A Man Called Ove: Chapters 21–29

But Sonja got so worked up about it all that in the end it inevitably affected him too.

Parvaneh waved him aside, walked up to the door, leaned her face up close, and knocked tentatively.

Ove managed to catch the three-year-old, who burst into peals of laughter.

Ove looked dejectedly at the garage door.

Added to this, Ove has the cat’s resentful stares to contend with.

He looked around for her, terrified, among the tumult of human bodies, but she was gone.

He threw himself forward, cutting himself under a rain of glass from the ceiling, but it was as if a furious wild animal were holding him back and forcing him down on the floor in unreflecting humiliation. It would pursue him every night for the rest of his life: his utter impotence in the situation.

A doctor came in and spoke to Ove in an indifferent, clinical voice about the need to “prepare himself for the likelihood of her not waking up again.”

He wrote letters to newspapers. He tried to sue the council. He literally inundated them with the unfathomable vengefulness of a father who has been robbed.

But on one of those early summer evenings in May that always come along bearing gentle promises about the summer ahead, she rolled up to him, the wheels leaving soft marks on the parquet floor.

“Don’t worry about what Ove is saying. It’s absolutely his cat.”
“He’s a bloody vagrant, that’s what he is!”

The girl waves something in the air, while yelling out some garbled words.

The next morning they get up at quarter to six. Drink coffee and eat tuna fish respectively.

“I’ll have that thing shot!” she hisses and points at the cat.
Very slowly Ove shakes his head without taking his eyes off her. She swallows. Something about his expression, as if sculpted from a seam of rock, makes her murderous assurance falter.

The cat traipses in over the threshold.

“Let’s give that village cur something to think about.”

“Corrugated iron?” he says to himself, as if tasting the word, like someone who’s just woken up and is intensely trying to remember what he’s been dreaming.

Her hands shake as well, these days. “The first stage of multiple sclerosis,” Sonja had also explained.

He used to make bets with Rune when they were on vacation in the summers, which grew so intensive that they developed complex systems of marginal extensions and half minutes to determine who was most accurate. That was how it was back in those days. The mail arrived at twelve o’clock on the dot, so one needed precise demarcations to be able to say who had guessed right.

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?

Stressed, Parvaneh turns the key in the ignition, which only makes it grind in a heartrending manner.

However, Ove got his revenge during the Snow Clearance Skirmish of the following winter, in which Rune wanted to anoint himself “Chief of Snow Shoveling” and at the same time lumber the Residents’ Association with the purchase of a gigantic snowblower.

Just to annoy Rune, in mid-January Ove hired a gigantic snowblower to clear the ten square yards outside his door. Rune was incandescent about it, Ove remembers with delight to this day.

As a partial restitution, Ove managed some four years later to stop Rune’s plans of putting in new windows in his house, because after thirty-three letters and a dozen angry telephone calls the Planning Department gave up and accepted Ove’s argument that this would “ruin the harmonious architectural character of the area.”

Quite coincidentally, of course, Rune and Ove happened to have diametrically different views on what sort of heating system was required, which was jokingly referred to by the other neighbors as “the battle of the water pump.”

Rune and Anita’s son, who’d had time to turn into a teenager by this stage, with all the divinely sanctioned charmlessness and impoliteness this entailed, sat at one end of the table like an irritable accessory.

Ove and Rune stood outside their houses, hands obstinately shoved into their trouser pockets, like ancient relics in a new age, while a parade of uppity real estate agents barely able to see over their grapefruit-size tie knots patrolled the little road between the houses and kept their eyes on them—like vultures watching aging water buffaloes.

“This kid here has a bicycle that needs repairing,” explains Ove as he pours water into the carafe.

“Hi there—ah, what...sorry, what are you doing?” asks the “boss,” looking with some interest at the spry stranger who has barricaded himself behind the counter of his café.

“Yes, it’s makeup.” He nods, rubbing himself around his eyes. “I went dancing last night,” he says, smiling gratefully as Parvaneh with the deftness of a fellow conspirator hauls out a wet-wipe from her handbag and offers it to him.

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

But he’s attentive and dextrous and in a certain sense does not make a complete fool of himself, Ove has to admit.

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

“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!”

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