Fredrik Backman - A Man Called Ove - A Novel

The platform is almost empty. On the other side of the track are some sleepy-looking youths with oversize backpacks which, Ove decides, are most likely filled with drugs. Alongside them is a man in his forties in a gray suit and a black overcoat. He’s reading the newspaper. A little farther off are some small-talking women in their best years with county council logos on their chests and purple tresses of hair. They’re chain-smoking long menthol cigarettes.

On Ove’s side of the track it’s empty but for three overdimensioned municipal employees in their midthirties in workmen’s trousers and hard hats, standing in a ring and staring down into a hole. Around them is a carelessly erected loop of cordon tape. One of them has a mug of coffee from 7-Eleven; another is eating a banana; the third is trying to poke his cell phone without removing his gloves. It’s not going so well. And the hole stays where it is. And still we’re surprised when the whole world comes crashing down in a financial crisis, Ove thinks. When people do little more than standing around eating bananas and looking into holes in the ground all day.

He checks his watch. One minute left. He stands at the edge of the platform. Balancing the soles of his shoes over the edge. It’s a fall of no more than five feet, he estimates. Five and a half, possibly. There’s a certain symbolism in a train taking his life and he doesn’t like this much. He doesn’t think the train driver should have to see the awfulness of it. For this reason he has decided to jump when the train is very close, so it’s rather the side of the first carriage that throws him onto the rails than the big windshield at the front. He looks in the direction the train is coming from and slowly starts counting. It’s important that the timing is absolutely right, he determines. The sun is just up; it shines obstinately into his eyes like a child who has just been given a flashlight.

And that’s when he hears the first scream.

Ove looks up just in time to see the suit-wearing man in his black overcoat starting to sway back and forth, like a panda that’s been given a Valium overdose. It continues for a second or so, then the suit-wearing man looks up blindly and his whole body is struck with some form of nervous twitching. His arms shake convulsively. And then, as if the moment is a long sequence of still photographs, the newspaper falls out of his hands and he passes out, falling off the edge onto the track with a thump, as if he were a sack of cement mixture.

The chain-smoking old girls with the county council logos on their breasts start shrieking in panic. The drug-taking youths stare at the track, their hands enmeshed in their backpack straps as if fearing that they might otherwise fall over. Ove stands on the edge of the platform on the other side and looks with irritation from one to the other.

“For Christ’s sake,” fumes Ove to himself at long last as he jumps down onto the track. “GRAB HOLD HERE WILL YOU!” he calls out to one of the backpackers on the platform. The stultified youth drags himself slowly to the edge. Ove hoists up the suit-wearing man in a way that men who have never put their foot in a gym yet have spent their entire lives carrying a concrete plinth under each arm tend to be able to do. He heaves up the body into the backpacker’s arms in a way that Audi-driving men wearing neon-bright jogging pants are often incapable of doing.

“He can’t stay here in the path of the train, you get that, don’t you?!”

The backpackers nod in confusion, and finally by their collective efforts manage to drag the suit-wearing body onto the platform. The county council women are still screaming, as if they sincerely believe this is a constructive approach under the circumstances. The man appears to be breathing, but Ove stays down there on the track. He hears the train coming. It’s not quite the way he planned it, but it’ll have to do.

Then he calmly goes into the middle of the track, puts his hands in his pockets, and stares into the headlights. He hears the warning whistle like a foghorn. Feels the track shaking powerfully under his feet, as if a testosterone-fueled bull were trying to charge him. He breathes out. In the midst of that inferno of shaking and yelling and the chilling scream of the train’s brakes he feels a deep relief.

At last.

To Ove, the moments that follow are elongated as if time itself has applied its brakes and made everything around him travel in slow motion. The explosion of sounds is muted into a low hiss in his ears, the train approaching so slowly that it’s as if it’s being pulled along by two decrepit oxen. The headlights flash despairingly at him. And in the interval between two of the flashes, while he isn’t blinded, he finds himself establishing eye contact with the train driver. He can’t be more than twenty years old. One of those who still gets called “the puppy” by his older colleagues.

Ove stares into the puppy’s face. Clenches his fists in his pockets as if he’s cursing himself for what he’s about to do. But it can’t be helped, he thinks. There’s a right way of doing things. And a wrong way.

So the train is perhaps fifteen yards away when Ove swears with irritation and, as calmly as if he were getting up to fetch himself a cup of coffee, steps out of the way and jumps up on the platform again.

The train has drawn level with him by the time the driver has managed to stop it. The puppy’s terror has sucked all the blood out of his face. He is clearly holding back his tears. The two men look at each other through the locomotive window as if they had just emerged from some apocalyptic desert and now realized that neither of them was the last human being on earth. One is relieved by this insight. And the other disappointed.

The boy in the locomotive nods carefully. Ove nods back with resignation.

Fair enough that Ove no longer wants his life. But the sort of man who ruins someone else’s by making eye contact with him seconds before his body is turned into blood paste against said person’s windshield; damn it, Ove is not that sort of man. Neither his dad nor Sonja would ever have forgiven him for that.

“Are you all right?” one of the hard hats calls out behind Ove.

“Another minute and you’d have been a goner!” yells one of the others.

They stand there staring at him, not at all unlike the way they were standing just now and staring into that hole. It seems to be their prime area of competence, in fact: to stare at things. Ove stares back.

“Another second, I mean,” clarifies the man who still has a banana in his hand.

“It could have gone quite badly, that,” sniggers the first hard hat.

“Really badly,” the other one agrees.

“Could have died, actually,” clarifies the third.

“You’re a real hero!”

“Saved their life!”

“His. Saved his life,” Ove corrects and hears Sonja’s voice in his own.

“Would have died otherwise,” the third one reiterates, taking a forthright bite of his banana.

On the track is the train with all its red emergency lights turned on, puffing and screeching like a very fat person who’s just run into a wall. A great number of examples of what Ove assumes must be IT consultants and other disreputable folk come streaming out and stand about dizzily on the platform. Ove puts his hands in his trouser pockets.

“I suppose now you’ll have a lot of bloody delayed trains as well,” he says and looks with particular displeasure at the chaotic press of people on the platform.

“Yeah,” says the first hard hat.

“Reckon so,” says the second.

“Lots and lots of delays,” the third one agrees.