It was signed by the man in the gray suit and black overcoat, the one Ove hoisted off the track after he passed out. Lena had told Ove that the swooning fit had been caused by some sort of complicated brain disease. If they hadn’t discovered it and started treating it when they did, it would have claimed his life within a few years. “So in a way you saved his life twice over,” she’d exclaimed in that excitable tone of voice that made Ove regret a little not having left her locked up inside the garage while he still had the chance.
He folded up the letter and put it back in the envelope. Held up the photo. Three children, the oldest a teenager and the others more or less the same age as Parvaneh’s oldest daughter, looked back at him. Or rather, they weren’t really looking, they were sort of lying about in a pile, each with a water pistol and apparently laughing until they were practically screaming. Behind them stood a blond woman of about forty-five, with a wide grin and her arms stretched out like a large bird of prey and an overflowing plastic bucket in each hand. At the bottom of the pile lay the man in the gray suit, but wearing a blue polo shirt, and trying in vain to shield himself from the downpour.
Ove threw away the letter along with the advertising, tied up the bag, put it by the front door, went back into the kitchen, got out a magnet from the bottom drawer, and put up the photo on the fridge. Right next to the riotous color drawing the three-year-old had made of him on the way back from the hospital.
Ove brushes his hand over the gravestone again, even though he’s already brushed off all the snow that can be brushed off.
“Well, yes, I told them one might like a bit of peace and quiet like a normal human being. But they don’t listen, they don’t,” he moans, waving his arms tiredly towards the gravestone.
“Hi, Sonja,” says Parvaneh behind him, with a cheerful wave so that her big mittens slip off her hands.
“Hajj!” the three-year-old hollers happily.
“‘Hi,’ you’re supposed to say ‘hi,’” the seven-year-old corrects.
“Hi, Sonja,” say Patrick, Jimmy, Adrian, and Mirsad, all nodding in turn.
Ove stamps the snow off his shoes and nods, with a grunt, at the cat beside him.
“Yeah. And the cat you already know.”
Parvaneh’s belly is now so big that she looks like a giant tortoise when she heaves herself down into a squatting position, one hand on the gravestone and the other hooked around Patrick’s arm. Not that Ove dares bring up the giant tortoise metaphor, of course. There are more pleasant ways of killing oneself, he feels. And that’s speaking as someone who’s already tried quite a few of them.
“This flower is from Patrick and the children and me,” says Parvaneh with a friendly smile at the stone.
Then she holds up another flower and adds:
“And this one’s from Anita and Rune. They send loads of love.”
The multifarious gathering turns around to go back to the parking area, but Parvaneh stays by the gravestone. When Ove wants to know why, she just says, “Never you bloody mind!” to him with the sort of smile that makes Ove want to throw things at her. Nothing hard, perhaps. But something symbolic.
He replies with a snort in the lower octave range, then finds, after a certain amount of inner deliberation, that a discussion with both of those women at the same time would be redundant from the very start. He starts going back to the Saab.
“Girl talk,” says Parvaneh succinctly when at last she comes back to the parking area and gets into the driver’s seat. Ove doesn’t know what she means by that, but he decides to leave it alone. Nasanin’s big sister helps her with her belt, in the backseat. In the meantime Jimmy, Mirsad, and Patrick have managed to squeeze into Adrian’s new car in front of them. A Toyota. Hardly an optimal choice of car for any kind of thinking person, Ove had pointed out to him many times while they stood there at the dealership. But at least it wasn’t French. And Ove managed to get the price reduced by almost eight thousand kronor and made sure that the kid got winter tires thrown in for the same price. So it seemed acceptable, in spite of it all.
When Ove got to the dealership the bloody kid had been checking out a Hyundai. So it could have been worse.
Once they make it back to their street, they go their separate ways. Ove, Mirsad, and the cat wave at Parvaneh, Patrick, Jimmy, and the children and turn off around the corner by Ove’s toolshed.
It’s difficult to judge how long the stocky man has been waiting outside Ove’s house. Maybe all morning. He has the determined look of a straight-backed sentry posted somewhere in the field, in the wilderness. As if he’s been cut from a thick tree trunk and the below-freezing temperature is of no concern to him. But when Mirsad comes walking around the corner and the stocky man catches sight of him, he quickly comes to life.
“Hello,” he says, stretching, shifting his body weight back to the first foot.
“Hello, Dad,” mumbles Mirsad.
That evening Ove has his dinner with Parvaneh and Patrick, while a father and son talk about disappointments and hopes and masculinity in two languages in Ove’s kitchen. Maybe most of all they speak of courage. Sonja would have liked it, Ove knows that much. But he tries not to smile so much that Parvaneh notices.
Before the seven-year-old goes to bed she presses a paper into Ove’s hand, on which is written “Birthday Party Invitation.” Ove reads through it as if it were a legal transfer of rights for a leasehold agreement.
“I see. And then you’ll be wanting presents, I expect?” he huffs at last.
She looks down at the floor and shakes her head.
“You don’t have to buy anything. I only want one thing anyway.”
Ove folds up the invitation and puts it in the back pocket of his trousers. Then, with a degree of authority, presses the palms of his hands against his sides.
“Right?”
“Mum says it’s too expensive anyway so it doesn’t matter,” she says without looking up, and then shakes her head again.
Ove nods conspiratorially, like a criminal who has just made a sign to another criminal that the telephone they are using is wiretapped. He and the girl look around the hall to check that neither her mother nor her father have their nosy ears around some corner, surreptitiously listening to them. And then Ove leans forward and the girl forms her hands in a funnel round her face and whispers into his ear:
“An iPad.”
Ove looks a little as if she just said, “An awyttsczyckdront!”
“It’s a sort of computer. There are special drawing programs for it. For children,” she whispers a little louder.
And something is shining in her eyes.
Something that Ove recognizes.
38
A MAN CALLED OVE AND THE END OF A STORY
Broadly speaking there are two kinds of people. Those who understand how extremely useful white cables can be, and those who don’t. Jimmy is the first of these. He loves white cables. And white telephones. And white computer monitors with fruit on the back. That’s more or less the sum of what Ove has absorbed during the car journey into town, when Jimmy natters on excitedly about the sorts of things every rational person ought to be so insuperably interested in, until Ove at last sinks into a sort of deeply meditative state of mind, in which the overweight young man’s babbling turns to a dull hissing in his ears.
As soon as the young man thundered into the passenger seat of the Saab with a large sandwich in his hand, Ove obviously wished he hadn’t asked for Jimmy’s help with this. Things are not improved by Jimmy aimlessly shuffling off to “check a few leads” as soon as they enter the shop.
If you want something done you have to do it yourself, as usual, Ove confirms to himself as he steers his steps alone towards the sales assistant. And not until Ove roars, “Have you been frontally lobotomized or what?!” to the young man who’s trying to show him the shop’s range of portable computers does Jimmy come hurrying to his aid. And then it’s not Ove but rather the shop assistant who needs to be aided.
&nb
sp; “We’re together.” Jimmy nods to the assistant with a glance that sort of functions as a secret handshake to communicate the message, “Don’t worry, I’m one of you!”
The sales assistant takes a long, frustrated breath and points at Ove.
“I’m trying to help him but—”
“You’re just trying to fob me off with a load of CRAP, that’s what you’re doing!” Ove yells back at him without letting him get to a full stop, and menacing him with something he spontaneously snatches off the nearest shelf.
Ove doesn’t quite know what it is, but it looks like a white electrical plug of some sort and it feels like the sort of thing he could throw very hard at the sales assistant if the need arises. The sales assistant looks at Jimmy with a sort of twitching around his eyes that Ove seems adept at generating in people with whom he comes into contact. This is so frequent that one could possibly name a syndrome after him.
“He didn’t mean any harm, man,” Jimmy tries to say pleasantly.
