The sirens of an approaching ambulance can be heard in the distance, but he barely takes any notice. Just gets into the driver’s seat and starts the engine. Opens the back electric window a couple of inches. Gets out of the car. Closes the garage door. Fixes the plastic tube tightly over the exhaust pipe. Watches the exhaust fumes slowly bubbling out of the other end of the tube. Then feeds the tube through the open back window. Gets into the car. Closes the door. Adjusts the wing mirrors. Fine-tunes the radio one step forward and one step back. Leans back in the seat. Closes his eyes. Feels the thick exhaust smoke, cubic inch by cubic inch, filling the garage and his lungs.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. You work and pay off the mortgage and pay taxes and do what you should. You marry. For better or for worse until death do us part, wasn’t that what they agreed? Ove remembers quite clearly that it was. And she wasn’t supposed to be the first one to die. Wasn’t it bloody well understood that it was his death they were talking about? Well, wasn’t it?
Ove hears a banging at the garage door. Ignores it. Straightens the creases of his trousers. Looks at himself in the rearview mirror. Wonders whether perhaps he should have put on a tie. She always liked it when he wore a tie. She looked at him then as the most handsome man in the world. He wonders if she will look at him now. If she’ll be ashamed of him turning up in the afterlife unemployed and wearing a dirty suit. Will she think he’s an idiot who can’t even hold down an honest job without being phased out, just because his knowledge has been found wanting on account of some computer? Will she still look at him the way she used to, like a man who can be relied on? A man who can take responsibility for things and fix a water heater if necessary. Will she like him as much now that he’s just an old person with no purpose in the world?
There’s more frenetic banging at the garage door. Ove stares sourly at it. More banging. Ove thinks to himself that it’s enough now.
“That will do!” he roars and opens the door of the Saab so abruptly that the plastic tube is dislodged from between the window and the molding and falls onto the concrete floor. Clouds of exhaust fumes pour out in all directions.
The Pregnant Foreign Woman should probably have learned by now not to stand so close to doors when Ove is on the other side. But this time she can’t avoid getting the garage door right in her face when Ove throws it open violently.
Ove sees her and freezes. She’s holding her nose. Looking at him with that distinct expression of someone who just had a garage door slammed into her nose. The exhaust fumes come pouring out of the garage in a dense cloud, covering half of the parking area in a thick, noxious mist.
“I . . . you have to bloo— you have to watch out when the door’s being opened. . . .” Ove manages to say.
“What are you doing?” the Pregnant One manages to bite back at him, while watching the Saab with its engine idling and the exhaust spewing out of the mouth of the plastic tube on the floor.
“Me? . . . nothing,” says Ove indignantly, looking as if he’d prefer to shut the garage door again.
Thick red drops are forming in her nostrils. She covers her face with one hand and waves at him with the other.
“I need a lift to the hospital,” she says, tilting her head back.
Ove looks skeptical. “What the hell? Pull yourself together. It’s just a nosebleed.”
She swears in something Ove assumes is Farsi and clamps the bridge of her nose hard between her thumb and index finger. Then she shakes her head impatiently, dripping blood all over her jacket.
“Not because of the nosebleed!”
Ove’s a bit puzzled by that. Puts his hands in his pockets.
“No, no. Well then.”
She groans.
“Patrick fell off the ladder.”
She leans her head back, so that Ove stands there talking to the underside of her chin.
“Who’s Patrick?” Ove asks the chin.
“My husband,” the chin answers.
“The Lanky One?” asks Ove.
“That’s him, yeah,” says the chin.
“And he fell off the ladder?” Ove clarifies.
“Yes. When he was opening the window.”
“Right. What a bloody surprise; you could see that one coming from a mile away. . . .”
The chin disappears and the large brown eyes reappear.
They don’t look entirely pleased.
“Are we going to have a debate about this or what?”
Ove scratches his head, slightly bothered.
“No, no . . . but can’t you drive yourself? In that little Japanese sewing machine you arrived in the other day?” he tries to protest.
“I don’t have a driver’s license,” she replies, mopping blood from her lip.
“What do you mean you don’t have a driver’s license?” asks Ove, as if her words are utterly inexplicable to him.
Again she sighs impatiently.
“Look, I don’t have a driver’s license and that’s all, what’s the problem?”
“How old are you?” Ove asks, almost fascinated now.
“Thirty,” she says impatiently.
“Thirty?! And no driver’s license? Is there something wrong with you?”
She groans, holding one hand over her nose and snapping her fingers with irritation in front of Ove’s face.
“Focus a bit, Ove! The hospital! You have to drive us to the hospital!”
Ove looks almost offended.
“What do you mean, ‘us’? You’ll have to call an ambulance if the person you’re married to can’t open a window without falling off a ladder—”
“I already did! They’ve taken him to the hospital. But there was no space for me in the ambulance. And now because of the snow, every taxi in town is occupied and the buses are getting bogged down everywhere!”
Scattered streams of blood are running down one of her cheeks. Ove clamps his jaws so hard that he starts gnashing his teeth.
