Fredrik Backman - A Man Called Ove - A Novel

“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 program 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.

“You’re the funniest thing she knows. That’s why she always draws you in color,” says Parvaneh.

Then she closes the passenger door and walks off.

It takes several seconds before Ove collects himself enough to call out after her: “What do you mean, ‘always’?”

But by then they have all started walking back to the houses.

Slightly offended, Ove adjusts the newspaper on the passenger seat. The cat climbs over from the back and makes itself comfortable on it. Ove backs the Saab into the garage. Closes the door. Puts it into neutral without turning off the engine. Feels the exhaust fumes slowly filling the garage and gazes at the plastic tube hanging on the wall. For a few minutes all that can be heard is the cat’s breathing and the engine’s rhythmic stuttering. It would be easy, just sitting there and waiting for the inevitable. It’s the only logical thing, Ove knows. He’s been longing for it for a long time now. The end. He misses her so much that sometimes he can’t bear existing in his own body. It would be the only rational thing, just sitting here until the fumes lull both him and the cat to sleep and bring this to an end.

But then he looks at the cat. And he turns off the engine.

The next morning they get up at quarter to six. Drink coffee and eat tuna fish respectively. When they’ve finished their inspection round, Ove carefully shovels snow outside his house. When he’s done with that he stands outside his shed, leaning on his snow shovel, looking at the line of row houses.

Then he crosses the road and starts clearing snow in front of the other houses.

25

A MAN CALLED OVE AND A PIECE OF CORRUGATED IRON

Ove waits till after breakfast, once he’s let the cat out. Only then does he take down a plastic bottle from the top shelf in the bathroom. He weighs it in his hand as if he’s about to throw it somewhere, rattles it lightly to see if many pills are left.

Towards the end the doctors prescribed so many painkillers for Sonja. Their bathroom still looks like a storage facility for the Colombian mafia. Ove obviously doesn’t trust medicine, has always been convinced its only real effects are psychological and, as a result, it only works on people with feeble brains.

But it’s only just struck him that chemicals are not at all an unusual way of taking one’s life.

He hears something outside the front door—the cat is back surprisingly quickly, scraping its paws by the threshold and sounding like it’s been caught in a steel trap. As if it knows what’s going through Ove’s mind. Ove can understand that it’s disappointed in him. He can’t possibly expect it to understand his actions.

He thinks about how it would feel, doing it this way. He has never taken any narcotics. Has hardly even been affected by alcohol. Has never liked the feeling of losing control. He’s come to realize over the years that it’s this very feeling that normal folk like and strive for, but as far as Ove is concerned only a complete bloody airhead could find loss of control a state worth aiming for. He wonders if he’ll feel nauseated, if he’ll feel pain when his body’s organs give up and stop functioning. Or will he just go to sleep when his body becomes unfit for use?

By now, the cat is howling out there in the snow. Ove closes his eyes and thinks of Sonja. It’s not that he’s the sort of man who gives up and dies; he doesn’t want her to think that. But it’s actually wrong , all this. She married him. And now he doesn’t quite know how to carry on without the tip of her nose in the pit between his throat and his shoulder. That’s all.

He unscrews the lid and distributes the pills along the edge of the washbasin. Watches them as if expecting them to transform into little murderous robots. Of course they don’t. Ove is unimpressed. He finds it quite inexplicable how those little white dots could do him any harm, regardless of how many of them he takes. The cat sounds as if it’s spitting snow all over Ove’s front door. But then it’s interrupted by another, quite different sound.