Fredrik Backman - A Man Called Ove - A Novel

Ove makes a sound like a heavy bureau that’s got a rusted-up hinge. He goes past all three of them without a word.

“Where you off to? You’re a hero!” the first hard hat yells at him, surprised.

“Yeah,” yells the second.

“A hero!” yells the third.

Ove doesn’t answer. He walks past the man behind the Plexiglas, back out into the snow-covered streets, and starts walking home.

The town slowly wakes up around him with its foreign-made cars and its statistics and credit-card debt and all its other crap.

And so this day was also ruined, he confirms with bitterness.

As he is walking alongside the bicycle shed by the parking area, he sees the white Škoda coming past from the direction of Anita and Rune’s house. A determined woman with glasses is sitting in the passenger seat, her arms filled with files and papers. Behind the wheel sits the man in the white shirt. Ove has to jump out of the way to avoid being run over as the car races round the corner.

The man lifts a smoldering cigarette towards Ove through the windshield, and offers a superior half smile. As if it’s Ove’s fault that he’s in the way, but he’s generous enough to let it go.

“Idiot!” Ove yells after the Škoda, but the man in the white shirt doesn’t seem to react at all.

Ove memorizes the license number before the car disappears round the corner.

“Soon it’ll be your turn, you old fart,” hisses a malevolent voice behind him.

Ove spins around with his fist instinctively raised, and finds himself staring at his own reflection in Blond Weed’s sunglasses. She’s holding that damned mutt in her arms. It growls at him.

“They were from Social Services,” she jeers, with a nod towards the road.

In the parking area, Ove sees that imbecile Anders backing his Audi out of his garage. It has those new, wave-shaped headlights, Ove notes, presumably designed so that no one at night will be able to avoid the insight that here comes a car driven by an utter shit.

“What business is it of yours?” Ove says to the Weed.

Her lips are pulled into the sort of grimace that comes as close to a real smile as a woman whose lips have been injected with environmental waste and nerve toxins is ever likely to achieve.

“It’s my business because this time it’s that bloody old man at the end of the road they’re putting in a home. And after that it’ll be you!”

She spits at the ground beside him and walks towards the Audi. Ove watches her, his chest puffing in and out under his shirt. As the Audi swings around she shows him the middle finger on the other side of the window. Ove’s first instinct is to run after them and tear that German sheet-metal monster, inclusive of imbeciles, weeds, growling mutts, and wave-shaped headlights, to smithereens. But then suddenly he feels out of breath, as if he’s been running full-tilt through the snow. He leans forward, puts his hands on his knees, and notices to his own fury that he’s panting for air, his heart racing.

He straightens up after a minute or so. There’s a slight flickering effect in his right eye. The Audi has gone. Ove turns and slowly heads back to his house, one hand pressed to his chest.

When he gets to his house he stops by the shed. Stares down into the cat-shaped hole in the snowdrift.

There’s a cat at the bottom of it.

Might have bloody known.

16

A MAN WHO WAS OVE AND A TRUCK IN THE FOREST

Before that day when the dour and slightly fumbling boy with the muscular body and the sad blue eyes sat down beside Sonja on the train, there were really only three things she loved unconditionally in her life: books, her father, and cats.

She’d obviously had quite a lot of attention, it wasn’t that. The suitors had come in all shapes and sizes. Tall and dark or short and blond and fun-loving and dull and elegant and boastful and handsome and greedy, and if they hadn’t been slightly dissuaded by the stories in the village of Sonja’s father keeping one or two firearms in the isolated wooden house out there in the woods, they would most likely have been a bit pushier. But none of them had looked at her the way that boy looked at her when he sat down beside her on the train. As if she were the only girl in the world.

Sometimes, especially in the first few years, some of her girlfriends questioned the choice she had made. Sonja was very beautiful, as the people around her seemed to find it so important to keep telling her. Furthermore she loved to laugh and, whatever life threw at her, she was the sort of person who took a positive view of it. But Ove was, well, Ove was Ove. Something the people around her also kept telling Sonja.

He’d been a grumpy old man since he started elementary school, they insisted. And she could have someone so much better.

But to Sonja, Ove was never dour and awkward and sharp-edged. To her, he was the slightly disheveled pink flowers at their first dinner. He was his father’s slightly too tight-fitting brown suit across his broad, sad shoulders. He believed so strongly in things: justice and fair play and hard work and a world where right just had to be right. Not so one could get a medal or a diploma or a slap on the back for it, but just because that was how it was supposed to be. Not many men of his kind were made anymore, Sonja had understood. So she was holding on to this one. Maybe he didn’t write her poems or serenade her with songs or come home with expensive gifts. But no other boy had gone the wrong way on the train for hours every day just because he liked sitting next to her while she spoke.

And when she took hold of his lower arm, thick as her thigh, and tickled him until that sulky boy’s face opened up in a smile, it was like a plaster cast cracking around a piece of jewelry, and when this happened it was as if something started singing inside Sonja. And they belonged only to her, those moments.

She didn’t get angry with him that first night they had dinner, when he told her he’d lied about his military service. Of course, she got angry with him on an immeasurable number of occasions after that, but not that night.

“They say the best men are born out of their faults and that they often improve later on, more than if they’d never done anything wrong,” she’d said gently.

“Who said that?” asked Ove and looked at the triple set of cutlery in front of him on the table, the way one might look at a box that had just been opened while someone said, “Choose your weapon.”

“Shakespeare,” said Sonja.

“Is that any good?” Ove wondered.

“It’s fantastic.” Sonja nodded, smiling.

“I’ve never read anything with him,” mumbled Ove into the tablecloth.

“ By him,” Sonja corrected, and lovingly put her hand on his.

In their almost four decades together Sonja taught hundreds of pupils with learning difficulties to read and write, and she got them to read Shakespeare’s collected works. In the same period she never managed to make Ove read a single Shakespeare play. But as soon as they moved into their row house he spent every evening for weeks on end in the toolshed. And when he was done, the most beautiful bookcases she had ever seen were in their living room.

“You have to keep them somewhere,” he muttered, and poked a little cut on his thumb with the tip of a screwdriver.

And she crept into his arms and said that she loved him.

And he nodded.