Fredrik Backman - A Man Called Ove - A Novel

The youth stands there rocking on his heels and looking down at the ground. As if he’s struggling with something inside that wants to come out.

“Was there something else?” Ove wonders.

The youth pulls his hand through his greasy, late-pubescent shock of hair.

“Ah, what the hell. . . . I was just wondering if you have a wife called Sonja,” he manages to say.

Ove looks suspicious. The lad points at the envelope.

“I saw the surname. I had a teacher with that name. Was just wondering. . . .”

He seems to be cursing himself for having said anything. He spins around on the spot and starts walking away. Ove clears his throat and kicks the threshold.

“Wait . . . that could be right. What about Sonja?”

The lad stops a yard farther away.

“Ah, shit. . . . I just liked her, that’s all I wanted to say. I’m . . . you know . . . I’m not so good at reading and writing and all that.”

Ove almost says, “I’d never have guessed,” but he leaves it. The youth twists awkwardly. Runs his hand through his hair, somewhat disoriented, as if he’s hoping to find the appropriate words up there somewhere.

“She’s the only teacher I ever had who didn’t think I was thick as a plank,” he mumbles, almost choking on his emotion. “She got me reading that . . . Shakespeare, you know. I didn’t know I could even read, sort of thing. She got me reading the most hard-core thick book an’ all. It felt really shit when I heard she died, you know.”

Ove doesn’t answer. The youth looks down at the ground. Shrugs.

“That’s it. . . .”

He’s silent. And then they both stand there, the fifty-nine-year-old and the teenager, a few yards apart, kicking at the snow. As if they were kicking a memory back and forth, a memory of a woman who insisted on seeing more potential in certain men than they saw in themselves. Neither of them knows what to do with their shared experience.

“What are you doing with that bike?” says Ove at last.

“I promised to fix it up for my girlfriend. She lives there,” the youth answers, nodding at the house at the far end of their row, opposite Anita and Rune’s place. The one where those recycling types live when they’re not in Thailand or wherever they go.

“Or, you know. She’s not my girlfriend yet. But I’m thinking I’m wanting her to be. Sort of thing.”

Ove scrutinizes the youth as middle-aged men often scrutinize younger men who seem to invent their own grammar as they go along.

“So have you got any tools, then?” he asks.

The youth shakes his head.

“How are you going to repair a bike without tools?” Ove marvels, more with genuine surprise than agitation.

The youth shrugs.

“Dunno.”

“Why did you promise to repair it, then?”

The youth kicks the snow. Scratches his face with his entire hand, embarrassed.

“Because I love her.”

Ove can’t quite decide what to say to that one. So he rolls up the local newspaper and envelope and slaps it into his palm, like a baton.

“I have to get going,” the youth mumbles almost inaudibly and makes a movement to turn around again.

“Come over after work, then, and I’ll get the bike out for you.”

Ove’s words seem to pop up out of nowhere. “But you have to bring your own tools,” he adds.

The youth brightens up.

“You serious, man?”

Ove continues slapping the paper baton into his hand. The youth swallows.

“Awesome! Wait . . . ah, shit . . . I can’t pick it up today! I have to go to my other job! But tomorrow, man, I can come tomorrow. Is it cool if I pick it up tomorrow, like, instead?”

Ove tilts his head and looks as if everything that’s just been said came from the mouth of a character in an animated film. The youth takes a deep breath and pulls himself together.

“What other job?” asks Ove, as if he’s had an incomplete answer in the final of Jeopard y !

“I sort of work in a café in the evenings and at the weekends,” says the youth, with that new-won hope in his eyes about perhaps being able to rescue his fantasy relationship with a girlfriend who doesn’t even know that she’s his girlfriend—the sort of relationship that only a boy in late puberty with greasy hair can have. “I need both jobs because I’m saving money,” he explains.

“For what?”

“A car.”

Ove can’t avoid noticing how he straightens up slightly when he says “car.” Ove looks dubious for a moment. Then he slowly but watchfully slaps the baton into his palm again.

“What sort of car?”

“I had a look at a Renault,” the youth says brightly, stretching a little more.

The air around the two men stops for a hundredth of a breath or so. An eerie silence suddenly envelops them. If this were a scene from a film, the camera would very likely have time to pan 360 degrees around them before Ove finally loses his composure.

“Renault? Renault ? That’s bloody FRENCH! You can’t bloody well go and buy a FRENCH car!!!”

The youth seems just about to say something but he doesn’t get the chance before Ove shakes his whole upper body as if trying to get rid of a persistent wasp.

“Christ, you puppy! Don’t you know anything about cars?”

The youth shakes his head. Ove sighs deeply and puts his hand on his forehead as if he’s been struck by a sudden migraine.

“And how are you going to get the bicycle to the café if you don’t have a car?” he says at long last, visibly struggling to regain his composure.

“I hadn’t . . . thought about that,” says the youth.

Ove shakes his head.

“Renault? Christ almighty. . . .”

The youth nods. Ove rubs his eyes in frustration.

“Where’s this sodding café you work at, then?” he mutters.

Twenty minutes later, Parvaneh opens her front door in surprise. Ove is standing outside, thoughtfully striking his hand with a paper baton.

“Have you got one of those green signs?”

“What?”

“You have to have one of those green signs when you’re a student driver. Do you have one or not?”

She nods.

“Yeah . . . yes, I have, but wh—”

“I’ll come and pick you up in two hours. We’ll take my car.”

Ove turns around and tramps back across the little road without waiting for an answer.

27

A MAN CALLED OVE AND A DRIVING LESSON

It happened now and then in the almost forty years they lived in the row of row houses that some thoughtless and recently moved-in neighbor was bold enough to ask Sonja what the real cause was for the deep animosity between Ove and Rune. Why had two men who had once been friends suddenly started hating one another with such overpowering intensity?

Sonja usually answered that it was quite straightforward. It was simply about how when the two men and their wives moved into their houses, Ove drove a Saab 96 and Rune a Volvo 244. A year or so later Ove bought a Saab 95 and Rune bought a Volvo 245. Three years later Ove bought a Saab 900 and Rune bought a Volvo 265. In the decades that followed, Ove bought another two Saab 900s and then a Saab 9000. Rune bought another Volvo 265 and then a Volvo 745, but a few years later he went back to a sedan model and acquired a Volvo 740. Whereupon Ove bought yet one more Saab 9000 and Rune eventually went over to a Volvo 760, after which Ove got himself a Saab 9000i and Rune part-exchanged to a Volvo 760 Turbo.

And then the day came when Ove went to the car dealer to look at the recently launched Saab 9-3, and when he came home in the evening, Rune had bought a BMW.