. The story revolves around a botched bank robbery that turns into an accidental hostage situation at an open house to sell an apartment. The narrative dives deep into the interconnected lives and anxieties of the people trapped inside.
You can explore his full bibliography at his wiki
Anxious People was his sixth novel.
Arundhaty found the novel a very entertaining read. If you are patient you will derive a whole lot about the anxieties of ordinary living. In the beginning, you get a bit confused because it jumps from one situation to another. But finally, the beginning of the story where this man is on the bridge ready jump into the water, is connected to all of the characters in some way or the other. It's tied up together beautifully.
Pamela’s daughter in Norway told her, all these people in the book they mentioned behave like typical Scandinavians. She said this is typical Scandinavian psychology. They have a lot of empathy, and realise this guy (a woman really) who becomes a bank robber actually had no intention to steal.
And the pistol she was using was a real pistol – she thought it was a toy pistol. Kumkum said she found it very difficult to read at first, but Arundhaty kept telling her that she should press on and she would slowly come to like it, especially as everything gets tied up neatly in the end.
The relationship between the father and the son, the two cops, and the pregnant girl, and the other characters in the apartment, are revealed as various issues are exposed.
Married couple Julia, who is pregnant, and Ro are looking for a place to start their family — but the two women are having a hard time deciding what they want in a new home
The bank robber was a woman; she would have been shot dead if it was in the USA. Somebody with a gun, patak!, they would have killed her.
Pamela – Chapter 13 Jack and Jim, the father-son police officers, decide one of the witnesses is lying – or they all are.
Jack and Jim, the father-son police officers, are prominent characters in this story. Pamela read from Chapter 13. It's one of the officers who saves the bank robber. It is nice to know their psychology a little bit. Jack and Jim decide one of the witnesses is lying, or they all are.
After reading the passage they suspect none of the so-called hostages were telling the truth when they were being interviewed. The interviews are so hilarious. They were just playing with the police officers and misleading them.
Thomo – Chapter 15 The cynical bank teller called London working at a cashless bank scoffs at the bank robber who demands 6,500 kronor and calls the cops.
These passages tell us a lot about Jack. Jack copes with his mother's death and sister's addiction. Jim, the dad-cop, aged badly after his wife died, and became a lesser man, never quite able to breathe back in all the air.
This chapter depicts the cynical bank teller called London working at a cashless bank scoffs at the robber who demanded 6,500 krona, and then she calls the police.
After reading the passage one becomes aware how different life is. There are cashless banks in India, although we hardly go to the bank any more except to get some cash to keep as a reserve at home.
During Modi's early days, when he demonetised certain bank note denominations, the banks were suddenly rendered cashless and it caused a lot of trouble for many traders who carried on their business in cash.
Nowadays most transactions in India are cashless with the near universal adoption of the UPI (created by RBI before Modi came to power). We use the UPI with a number of interoperable payment apps, plus debit cards.
Cash is still the medium for church and temple donations, but many of the temples have QR codes now, displayed on these public places. Devika mentioned a temple she frequents in Panangad. There was a fraud when somebody put up his own QR code and walked off with quite a few lakhs before they figured it out.
Sometimes commercial QR codes are in the name of the shop-owner, for example Philip C. George at Nilgiris store in Panampilly Nagar. Other examples were given.
Arundhaty – Chapter 24 Zara suggests to the psychologist that the picture of the woman on the bridge is about someone about to commit suicide
As Pamela said, all the police interviews with the hostages are very interesting and they are light-hearted. Nobody takes anybody seriously in these conversations. Arundhaty selected the conversation between the psychologist and the bank director, a lady called Zara.
Zara challenges the psychologist and her capabilities, but finally, they both connect in some way.
There was a strong breeze at this time in the reading session and a door banged. Devika recollected that they used to live in a house in Chennai on the third floor and there was so much breeze that her table lamps were blown away and broke. Once Devika remembered she had a beautiful decoration sent by a friend from abroad. Her granddaughter happily opened all the windows and that went crashing, a vase and other things with the breeze.
Somebody kept a book upright and that book opened up because of the breeze. She had a friend who lost a whole Noritake set on a trolley and a picture on top came crashing down. A breeze prompted all these disaster stories.
Her friend who is into Buddhism uttered a saying, ‘Never cry for something that cannot cry for you.’ That’s why she never cries over spilled milk! Devika has not forgotten that maxim.
Priya , slated to go next, could not join to read her chosen passage from Ch 36 on account of her daughter’s family arriving from Calcutta.
