The Winners, page 33
When the congregation begins to pour into the church Peter feels like a wasp in a beer glass. He’s standing next to Teemu and one by one men and women come over and shake his hand, the way they used to when he was general manager, some of them cast nervous glances at the company he’s keeping, but plenty of them don’t. Some of them shake Teemu by the hand as well. Out of respect for Ramona, perhaps, but also out of an appreciation of the political situation in the town right now. Everyone has heard about the trouble at the rink, and no one imagines that’s the end of anything, everyone knows it’s only the beginning. In a week’s time Beartown’s and Hed’s A-teams will meet in the first game of the season. There may be times when you might want to mark your distance from men like Teemu, but this isn’t one of them.
It takes twenty minutes to fill the church, and twice as long to explain to everyone left outside why they can’t come inside. Ramona’s funeral is conducted with open doors.
* * *
Maya sits next to Ana in the pew behind her mother and younger brother. When they see how slowly Peter walks toward the microphone at the front, they realize that his legs are so unsteady that he’s afraid of stumbling. He’s played hundreds of hockey games in front of thousands of people, but nothing on the ice could scare the shit out of him as much as having to give a speech. He adjusts his white tie, as uncomfortable as if it were a medal he hadn’t deserved. The church falls silent and when he clears his throat it sounds much louder than he expected, it even makes him start, and the ripple of laughter from the congregation and the new silence that immediately follows leave him paralyzed. But then. Eventually, he manages to unfold a crumpled sheet of paper from his pocket and say:
“I… I’ll keep this short. I… I couldn’t decide what to say today. I don’t want to stand here and pretend that I knew Ramona better than any of you. The truth is that I hardly knew her at all. Even so, I miss her the way you miss… well… like you miss a parent. I… sorry…”
He looks down at the sheet of paper, it’s shaking so hard that the rustle can be heard all the way to the back row. He breathes in through his mouth, out through his nose, then tries stiffly to remember his speech:
“The only thing we could really talk about without falling out was hockey. One time I said to her that this sport is so strange, we devote all our lives to it and what’s the best we can hope for, really? A few moments… that’s all. A few victories, a few seconds when we feel bigger than we really are, a few isolated occasions when we can convince ourselves that we’re immortal.”
He pulls himself together and folds the sheet of paper up and presses it into his pocket, because he’s shaking so much that he realizes it’s becoming a joke. He doesn’t know if it’s the audience in the church or the one in Heaven that’s worse, but he just does what he used to do in the locker room: bites his lip so hard that the pain and the taste of blood force his mind to focus:
“A few moments, I said to her, that’s all this sport gives us. And then Ramona poured a large shot of whiskey and laughed at me and said: ‘So what the hell is life, then, Peter? More than moments?’ ”
Teemu is sitting in the front row, his face motionless but with his fists quivering on his knees. Benji is standing alone right at the back of the church, as close to the door as possible, his tears dripping softly onto the stone floor. Peter tries to steady his voice. Three boys without dads. If you want to know who Ramona was and what she really meant to this part of the world, you only have to look at the desolation in their faces. Peter looks up and forces himself to say:
“That’s what you left us with, Ramona. Moments. Stories. Anecdotes. No one could tell them like you. You were this town. You WERE this town. The whole of Beartown misses you now. Say hi to Holger. Good… good-bye.”
He bows to the coffin and tries to walk back to his place without stumbling. He almost succeeds. As he sinks down next to Kira she reaches for his fingers, gently, gently, but just as she almost touches his skin Teemu’s mournful grunt breaks the silence:
“Bloody hell! Now the beer in Heaven’s going to be REALLY expensive!”
The laughter that explodes then, from hundreds of bodies but just as suddenly as if from a single mouth, is so loud and communal and liberating that it lifts every single person in there. It straightens their backs, drags them back up to the surface, like the intake of breath just before a goal and the roar immediately after. Peter laughs so much that Kira’s hand just misses his when he raises it to wipe his tears. She sits there unmoved.
* * *
After the funeral, as hundreds of smiles stream out between the tears through the church door, Maya sits on the wall outside with her guitar on her lap, noting down all her feelings on her phone. One day it might become a song, but never one that she can bear to sing.
You said life was simpler here
Maybe it is, it isn’t clear
If only it wasn’t so isolated
If only it wasn’t so complicated
Or complicated in the right way
Who can say?
If you love just as hard
And hate just as hard
If you pretend you can bear the load
And secretly live by a different code
Then maybe life is simpler here
Maybe it is. To me, it isn’t clear.
Then she sees her mother come out of the church, alone. Her dad is still in there, surrounded by people who want to shake his hand. And Maya writes:
I’m a romantic who’s never been in love, because children become
all the things that they see
I’ve always believed in everlasting love, which never happens,
yet it happened to you and he
But now, what to do?
Is it still he and you?
