A Man Called Ove: A Novel (26 page)

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.

“But you have to talk . . .” she begins to say in a faltering voice. It’s as if all the energy in Ove’s body is draining out of him even as he stands there.

Maybe it’s the sight of Anita’s worn-out face. Maybe it’s the insight that a simple battle won is nothing in the greater scheme of things. A boxed-in Škoda makes no difference. They always come back. Just like they did with Sonja. Like they always do. With their clauses and documents. Men in white shirts always win. And men like Ove always lose people like Sonja. And nothing can bring her back to him.

In the end, there is nothing left but a long series of weekdays with nothing more meaningful than oiling the kitchen counters. And Ove can’t cope with it anymore. He feels it in that moment more clearly than ever. He can’t fight anymore. Doesn’t want to fight anymore. Just wants it all to stop.

Parvaneh keeps trying to argue with him, but he just closes the door. She hammers at it but he doesn’t listen. He sinks down on the stool in the hall and feels his hands trembling. His heart thumps so hard that it feels like his ears are about to explode. The pressure on his chest, as if an enormous darkness has put its boot over his throat, doesn’t begin to release till more than twenty minutes later.

And then Ove starts to cry.

32

A MAN CALLED OVE ISN’T RUNNING A DAMNED HOTEL

S
onja said once that to understand men like Ove and Rune, one had to understand from the very beginning that they were men caught in the wrong time. Men who only required a few simple things from life, she said. A roof over their heads, a quiet street, the right make of car, and a woman to be faithful to. A job where you had a proper function. A house where things broke at regular intervals, so you always had something to tinker with.

“All people want to live dignified lives; dignity just means something different to different people,” Sonja had said. To men like Ove and Rune dignity was simply that they’d had to manage on their own when they grew up, and therefore saw it as their right not to become reliant on others when they were adults. There was a sense of pride in having control. In being right. In knowing what road to take and how to screw in a screw, or not. Men like Ove and Rune were from a generation in which one was what one did, not what one talked about.

She knew, of course, that Ove didn’t know how to bear his nameless anger. He needed labels to put on it. Ways of categorizing. So when men in white shirts at the council, whose names no normal person could keep track of, tried to do everything Sonja did not want—make her stop working, move her out of her house, imply that she was worth less than a healthy person who was able to walk, and assert that she was dying—Ove fought them. With documents and letters to newspapers and appeals, right down to something as unremarkable as an access ramp at a school. He fought so doggedly for her against men in white shirts that in the end he began to hold them personally responsible for all that happened to her—and to the child.

And then she left him alone in a world where he no longer understood the language.

Later that night, once Ove and the cat have had their dinner and watched the TV for a while, he turns out the lamp in the living room and goes upstairs. The cat follows watchfully at his heels, as if sensing that he’s going to do something it hasn’t been informed about. It sits on the bedroom floor while Ove gets undressed and looks as if it’s trying to figure out a magic trick.

Ove goes to bed and lies still while the bloody cat, on Sonja’s side of the bed, takes more than an hour to go to sleep. Obviously, he does not go to such lengths because of some lingering sense of obligation to the cat; he just doesn’t have the energy for an argument. He can’t be expected to explain the concept of life and death to an animal that can’t even take care of its own fur.

When the cat finally rolls onto its back on Sonja’s pillow and starts snoring with an open mouth, Ove sneaks out of bed as light-footedly as he can. Goes down into the living room, gets out the rifle from the hiding place behind the radiator. He gets out four heavy-duty tarpaulins he’s fetched in from the toolshed and hidden in the broom cupboard so the cat doesn’t notice them. Starts taping them up on the walls in the hall. Ove, after some consideration, has decided that this will probably be the best room for the deed, because it has the smallest surface area. He’s assuming that there’s a good deal of splattering when one shoots oneself in the head, and he’s loath to leave more of a mess behind than he has to. Sonja always hated it when he made a mess.

He’s wearing his going-out shoes and suit again. It’s dirty and still smells of car exhaust, but it’ll have to do. He weighs the rifle in his hands, as if checking its center of gravity. As if this will play a decisive role in the future of the venture. He turns and twists it, tries to angle the barrel almost as if intending to fold the weapon double. Not that Ove knows very much about weapons, but one wants to know if it’s a decent piece of equipment one’s got, more or less. And because Ove supposes one can’t test the quality of a rifle by kicking it, he decides it can be done by bending and pulling at it, to see what happens.

While he’s doing this, it strikes him that it was probably a fairly bad idea to put on his best gear. Will be an awful lot of blood on the suit, Ove imagines. Seems silly. So he puts down the rifle, goes into the living room, gets undressed, carefully folds up the suit, and puts it neatly beside his going-out shoes. Then he gets out the letter with all the instructions for Parvaneh and writes “Bury me in my suit” under the heading “Funeral Arrangements” and puts the letter on top of the pile of clothes. He has already stated clearly and unmistakably that there should not be any fuss in other respects. No exaggerated ceremony and rubbish like that. Shove him in the ground next to Sonja, that’s all. The spot has already been prepared and paid for, and Ove has put cash in the envelope for the hearse.

So, wearing nothing but his socks and underwear, Ove goes back into the hall and picks up his rifle. He catches sight of his own body in the hall mirror. He hasn’t seen himself in this way for probably thirty-five years. He’s still quite muscular and robust. Certainly in better shape than most men of his age. But something’s happened to his skin that makes him look like he’s melting, he notes. It looks terrible.