Geetha – Chapter 46 Jack copes with his mum’s death and sister’s addiction
This is one of the poignant parts of the story in Ch 46 about the policeman Jack’s mom and his life after her death.
Different types of people gather in the viewing of the apartment, and all have their own different backgrounds and psyches. Finally, they all sympathised with the robber’s plight; they all had a heart. What ties them together is anxiety. They are simple people, but with a heart. The dad cop is a soft hearted person, ever forgiving of his daughter, a junkie. He's a real dad, more than a cop.
It was a beautiful passage, a touching passage. Joe said if all Stockholmers are like this, he would like to live in Stockholm. But he is quite happy in Kerala as well. The father Jim was also very, very compassionate. But he was erasing things in the police record to safeguard the woman robber.
They are like this. Geetha was thinking about herself in this context. His mother never really told him to believe in God.
Geetha said that every time she spoke to Rahul, her son in Bengaluru, her last line would be telling him just to thank God for everything. She would send verses from the Bible or a wholesome forward with a nice song. She vouched that she is very appreciative of Jack’s mother who just lived her life. She let her son be.
According to Zakia most Scandinavians don't believe in God. If you mention the word God, they look at you like, what's wrong with you? Very few go to the church, you'll find perhaps 10 or 15 in a huge church and most of those would be in the over-60 age group. All over Europe it's like that. They don't feel that they need to go to church. Yet there are so many beautiful churches all over Europe. It's sad to think that people don't visit them to pray or turn their gaze inward.
Churches serve as tourist attractions though.
Zakia – Chapteer 53 Zara has a conversation with the ‘rabbit’ about the economic system
Zakia read from a passage where Zara goes out to the balcony to get some air. She's also recalling everything. The ‘rabbit’ a professional, hired to disrupt the apartment viewing to bring the price down; he also follows her out and has a conversation with her. It was quite an interesting chapter because he keeps trying to get her attention and Zara just wants to be left alone with her headphones on. But the ‘rabbit’ doesn't relent, he keeps talking to her.
Lennart, dressed as a rabbit for reasons that are later explained. Lennart is an actor who gets caught up in dramas — both hostage-related and otherwise — that he never really understands.
That's when you realise that Zara is connected with the bridge in the opening scene of the novel, with a man jumping off the bridge. That connection prompted Zakia to read the passage.
KumKum took help from the 6-episode series Anxious People on Prime Video which she watched after a visit by her Kolkata niece and her fiancé.
She enjoyed the book a lot, because she had to discover all these things by herself. She watched leisurely. She enjoyed the book, and the serial which was very well done. There is a bit of back and forth at the beginning since it is not a story being told in a time-linear fashion.
All the readers and Arundhaty kept encouraging KumKum to go on reading, when she was having a difficult time just after her cataract surgery when the eyesight was blurred.
KumKum – Chapter 56 An emotional and poignant reading about Estelle, an elderly widow. A quiet meditation on love and loss that speaks to the power of small, everyday intimacies.
KumKum read an emotional and poignant reading about Estelle, an elderly widow who seems least bothered by the stage situation.
Estelle is an older woman ostensibly searching for a new apartment for her daughter — and is alone at the showing while her husband parks the car
It is a quiet meditation on love and loss that speaks to the power of small everyday intimacies. Estelle was quite a crazy woman in the novel. She offers a rescue to the bank robber and allows her with her two kids to stay in the apartment she owned next door.
Joe – Chapter 65 The bank robber tells Jim the older policeman her story
He read from chapter 65; it's where the bank robber tells her story to Jim, the dad policeman. He then sets aside his policing duties, on account of his human empathy for her. She didn't do anything heinous – there was no violence committed, nobody was hurt in the process, and no money was stolen.
Jim erased all the records and files, everything. In the end the son policeman, Jack, also does the same thing, and sets the bank robber free to look after her children.
People are not like that anymore, said KumKum. But Pamela insisted there are people like that in Scandinavia, there are people, very sweet people, frank, innocent and straightforward, not like the cunning kind you see in India. Or in the USA.
US people are not kind so much as foolish. Pamela received a book from a Norwegian, called Understanding a Norwegian, and the book was on the basic psyche of Norwegians. They have been used to living on mountains separated by fiords. If you wanted to visit your neighbour, you would have to climb down a mountain and climb up another mountain to visit. That's the kind of culture they had for years together, when it was extremely cold, no roads and no pathways – you just had your own family. So they're not very outgoing. Joe said he understands now why they are numero uno in winter sports.
Or they got into the open boats and the Norsemen went pillaging around Europe. This was during the Viking Age (roughly 793–1050 CE); those who engaged in pirating and raiding were specifically known as Vikings.