Mom, both of you are so weary now
Dad, both of you are so sad now
Such brittle and delicate and fragile dreams
Worn down so the wind can destroy you, it seems
When all that needs saying is:
I’ll never get over you
Three small words of salvation:
I need you
I
Need
You
She’s interrupted by Ana coming around the corner with a beer in each hand, Maya has no idea where she got them, but if there’s anyone who can find alcohol in a churchyard, then obviously it’s Ana.
“Who are you writing to? Your best friend?” Ana grins.
“Yes, but your fat head is blocking the signal!” Maya retorts, and slips her phone into her pocket.
Then the two young women sit on the wall and drink beer and insult each other, and on one side of them sit the two invisible girls they used to be. And, almost certainly, on the other side of them sits Ramona.
51 Truths
The concept of “truth” is hard to come to terms with, but for a local newspaper it’s all but impossible.
The editor in chief notes with a degree of reluctance that she’s thinking more and more about something her dad taught her as a child, the classical philosophical principle: “The simplest explanation is often the truth.”
She doesn’t attend the funeral, she wouldn’t be welcome, journalists are tolerated around here, but no more than that. In Beartown people complain that the paper supports Hed because that’s where its offices are. In Hed people complain that all the paper does is fawn over Beartown. There’s no neutral ground. You’re either for or against these people, there’s no way to win, so she reminds herself that it isn’t an editor in chief’s job to do that.
Her dad suggested that he attend the funeral, because no one knows who he is, and after a lot of hesitation she eventually agreed. “But don’t talk to anyone, just take pictures!” she demanded, and he promised a little too readily. She looked at him suspiciously, because he didn’t look stressed and angry like he usually does, he was calm, the way he always was when she was growing up and he had made a breakthrough in his investigation into some politician or celebrity and knew that he “had the bastard now.” “What have you found?” she wondered curiously, and only then did his face crack into a happy smile as he dropped a bundle of papers on her desk: copies of contracts she’s never seen before. Now he’s at the funeral and she’s sitting here reading them in astonishment, thinking that you could lock the old man up in an empty room and he’d still emerge with state secrets.
At first glance the contracts at the top of the pile look innocent enough: they concern the sale of some land two years ago, the seller was the council, the buyer the local factory. Nothing odd about that, the factory wants to expand and the council wants more jobs, the price was in line with the market value, nothing for anyone to complain about. But beneath that contract her dad has placed copies of other contracts he’s found: one concerns the sale of the same piece of land a short time later, this time sold by the factory and bought by Beartown Hockey. The sale price was considerably lower this time, so low in fact that if it was correct, the market must have collapsed in value by over ninety percent. It appears to be a terrible piece of business for the factory until the editor in chief sees the next contract: a couple of days later the factory buys another piece of land, right next to the factory, which everyone knows they’ve wanted to buy for years. The seller? The council. So that was the condition, the editor in chief concludes: the council couldn’t sell the land cheap to the hockey club without someone noticing, so the factory agreed to act as a middleman in exchange for being allowed to buy the piece of land they really wanted.
That’s bad enough, but that isn’t the end of it: the next contract in the pile shows how, sometime later, the council bought back the same piece of land next to the ice rink, the land they sold in the first instance, from Beartown Hockey. But for much more money. Because now the contract doesn’t just say “land,” but also “building,” because this exchange suddenly involves the hockey club’s “training facility.” The cost is divided into many small amounts over a long period of time, but in total amounts to millions. And that’s not all: the next contract in the pile is signed on the same date by the same people, and commits the council to allowing Beartown Hockey to rent back the training facility it had just sold and carry on using it, almost for free.
The editor in chief sighs bitterly, because although she can hardly think of a more obvious way for the council to channel taxpayers’ money into the hockey club, she knows it isn’t a big enough scandal for anyone to be held to account. It’s too complicated for most of her readers to understand, not exciting enough, not enough of a “good story” as her dad usually says. So why did he look so happy when he gave her the pile of papers?
She has to leaf through them all the way to the bottom to find out. There she finds not contracts but a printout of a photograph. It’s fuzzy, but she can still see that it shows the parking lot down by the ice rink, her dad has written the day’s date at the top and on the back he has written: “There is no training facility!”
She just stares at the photograph. Millions of taxpayers’ money, but there’s nothing there, not a single construction crane or barrier. They haven’t even tried to make it look real, so confident were they that they’d never be found out. Because why would they? They’ve gotten away with everything so easily up to now.
The editor in chief leans back in her chair and tries to deploy all her journalist’s training to question herself now. Is she being objective? Is she being fair? Because she can see Peter Andersson’s signature all over this chain of documents, but could he really be the brains behind all this? It happened after he resigned as general manager, so why was he even signing these papers? Maybe he signed them without understanding the consequences? Maybe he was tricked into it?
