Fredrik Backman - A Man Called Ove - A Novel

“Saaaab,” he said, therefore, pointing demonstratively at his chest.

Schosse stared in puzzlement at him for a moment. Then he pointed at himself.

“Schosse!”

“I wasn’t bloody asking for your name, I was only sayi—” Ove started saying, but he stopped himself when he was met on the other side of the hood by a stare as glazed as an inland lake.

Obviously this Schosse’s grasp of Swedish was even worse than Ove’s Spanish. Ove sighed and looked with some concern at the children in the backseat. They were holding the old woman’s hands and looked quite terrified. Ove looked down at the engine again.

Then he rolled up his shirtsleeves and motioned for Schosse to move out of the way. Within ten minutes they were back on the road, and Ove had never seen anyone so relieved to have his car fixed.

However much she flicked through her little phrase book, Sonja never found out the exact reason why they weren’t charged for any of the food they ate in José’s restaurant that week. But she laughed until she was positively simmering every time the little Spanish man who owned the restaurant lit up like a sun when he saw Ove, held out his arms, and exclaimed: “Señor Saab!!!”

Her daily naps and Ove’s walks became a ritual. On the second day, Ove walked past a man putting up a fence, and stopped to explain that this was absolutely the wrong way to do it. The man couldn’t understand a word of what he was saying, so Ove decided in the end that it would be quicker to show him how. On the third day he built a new exterior wall on a church building, with the assistance of the village priest. On the fourth day he went with Schosse to a field outside the village, where he helped one of Schosse’s friends pull out a horse that had got stuck in a muddy ditch.

Many years later it occurred to Sonja to ask him about all that. When Ove at last told her, she shook her head both long and hard. “So while I was sleeping you sneaked out and helped people in need . . . and mended their fences? People can say whatever they like about you, Ove. But you’re the strangest superhero I ever heard about.”

On the bus on the way home from Spain she put Ove’s hand on her belly and he felt the child kicking—faintly, as if someone had prodded the palm of his hand through a very thick oven mitt. They sat there for several hours feeling the little bumps. Ove didn’t say anything but Sonja saw the way he wiped his eyes with the back of his hand when he rose from his seat and mumbled something about needing the bathroom.

It was the happiest week of Ove’s life.

It was destined to be followed by the very unhappiest.

22

A MAN CALLED OVE AND SOMEONE IN A GARAGE

Ove and the cat sit in silence in the Saab outside the hospital.

“Stop looking at me as if this is my fault,” says Ove to the cat.

The cat looks back at him as if it isn’t angry but disappointed.

It wasn’t really the plan that he would be sitting outside this hospital again. He hates hospitals, after all, and now he’s bloody been here three times in less than a week. It’s not right and proper. But no other choice was available to him.

Because today went to pot from the very beginning.

It started with Ove and the cat, during their daily inspection, when they discovered that the sign forbidding vehicular traffic within the residential area had been run over. This inspired such colorful profanities from Ove that the cat looked quite embarrassed. Ove marched off in fury and emerged moments later with his snow shovel. Then he stopped, looking towards Anita and Rune’s house, his jaws clamped so hard that they made a creaking sound.

The cat looked at him accusingly.

“It’s not my fault the old sod went and got old,” he said more firmly.

When the cat didn’t seem to find this to be in any way an acceptable explanation, Ove pointed at it with the snow shovel.

“You think this is the first time I’ve had a run-in with the council? That decision about Rune, do you think they’ve actually come to a real conclusion about it? They NEVER will! It’ll go to appeal and then they’ll drag it out and put it through their shitty bureaucratic grind! You understand? You think it’ll happen quickly, but it takes months! Years! You think I’m going to stick around here just because that old sod went all helpless?”

The cat didn’t answer.

“You don’t understand! Understand?” Ove hissed and turned around.

He felt the cat’s eyes on his back as marched inside.

That is not the reason why Ove and the cat are sitting in the Saab in the parking area outside the hospital. But it does have a fairly direct connection with Ove standing there shoveling snow when that journalist woman in her slightly too large green jacket turned up outside his house.

“Ove?” she asked behind him, as if she was concerned that he might have changed his identity since she last came here to disturb him.

Ove continued shoveling without in any way acknowledging her presence.

“I only want to ask you a few questions. . . .” she tried.

“Ask them somewhere else. I don’t want them here,” Ove answered, scattering snow about him in a way that made it difficult to tell whether he was shoveling or digging.

“But I only want t—” she said, but she was interrupted by Ove and the cat going into the house and slamming the door in her face.

Ove and the cat squatted in the hall and waited for her to leave. But she didn’t leave. She started banging on the door and calling out: “But you’re a hero!!!”

“She’s absolutely psychotic, that woman,” said Ove to the cat.

The cat didn’t disagree.

When she carried on banging and shouting even louder, Ove didn’t know what to do, so he threw the door open and put his finger over his mouth, hushing her, as if in the next moment he was going to point out that this was actually a library.

She attempted to grin up at his face, waving something that Ove instinctively perceived as a camera of some sort. Or something else. It wasn’t so easy knowing what cameras looked like anymore in this bloody society.

Then she tried to step into his hall. Maybe she shouldn’t have done that.

Ove raised his big hand and pushed her back over the threshold as a reflex, so that she almost fell headfirst into the snow.

“I don’t want anything,” said Ove.

She regained her balance and waved the camera at him, while yelling something. Ove wasn’t listening. He looked at the camera as if it were a weapon, and then decided to flee. This person was clearly not a reasonable person.

So the cat and Ove stepped out the door, locked it, and headed off as quick as they could towards the parking area. The journalist woman jogged along behind them.

To be absolutely clear about it, though, no part of this bears any relation to why Ove is now sitting outside the hospital. But when Parvaneh stood knocking on the door of Ove’s house, fifteen minutes or so later, holding her three-year-old by the hand, and when no one opened and then she heard voices from the parking area, this, so to speak, has a good deal to do with Ove sitting outside the hospital.

Parvaneh and the child came around the corner of the parking area and saw Ove standing outside his closed garage door with his hands sullenly shoved into his pockets. The cat was sitting at his feet looking guilty.