Thomo said the Swedes and the Finns are the best in car rallying. The current champion is Kalle Rovanperä, the first DNF (“Did Not Finish”) in a Single Seater – he's from Finland, and there's Mika Salo, and a whole lot of them. Thomo can name at least at least 10 world champions in motor rallying from that part of the world.
Joginder Singh (Sardar Joginder Singh Bhachu), affectionately known as "The Flying Sikh", was the legendary East African motorsport icon. Born in Kenya, he was a giant in endurance rallying during the 1960s and 1970s. He won in the Sahara three or four times. Then he went to do one of these Scandinavian rallies, but he just couldn't get anywhere, because he was not used to the snow. It's a completely different kind of driving.
In the novel a guy sits there and looks at the winter scene, the white emptiness, and the only way you can do anything with it is to get some enjoyment in sending the cars sideways as he takes a car. In the same book on understanding Norwegians, there's another line which says, ‘All Norwegians are born with skis.’ They've been using that for traveling in the winter ever since.
Most gold medals in winter Olympics are won by the Norwegians, Joe noted.
Scandinavians are good at design, for example, IKEA and all of that furniture design. Copenhagen is a city with striking shops for home design and furniture design. Furniture has the most beautiful lines, curved and straight.
Here is a good video on Norway:
Pamela said not everyone likes all the Norwegians in their family. One of her nephews is married in Norway. She's a landscape architect. Her husband is also an architect, or an engineer. He went into design after that, urban design.
In Finland, Thomo stayed in an Airbnb owned by a Bengali, who had gone to Finland. His subject was metallurgy and gold. He was actually working to mine for gold in Finland. Even the landscape architect wondered what he was doing in a place where there is only skiing and ice.
Devika – Chapter 66 Estelle hands over the key to the adjoining apartment to the bank-robber to live with her children – an apartment she thought her own daughter would move into.
Her passage is all about Estelle. In the passage Estelle hands over the key to the adjoining apartment to the bank-robber so she can live with her children – an apartment she thought her own daughter would move into.
I think that's beautiful said KumKum as she thanked Devika. The bankroller, never named in the novel, makes it her home by escaping into it; the exit is unnoticed by the rest of the hostages.
It’s Estelle’s home, her children grew up there and she hoped to have her daughter live next to her – but it was not to be– the daughter chose a life of her own. When Estelle gives the apartment away there is a sadness, but also the comforting knowledge that it is going to be used by a needy family to preserve the next generation.
In their Thevara flat Geetha had a similar concept for moving there. Geetha's brother lives in the next complex, on the same floor. Sometimes she hands food over, sambar and such, over the wall. Thomo’s brother lives across the road. It makes sense for their old house was harder to manage after a time since it was two storeys. The other factor was that after Geetha’s father died, Thomo and Geetha began travelling a lot more. In their new flat they can just lock the front door and go for a journey, whereas before they couldn't do that when living in their house in Yacht Club Enclave.
They had to get used to something smaller because as age crept up, and Geetha stopped being able to climb to the upper bedrooms.
Thanks to the Yacht Club, and the movie nights Geetha and Thomo meet their erstwhile neighbours more often now. They can still go back and see their old house if need be, because they know the new owners.The first thing the new owner wanted after he gave Thomo the advance payment, was Membership in the Yacht Club. He bought the house for that alone, for his wife is a champion swimmer and she wanted to train the children in swimming at the pool.
Pamela said the last line of the book reminded her of Gone With The Wind and the words spoken by Scarlett O'Hara: “After all, tomorrow is another day.” This novel ends:
“When this day is over and the night takes us, allow yourself a deep breath. Because we made it through this day as well.
There’ll be another one along tomorrow.”
Joe reaching for another famous ‘day’ line said it’s like Clint Eastwood saying the iconic line,
“Go ahead, make my day,” as the character Detective Harry Callahan in the 1983 film Sudden Impact. Callahan corners an armed robber holding a hostage in a small diner eating place, staring him down before delivering the famous ultimatum.
The day before, Thomo saw on Netflix the famous movie On The Waterfront, starring Eva Marie Saint, Lee J. Cobb, and Marlon Brando in his youth. Brando has a scar on his eyebrow, from acting as a boxer in the movie.
Joe said today is the semi-final of the IPL tournament, Gujarat Titans versus Rajasthan Royals. RR has the Wunderkind Vaibhav Sooryavanshi about whom we had a quiz on KRG channel with the clue that he a descendant of the Sun god, Ra with an Egyptian illustration of the god.