No, she already knows what her dad would say to that: “Fish rot from the head down, kid. This is financial doping and it’s been going on for years, and it started at the top. Peter probably resigned as general manager right before the deal with the training facility precisely to cover their tracks. What have I always taught you? If there seems to be several different explanations: choose the simplest.”
52 Moments
Everyone needs to feel needed. For some people that’s as important as desire and admiration and love. For others, particularly those who have devoted their whole lives to a team sport, it’s more important than any-thing.
“Nice speech!” the old man says, shaking Peter’s hand after the funeral.
There’s a long line of other old men behind him who want to say the same thing. Everyone wants to shake hands, wants to talk a bit of hockey, several of them want to tell him that they miss him on the management team at Beartown Hockey and hope he can take Ramona’s seat on the committee now. Peter doesn’t know how to laugh that off, it’s such a ridiculous idea, but like all ridiculous ideas it has a tendency to seem less ridiculous the more times you hear it.
“There’s only number crunchers and analysts and shit like that everywhere in hockey these days, without people like you and Ramona there won’t be any heart left in it! You win hockey on the ice, the way it was in your day, not by looking at data like they do now!” one of the last old men declares, and when Peter is left alone afterward he has trouble stopping himself from longing to get back in.
Not the way you long for the future, for the summer, or for a holiday, but the way you long to get back to yourself. To how it was “in our day,” even though that time never really existed except in our filtered memories. You long to be the person you think you were, during some sort of youth when you tell yourself that life was uncomplicated, or the man you imagine you could have been if only you had the chance to do everything again. Not longing for that is difficult for most people, and for some it is all but impossible.
The church is almost empty now. Peter gathers together his few belongings and his many emotions and touches his fingers to Ramona’s photograph one last time. It was taken by someone without her knowledge, because no one ever dared to try when she was aware of it, she’s young, standing behind the bar with Holger with her arms up in the air, so someone has evidently scored a goal on television. Possibly even Peter.
“Only moments, eh, Ramona? Was that it? I reckon you could have given us a few more. Who am I… going to talk hockey with now?”
His voice grows thick and his eyes prick with that last sentence, and shortly afterward his whole face is burning with embarrassment when he turns around and realizes he isn’t alone. Elisabeth Zackell is still sitting in her place ten rows back in the church, as if she’s waiting her turn. The hockey coach and bar owner may not have shared anything that could be called a friendship, but for Zackell it was probably as close as she got, she used to eat boiled potatoes and drink lukewarm beer in the Bearskin, and insofar as it could be called conversation, she probably shared more conversation with Ramona than anyone else in the town. Ramona, of course, thought Zackell was a “bloody woman, a vegan, a teetotaler, and God knows what else,” and even if she did manage to teach her to drink a bit of beer she could never cure her of the rest. But Zackell was good at two things, winning and keeping her mouth shut, and that went a long way. So when the old men in the bar tried to tell her how to train the hockey team, Ramona always snapped: “Do you want to learn about hockey? Really learn something? Then you shouldn’t talk to Zackell, because you’re too damn stupid to understand anything she knows!” No one knows anything about Zackell’s feelings, perhaps because she doesn’t have as many as the rest of us, or perhaps because she doesn’t see the point in showing them, but when the Bearskin burned down two years ago, she was the one who ran inside to rescue Ramona. She ate her potatoes for free after that, but she still had to pay for her beer. After all, there had to be some sort of limit to charity.
“Sorry… I’ll leave you two in peace…,” Peter says apologetically, and starts to walk down the aisle between the pews.
“Who?” Zackell wonders, genuinely taken aback and looking around her as Peter approaches.
“You and… I thought you were waiting to…,” Peter begins, but the hockey coach’s face is as impassive as the lake.
“A lot of people seemed to like your speech,” she says instead, looking as if she’s really, really trying to find something to talk to him about, like an adult talking to a child when that adult really, really doesn’t like children.
“Thanks,” Peter says, then realizes that’s the wrong word, because she never said that she liked it.
He’s never figured out how to talk to her, not even when he worked at the club, but he learned to respect her determination. Ramona once told him that Zackell might not fit in in Beartown, but there probably wasn’t anywhere on the whole damn planet where she would fit in better, because where the hell else would you put a coach like her? “On a team in one of those towns where people try to convince themselves that there are more important things in life than hockey?”
“I heard you’d resigned as general manager,” Zackell suddenly says.
Peter can’t help but burst out with laughter, and it echoes around the church.
“Yes, two years ago.”
“Oh?” comes the reply.
“Are you serious? You’ve only just heard? I was actually your boss, Elisabeth,” he smiles.
She replies, completely untroubled:
“I usually notice if someone leaves because they get replaced. But they haven’t replaced you. I thought you were on holiday.”
Peter’s laughter dies quickly and awkwardly away. The club no longer has a general manager, the committee and Zackell herself share his former responsibilities, and considering that Zackell ignored every opinion Peter ever had about her job, he presumes that his absence must have been easy to miss. In an attempt to change the subject, he says:
