A Man Called Ove: A Novel, Page 22

  And Ove had probably known all along what he had to do, whom he had to help before he could die. But we are always optimists when it comes to time; we think there will be time to do things with other people. And time to say things to them.

  Time to appeal.

  Again Ove turns to Jimmy with a grim expression.

  “Two years?”

  Jimmy nods. Ove clears his throat. For the first time he looks unsure.

  “I thought she’d just started. I thought I . . . had more time,” he mumbles.

  Jimmy looks as if he’s trying to figure out who Ove is talking to. Ove looks up.

  “And they’re coming to get Rune now? Seriously? No bureaucratic rot and appeals and all that shit. You’re SURE about this?”

  Jimmy nods again. He opens his mouth to say something, but Ove has already started moving off. He makes off between the houses with the movements of a man about to take his revenge for a deadly injustice in a Western. Turns off at the house at the end of the road, where the trailer and the white Škoda are still parked, banging at the door with such force that it’s difficult to tell whether it will open before he reduces it to wood chips. Anita opens, in shock. Ove steps right into her hall.

  “Have you got the papers from the authorities here?”

  “Yes, but I tho—”

  “Give them to me!”

  In retrospect, Anita will tell the other neighbors that she had not seen Ove so angry since 1977, when there was talk of a merger between Saab and Volvo.

  34

  A MAN CALLED OVE AND A BOY IN THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR

  Ove has brought along a blue plastic deck chair to push into the snow and sit on. This could take a while, he knows. It always does when he has to tell Sonja something she doesn’t like. He carefully brushes away all the snow from the gravestone, so they can see each other properly.

  In just short of forty years a lot of different kinds of people have had time to pass through their block of row houses. The house between Ove’s and Rune’s has been lived in by quiet, loud, peculiar, unbearable, and hardly noticeable kinds of people. Families have lived there whose teenage children pissed on the fence when they were drunk, or families who tried to plant nonapproved bushes in the garden, and families who got the idea that they wanted to paint their house pink. And if there was one single thing Ove and Rune agreed on, irrespective of how much they were feuding at the time, it was that whoever currently populated the neighbor’s house tended to be utter imbeciles.

  At the end of the 1980s the house was bought by a man who was apparently some sort of bank manager—as “an investment,” Ove heard him boast to the real estate agent. He, in turn, rented the house to a series of tenants in the coming years. One summer, to three young men who made an audacious attempt to redefine it as a free zone for a veritable parade of drug addicts, prostitutes, and criminal elements. The parties went on around the clock, broken glass from beer bottles covered the little walkway between the houses like confetti, and the music boomed out so loud that the pictures fell off the wall in Sonja and Ove’s living room.

  Ove went over to put a stop to the nuisance, and the young men jeered at him. When he refused to go, one of them threatened him with a knife. When Sonja tried to make them see sense the following day, they called her a “paralyzed old bag.” The evening after they played louder than ever, and when Anita in pure desperation stood outside and shouted at them, they threw a bottle that went right through her and Rune’s living room window.

  And that was obviously quite a bad idea.

  Ove immediately began working on his plans for revenge by examining the financial doings of their landlord. He called lawyers and the tax authorities to put a stop to the renting of the house, and he intended to persist with it even if he had to take the case “all the bloody way to the Supreme Court,” as he put it to Sonja. But he never had time to get that idea off the ground.

  Late one night he saw Rune walking towards the parking area with his car keys in his hand. When he came back he had a plastic bag, the contents of which Ove could not determine, in his hand. And the following day the police came and took away the three young men in handcuffs and charged them with possession of a large amount of drugs, which, after an anonymous tip-off, had been found in their shed.

  Ove and Rune were both standing in the street when it happened. Their eyes met. Ove scratched his chin.

  “Me, I wouldn’t even know where to buy narcotics in this town,” said Ove thoughtfully.

  “On the street behind the train station,” said Rune with his hands in his pockets. “At least, that’s what I’ve heard,” he added with a grin.

  Ove nodded. They stood smiling there in the silence for a long time.

  “Car running well?” asked Ove eventually.

  “Like a Swiss watch.” Rune smiled.

  They were on good terms for two months after that. Then, of course, they fell out again over the heating system. But it was nice while it lasted, as Anita said.

  The tenants came and went in the following years, most with a surprising amount of forbearance and acceptance from Ove and Rune. Perspective can make a great deal of difference to people’s reputations.

  One summer halfway through the 1990s, a woman moved in with a chubby boy of about nine, whom Sonja and Anita immediately took to their hearts. The boy’s father had left them when the boy was newborn, Sonja and Anita were told. A bull-necked man of about forty who lived with them now, and whose breath the two women tried to ignore for as long as possible, was her new love. He was rarely at home, and Anita and Sonja avoided asking too many questions. They supposed that the girl saw qualities in him that they, perhaps, did not understand. “He has taken care of us, and you know how it is, it’s not easy being a single mother,” she said with a brave smile at some point, and the women from the neighboring houses left it at that.

  The first time they heard the bull-necked man shouting through the walls they decided that each and every one must be allowed to mind their own business in their home. The second time they thought that all families fight sometimes, and maybe this was nothing more serious than that.

  When the bull-necked man was away the next time, Sonja invited in the woman and the boy for coffee. The woman explained with a strained laugh that the bruises were because she had thrown open a kitchen cabinet too quickly. In the evening Rune met the bull-necked man in the parking area. He got out of his car in a clear state of intoxication.

  In the two nights that followed, the neighboring houses on either side overheard how the man was shouting in there and things were being thrown on the floor. They heard the woman giving a short cry of pain, and when the sound of the weeping nine-year-old boy pleading with the man to stop came through the wall, Ove went outside and stood in front of his house. Rune was already waiting.

  They were in the midst of one of their worst-ever power struggles in the steering group of the Residents’ Association. Had not even spoken to each other for almost a year. Now they just briefly glanced at one another, and then went back into their houses without a word. Two minutes later they met fully dressed at the front. They rang the bell; the thug lashed out at them as soon as he opened the door, but Ove’s fist struck the bridge of his nose. The man lost his footing, got up, grabbed a kitchen knife, and ran at Ove. He never got there. Rune’s massive fist slugged him like a mallet. In his heyday he was quite a piece, that Rune. Highly unwise to get involved in fisticuffs with him.

  The next day the man left the house and never came back. The young woman slept with Anita and Rune for two weeks before she dared go home again with her boy. Then Rune and Ove went into town and went to the bank, and in the evening Sonja and Anita explained to the young woman that she could see it as a gift or a loan, whichever she preferred. But it wasn’t open for discussion. And so it was that the young woman stayed on in the house with her son, a chubby, computer-loving little boy whose name was Jimmy.

  Now Ove leans forward and looks with great seriousness at the gr
avestone.

  “I just thought I’d have more time, somehow. To do . . . everything.”

  She doesn’t answer.

  “I know how you feel about causing trouble, Sonja. But this time you have to understand. One can’t reason with these people.”

  He pokes his thumbnail into the palm of his hand. The gravestone stays where it is without saying anything, but Ove doesn’t need words to know what she would have thought. The silent approach has always been her preferred trick when there are disputes with him. Whether she’s alive or dead.

  In the morning, Ove had called that Social Services Authority or whatever the hell it was called. He’d called from Parvaneh’s house because he no longer had a telephone line. Parvaneh had advised him to be “friendly and approachable.” It hadn’t started so well, because before long Ove had been connected to the “responsible officer.” Which was the smoking man in the white shirt. He directly demonstrated a significant level of agitation about the little white Škoda, which was still parked at the end of the road outside Rune and Anita’s house. And, yes, Ove could have established a better negotiating position if he’d immediately apologized about it and maybe even agreed that it was regrettable that he’d intentionally put the man in the white shirt in this nonvehicular predicament. It would certainly have been better than the alternative, which was to hiss: “So maybe you’ve learned to read signs now! Illiterate bastard!”

  Ove’s next move involved trying to convince the man that Rune should not be put in a home. The man informed Ove that “Illiterate bastard!” was a very bad choice of words for bringing up that subject. After this, there was a long series of impolite phrases on both ends of the telephone line, before Ove declared in clear terms that things could not be allowed to work like this. One couldn’t just come along and remove people from their homes and transport them to institutions any old way one liked, just because their memory was getting a bit defective. The man at the other end answered coldly that it didn’t matter very much where they put Rune now “in the state he was in” because for him it “would probably make a very marginal difference where he was.” Ove roared a series of invectives back. And then the man in the white shirt said something very stupid.

  “The decision has been made. The investigation has been going on for two years. There’s nothing you can do, Ove. Nothing. At all.”

  And then he hung up.

  Ove looked at Parvaneh. Looked at Patrick. Slammed Parvaneh’s cell phone into their kitchen table and boomed that they needed a “New plan! Immediately!” Parvaneh looked deeply unhappy but Patrick nodded at once, grabbed his crutches, and hobbled quickly out the door. As if he’d just been waiting for Ove to say that. Five minutes later, to Ove’s deep dissatisfaction, he came back with that silly fop Anders from the neighboring house. With Jimmy cheerfully tagging along.

  “What’s he doing here?” said Ove, pointing at the fop.

  “I thought you needed a plan?” said Patrick, nodding at the fop and looking very pleased with himself.

  “Anders is our plan!” Jimmy threw in.

  Anders looked around the hall a little awkwardly, apparently slightly dissuaded by Ove’s expression. But Patrick and Jimmy insistently pushed him into the living room.

  “Go on, tell him,” Patrick prompted.

  “Tell me what?”

  “Okay, so I heard you had some problems with the owner of that Škoda, yeah?” began Anders, giving Patrick a nervous glance. Ove nodded impatiently for him to continue.

  “Well, I don’t think I’ve ever told you what sort of company I have, have I?” Anders went on tentatively.

  Ove put his hands in his pockets. Adopted a slightly more relaxed position. And then Anders told him. And even Ove had to admit that it sounded almost more than decently opportune.

  “Where are you keeping that blond bimbo—” he started saying once Anders had finished, but he stopped himself when Parvaneh kicked his leg. “Your girlfriend,” he corrected himself.

  “Oh. We split up. She moved out,” said Anders and looked at his shoes.

  Whereupon he had to explain that apparently she’d become a bit upset about Ove feuding so much with her and the dog. But her annoyance had been small beer compared to her agitation when Anders found out that Ove called her dog “Mutt” and had not quite been able to stop himself smiling about it.

  And so it came to pass that when the chain-smoking man in the white shirt turned up on their road that afternoon accompanied by a police officer to demand that Ove release the white Škoda from its captivity, both the trailer and the white Škoda were already gone. Ove stood outside his house with his hands calmly tucked into his pockets, while his adversary finally lost his composure altogether and started roaring expletives at him. Ove maintained that he had no idea how this had happened, but pointed out in a friendly manner that none of this would have happened in the first place if he’d just respected the sign that made it clear that cars were prohibited in the area. He obviously left out the detail that Anders owned a car towing company, and that one of his tow trucks had picked up the Škoda at lunchtime and then placed it in a large gravel pit twenty-five miles outside town. And when the police officer tactfully asked if he had really not seen anything, Ove looked right into the eyes of the man in the white shirt and answered:

  “I don’t know. I may have forgotten. You start losing your memory at my age.”

  When the policeman looked around and then wondered why Ove was standing about here in the street if he had nothing to do with the disappearance of the Škoda, Ove just innocently shrugged his shoulders and peered at the man in the white shirt.

  “There’s still nothing good on TV.”

  Anger drained the man’s face of color until, if possible, his face was even whiter than his shirt. He stormed off, raging that this was “far from over.” And of course it wasn’t. Only an hour or so later, Anita opened the door to a courier, who gave her a certified letter from the council. Signed, confirmed, with the time and date of the “transfer into care.”

  And now Ove stands by Sonja’s gravestone and manages to say something about how sorry he is.

  “You get so damned worked up when I fight with people, I know that. But the reality of it is this. You’ll just have to wait a bit longer for me up there. I don’t have time to die right now.”

  Then he digs up the old, frozen pink flowers out of the ground, plants the new ones, straightens up, folds up his deck chair, and walks towards the parking area while muttering something that sounds suspiciously like “because there’s a bloody war on.”

  35

  A MAN CALLED OVE AND SOCIAL INCOMPETENCE

  When Parvaneh, with panic in her eyes, runs right into Ove’s hall and continues into the bathroom without even bothering to say “Good morning,” Ove immediately disputes how one can become so acutely in need of a pee in the space of the twenty seconds it takes her to walk from her own house to his. But “hell has no fury like a pregnant woman in need,” Sonja once informed him. So he keeps his mouth shut.

  The neighbors are saying he’s been “like a different person” these last days, that they’ve never seen him so “engaged” before. But as Ove irritably explains to them, that’s only because Ove has never bloody engaged himself in their particular business before. He’s always been a bloody “engaged” person.

