And all the screams. He’d never forget them.
Ove was thrown about and only remembered falling on his stomach. He looked around for her, terrified, among the tumult of human bodies, but she was gone. He threw himself forward, cutting himself under a rain of glass from the ceiling, but it was as if a furious wild animal were holding him back and forcing him down on the floor in unreflecting humiliation. It would pursue him every night for the rest of his life: his utter impotence in the situation.
He sat by her bed every moment of the first week. Until the nurses insisted that he shower and change his clothes. Everywhere they looked at him with sympathetic stares and expressed their “condolences.” A doctor came in and spoke to Ove in an indifferent, clinical voice about the need to “prepare himself for the likelihood of her not waking up again.” Ove threw that doctor through a door. A door that was locked and shut. “She isn’t dead,” he raved down the corridor. “Stop behaving as if she was dead!” No one at the hospital dared make that mistake again.
On the tenth day, as the rain smattered against the windows and the radio spoke of the worst storm in several decades, Sonja opened her eyes in torturous little slits, caught sight of Ove, and stole her hand into his. Enfolded her finger in the palm of his hand.
Then she fell asleep and slept through the night. When she woke up again the nurses offered to tell her, but Ove grimly insisted that he was the one who would do it. Then he told her everything in a composed voice, while caressing her hands in his, as if they were very, very cold. He told her about the driver smelling of wine and the bus veering into the crash barrier and the collision. The smell of burned rubber. The earsplitting crashing sound.
And about a child that would never come now.
And she wept. An ancient, inconsolable despair that screamed and tore and shredded them both as countless hours passed. Time and sorrow and fury flowed together in stark, long-drawn darkness. Ove knew there and then that he would never forgive himself for having got up from his seat at that exact moment, for not being there to protect them. And knew that this pain was forever.
But Sonja would not have been Sonja if she had let the darkness win. So, one morning, Ove did not know how many days had passed since the accident, expressing herself quite succinctly, she declared that she wanted to start having physiotherapy. And when Ove looked at her as if it were his own spine screaming like a tortured animal every time she moved, she gently leaned her head against his chest and whispered: “We can busy ourselves with living or with dying, Ove. We have to move on.”
And that’s how it was.
In the following months, back in Sweden, Ove met innumerable men in white shirts. They sat behind desks made of light-colored wood in various municipal offices and they apparently had endless amounts of time to instruct Ove in what documents had to be filled in for various purposes, but no time at all to discuss the measures that were needed for Sonja to get better.
A woman was dispatched to the hospital from one of the municipal authorities, where she bullishly explained that Sonja could be placed in “a service home for other people in her situation.” Something about how “the strain of everyday life” quite understandably could be “excessive” for Ove. She didn’t say it right out, but it was clear as crystal what she was driving at. She did not believe that Ove could see himself staying with his wife now. “Under present conditions,” she kept repeating, nodding discreetly at the bedside. She spoke to Ove as if Sonja were not even in the room.
Admittedly Ove opened the door this time, but she was ejected all the same.
“The only home we’re going to is our own! Where we LIVE!” Ove roared at her, and in pure frustration and anger he threw one of Sonja’s shoes out of the room.
Afterwards he had to go and ask the nurses, who’d almost been hit by it, if they knew where it had gone. Which of course made him even angrier. It was the first time since the accident that he heard Sonja laughing. As if it was pouring out of her, without the slightest possibility of stopping it, like she was being wrestled to the ground by her own giggling. She laughed and laughed and laughed until the vowels were rolling across the walls and floors, as if they meant to do away with the laws of time and space. It made Ove feel as if his chest was slowly rising out of the ruins of a collapsed house after an earthquake. It gave his heart space to beat again.
He went home and rebuilt the whole house, ripped out the old countertop and put in a new, lower one. Even managed to find a specially made stove. Reconstructed the doorframes and fitted ramps over all the thresholds. The day after Sonja was allowed to leave the hospital, she went back to her teacher training. In the spring she sat her examination. There was an advertisement in the newspaper for a teaching position in a school with the worst reputation in town, with the sort of class that no qualified teacher with all the parts of her brain correctly screwed together would voluntarily face. It was attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder before attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder had been invented. “There’s no hope for these boys and girls,” the headmaster soberly explained in the interview. “This is not education, this is storage.” Maybe Sonja understood how it felt to be described as such. The vacant position attracted only one applicant, and she got those boys and girls to read Shakespeare.
In the meantime Ove was so weighed down with anger that Sonja sometimes had to ask him to go outside so he didn’t demolish the furniture. It pained her infinitely to see his shoulders so loaded down with the will to destroy. Destroy that bus driver. The travel agency. The crash barrier of that highway. The wine producer. Everything and everyone. Punch and keep punching until every bastard had been obliterated. That was all he wanted to do. He put that anger in his shed. He put it in the garage. He spread it over the ground during his inspection rounds. But that wasn’t all. In the end he also started putting it in letters. He wrote to the Spanish government. To the Swedish authorities. To the police. To the court. But no one took responsibility. No one cared. They answered by reference to legal texts or other authorities. Made excuses. When the council refused to build a ramp at the stairs of the school where Sonja worked, Ove wrote letters and complaints for months. He wrote letters to newspapers. He tried to sue the council. He literally inundated them with the unfathomable vengefulness of a father who has been robbed.
