And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer

A Novella

Fredrik Backman

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781501160486
• eBook ISBN: 9781501160578
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

A little book with a big heart—from the New York Times bestselling author of A Man Called Ove and Anxious People.

“I read this beautifully imagined and moving novella in one sitting, utterly wowed, wanting to share it with everyone I know.” —Lisa Genova, bestselling author of Still Alice

From the New York Times bestselling author of A Man Called Ove, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry, Britt-Marie Was Here, and Anxious People comes an exquisitely moving portrait of an elderly man’s struggle to hold on to his most precious memories, and his family’s efforts to care for him even as they must find a way to let go.

With all the same charm of his bestselling full-length novels, here Fredrik Backman once again reveals his unrivaled understanding of human nature and deep compassion for people in difficult circumstances. This is a tiny gem with a message you’ll treasure for a lifetime.

There’s a hospital room at the end of a life where someone, right in the middle of the floor, has pitched a green tent. A person wakes up inside it, breathless and afraid, not knowing where he is. A young man sitting next to him whispers:

“Don’t be scared.”

Isn’t that the best of all life’s ages, an old man thinks as he looks at his grandchild. When a boy is just big enough to know how the world works but still young enough to refuse to accept it. Noah’s feet don’t touch the ground when his legs dangle over the edge of the bench, but his head reaches all the way to space, because he hasn’t been alive long enough to allow anyone to keep his thoughts on Earth. His grandpa is next to him and is incredibly old, of course, so old now that people have given up and no longer nag him to start acting like an adult. So old that it’s too late to grow up. It’s not so bad either, that age.

The bench is in a square; Noah blinks heavily at the sunrise beyond it, newly woken. He doesn’t want to admit to Grandpa that he doesn’t know where they are, because this has always been their game: Noah closes his eyes and Grandpa takes him somewhere they’ve never been before. Sometimes the boy has to squeeze his eyes tight, tight shut while he and Grandpa change buses four times in town, and sometimes Grandpa just takes him straight into the woods behind the house by the lake. Sometimes they go in the boat, often for so long that Noah falls asleep, and once they’ve made it far enough Grandpa whispers “open your eyes” and gives Noah a map and a compass and the task of working out how they’re going to get home. Grandpa knows he’ll always manage, because there are two things in life in which Grandpa’s faith is unwavering: mathematics and his grandson. A group of people calculated how to fly three men to the moon when Grandpa was young, and mathematics took them all the way there and back again. Numbers always lead people back.

But this place lacks coordinates; there are no roads out, no maps lead here.

Noah remembers that Grandpa asked him to close his eyes today. He remembers that they crept out of Grandpa’s house and he knows that Grandpa took him to the lake, because the boy knows all the sounds and songs of the water, eyes open or not. He remembers damp wood underfoot as they stepped into the boat, but nothing after that. He doesn’t know how he and Grandpa ended up here, on a bench in a round square. The place is strange but everything here is familiar, like someone stole all the things you grew up with and put them into the wrong house. There’s a desk over there, just like the one in Grandpa’s office, with a mini calculator and squared notepaper on top. Grandpa whistles gently, a sad tune, takes a quick little break to whisper:

“The square got smaller overnight again.”

Then he starts whistling again. Grandpa seems surprised when the boy gives him a questioning look, aware for the first time that he said those words aloud.

“Sorry, Noahnoah, I forgot that thoughts aren’t silent here.”

Grandpa always calls him “Noahnoah” because he likes his grandson’s name twice as much as everyone else’s. He puts a hand in the boy’s hair, not ruffling it, just letting his fingers rest there.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of, Noahnoah.”

Hyacinths are blooming beneath the bench, a million tiny purple arms reaching up from the stalks to embrace the rays of sunlight. The boy recognizes the flowers, they’re Grandma’s, they smell like Christmas. For other children maybe that scent would be ginger biscuits and mulled wine, but if you’ve ever had a Grandma who loved things that grew then Christmas will always smell like hyacinths. There are shards of glass and keys glittering between the flowers, like someone had been keeping them safe in a big jar but then fell over and dropped it.

“What are all those keys for?” the boy asks.

“Which keys?” asks Grandpa.

The old man’s eyes are strangely empty now. He raps his temples in frustration. The boy opens his mouth to say something, but stops himself when he sees that. He sits quietly instead and does what Grandpa taught him to do if he gets lost: take in his surroundings, look for landmarks and clues. The bench is surrounded by trees, because Grandpa loves trees, because trees don’t give a damn what people think. Silhouettes of birds lift up from them, spread out across the heavens, and rest confidently on the winds. A dragon is crossing the square, green and sleepy, and a penguin with small chocolate-colored handprints on its stomach is sleeping in one corner. A soft owl with only one eye is sitting next to it. Noah recognizes them too; they used to be his. Grandpa gave him the dragon when he had just been born, because Grandma said it wasn’t suitable to give newborn children dragons as cuddly toys and Grandpa said he didn’t want a suitable grandson.

People are walking around the square, but they’re blurry. When the boy tries to focus on their outlines they slip from his eyes like light through venetian blinds. One of them stops and waves to Grandpa. Grandpa waves back, tries to look confident.

“Who’s that?” the boy asks.

“That’s . . . I . . . I can’t remember, Noahnoah. It was so long ago . . . I think . . .”

He falls silent, hesitates, and searches for something in his pockets.

“You haven’t given me a map and a compass today, nothing to count on, I don’t know how I’m meant to find the way home, Grandpa,” Noah whispers.

“I’m afraid those things won’t help us here, Noahnoah.”

“Where are we, Grandpa?”

Then Grandpa starts to cry, silently and tearlessly, so that his grandson won’t realize.

“It’s hard to explain, Noahnoah. It’s so incredibly, incredibly hard to explain.”

The girl is standing in front of him and smells like hyacinths, like she’s never been anywhere else. Her hair is old but the wind in it is new, and he still remembers what it felt like to fall in love; that’s the last memory to abandon him. Falling in love with her meant having no room in his own body. That was why he danced.

“We had too little time,” he says.

She shakes her head.

“We had an eternity. Children and grandchildren.”

“I only had you for the blink of an eye,” he says.

She laughs.

“You had me an entire lifetime. All of mine.”

“That wasn’t enough.”

She kisses his wrist; her chin rests in his fingers.

“No.”

They walk slowly along a road he thinks he has walked before, not remembering where it leads. His hand is wrapped safely around hers and they’re sixteen again, no shaking fingers, no aching hearts. His chest tells him he could run to the horizon, but one breath passes and his lungs won’t obey him anymore. She stops, waits patiently beneath the weight of his arm, and she’s old now, like the day before she left him. He whispers into her eyelid:

“I don’t know how to explain it to Noah.”

“I know,” she says and her breath sings against his neck.

“He’s so big now, I wish you could see him.”

“I do, I do.”

“I miss you, my love.”

“I’m still with you, darling difficult you.”

“But only in my memories now. Only here.”

“That doesn’t matter. This was always my favorite part of you.”

“I’ve filled the square. It got smaller overnight again.”

“I know, I know.”

Then she dabs his forehead with a soft handkerchief, making small red circles bloom on the material, and she admonishes him:

“You’re bleeding; you need to be careful when you get into the boat.”

He closes his eyes.

“What do I say to Noah? How do I explain that I’m going to be leaving him even before I die?”

She takes his jaw in her hands and kisses him.

“Darlin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Letter from Fredrik Backman
• And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer
• ‘Beartown’ Teaser
• About the Author
• Copyright