“I’m trying to show him a MacBook and he’s asking me what sort of car I drive,” the sales assistant bursts out, looking genuinely hurt.
“It’s a relevant question,” mutters Ove, with a firm nod at Jimmy.
“I don’t have a car! Because I think it’s unnecessary and I want to use more environmentally friendly modes of transportation!” says the sales assistant in a tone of voice pitched somewhere between intransigent anger and the fetal position.
Ove looks at Jimmy and throws out his arms, as if this should explain everything.
“You can’t reason with a person like that.” He nods and evidently expects immediate support. “Where the hell have you been, anyway?”
“I was just checking out the monitors over there, you know,” explains Jimmy.
“Are you buying a monitor?” asks Ove.
“No,” says Jimmy and looks at Ove as if it was a really strange question, more or less in the way that Sonja used to ask, “What’s that got to do with it?” when Ove asked her if she really “needed” another pair of shoes.
The sales assistant tries to turn around and steal away, but Ove quickly puts his leg forward to stop him.
“Where are you going? We’re not done here.”
The sales assistant looks deeply unhappy now. Jimmy pats him on the back, to encourage him.
“Ove here just wants to check out an iPad—can you sort us out?”
The sales assistant gives Ove a grim look.
“Okay, but as I was trying to ask him earlier, what model do you want? The 16-, 32-, or 64-gigabyte?”
Ove looks at the sales assistant as if he feels the latter should stop regurgitating random combinations of letters.
“There are different versions with different amounts of memory,” Jimmy translates for Ove as if he were an interpreter for the Department of Immigration.
“And I suppose they want a hell of a lot of extra money for it,” Ove snorts back.
Jimmy nods his understanding of the situation and turns to the sales assistant.
“I think Ove wants to know a little more about the differences between the various models.”
The sales assistant groans.
“Well, do you want the normal or the 3G model, then?”
Jimmy turns to Ove.
“Will it be used mainly at home or will she use it outdoors as well?”
Ove pokes his flashlight finger into the air and points it dead straight at the sales assistant.
“Hey! I want her to have the BEST ONE! Understood?”
The sales assistant takes a nervous step back. Jimmy grins and opens his massive arms as if preparing himself for a big hug.
“Let’s say 3G, 128-gig, all the bells and whistles you’ve got. And can you throw in a cable?”
A few minutes later Ove snatches the plastic bag with the iPad box from the counter, mumbling something about “eightthousandtwohundredandninetyfivekronor and they don’t even throw in a keyboard!” followed by “thieves,” “bandits,” and various obscenities.
And so it turns out that the seven-year-old gets an iPad that evening from Ove. And a lead from Jimmy.
She stands in the hall just inside the door, not quite sure what to do with that information, and in the end she just nods and says, “Really nice . . . thanks.” Jimmy nods expansively.
“You got any snacks?”
She points to the living room, which is full of people. In the middle of the room is a birthday cake with eight lit candles, towards which the well-built young man immediately navigates. The girl, who is now an eight-year-old, stays in the hall, touching the iPad box with amazement. As if she hardly dares believe that she’s actually got it in her hands. Ove leans towards her.
“That’s how I always felt every time I bought a new car,” he says in a low voice.
She looks around to make sure no one can see; then she smiles and gives him a hug.
“Thanks, Granddad,” she whispers and runs into her room.
Ove stands quietly in the hall, poking his house keys against the calluses on one of his palms. Patrick comes limping along on his crutches in pursuit of the eight-year-old. Apparently he’s been given the evening’s most thankless task: that of convincing his daughter that it’s more fun sitting there in a dress, eating cake with a lot of boring grown-ups, than staying in her room listening to pop music and downloading apps onto her new iPad. Ove stays in the hall with his jacket on and stares emptily at the floor for what must be almost ten minutes.
“Are you okay?”
Parvaneh’s voice tugs gently at him as if he is coming out of a deep dream. She’s standing in the opening to the living room with her hands on her globular stomach, balancing it in front of her as if it were a large laundry basket. Ove looks up, slightly hazy in his eyes.