  Patrick says the way he walks between the houses and slams the doors the whole time is like “a really angry avenging robot from the future.” Ove doesn’t know what he means by that. But, anyway, he’s spent hours at a time in the evenings sitting with Parvaneh and Patrick and the girls, while Patrick to the best of his abilities has tried to get Ove not to put angry fingerprints all over Patrick’s computer monitor whenever he wants to show them something. Jimmy, Mirsad, Adrian, and Anders have also been there. Jimmy has repeatedly tried to get everyone to call Parvaneh and Patrick’s kitchen “The Death Star” and Ove “Darth Ove.” They’ve considered countless plans over the last few days—including pla
nting marijuana in the white-shirted man’s shed, as Rune might have suggested—but after a few nights Ove seems to give up. He nods grimly, demands to use the telephone, and shuffles off into the next room to make a call.

  He didn’t like doing it. But when there’s a war on, there’s a war.

  Parvaneh comes out of the bathroom.

  “Are you done?” Ove wonders, as if he’s suspecting this to be some sort of halftime interval.

  She nods, but just as they’re on their way out the door she notices something in his living room and stops. Ove is standing in the doorway but he knows very well what she’s staring at.

  “It’s . . . Pah! What the hell, it’s nothing special,” he mumbles and tries to wave her out the door.

  When she fails to move he gives the edge of the doorframe a hard kick.

  “It was only gathering dust. I sanded it down and repainted it and applied another layer of lacquer, that’s all. It’s no big bloody deal,” he grumbles, irritated.

  “Oh, Ove,” whispers Parvaneh.

  Ove occupies himself checking the threshold with a couple of kicks.

  “We can sand it down and repaint it pink. If it’s a girl, I mean,” he mutters.

  Clears his throat.

  “Or if it’s a boy. Boys can have pink nowadays, can’t they?”

  Parvaneh looks at the light blue crib, her hand across her mouth.

  “If you start crying now you’re not having it,” warns Ove.

  And when she starts crying anyway, Ove sighs—“Bloody women”—and turns around and starts walking down the road.

  The man in the white shirt extinguishes his cigarette under his shoe and bangs on Anita and Rune’s door about half an hour later. He’s brought along three young men in nurse uniforms, as if he’s expecting violent resistance. When frail little Anita opens the door, the three young men look a touch ashamed of themselves more than anything, but the man in the white shirt takes a step towards her and waves his document in the air as if holding an axe in his hands.

  “It’s time,” he informs her with a certain impatience and tries to step into the hall.

  But she places herself in his way. As much as a person of her size can place herself in anyone’s way.

  “No!” she says without budging an inch.

  The man in the white shirt stops and looks at her. Shakes his head tiredly at her and tightens the skin around his nose until it almost seems to be swallowed up in his cheek-flesh.

  “You’ve had two years to do this the easy way, Anita. And now the decision has been made. And that’s all there is to it.”

  He tries to get past her again but Anita stays where she is on her threshold, immovable as an ancient standing stone.

  She takes a deep breath without breaking their eye contact.

  “What sort of love is it if you hand someone over when it gets difficult?” she cries, her voice shaking with sorrow. “Abandon someone when there’s resistance? Tell me what sort of love that is!”

  The man pinches his lips. There’s a nervous twitch around his cheekbones.

  “Rune doesn’t even know where he is half the time, the investigation has showed th—”

  “But I KNOW!” Anita interrupts and points at the three nurses. “I KNOW!” she cries at them.

  “And who’s going to take care of him, Anita?” he asks rhetorically, shaking his head. Then he takes a step forward and gestures for the three nurses to follow him into the house.

  “I’m going to take care of him!” answers Anita, her gaze as dark as a burial at sea.

  The man in the white shirt just continues shaking his head as he pushes past her. And only then does he see the shadow rising up behind her.

  “And so will I,” says Ove.

  “And I will,” says Parvaneh.

  “And me!” say Patrick, Jimmy, Anders, Adrian, and Mirsad with a single voice as they push their way into the doorway until they’re falling over each other.

  The man in the white shirt stops. His eyes narrow into slits.

  Suddenly a woman wearing beat-up jeans and a slightly too big green windbreaker turns up at his side with a voice recorder in her hand.

  “I’m from the local newspaper,” Lena announces, “and I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  The man in the white shirt looks at her for a long time. Then he turns his gaze on Ove. The two men stare at one another in silence. Lena, the journalist, produces a pile of papers from her bag. She presses this into the man’s arms.

  “These are all the patients you and your section have been in charge of in recent years. All the people like Rune who have been taken into care and put in homes against their own and their families’ wishes. All the irregularities that