It’s very quiet in the house. In the whole neighborhood, actually. Everyone’s sleeping. And only then does Ove realize that the cat will probably wake at the sound of the shot. Will probably scare the living daylights out of the poor critter, Ove admits. He thinks about this for a good while before he determinedly sets down the rifle and goes into the kitchen to turn on the radio. Not that he needs music to take his own life, and not that he likes the idea of the radio clicking its way through units of electricity when he’s gone. But because if the cat wakes up from the bang, it may end up thinking that it’s just a part of one of those modern pop songs the radio plays all the time these days. And then go back to sleep. That is Ove’s train of thought.

There’s no modern pop song on the radio, Ove hears, when he comes back into the hall and picks up the rifle again. It’s the local news bulletin. So he stays where he is for a moment and listens. Not that it’s so important to listen to the local news when you’re about to shoot yourself in the head, but Ove thinks there’s no harm in keeping yourself updated. They talk about the weather. And the economy. And the traffic. And the importance of local property owners staying vigilant over the weekend because of a large number of burglary rings on the rampage all over town. “Bloody hooligans,” Ove mutters, and grips the rifle a little more firmly when he hears that.

From a purely objective point of view, the fact that Ove was wielding a gun was something two other hooligans, Adrian and Mirsad, would ideally have been aware of before they unconcernedly trotted up to Ove’s front door a few seconds later. They would then quite likely have understood that when Ove heard their creaking steps in the snow he would not immediately think to himself, Guests, how nice! but rather, Well, I’ll be damned! And they’d probably also know that Ove, wearing nothing but socks and underpants, with a three-quarter-century-old hunting rifle in his hands, would kick the door open like an aging, half-naked, suburban Rambo. And maybe then Adrian would not have screamed in a high-pitched voice that went right through every window on the street, nor would he have turned in panic and run into the toolshed, almost knocking himself unconscious.

It takes a few confused cries and a good deal of tumult before Mirsad has time to clarify his identity as that of a normal hooligan, not a burglar hooligan, and for Ove to come to grips with what is happening. Before then he has had time to wave his rifle at them, making Adrian scream like an air raid warning.

“Shush! You’ll wake the bloody cat!” Ove hisses angrily while Adrian reels backwards, a swelling as large as a medium-size pack of ravioli on his forehead.

“What in the name of God are you doing here?” he raves, the gun still firmly fixed on them. “It’s the middle of the bloody night!”

Mirsad is holding a big bag in his hand, which he gently drops into the snow. Adrian impulsively holds his hands up as if he’s about to be robbed, and almost loses his balance and falls into the snow again.

“It was Adrian’s idea,” Mirsad begins, looking down into the snow.

“Mirsad came out today, you know!” Adrian blurts out.

“What?”

“He . . . came out, you know. Told everyone he was . . .” says Adrian, but he seems slightly distracted, partly by the fact that a fuming old man in his underpants is pointing a gun at him, and partly because he is increasingly convinced that he’s sustained some sort of concussion.

Mirsad straightens up and nods at Ove with more determination.

“I told my dad I’m gay.”

Ove’s eyes grow slightly less threatening. But he doesn’t lower his rifle.

“My dad hates gays. He always said he’d kill himself if he found out that any of his children were gay,” Mirsad goes on.

After a moment’s silence he adds:

“He didn’t take it so well. You might say.”

“He throwed him out!” Adrian interjects.

“Threw,” Ove corrects.

Mirsad picks up his bag from the ground and nods anew at Ove.

“This was a stupid idea. We shouldn’t have disturbed—”

“Disturbed me with what?” Ove cuts him short.

Now that he’s standing here in his underpants in below-freezing temperatures, he might as well at least find out the reason why, it seems to him.

Mirsad takes a deep breath. As if he’s physically shoving his pride down his throat.

“Dad said I was sick and not welcome under his roof with my . . . ‘unnatural ways,’” he says, swallowing hard before he manages to spit out the word “unnatural.”

“Because you’re a bender?” Ove clarifies.

Mirsad nods.

“I don’t have any relatives here in town. I was going to stay the night at Adrian’s, but his mum’s new boyfriend is staying. . . .”

He goes quiet. Looks like he’s feeling very silly.

“It was an idiotic idea,” he says in a low voice and makes a move to turn around and leave.

Adrian, on the other hand, seems to be rediscovering a desire for discussion, and he stumbles eagerly through the snow towards Ove.

“What the hell, Ove! You’ve got a load of space in there! So we thought maybe he could crash here tonight?”

“Here? This is not a damned hotel!” says Ove, raising the rifle so that Adrian’s chest collides right into the barrel.

Adrian freezes. Mirsad takes two quick steps forward through the snow and puts his hand on the rifle.

“We had nowhere else to go, sorry,” he says in a low voice while gently turning the barrel away from Adrian.

Ove looks like he’s coming to his senses slightly. He lowers his weapon to the ground. When he almost imperceptibly takes a half step backwards into the hall, as if he’s only now become aware of the cold which envelops his not-so-well-dressed body, he notices, from the corner of his eye, the photo of Sonja on the wall. The red dress. The bus trip to Spain when she was pregnant. He asked her so many times to take that bloody photo down, but she refused. Said it was “a memory worth as much as any other.”

Obstinate woman.

So this should have been the day Ove
finally
died. Instead it became the evening before the morning when he woke with not only a cat but also a bent person living in his row house. Sonja would have liked it, most likely. She liked hotels.