He's only 15, still has puppy fat, but actually very solid in his game. He missed a century by 3 runs in the first match. He made a record in the Under-19, and he'll be unique. Joe said consider that nobody, Rahul Dravid, Virat Kohli, etc – nobody has played two under-19s. But Sooryavanshi was only 14 when he played the Under-19 last year. So he will still be under-19 and eligible to play when the World U-19 tournament comes up in 2029!
By that time, he would be part of all the Indian Men’s teams also, including the Test cricket team. Imagine being part of the Indian Men's T20, Men's ODI, and Men's Test cricket, and also playing for the U-19! ‘Unfair,’ the other nations will complain.
Footnote:
June 26 will be the date of the Poetry Session; any published poet can be chosen. June 27 is lunch at the Yacht Club for two birthday ladies, Pamela and Gopa.
The Readings
Pamela – Ch 13 Jack and Jim, the father-son police officers, decide one of the witnesses is lying – or they all are.
Jack’s frustration is dragging his eyebrows down and restlessness is blowing a gale inside him. He’s been teetering on the verge of a furious outburst ever since he was the first officer into the apartment. He’s been keeping a lid on it, but after the last interview he marched into the staffroom and exploded: “One of these witnesses knows what happened! Someone knows and is lying to our faces! Don’t they understand that a man could be lying hidden somewhere, bleeding to death right now? How the hell can anyone lie to the police while someone’s dying?”
Jim didn’t say a word when Jack sat down at his computer after his outburst. But when the coffee cup hit the wall, it wasn’t Jack who threw it. Because even if his son was furious about not being able to save the perpetrator’s life, and hated the fact that a group of damn Stockholmers were about to show up and take the investigation away from him, that came nowhere close to the frustration his father felt at not being able to help him.
A long silence follows. First they glare at each other, then down at their keyboards. Eventually Jim manages to say: “Sorry. I’ll clean it up. I just… I can understand that this is driving you crazy. I just want you to know that it’s driving me crazy… too.”
He and Jack have both studied every last inch of the plan of the apartment.
There are no hiding places in there, nowhere to go. Jack looks at his dad, then at the remains of the coffee cup behind him, and says quietly: “He must have had help. We’re missing something here.”
Jim stares at the notes from the interviews with the witnesses.
“We can only do our best, son.”
It’s easier to talk about work when you haven’t quite got the words to talk about the other things in life, but obviously those words apply to both things at the same time. Jack has been thinking about the bridge ever since the hostage drama started, because during his best nights he still dreams that the man didn’t jump, that Jack managed to save him. Jim thinks about the same bridge all the time, because during his worst nights he dreams that it was Jack who jumped instead.
“Either one of the witnesses is lying, or they all are. Someone must know where this man is hiding,” Jack repeats mechanically.
Jim sneaks a glance at Jack’s two index fingers, tapping the desktop the same way as his mother after a heavy night at the hospital or prison. Too much time has passed for the father to ask his son how he’s doing, too much time for the son to be able to explain. The distance between them is too great now. But when Jim slowly gets up from his chair with the full symphony of a middle-aged man’s groans, to wipe the wall and pick up the pieces of the cup he threw, Jack gets quickly to his feet and walks to the staffroom. He comes back with two more cups. Not that Jack drinks coffee, but he understands that it occasionally means something to his father not to have to drink alone.
“I shouldn’t have got involved in your interview, son,” Jim says in a low voice.
“It’s okay, Dad,” Jack replies.
Neither of them means it. We lie to those we love. They hunch over their keyboards again and type up the final transcripts of all the interviews with the witnesses, reading them through one more time in search of clues.
They’re right, both of them. The witnesses aren’t telling the truth, not all of it. Not all of them.
Thomo – Ch 15 The cynical bank teller called London working at a cashless bank scoffs at the bank robber who demands 6,500 kronor and calls the cops.
It was a day completely devoid of weather. During some weeks in winter in the central part of Scandinavia the sky doesn’t seem to bother even attempting to impress us, it greets us with the color of newspaper in a puddle, and dawn leaves behind it a fog as if someone has been setting fire to ghosts. It was, in other words, a bad day for an apartment viewing, because no one wants to live anywhere at all in weather like that. On top of that, it was also the day before New Year’s Eve, and what sort of lunatic holds a viewing on a day like that? It was even a bad day for a bank robbery, although, in defense of the weather, that was more the fault of the bank robber.
But if we’re being picky, it wasn’t by definition even a bank robbery. Which isn’t to say that the bank robber didn’t fully intend to be a bank robber, because that was very much the intention, it’s just that the bank robber failed to pick a bank that contained any cash. Which probably has to be considered one of the main prerequisites for a bank robbery.
But this wasn’t necessarily the bank robber’s fault. It was society’s. Not that society was responsible for the social injustices that led the bank robber onto a path of crime (which society may well in fact be responsible for, but that’s completely irrelevant right now), but because in recent years society has turned into a place where nothing is named according to what it is anymore. There was a time when a bank was a bank. But now there are evidently “cashless” banks, banks without any money, which is surely something of a travesty? It’s hardly surprising that people get confused and society is going to the dogs when it’s full of caffeine-free coffee, gluten-free bread, alcohol-free beer.
So the bank robber who failed to be a bank robber stepped into the bank that was barely a bank, and declared the purpose of the visit fairly clearly with the use a real pistol!”
By this point in the conversation, the bank robber was starting to feel very old, especially since the twenty-year-old on the other side of the conversation gave the impression that she was around fourteen years old. Which of course she wasn’t, but the bank robber was thirty-nine, and had therefore reached an age where there’s suddenly very little difference between fourteen and twenty. That’s what makes a person feel old.
“Hello? Are you going to answer me, or what?” London exclaimed impatiently, and obviously it’s easy in hindsight to think that this was a somewhat poorly considered thing to shout at a masked bank robber holding a pistol, but if you knew London you’d have known that this wasn’t because she was stupid. She was just a miserable person. That was because she didn’t have any real friends, not even on social media, and instead spent most of her time getting upset that celebrities she didn’t like hadn’t had their life together ruined, again. Just before the bank robber came in she had been busy refreshing her browser to find out if two famous actors were going to get divorced or not. She hoped they were, because sometimes it’s easier to live with your own anxieties if you know that no one else is happy, either.
The bank robber didn’t say anything, though, and had started to feel rather stupid by this point, and was now regretting the whole thing. Robbing a bank had clearly been a breathtakingly stupid idea right from the outset. The bank robber was actually on the point of explaining this to London before apologizing and walking out, and then perhaps everything that happened after that wouldn’t have happened at all, but the bank robber didn’t get a chance seeing as London announced instead: “Look, I’m going to call the cops now!”
Arundhaty – Ch 24 . Zara suggests to the psychologist that the picture of the woman on the bridge is about someone about to commit suicide
They sat in silence for a long while after that, somewhat awkwardly, until Zara finally nodded toward the woman on the wall.
“What do you think she’s doing?”
The psychologist looked at the picture and blinked slowly.
“The same as everyone else. Searching.”
“What for?”
The psychologist’s shoulders moved up one inch, then down two.
“For something to cling on to. Something to fight for. Something to look forward to.”
Zara took her eyes from the picture and looked past the psychologist, out of the window.
“What if she’s thinking of committing suicide, then?”
The psychologist didn’t look away from the picture, just smiled and gave away none of the feelings that were raging inside her. It takes years of training and two parents you love and never want to worry to master that facial expression.
“Why do you think that’s what she’s thinking?”
“Don’t all intelligent people think about that, some time or other?”
At first the psychologist was going to reply with some practiced phrase she had learned during her training, but she was well aware that wouldn’t help. So she replied honestly instead: “Yes. Maybe. What do you think stops us?”
Zara leaned forward and moved two pens on the desk so they were lying parallel. Then she said: “Fear of heights.”
There isn’t a person on this planet who could have said there and then with any certainty if she was joking or not. The psychologist considered her next question for a long time.
“Can I ask, Zara—do you have any hobbies?”
“Hobbies?” Zara repeated, but not in an entirely condescending way.
The psychologist elaborated: “Yes. Are you involved in any charities, for instance?”
Zara shook her head silently. The psychologist thought at First that it was a compliment that she didn’t just fire back with an insult, but the look in Zara’s eyes made her hesitate, as if the question had toppled and broken something inside her.
“Are you okay? Did I say something wrong?” the psychologist asked anxiously, but Zara had already looked at the time, stood up, and was now walking to the door. The psychologist, who hadn’t been a psychologist long enough not to be struck by panic at the thought of losing a patient, found herself saying something quite remarkably unprofessional:
“Don’t do anything silly, now!”
Zara stopped at the door, surprised.
“Such as what?”
The psychologist didn’t know what to say, so she smiled awkwardly and said:
“Well, don’t do anything silly… before you’ve paid my bill.”
Zara let out a sudden laugh. The psychologist joined in. It was harder to identify the extent to which that was also unprofessional.
While Zara was standing in the elevator, the psychologist sat in her office staring at the woman in the painting, surrounded by sky. Zara was the first person who had ever suggested that the woman might be thinking of ending her life, no one else had looked at it like that.
The psychologist herself always felt that the woman was gazing off toward the horizon in a way that can only have two explanations: longing or fear. That was why she had painted the picture, as a reminder to herself. It was the sort of subject psychologists love, because you can look at it for ages without noticing the most obvious thing. The fact that the woman is standing on a bridge. (562 words)
Geetha – Ch 46 Jack copes with his mum’s death and sister’s addiction
Jim aged badly after she died, became a lesser man, never quite able to breathe back in all the air that had gone out of him. When he sat in the hospital that night, life felt like an icy crevice, and when he lost his grip on the edge and slipped down into the darkness inside him, he whispered angrily to Jack: “I’ve tried talking to God, I really have tried, but what sort of God makes a priest this sick? She’s never done anything but good for other people, so what sort of God gives an illness like this to her?!”
Jack had no answer then, and he has no answer now. He just sat quietly in the waiting room and held his dad until it was impossible to tell whose tears were running down his neck. The following morning they were angry at the sun for rising, and couldn’t forgive the world for living on without her.
But when it was time, Jack got to his feet, grown-up and straight-backed, walked through a series of doors, and stopped outside her room. He was a proud young man, certain in his beliefs, he wasn’t religious and his mom had never said a single stern word to him about that. She was the sort of priest who got shouted at by everyone, by religious people for not being religious enough, and by everyone else because she was religious at all. She had been to sea with sailors, in the desert with soldiers, in prison with inmates, and in hospitals with sinners and atheists. She liked a drink and could tell dirty jokes, no matter who she was with. If anyone even asked what God would think about that, she always replied: “I don’t think we agree about everything, but I have a feeling He knows I’m doing the best I can. And I think maybe He knows I work for Him, because I try to help people.” If anyone asked her to sum up her view of the world, she always quoted Martin Luther: “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.” Her son loved her, but she never managed to get him to believe in God, because although you might be able to drum religion into people, you can’t teach faith. But that night, all alone at the end of a dimly lit corridor in a hospital where she had held so many dying people by the hand, Jack sank to his knees and asked God not to take his mom away from him.
When God took her anyway, Jack went into her bed, held her hand too hard in his, as if he were hoping she might wake up and tell him off. Then he whispered disconsolately: “Don’t worry, Mom, I’ll take care of Dad.”
He called his sister afterward. She made promise after promise, of course, as usual. She just needed money for the flight. Obviously. Jack sent the money, but she didn’t come to the funeral. Naturally, Jim has never once called her an “addict” or “junkie,” because dads can’t do that. He always says his daughter is “ill,” because that makes it feel better. But Jack always calls his sister what she is: a heroin addict. She’s seven years older than him, and with that age gap you don’t have a big sister when you’re little, you have an idol. When she left home he couldn’t go with her, and when she tried to find herself he couldn’t help, and when she went under he couldn’t save her.
Zakia – Ch 53 Zara has a conversation with the ‘rabbit’ about the economic system
“Are you here on safari, then?”
She glared at him in surprise.
“What does that mean?”
“Just an observation. There’s always someone like you at every apartment viewing. Someone who doesn’t want the apartment, but is just curious. On safari. Test-driving a lifestyle. You get to recognize that sort of thing in my job.” The look in Zara’s eyes was poisonous, but her mouth remained closed. Being seen through isn’t pleasant, you tend to pull your clothes a little tighter when it happens, especially if you’re usually the one who sees through other people. Her instinct was to say something cruel to put a bit of distance between them, but instead she found herself asking: “Aren’t you cold?”
He shook his head and she had to duck to avoid one of his ears. Then he patted his furry face and chuckled: “Nope. They say seventy percent of your body heat gets lost through your head, so seeing as I’m stuck in here, I suppose I’m only losing thirty percent right now.”
That isn’t the sort of thing a man dressed in tight underwear usually boasts about in freezing temperatures, Zara noted. She put the headphones back on again, hoping that would be enough to get rid of him, but even before he tapped on the headphone again she had already guessed that his next sentence was going to start with the word “I.”
“I’m really an actor. This business of disrupting apartment viewings is only a sideline.”
“How interesting,” Zara said in a tone that only the child of a telesales operative would interpret as an invitation to go on talking.
“Times are tough for people in the cultural sector,” the rabbit nodded.
Zara pulled the headphones down around her neck in resignation and snorted.
“So that’s your excuse for exploiting the fact that times are tough for people selling apartments, too? How come you people in the ‘cultural sector’ never think capitalism is any good except when you’re the ones profiting from it?” It just slipped out, she didn’t really know why. Between his ears she caught a glimpse of the bridge. The ears wavered thoughtfully in the December wind.
“Sorry, but you don’t strike me as the sort of person who feels sorry for people trying to sell apartments,” he said.
Zara snorted again, more angrily.
“I don’t care about sellers or buyers. But I do care about the fact that you don’t seem to appreciate that your ‘sideline’ is manipulating the economic system!”
The rabbit’s head was stuck in a rictus grin while Lennart was thinking hard inside it. Then he said what Zara considered to be the stupidest thing that could ever come out of anyone’s mouth, rabbit or human: “What have I got to do with the economic system?”
Zara massaged her hands. Counted the windows.
“The market is supposed to be self-regulating, but people like you spoil the balance between supply and demand,” she said wearily.
Of course the rabbit responded at once by saying the most predictable thing possible: “That’s not true. If I wasn’t doing this, someone else would. I’m not breaking the law. An apartment is the largest investment most people make, and they want the best price, so I’m just offering a service that—”
“Apartments aren’t supposed to be investments,” Zara replied gloomily.
“What are they supposed to be, then?”
“Homes.”
“Are you some sort of communist?” the rabbit chuckled.
Zara felt like punching him on the nose for that, but instead she pointed between his ears and said: “When the financial crisis hit ten years ago, a man jumped off that bridge because of a property market crash on the other side of the world. Innocent people lost their jobs and the guilty were given bonuses. You know why?”
“Now you’re exaggerat—”
“Because people like you don’t care about the balance in the system.”
KumKum Ch 56 Emotional and poignant reading about Estelle, an elderly widow. A quiet meditation on love and loss that speaks to the power of small, everyday intimacies.
“Death, death, death,” Estelle thought in the closet. Many years ago she had read that her favorite author used to start telephone conversations with that. “Death, death, death.” Then, when that was out of the way, they could discuss other things. Otherwise, after a certain age, no phone call ever seemed to be about life, only the other. Estelle could understand that point of view these days. The same author once wrote that “you have to live your life in such a way that you become friends with death,” but Estelle found that harder. She remembered when she used to read bedtime stories to the children, and Peter Pan declaring: “To die will be an awfully big adventure.” Maybe for the person doing it, Estelle thought, but not for the one who was left behind. All that awaited her were a thousand sunrises where life is a beautiful prison. Her cheeks quivered, reminding her that she had grown old, her skin was so thin now that it moved the whole time in a breeze that nobody else could feel. She had nothing against old age, just loneliness. When she met Knut it wasn’t a love story, not the way she had read it could feel, theirs was always more like a story of a child finding the perfect playmate. When Knut touched Estelle, right up to the end, it made her feel like climbing trees and jumping from jetties. Most of all she missed making him laugh so hard he spat his breakfast out. That sort of thing only got more fun with age, especially after he got false teeth.
“Knut’s dead,” she said for the first time, and swallowed hard.
Julia was looking down at the floor in irresolute silence. Anna-Lena sat and tried to think of something to say for a while, then leaned toward Estelle and tapped her on the shoulder with the wine bottle instead. Estelle took it and drank two small sips, before handing it back and going on, half to herself: “But he was very good at parking, Knut. He could parallel park in tiny spaces. So sometimes, when it’s most painful, when I see something really funny and think ‘He’d have laughed so hard his breakfast would have covered the wallpaper’—that’s when I fantasize that he’s just outside, parking the car. He wasn’t perfect, no man is, God knows, but whenever we went anywhere and it was raining, he would always drop me off just outside the door. So I could wait in the warm while he… parked the car.”
…
“He was my echo. Everything I do is quieter now,” she said to the other women in the closet. (447 words)
Joe Ch 65 – The bank robber tells Jim the older policeman her story
“My husband left me. Well, he kicked me out, actually. He’d been having an affair with my boss. They fell in love. They moved in together, in our apartment, because it was only in his name. Everything happened so quickly, and I didn’t want to make a fuss or cause… chaos. For the children’s sake.”
Jim nodded slowly. He looked at her ring and toyed with his own. There’s nothing harder to remove.
“Girls or boys?”
“Girls.”
“I’ve got one of each.”
“I… someone needs to… I don’t want them to…”
“Where are they now?”
“With their dad. I was supposed to pick them up tonight. We were going to celebrate New Year together. But now… I…”
She trailed off. Jim nodded thoughtfully.
“What did you need the money from the bank robbery for?”
The desperation on her face revealed the chaos in her heart as she said: “To pay the rent. I needed six thousand I’ve hundred. My husband’s lawyer was threatening to take the girls away from me if I didn’t have anywhere to live. Jim held on to the handrail to stop himself collapsing as his heart broke. Empathy is like vertigo. Six thousand five hundred, because she thought she’d lose her children otherwise. Her children.
“There are rules, legislation, no one can just take your children away from you simply because…,” he began, then thought better of it and said: “But now they can… now you’ve held up a bank and…” His voice almost gave out as he whispered: “You poor child, what have you got yourself mixed up in?”
The woman had to force her tongue to move, her lips to open, as her smallest muscles seemed to have almost given up.
“I… I’m an idiot. I know, I know, I know. I didn’t want to cause any trouble with my husband, I didn’t want to expose the girls to that, I thought I might be able to sort it all out for myself. But all I’ve done is create chaos. It’s my fault, it’s all my fault. I’m ready to give up now, I’ll let all the hostages go, I promise, the pistol’s still in there, it isn’t even real…”
Jim couldn’t help thinking that was one hell of a reason to rob a bank: because you’re scared of conflict. He tried to see her as a criminal, tried to look at her without seeing his daughter, and failed at both.
“Even if you release the hostages and give up, you’ll still end up in prison. Even if the pistol isn’t real,” he said mournfully, and of course he’d been a police officer long enough to have seen that it was. He knew she wouldn’t stand a chance, no matter how sympathetic any decent person might feel about her situation. You’re not allowed to rob banks, you’re not allowed to run around with firearms, and we can’t let criminals like that go unpunished if we catch them. So Jim concluded there and then that the only way she wouldn’t get punished was not to do that. Not to catch her. (516 words)
Devika Ch 66 – Estelle hands over the key to the adjoining apartment to the bank-robber to live with her children – an apartment she thought her own daughter would move into.
“I had an affair once!” she repeated, with her eyes fixed on the bank robber’s, and the bank robber suddenly felt nervous about the possible details that might slip out in a story that started like that. Estelle waved the wine bottle and went on: “He loved books, and so did I, but my husband didn’t. Knut liked music. I suppose music’s all right, but it’s not the same, is it?”
The bank robber shook her head politely.
“No. I like books, too.”
“I thought as much from looking at you! As if you understand that people need fairy tales as well, not just narrative. I’ve liked you from the moment you came in here, you know. You messed things up a bit, with the pistol and all that, but who hasn’t messed things up at one time or another? All interesting people have done something really stupid at least once! For instance, I had an affair, behind Knut’s back, with a man who loved books, just like me. Whenever I read anything now I think of the pair of them, because he gave me a key, and I never told Knut that I kept it.”
“Please, Estelle, we’re trying to…,” Julia said, but Estelle ignored her. She ran one hand along the bookcase. One of the last times she met her neighbor in the elevator he gave her a very thick book, written by a man. He had underlined one sentence, several hundred pages in: We are asleep until we fall in love. Estelle gave him a book in exchange, one written by a woman, so it didn’t need hundreds of pages to say things. Close to the start Estelle had underlined: Love is wanting you to exist.
Her fingers traced the spines of the books on the shelf, as if she were dreaming, not as if she were looking. A book fell out from the middle of a row, not as if it had done so on purpose, but simply because her fingernails happened to touch its spine. It landed on the floor and fell open a few pages in. The key that fell out bounced off the pages, then landed on the parquet floor with a tinkling sound.
Estelle’s chest was rising and falling breathlessly and her voice may have been slurred but her eyes were crystal clear when she said: “When Knut fell ill we signed the apartment over to our daughter. I thought she might want to move in here with her children, but that was obviously a silly idea. They didn’t want to live here. They’ve got their own lives, in a place of their own. Since then there’s only been me here, and… well, you can see… it’s too big for me. This isn’t a sensible apartment for a single person. So in the end my daughter said we ought to sell it and buy something smaller for me, something easier to look after, she said. So I called several different real estate agents and obviously they all said that it wasn’t usual to hold a viewing so close to New Year, but I wanted… well, I thought it would be nice to have a bit of company at this time of year. So I went out before the real estate agent arrived, then I came back up once the viewing had started and pretended to be a prospective buyer. Because I didn’t want to sell the apartment without knowing who was going to be buying it. This isn’t just an apartment, it’s my home, I don’t want to hand it over to someone who’s just going to be passing through, to make money from it. I want someone who’s going to love living here, like I have. Maybe that’s hard for a young person to understand.”
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