“Yeah, yeah, of course I am.”
“You want to come in and have some cake?”
“No . . . no. I don’t like cake. I’ll just take a little walk with the cat.”
Parvaneh’s big brown eyes hold on to him in that piercing way, as they do more and more often these days, which always makes him very unsettled. As if she’s filled with dark premonitions.
“Okay,” she says at last, without any real conviction in her voice. “Are we having a driving lesson tomorrow? I’ll ring your doorbell at eight,” she suggests after that.
Ove nods. The cat strolls into the hall with cake in its whiskers.
“Are you done now?” Ove snorts at it, and when the cat looks ready to confirm that it is, Ove glances at Parvaneh, fidgets a little with his keys, and agrees in a low voice:
“Right. Tomorrow morning at eight, then.”
The dense winter darkness has descended when Ove and the cat venture out into the little walkway between the houses. The laughter and music of the birthday party well out like a big warm carpet between the walls. Sonja would have liked it, Ove thinks to himself. She would have loved what was happening to the place with the arrival of this crazy, pregnant foreign woman and her utterly ungovernable family. She would have laughed a lot. And God, how much Ove misses that laugh.
He walks up towards the parking area with the cat. Checks all the signposts by giving them a good kick. Tugs at the garage doors. Makes a detour over the guest parking and then comes back. Checks the trash room. As they come back between the houses alongside Ove’s toolshed, Ove sees something moving down by the last house on Parvaneh and Patrick’s side of the road. At first Ove thinks it’s one of the party guests, but soon he sees that the figure is moving by the shed belonging to the dark house of that recycling family. They, as far as Ove knows, are still in Thailand. He squints into the gloom to be sure that the shadows are not deceiving him, and for a few seconds he actually doesn’t see anything. But then, just as he’s ready to admit that his eyesight is not what it used to be, the figure reappears. And behind him, another two. And then he hears the unmistakable sound of someone tapping with a hammer at a window that’s covered in insulation tape. Which is how one minim
izes the noise when the glass shatters. Ove knows exactly what it sounds like; he learned how to do it on the railways when they had to knock out broken train windows without cutting their fingers.
“Hey? What are you doing?” he calls through the darkness.
The figures down by the house stop moving. Ove hears voices.
“Hey, you!” he bellows and starts running towards them.
He sees one of them take a couple of steps towards him, and he hears one of them shouting something. Ove increases his pace and charges at them like a human battering ram. He has time to think that he should have brought something from the toolshed to fight with, but now it’s too late. From the corner of his eye he notices one of the figures swinging something long and narrow in one fist, so Ove decides he has to hit that bastard first.
When there’s a stabbing feeling in his breast he thinks at first that one of them has managed to attack him from behind and thump a fist into his back. But then there’s another stab, from inside. Worse than ever, as if someone were skewering him from the scalp down, methodically working a sword all the way through his body until it comes out through the soles of his feet. Ove gasps for air but there’s no air to be had. He falls in the middle of a stride, tumbles with his full weight into the snow. Perceives the dulled pain of his cheek scraping against the ice, and feels how something seems to be squeezing the insides of his chest in a big, merciless fist. Like an aluminum can being crushed in the hand.
Ove hears the running steps of the burglars in the snow, and realizes that they are fleeing. He doesn’t know how many seconds pass, but the pain in his head, like a long line of fluorescent tubes exploding, is unbearable. He wants to cry out but there’s no oxygen in his lungs. All he hears is Parvaneh’s remote voice through the deafening sound of pulsating blood in his ears. Perceives the tottering steps when she stumbles and slips through the snow, her disproportionate body on those tiny feet. The last thing Ove has time to think before everything goes dark is that he has to make her promise that she won’t let the ambulance drive down between the houses.
The Fredrik Backman Collection_A Man Called Ove, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry, and Britt-Marie Was Here Page 27