Everybody's Somebody's Fool

Everybody's Somebody's Fool is the Swedish version of a Siw Malmkvist song that briefly becomes an audible point of contact between Ewert Grens’s past and his bereavement. When Einarsson sings it among shelves of seized property, Grens stops him, making clear that the song belongs not just to a remembered musical repertoire but to grief he is still trying to manage.

Song and remembered life

The novel places the song within Grens’s attachment to Siw Malmkvist’s music. His office contains cassettes of her songs that he recorded and mixed himself, alongside early record sleeves from the 1960s whose colors have endured, and a photograph of Siwan that he took one evening at Kristianstads Folkets Park. These objects are more than a collection: they are what he identifies as belonging to a time when all was good. The text does not establish that this particular song is among the cassettes, but it does set its later appearance within the same carefully preserved musical world.

That world is under pressure from the loss of Anni. After visiting the nursing home, Grens drives to police headquarters, collects three cardboard boxes, and begins wrapping and packing the things on the shelf behind his desk. The act gives his changing relationship to memory a concrete form: he is putting away the music and images associated with a happier time, even as his grief has only recently begun to shift from sustained anger toward a quieter, more pensive state. Later, looking at the boxes, he recognizes what he misses: Siwan’s sound, Anni, and the time when life seemed simpler. The song’s significance therefore rests on an association the narrative builds across these scenes, rather than on any stated explanation of its lyrics.

The song interrupts the present

The song returns not in Grens’s office but among the rows of seized property. A colleague has helped carry a cardboard box to the shelves; Grens leaves a form on the counter and turns to go. Then he hears Einarsson singing Everybody's Somebody's Fool. The placement matters: music tied to Grens’s private past rises from inside a working space organized around objects taken into police custody. A personal memory enters an ordinary institutional setting without warning.

Grens stops and calls toward the cramped storage area. His response is immediate and emphatic: he tells Einarsson not to sing, then explains that the singing is disturbing his grief. Einarsson, surprised, appears around the shelves. The exchange turns the song into the occasion for a boundary being stated aloud. Grens does not explain the memories behind his reaction or ask for comfort; instead, he names his grief as something the colleague’s singing has interrupted. The moment gives the song a clear narrative function without requiring the text to supply a new account of the loss.

Musical memory and grief

The song links two forms of remembering already present in Grens’s story: the deliberate preservation of music and photographs, and the involuntary return of feeling when a familiar sound reaches him. His boxed recordings and memorabilia show an effort to contain a past he associates with happiness. Einarsson’s singing defeats that separation for a moment: what Grens has been packing away becomes audible again in the middle of the workday.

The scene also sharpens the contrast between grief as private experience and grief as something that can surface in public. Grens has recently become more reserved, but the song elicits a direct response in front of a colleague. His words are not a general rejection of music; they are a request that this particular interruption stop, because he is not ready for it. Thus Everybody's Somebody's Fool is significant less as a separately explained musical object than as the trigger for a brief encounter between the sounds Grens has preserved and the loss he cannot simply put into a box.