Fredrik Backman - A Man Called Ove - A Novel

“Hello?” the journalist woman called just before Ove flew out the front door.

“Oh, dear, dear,” Parvaneh mumbled anxiously when she came out of the bathroom and caught sight of him careering along between the houses.

The man in the white shirt got out of the Škoda on the driver’s side outside Rune and Anita’s house.

“It’s enough now! You hear? You’re NOT driving your car inside the residential area! Not another bloody YARD! You got it?” shouted Ove in the distance, long before he’d even reached him.

The little man in the white shirt, in a most superior manner, adjusted the cigarette packet in his breast pocket while calmly meeting Ove’s gaze.

“I have permission.”

“Like hell you do!”

The man in the white shirt shrugged. As if to chase away an irritating insect more than anything.

“And what exactly are you going to do about it, Ove?”

The question actually caught Ove off-balance. Again. He stopped, his hands trembling with anger, at least a dozen pieces of invective at his disposal. But to his own surprise he could not bring himself to use any of them.

“I know who you are, Ove. I know everything about all the letters you’ve written about your wife’s accident and your wife’s illness. You’re something of a legend in our offices, you should know,” said the man in the white shirt, his voice quite unwavering.

Ove’s mouth opened into a crack. The man in the white shirt nodded at him.

“I know who you are. And I’m only doing my job. A decision is a decision. You can’t do anything about it, you should have learned that by now.”

Ove took a step towards him but the man put up a hand against his chest and pressed him back. Not violently. Not aggressively. Just softly and firmly, as if the hand did not belong to him but was directly controlled by some robot at the computer center of a municipal authority.

“Go and watch some TV instead. Before you have more problems with that heart of yours.”

On the passenger side of the Škoda the determined woman, wearing an identical white shirt, stepped out with a pile of paper in her arms. The man locked the car with a loud bleep. Then he turned his back on Ove as if Ove had never stood there talking to him.

Ove stayed where he was, his fists clenched at his sides and his chin jutting out as if he were an outraged bull elk. The white shirts disappeared into Anita and Rune’s house. It took a minute before he recovered himself enough to even turn around. But then he did so with determined fury and started walking towards Parvaneh’s house. Parvaneh was standing halfway up the little road.

“Is that useless husband of yours at home?” Ove growled, walking past her without waiting for an answer.

Parvaneh didn’t have time to do more than nod before Ove, in four long strides, reached their front door. Patrick opened it, standing there on crutches, casts apparently covering half of his body.

“Hi, Ove!” he called out cheerfully, trying to wave with a crutch, with the immediate effect that he lost his balance and stumbled into the wall.

“That trailer you had when you moved in. Where did you get it?” Ove demanded.

Patrick leaned with his functioning arm against the wall. Almost as if he wanted it to look as if he’d meant to stumble into it.

“What? Oh . . . that trailer. I borrowed it off a guy at work—”

“Call him. You need to borrow it again.”

And this was the reason why Ove did not die today. Because he was detained by something that made him sufficiently angry to hold his attention.

When the man and woman in the white shirts come out of Anita and Rune’s house almost an hour later, they find that their little white car with the council logo has been boxed into the little cul-de-sac by a large trailer. A trailer that someone, while they were inside the house, must have parked exactly so it blocks the entire road behind them. One could almost think it had been done on purpose.

The woman looks genuinely puzzled. But the man in the white shirt immediately walks up to Ove.

“Have you done this?”

Ove crosses his arms and looks at him coldly.

“No.”

The man in the white shirt smiles in a superior manner. The way men in white shirts, who are used to always having things their own way, smile when someone tries to disagree with them.

“Move it at once.”

“I don’t think so,” says Ove.

The man in the white shirt sighs, as if the threatening statement he makes after that were directed at a child.

“Move the trailer, Ove. Or I’ll call the police.”

Ove shakes his head nonchalantly, pointing at the sign farther down the road.

“Motor vehicles prohibited inside the residential area. It says so clearly on the sign.”

“Don’t you have anything better to do than standing out here pretending to be the foreman?” groans the man in the white shirt.

“There was nothing good on TV,” says Ove.

And that’s when there’s a little twitch at the temple of the man in the white shirt. As if his mask has slipped a little, just a fraction. He looks at the trailer, his boxed-in Škoda, the sign, Ove standing in front of him with his arms crossed. The man seems to consider for an instant whether he might try to force Ove by violence, but he realizes in another instant that this would very likely be an extremely bad idea.

“This was very silly of you, Ove. This was very, very silly,” he hisses finally.

And his blue eyes, for the first time, are filled with genuine fury. Ove’s face does not betray the slightest emotion. The man in the white shirt walks away, up towards the garages and the main road, with the sort of steps that make it clear that this will not be the end of this story.

The woman with the papers hurries off after him.

One might have expected Ove to watch them with a look of triumph in his eyes. He would probably have expected this himself, in fact. But instead he just looks sad and tired. As if he hasn’t slept in months. As if he hardly has the strength to keep his arms up any longer. He lets his hands glide into his pockets and goes back home. But no sooner has he closed the door than someone starts banging on it again.

“They’re going to take Rune away from Anita,” says Parvaneh urgently, snatching the front door open before Ove has even reached the handle.

“Pah,” Ove snorts tiredly.

The resignation in his voice clearly takes both Parvaneh and Anita, who’s standing behind her, by surprise. Maybe it also surprises Ove. He inhales quickly through his nose. Looks at Anita. She’s grayer and more sunken than ever; her eyes are red, swollen.

“They say they’ll come and pick him up this week, and that I can’t manage to take care of him myself,” she says, in a voice so fragile that it hardly manages to get past her lips.

“We have to do something!” cries Parvaneh, grabbing him.

Ove snatches his arm back and avoids her eyes.

“Pah! They won’t come to get him for years and years. This’ll go to appeal and then it’ll go through all the bureaucratic shit,” says Ove.

He tries to sound more convinced and sure of himself than he actually feels. But he doesn’t have the strength to care about how he’s coming across. He just wants them to leave.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about!” roars Parvaneh.

“You’re the one who doesn’t know what you’re talking about—you’ve never had anything to do with the county council, you don’t know what it’s like fighting them,” he answers in a monotone voice, his shoulders slumped.