Fredrik Backman - A Man Called Ove - A Novel

Ove turns on the percolator and, once it begins to splutter, turns around and leans against the inside of the counter as if this is the most natural thing in the world in a café where one doesn’t work.

“Bent, are you?”

“OVE!” says Parvaneh and slaps him on the arm.

Ove snatches back his arm and looks very offended.

“What?!”

“You don’t say . . . you don’t call it that,” Parvaneh says, clearly unwilling to pronounce the word again.

“Queer?” Ove offers.

Parvaneh tries to hit his arm again but Ove is too quick.

“Don’t talk like that!” she orders him.

Ove turns to the sooty boy, genuinely puzzled.

“Can’t one say ‘bent’? What are you supposed to say nowadays?”

“You say homosexual. Or an LGBT person,” Parvaneh interrupts before she can stop herself.

“Ah, you can say what you want, it’s cool.” The boy smiles as he walks around the counter and puts on an apron.

“Right, good. Good to be clear. One of those gays, then,” mumbles Ove. Parvaneh shakes her head apologetically; the boy just laughs. “Well then,” says Ove with a nod, and starts pouring himself a coffee while it’s still going through.

Then he takes the cup and without another word goes outside and across the street to the parking area. The sooty boy doesn’t comment on his taking the cup outside. It would seem a little unnecessary, under the circumstances, when this man within five minutes of his arrival at the boy’s café has already appointed himself as barista and interrogated him about his sexual preferences.

Adrian is standing by the Saab, looking as if he just got lost in a forest.

“Is it going well?” asks Ove rhetorically, taking a sip of coffee and looking at the bicycle, which Adrian hasn’t even unhooked yet from the back of the car.

“Nah . . . you know. Sort of. Well,” Adrian begins, compulsively scratching his chest.

Ove observes him for half a minute or so. Takes another mouthful of his coffee. Nods irritably, like someone squeezing an avocado and finding it overly ripe. He forcefully presses his cup of coffee into the hands of the boy, and then steps forward to unhitch the bicycle. Turns it upside down and opens the toolbox the youth has brought from the café.

“Didn’t your dad ever teach you how to fix a bike?” he says without looking at Adrian, while he hunches over the punctured tire.

“My dad’s in the slammer,” Adrian replies almost inaudibly and scratches his shoulder, looking around as if he’d like to find a big black hole to sink into. Ove stops himself, looks up, and gives him an evaluating stare. The boy stares at the ground. Ove clears his throat.

“It’s not so bloody difficult,” he mutters at long last and gestures at Adrian to sit on the ground.

It takes them ten minutes to repair the puncture. Ove barks monosyllabic instructions; Adrian remains silent throughout. But he’s attentive and dextrous and in a certain sense does not make a complete fool of himself, Ove has to admit. Maybe he’s not quite as fumbling with his hands as he is with words. They wipe off the dirt with a rag from the trunk of the Saab, avoiding eye contact with each other.

“I hope the lady’s worth it,” says Ove and closes the trunk.

Now it’s Adrian’s turn to look nonplussed.

When they go back into the café, there’s a short cube-shaped man in a stained shirt standing on a stepladder, tinkering with something that Ove suspects is a fan heater. The sooty boy stands below the stepladder with a selection of screwdrivers held aloft. He keeps mopping the remnants of makeup around his eyes, peering at the fat man on the ladder and looking a little on the nervous side. As if worried that he may be caught out. Parvaneh turns excitedly to Ove.

“This is Amel! He owns the café!” she says in a suitably gushing manner. She points to the cubic man on the ladder.

Amel doesn’t turn around, but he emits a long sequence of hard consonants that, even though Ove does not understand them, he suspects to be various combinations of four-letter words and body parts.

“What’s he saying?” asks Adrian.

The sooty boy twists uncomfortably.

“Ah . . . he . . . something about the fan heater being a bit of a fairy . . .”

He looks over at Adrian, then quickly turns his face down.

“What’s that?” asks Ove, wandering over to him.

“He means it’s worthless, like a homo,” he says in such a low voice that only Ove catches his words.

Parvaneh, on the other hand, is busy pointing at Amel with delight.

“You can’t hear what he’s saying but you sort of know that almost all of it is swear words! He’s like a dubbed version of you, Ove!”

Ove doesn’t look particularly delighted. Nor does Amel.

He stops tinkering with the fan heater and points at Ove with the screwdriver.

“The cat? Is that your cat?”

“No,” says Ove.

Not so much because he wants to point out that it isn’t his cat, but because he wants to clarify that it’s no one’s cat.

“Cat out! No animals in café!” Amel slashes at the consonants so that they hop about like naughty children caught inside the sentence.

Ove looks with interest at the fan heater above Amel’s head. Then at the cat on the bar stool. Then at the toolbox, which Adrian is still holding in his hand. Then at the fan heater again. And at Amel.

“If I repair that for you, the cat stays.”

He offers this more as a statement than a question. Amel seems to lose his self-possession for a few moments. By the time he regains it, in a way he could probably not explain afterwards, he has become the man holding the stepladder rather than the man standing on the stepladder. Ove digs about up there for a few minutes, climbs down, brushes the palm of his hand against his trouser leg, and hands the screwdriver and a little adjustable wrench to the sooty boy.

“You fixed!” cries Amel suddenly as the fan heater splutters back to life.

In an effusive manner, he grabs Ove’s shoulders.

“Whiskey? You want? In my kitchen I have the whiskey!”

Ove checks his watch. It’s quarter past two in the afternoon. He shakes his head while looking a little uncomfortable, partly about the whiskey and partly because of Amel, who is still holding on to him. The sooty boy disappears through the kitchen door behind the counter, still frenetically rubbing his eyes.

Adrian catches up with Ove and the cat on their way back to the Saab.

“Ove, mate, you won’t say anything about Mirsad being . . .”

“Who?”

“My boss,” says Adrian. “The one with the makeup.”

“The bent person?” says Ove.

Adrian nods.

“I mean his dad . . . I mean Amel . . . he doesn’t know Mirsad is . . .”

Adrian fumbles for the right word.

“A bender?” Ove adds.

Adrian nods. Ove shrugs. Parvaneh comes wagging along behind them, out of breath.

“Where did you get to?” Ove asks her.

“I gave my change to him,” says Parvaneh, with a nod at the man with the dirty beard by the house wall.

“You know he’ll only spend it on schnapps,” Ove states.

Parvaneh opens her eyes wide with something Ove strongly suspects to be sarcasm. “Really? Will he? And I was sooo hoping he would use it to pay off his student loans from his university education in particle physics!”

Ove snorts and opens the Saab. Adrian stays where he is on the other side of the car.

“Yes?” Ove wonders.

“You won’t say anything about Mirsad, will you? Seriously?”