Britt-Marie Was Here Read Online Free PDF

Germany. Britt-Marie remembers all his smells. Most of all the smell of the hospital room. It was loaded with bouquets (it is common practice to receive flowers when you have a heart attack) but Britt-Marie can still remember that smell of perfume and pizza from the shirt by the side of his bed.
    He was sleeping, snoring slightly. She held his hand a last time,without waking him. Then she folded up the shirt and put it in her handbag. When she came home she cleaned the collar with baking soda and vinegar and washed it twice before she hung it up. Then she polished the windows with Faxin and freshened up the mattress and brought in the balcony boxes and packed her bag and turned on her cell phone for the first time in her life. For the first time in their life together. She thought the children might call and ask how things were with Kent. They didn’t. They both sent a single text message.
    There was a time just after their teenage years when they still promised to come to visit at Christmas. Then they started pretending to have reasons for canceling. After a year or two they stopped pretending to have reasons for canceling. In the end they stopped pretending that they were coming at all. That’s how life went.
    Britt-Marie has always liked the theater, because she enjoys the way the actors get applauded at the end for their pretense. Kent’s heart attack and the voice of the young, beautiful thing meant there’d be no applause for her. You can’t keep pretending someone doesn’t exist when she speaks to you on the telephone. So Britt-Marie left the hospital room with a shirt smelling of perfume and a broken heart.
    You don’t get any flowers for that.
    “But, shit, are you . . . like . . . dead?” Somebody asks impatiently.
    Britt-Marie finds it extremely impolite for Somebody to interrupt her in the midst of dying. Especially with such terrible language. There are certainly a good number of alternatives to “shit,” if you have a particular need to express such a feeling. She looks up at this Somebody standing over her, looking down.
    “May I ask where I am?” asks Britt-Marie, in confusion.
    “Hi there! At the health center,” says Somebody cheerfully.
    “It smells of pizza,” Britt-Marie manages to say.
    “Yeah, you know, health center is also pizzeria,” says Somebody, nodding.
    “That hardly strikes me as hygienic,” Britt-Marie manages to utter.
    Somebody shrugs his shoulders. “First pizzeria. You know, they closed down that health center. Financial crisis. What a shit. So now, you know, we do what we can. But no worry. Have first aid!”
    Somebody, who actually seems to be a woman, points jovially at an open plastic case marked with a red cross on the lid, and “First Aid” written on it. Then she waves a stinky bottle.
    “And here, you know, second aid! You want?”
    “Excuse me?” Britt-Marie squeaks, with her hand on a painful bump on her forehead.
    Somebody, who on closer inspection is not standing over Britt-Marie but sitting over her, offers her a glass.
    “They closed down the liquor store here, so now we do what we can. Here! Vodka from Estonia or some shit like that. Letters bloody weird, you know. Maybe not vodka, but same shit, burns your tongue but you get used to it. Good when you get those, what’s-it-called? Flu blisters?”
    Tormented, Britt-Marie shakes her head and catches sight of some red stains on her jacket.
    “Am I bleeding?” she bursts out, sitting up in terror.
    It would be terribly vexatious if she left bloodstains on Somebody’s floor, whether it’s been mopped or not.
    “No! No! No shit like that. Maybe you get a bump on your head from the shot, huh, but that’s just tomato sauce, you know!” yells Somebody and tries to mop Britt-Marie’s jacket with a tissue.
    Britt-Marie notices that Somebody is in a wheelchair. It’s a difficult thing not to notice. Furthermore Somebody seems intoxicated. Britt-Marie bases this observation on the fact that