Fredrik Backman - A Man Called Ove - A Novel

He puts the cigarette he’s shaken out in his mouth and lights it. Ove breathes so heavily that his chest is pumping up and down under his jacket. The woman gathers up her papers and files and adjusts her glasses. The man just sighs, as if Ove is a cheeky child refusing to stop riding his skateboard on the sidewalk.

“You know what I’m doing here. We’re taking Rune, in the house at the end of the road, into care.”

He hangs his arm out the window and flicks the ash against the wing mirror of the Škoda.

“Taking him into care?”

“Yes,” says the man, nodding indifferently.

“And if Anita doesn’t want that?” Ove hisses, tapping his index finger against the roof of the car.

The man in the white shirt looks at the woman in the passenger seat and smiles resignedly. Then he turns to Ove again and speaks very slowly. As if otherwise Ove might not understand his words.

“It’s not up to Anita to make that decision. It’s up to the investigation team.”

Ove’s breathing becomes even more strained. He can feel his pulse in his throat.

“You’re not bringing this car into this area,” he says through gritted teeth.

His fists are clenched. His tone is pointed and threatening. But his opponent looks quite calm. He puts out the cigarette against the paintwork of the door and drops it on the ground.

As if everything Ove had said was nothing more than the inarticulate raving of a senile old man.

“And what exactly are you going to do to stop me, Ove?” says the man at long last.

The way he flings out his name makes Ove look as if someone just shoved a mallet in his gut. He stares at the man in the white shirt, his mouth slightly agape and his eyes scanning to and fro over the car.

“How do you know my name?”

“I know a lot about you.”

Ove only manages by a whisker to pull his foot out of the way of the wheel as the Škoda moves off again and drives down towards the houses. Ove stands there, in shock, staring after them.

“Who was that?” says the woman in the windbreaker behind him.

Ove spins around.

“How do you know my name?” he demands.

She takes a step back. Pushes a few evasive wisps of hair out of her face without taking her eyes off Ove’s clenched fists.

“I work for the local newspaper—we interviewed people on the platform about how you saved that man. . . .”

“How do you know my name?” says Ove again, his voice shaking with anger.

“You swiped your card when you paid for your train ticket. I went through the receipts in the register,” she says and takes a few more steps back.

“And him!!! How does HE know my name?” Ove roars and waves in the direction in which the Škoda went, the veins on his forehead bulging.

“I . . . don’t know,” she says.

Ove breathes violently through his nose and nails her with his eyes. As if trying to see whether she’s lying.

“I have no idea. I’ve never seen that man before,” she promises.

Ove rivets his eyes into her even harder. Finally he nods grimly to himself. Then he turns around and walks towards his house. She calls out to him but he doesn’t react. The cat follows him into the hall. Ove closes the door. Farther down the road, the man in the white shirt and the woman with glasses ring the doorbell of Anita and Rune’s house.

Ove sinks onto the stool in his hall. Shaking with humiliation.

He had almost forgotten that feeling. The humiliation of it. The powerlessness. The realization that one cannot fight men in white shirts.

And now they’re back. They haven’t been here since he and Sonja came home from Spain. After the accident.

21

A MAN WHO WAS OVE AND COUNTRIES WHERE THEY PLAY FOREIGN MUSIC IN RESTAURANTS

Of course, the bus tour was her idea. Ove couldn’t see the use of it. If they had to go anywhere, why not just take the Saab? But Sonja insisted that buses were “romantic,” and that sort of thing was incredibly important, Ove had learned. So that’s how it ended up. Even though everyone in Spain seemed to think they were somehow exceptional because they went around yawning and drinking and playing foreign music in restaurants and going to bed in the middle of the day.

Ove did his best not to like any of it. But Sonja got so worked up about it all that in the end it inevitably affected him too. She laughed so loudly when he held her that he felt it through his whole body. Not even Ove could avoid liking it.

They stayed in a little hotel, with a little pool, and a little restaurant run by a man whose name, as Ove understood it, was Schosse. It was spelled “José” but it seemed people weren’t too particular about pronunciation in Spain. Schosse couldn’t speak any Swedish but he was very interested in speaking anyway. Sonja had a little book in which she looked things up, so she could say things like “sunset” and “ham” in Spanish. Ove felt it didn’t stop being the butt end of a pig just because you said it another way, but he never mentioned this.

On the other hand he tried to point out to her that she shouldn’t give money to the beggars in the street, as they’d only buy schnapps with it. But she kept doing it.

“They can do what they like with the money,” she said.

When Ove protested she just smiled and took his big hands in hers and kissed them, explaining that when a person gives to another person it’s not just the receiver who’s blessed. It’s the giver.

On the third day she went to bed in the middle of the day. Because that was what people did in Spain, she said, and one should adopt the “local customs of a place.” Ove suspected it was not so much about customs as her own preferences, and this suited her very well as an excuse. She already slept sixteen hours out of twenty-four since she got pregnant.

Ove occupied himself by going for walks. He took the road leading past the hotel into the village. All the houses were made of stone, he noted. Many of them didn’t appear to have thresholds under their front doors, and there were no decent window seals to be seen. Ove thought it slightly barbaric. One couldn’t bloody build houses like this.

He was on his way back to the hotel when he saw Schosse leaning over a smoking brown car at the side of the road. Inside sat two children and a very old woman with a shawl around her head. She didn’t seem to be feeling very well.

Schosse caught sight of Ove and waved at him in an agitated manner with something almost like panic in his eyes. “Sennjaur,” he called out to Ove, the way he’d done every time he’d spoken to him since their arrival. Ove assumed it meant “Ove” in Spanish, but he hadn’t checked Sonja’s phrase book so carefully. Schosse pointed at the car and gesticulated wildly at Ove again. Ove stuck his hands into his trouser pockets and stopped at a safe distance, with a watchful look on his face.

“Hospital!” Schosse shouted again and pointed at the old woman in the car. In fact, she didn’t look in very good shape, Ove reaffirmed to himself. Schosse pointed to the woman and pointed under the hood at the smoking engine, repeating despairingly, “Hospital! Hospital!” Ove cast his evaluating eye on the spectacle and finally drew the conclusion that this smoking, Spanish-manufactured car must be known as a “hospital.”

He leaned over the engine and peered down. It didn’t look so complicated, he thought.

“Hospital,” Schosse said again and nodded several times and looked quite worried.

Ove didn’t know what he was expected to say to that; clearly the whole matter of car makes was considered quite important in Spain, and certainly Ove could empathize with that.