But everywhere, sooner or later, he was stopped by men in white shirts with strict, smug expressions on their faces. And one couldn’t fight them. Not only did they have the state on their side, they were the state. The last complaint was rejected. The fighting was over because the white shirts had decided so. And Ove never forgave them that.
Sonja saw everything. She understood where he was hurting. So she let him be angry, let all that anger find its outlet somewhere, in some way. But on one of those early summer evenings in May that always come along bearing gentle promises about the summer ahead, she rolled up to him, the wheels leaving soft marks on the parquet floor. He was sitting at the kitchen table writing one of his letters, and she took his pen away from him, slipped her hand into his, and pressed her finger into his rough palm. Leaned her forehead tenderly against his chest.
“That’s enough now, Ove. No more letters. There’s no space for life with all these letters of yours.”
And she looked up, softly caressed his cheek, and smiled.
“It’s enough now, my darling Ove.”
And then it was enough.
The next morning Ove got up at dawn, drove the Saab to her school, and with his own bare hands built the disabled ramp the council was refusing to put up. And after that she came home every evening for as long as Ove could remember and told him, with fire in her eyes, about her boys and girls. The ones who arrived in the classroom with police escorts yet when they left could recite four-hundred-year-old poetry. The ones who could make her cry and laugh and sing until her voice was bouncing off the ceilings of their little house. Ove could never make head nor tail of those impossible kids, but he was not beyond liking them for w
hat they did to Sonja.
Every human being needs to know what she’s fighting for. That was what they said. And she fought for what was good. For the children she never had. And Ove fought for her.
Because that was the only thing in this world he really knew.
24
A MAN CALLED OVE AND A BRAT WHO DRAWS IN COLOR
The Saab is so full of people when Ove drives away from the hospital that he keeps checking the fuel gauge, as if he’s afraid that it’s going to break into a scornful dance. In his rearview mirror he sees Parvaneh unconcernedly giving the three-year-old paper and color crayons.
“Does she have to do that in the car?” barks Ove.
“Would you rather have her restless, so she starts wondering how to pull the upholstery off of the seats?” Parvaneh says calmly.
Ove doesn’t answer. Just looks at the three-year-old in his mirror. She’s shaking a big purple crayon at the cat in Parvaneh’s lap and yelling: “DROORING!” The cat observes the child with great caution, clearly reluctant to make itself available as a decorative surface.
Patrick sits between them, turning and twisting his body to try to find a comfortable position for his leg cast, which he’s wedged up on the armrest between the front seats.
It’s not easy, because he’s doing his best not to dislodge the newspapers that Ove has placed both on his seat and under the cast.
The three-year-old drops a color crayon, which rolls forward under the front passenger seat, where Jimmy is sitting. In what must surely be a move worthy of an Olympian acrobat for a man of his physique, Jimmy manages to bend forward and scoop up the crayon from the mat in front of him. He checks it out for a moment, grins, then turns to Patrick’s propped-up leg and draws a large, smiling man on the cast. The toddler shrieks with joy when she notices.
“So you’re going to start making a mess as well?” says Ove.
“Pretty neat, isn’t it?” Jimmy crows and looks as if he’s about to make a high-five at Ove.
Ove rolls his eyes.
“Sorry, man, couldn’t stop myself,” says Jimmy and, somewhat shamefaced, gives back the crayon to Parvaneh.
There’s a plinging sound in Jimmy’s pocket. He hauls out a cell phone as large as a full-grown man’s hand and occupies himself with frenetically tapping the display.
“Whose is the cat?” Patrick asks from the back.
“Ove’s kitty!” the three-year-old answers with rock-solid certainty.
“It is not,” Ove corrects her at once.
He sees Parvaneh smiling teasingly at him in the rearview mirror.
“Is so!” she says.
“No it ISN’T!” says Ove.
She laughs. Patrick looks very puzzled. She pats him encouragingly on the knee.
“Don’t worry about what Ove is saying. It’s absolutely his cat.”
“He’s a bloody vagrant, that’s what he is!” Ove corrects.
The cat lifts its head to find out what all the commotion is about, then concludes that all this is sensationally uninteresting and snuggles back into Parvaneh’s lap. Or rather, her belly.
“So it’s not being handed in somewhere?” Patrick wonders, scrutinizing the feline.
The cat lifts its head a little, hissing briefly at him by way of an answer.
“What do you mean, ‘handed in’?” Ove says, cutting him short.
“Well . . . to a cat home or someth—” Patrick begins, but gets no further before Ove bawls:
“No one’s being handed in to any bloody home!”
And with this, the subject is exhausted. Patrick tries not to look startled. Parvaneh tries not to burst out laughing. Neither really manages.
“Can’t we stop off somewhere for something to eat?” Jimmy interjects and adjusts his seat position; the Saab starts swaying.
Ove looks at the group assembled around him, as if he’s been kidnapped and taken to a parallel universe. For a moment he thinks about swerving off the road, until he realizes that the worst-case scenario would be that they all accompanied him into the afterlife. After this insight, he reduces his speed and increases the gap significantly between his own car and the one in front.
“Wee!” yells the three-year-old.
“Can we stop, Ove? Nasanin needs to pee,” Parvaneh calls out, in that manner peculiar to people who believe that the backseat of a Saab is two hundred yards behind the driver.
“Yeah! Then we can have something to eat at the same time.” Jimmy nods with anticipation.
“Yeah, let’s do that, I need a wee as well,” says Parvaneh.
“McDonald’s has toilets,” Jimmy informs them helpfully.
“McDonald’s will be fine, stop there,” Parvaneh nods.
“There’ll be no stopping here,” says Ove firmly.
Parvaneh eyes him in the rearview mirror. Ove glares back. Ten minutes later he’s sitting in the Saab, waiting for them all outside McDonald’s. Even the cat has gone inside with them. The traitor. Parvaneh comes out and taps on Ove’s window.
“Are you sure you don’t want anything?” she says softly to him.
Ove nods. She looks a little dejected. He rolls up the window again. She walks around the car and hops in on the passenger side.
“Thanks for stopping.” She smiles.
“Yeah, yeah,” says Ove.
She’s eating french fries. Ove reaches forward and puts more newspaper on the floor in front of her. She starts laughing. He can’t understand at what.
“I need your help, Ove,” she says suddenly.
Ove doesn’t seem spontaneously or enormously enthusiastic.
“I thought you could help me pass my driving test,” she continues.
“What did you say?” asks Ove, as if he must have heard her wrong.
She shrugs. “Patrick will be in casts for months. I have to get a driver’s license so I can give the girls lifts. I thought you could give me some driving lessons.”
Ove looks so confused that he even forgets to get upset.
“So in other words you don’t have a driver’s license?”
“No.”
“So it wasn’t a joke?”
“No.”
“Did you lose your license?”
“No. I never had one.”
Ove’s brain seems to need a good few moments to process this information, which, to him, is utterly beyond belief.
“What’s your job?” he asks.
“What’s that got to do with it?” she replies.
“Surely it’s got everything to do with it?”
“I’m a real estate agent.”
Ove nods.
“And no driver’s license?”
“No.”
Ove shakes his head grimly, as if this is the very pinnacle of being a human being who doesn’t take responsibility for anything. Parvaneh smiles that little teasing smile of hers again, scrunches up the empty french fries bag, and opens the door.
“Look at it this way, Ove: Do you really want anyone else to teach me to drive in the residential area?”
She gets out of the car and goes to the trash can. Ove doesn’t answer. He just snorts.
Jimmy shows up in the doorway.
“Can I eat in the car?” he asks, a piece of chicken sticking out of his mouth.
At first Ove thinks of saying no, but then realizes they’ll never get out of here at this rate. Instead, he spreads so many newspapers over the passenger seat and floor that it’s as if he’s preparing to give the car a respray.
“Just hop in, will you, so we can get home,” he groans and gestures at Jimmy.
Jimmy nods, upbeat. His cell phone plings.
“And stop that noise—this isn’t a bloody pinball arcade.”
“Sorry, man, work keeps e-mailing me all the time,” says Jimmy, balancing his food in one hand and fiddling with the phone in his pocket with the other.
“So you have a job, then?” says Ove.
Jimmy nods enthusiastically.
“I progr
am iPhone apps.”
Ove has no further questions.
At least it’s relatively quiet in the car for ten minutes until they roll into the parking area outside Ove’s garage. Ove stops alongside the bicycle shed, puts the Saab into neutral without turning off the engine, and gives his passengers a meaningful look.
“It’s fine, Ove. Patrick can manage on his crutches from here,” says Parvaneh with unmistakable irony.
“Cars aren’t allowed in the residential area,” says Ove.
Undeterred, Patrick extricates himself and his cast from the backseat of the car, while Jimmy squeezes out of the passenger seat, chicken grease all over his T-shirt.
Parvaneh lifts out the three-year-old in her car seat and puts it on the ground. The girl waves something in the air, while yelling out some garbled words.
Parvaneh nods, goes back to the car, leans in through the front door, and gives Ove a sheet of paper.
“What’s that?” Ove asks, making not the slightest movement to accept it.
“It’s Nasanin’s drawing.”
“What am I supposed to do with that?”
“She’s drawn you,” Parvaneh replies, and shoves it into his hands.
Ove gives the paper a reluctant look. It’s filled with lines and swirls.
“That’s Jimmy, and that’s the cat, and that’s Patrick and me. And that’s you,” explains Parvaneh.
When she says that last bit she points at a figure in the middle of the drawing. Everything else on the paper is drawn in black, but the figure in the middle is a veritable explosion of color. A riot of yellow and red and blue and green and orange and purple.
The Fredrik Backman Collection: A Man Called Ove, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry, and Britt-Marie Was Here Page 18