Fredrik Backman - Us Against You

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ALSO BY FREDRIK BACKMAN

A Man Called Ove

My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You Shes Sorry

Britt-Marie Was Here

And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer

Beartown

The Deal of a Lifetime

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the authors imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2017 by Fredrik Backman

English language translation copyright 2018 by Neil Smith

Published by arrangement with the Salomonsson Agency

Originally published in Sweden in 2017 by Bokforlaget Forum as Vi mot er

First Atria Books hardcover edition June 2018

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Jacket art and design by Alan Dingman

Jacket photographs by Shutterstock

Author photograph Linna Jonasson Bernholm/Appendix Fotografi

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBN 978-1-5011-6079-0

ISBN 978-1-5011-6081-3 (ebook)

For Neda. Im still trying to impress you. Just so you know.

Its Going to Be Someones Fault

H ave you ever seen a town fall? Ours did. Well end up saying that violence came to Beartown this summer, but that will be a lie; the violence was already here. Because sometimes hating one another is so easy that it seems incomprehensible that we ever do anything else.

Were a small community in the forest; people say that no roads lead here, just past. The economy coughs every time it takes a deep breath; the factory cuts its workforce each year like a child that thinks no one will notice the cake in the fridge getting smaller if you take a little bit from each side. If you lay a current map of the town over an old one, the main shopping street and the little strip known as the center seem to shrink like bacon in a hot pan. We have an ice rink but not much else. But on the other hand, as people usually say here: What the hell else do you need?

People driving through say that Beartown doesnt live for anything but hockey, and some days they may be right. Sometimes people have to be allowed to have something to live for in order to survive everything else. Were not mad, were not greedy; say what you like about Beartown, but the people here are tough and hardworking. So we built a hockey team that was like us, that we could be proud of, because we werent like you. When people from the big cities thought something seemed too hard, we just grinned and said, Its supposed to be hard. Growing up here wasnt easy; thats why we did it, not you. We stood tall, no matter the weather. But then something happened, and we fell.

Theres a story about us before this one, and were always going to carry the guilt of that. Sometimes good people do terrible things in the belief that theyre trying to protect what they love. A boy, the star of the hockey team, raped a girl. And we lost our way. A community is the sum of its choices, and when two of our children said different things, we believed him. Because that was easier, because if the girl was lying our lives could carry on as usual. When we found out the truth, we fell apart, taking the town with us. Its easy to say that we should have done everything differently, but perhaps you wouldnt have acted differently, either. If youd been afraid, if youd been forced to pick a side, if youd known what you had to sacrifice. Perhaps you wouldnt be as brave as you think. Perhaps youre not as different from us as you hope.

This is the story of what happened afterward, from one summer to the following winter. It is about Beartown and the neighboring town of Hed, and how the rivalry between two hockey teams can grow into a mad struggle for money and power and survival. It is a story about hockey rinks and all the hearts that beat around them, about people and sports and how they sometimes take turns carrying each other. About us, people who dream and fight. Some of us will fall in love, others will be crushed; well have good days and some very bad days. This town will rejoice, but it will also start to burn. Theres going to be a terrible bang.

Some girls will make us proud; some boys will make us great. Young men dressed in different colors will fight to the death in a dark forest. A car will drive too fast through the night. We will say that it was a traffic accident, but accidents happen by chance, and we will know that we could have prevented this one. This one will be someones fault.

People we love will die. We will bury our children beneath our most beautiful trees.

There Are Three Types of People

B ang-bang-bang-bang-bang.

The highest point in Beartown is a hill to the south of the last buildings in town. From there you can see all the way from the big villas on the Heights, past the factory and the ice rink and the smaller row houses near the center, right over to the blocks of rental apartments in the Hollow. Two girls are standing on the hill looking out across their town. Maya and Ana. Theyll soon be sixteen, and its hard to say if they became friends in spite of their differences or because of them. One of them likes musical instruments; the other likes guns. Their mutual loathing of each others taste in music is almost as recurrent a topic of argument as their ten-year-long fight about pets. Last winter they got thrown out of a history class at school because Maya muttered, You know who was a dog person, Ana? Hitler! whereupon Ana retorted, You know who was a cat person, then? Josef Mengele!

They squabble constantly and love each other unquestioningly, and ever since they were little they have had days when theyve felt it was just the two of them against the whole world. Ever since what happened to Maya earlier in the spring, every day has felt like that.