Anxious People(46)
“I don’t like to boast, but the alcoholic spaghetti-throwing neighbor is one of my most popular characters.”
Roger stared at Anna-Lena.
“Do you mean to say that… but… what about all my negotiations with the Realtor? All my tactics?”
Anna-Lena couldn’t meet his gaze.
“You get so upset when you lose a bid. I just wanted you to… win.”
She wasn’t telling the whole truth. That she had become the sort of person who just wanted a home. That she wanted to stop now. That she’d like to go to the movies occasionally and see something made-up instead of yet another documentary on television. That she didn’t want to be a shark. She was worried that the betrayal would be too much for Roger.
“How many times?” Roger whispered in a broken voice.
“Three,” Anna-Lena lied.
“Six, actually! I know all the addresses by heart…,” the rabbit corrected.
“Shut up, Lennart!” Anna-Lena sobbed.
Lennart nodded obediently, and started to tug and pull at the rabbit’s head again. He spent a long time fully absorbed in that, before declaring: “I think something loosened a bit just then!”
Roger just stared down at the floor with his toes tightly clenched in his shoes, because Roger was the sort of man who felt emotion in his feet. He started to walk around in a wide semicircle, over to the balcony door, accidentally stubbed his toes against one of the baseboards, and swore quietly, quietly, quietly, both at the damnable baseboard and the damnable rabbit.
“You stupid… stupid… you stupid…,” he muttered, as if he were searching for the very worst insult he could think of. Eventually he found it: “You stupid Stockholmer!” His toes hurt as much as his heart, so he clenched his fists and looked up, then ran back through the apartment so quickly that no one had time to stop him, and knocked the rabbit to the floor. With all his love, at full force, one single blow.
The rabbit fell through the door back onto the bathroom floor. Fortunately the padded rabbit’s head absorbed most of the impact from Roger’s punch, and the softness of the rest of Lennart’s physique (he had roughly the same density as a dumpling) absorbed the rest. When he opened his eyes and looked up at the ceiling, Julia was leaning over him.
“Are you still alive?” she asked.
“The head’s stuck again,” he replied.
“Are you hurt?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Good. Move, then. I need to pee.”
The rabbit whimpered some sort of apology and crawled out of the bathroom. On the way, he handed Julia a business card, nodded so hard toward her stomach that his rabbit’s ears fell over his eyes, and managed to say: “I do children’s parties as well. If you don’t like your children.”
Julia closed the door behind him. But she kept the business card. Any normal parent would have done the same.
* * *
Anna-Lena was looking at Roger, but he was refusing to look back. Blood was dripping from his nose. Their doctor had told Anna-Lena that it was a reaction to stress after Roger was diagnosed as being burnt-out at work.
“You’re bleeding, I’ll get some tissue,” she whispered, but Roger wiped his nose on the sleeve of his shirt.
“Dammit, I’m just a bit tired!”
He strode out into the hall, mostly because he wanted to be in a different room, which made him curse the open plan layout. Anna-Lena wanted to follow him but realized he needed some space, so she turned and walked into the closet, because that was as far from him as she could get. There she sat down on a small stool and went to pieces. She didn’t notice the cold air blowing in, as if a window were open. As if there could be an open window in a closet.
* * *
The bank robber was standing in the center of the apartment, surrounded by Stockholmers, both figurative and literal. “Stockholm” is, after all, an expression more than it is a place, both for men like Roger and for most of the rest of us, just a symbolic word to denote all the irritating people who get in the way of our happiness. People who think they’re better than us. Bankers who say no when we apply for a loan, psychologists who ask questions when we only want sleeping pills, old men who steal the apartments we want to renovate, rabbits who steal our wives. Everyone who doesn’t see us, doesn’t understand us, doesn’t care about us. Everyone has Stockholmers in their life, even people from Stockholm have their own Stockholmers, only to them it’s “people who live in New York” or “politicians in Brussels,” or other people from some other place where people seem to think that they’re better than the Stockholmers think they are.
Everyone inside the apartment had their own complexes, their own demons and anxieties: Roger was wounded, Anna-Lena wanted to go home, Lennart couldn’t get his rabbit head off, Julia was tired, Ro was worried, Zara was in pain, and Estelle… well… no one really knew what Estelle was yet. Possibly not even Estelle. Sometimes “Stockholm” can actually be a compliment: a dream of somewhere bigger, where we can become someone else. Something that we long for but don’t quite dare to do. Everyone in the apartment was wrestling with their own story.
“Forgive me,” the bank robber suddenly said in the silence that had settled upon them. At first it seemed that no one had heard, but they all did, really. Thanks to the thin walls and that wretched open plan layout, the words even reached all the way into the closet, out into the hall, and through the bathroom door. They may not have had much in common, but they all knew what it was like to make a mistake.