“You can’t trust bloody buses. The drivers are always drunks,” he says quietly, his chin at an angle that might make someone believe he was trying to hide his words on the inside of his shirt collar.
Maybe she notices the way his mood shifts as soon as she mentions the word “bus.” Maybe not. Anyway, she nods, as if this in some way clinches it.
“Right, then. So you have to drive us.”
Ove makes a courageous attempt to point threateningly at her. But to his own dismay he feels it’s not as convincing as he might have hoped.
“There are no have-tos around here. I’m not some bloody mobility service!” he manages to say at last.
But she just squeezes her index finger and thumb even harder around the bridge of her nose. And nods, as if she has not in any way listened to what he just said. She waves, with irritation, towards the garage and the plastic tube on the floor spewing out exhaust fumes thicker and thicker against the ceiling.
“I don’t have time to fuss about this anymore. Get things ready so we can leave. I’ll go and get the children.”
“The CHILDREN???” Ove shouts after her, without getting any kind of answer.
She’s already swanned off on those tiny feet that look wholly undersized for that large pregnant bump, disappearing around the corner of the bicycle shed and down towards the houses.
Ove stays where he is, as if waiting for someone to catch up with her and tell her that actually Ove had not finished talking. But no one does. He tucks his fists into his belt and throws a glance at the tube on the floor. It’s actually not his responsibility if people can’t manage to stay on the ladders they borrow from him—that’s his own view.
But of course he can’t avoid thinking about what his wife would have told him to do under the circumstances, if she’d been here. And of course it’s not so difficult to work it out, Ove realizes. Sadly enough.
At long last he walks up to the car and pokes off the tube from the exhaust pipe with his shoe. Gets into the Saab. Checks his mirrors. Puts it into first and pull
s out into the parking area. Not that he cares particularly about how the Pregnant Foreign Woman gets to the hospital. But Ove knows very well that there’ll be no end of nagging from his wife if the last thing Ove does in this life is to give a pregnant woman a nosebleed and then abandon her to take the bus.
And if the gas is going to be used up anyway, he may as well give her a lift there and back. Maybe then that woman will leave me in peace, thinks Ove.
But of course she doesn’t.
12
A MAN WHO WAS OVE AND ONE DAY HE HAD ENOUGH
People always said Ove and Ove’s wife were like night and day. Ove realized full well, of course, that he was the night. It didn’t matter to him. On the other hand it always amused his wife when someone said it, because she could then point out while giggling that people only thought Ove was the night because he was too mean to turn on the sun.
He never understood why she chose him. She loved only abstract things like music and books and strange words. Ove was a man entirely filled with tangible things. He liked screwdrivers and oil filters. He went through life with his hands firmly shoved into his pockets. She danced.
“You only need one ray of light to chase all the shadows away,” she said to him once, when he asked her why she had to be so upbeat the whole time.
Apparently some monk called Francis had written as much in one of her books.
“You don’t fool me, darling,” she said with a playful little smile and crept into his big arms. “You’re dancing on the inside, Ove, when no one’s watching. And I’ll always love you for that. Whether you like it or not.”
Ove never quite fathomed what she meant by that. He’d never been one for dancing. It seemed far too haphazard and giddy. He liked straight lines and clear decisions. That was why he had always liked mathematics. There were right or wrong answers there. Not like the other hippie subjects they tried to trick you into doing at school, where you could “argue your case.” As if that was a way of concluding a discussion: checking who knew more long words. Ove wanted what was right to be right, and what was wrong to be wrong.
He knew very well that some people thought he was nothing but a grumpy old sod without any faith in people. But, to put it bluntly, that was because people had never given him reason to see it another way.
Because a time comes in every man’s life when he decides what sort of man he’s going to be: the kind who lets other people walk all over him, or not.
Ove slept in the Saab the nights after the fire. The first morning he tried to clear up among the ashes and destruction. The second morning he had to accept that this would never sort itself out. The house was lost, and all the work he had put into it.
On the third morning two men, wearing the same kind of white shirt as that chief fireman, turned up. They stood by his gate, apparently quite unmoved by the ruin in front of them. They didn’t present themselves by name, only mentioned the name of the authority they came from. As if they were robots sent out by the mother ship.
“We’ve been sending you letters,” said one of the white shirts, holding out a pile of documents for Ove.
“Many letters,” said the other white shirt and made a note in a pad.
“You never answered,” said the first, as if he were reprimanding a dog.
Ove just stood there, defiant.
“Very unfortunate, this,” said the other, with a curt nod at what used to be Ove’s house.
Ove nodded.
“The fire brigade says it was caused by a harmless electrical fault,” continued the first white shirt robotically, pointing at a paper in his hand.
Ove felt a spontaneous objection to his use of the word “harmless.”
“We’ve sent you letters,” the second man repeated, waving his pad. “The municipal boundaries are being redrawn.”
“The land where your house stands will be developed for a number of new constructions.”
“The land where your house stood,” corrected his partner.
“The council is willing to purchase your land at the market price,” said the first man.
“Well . . . a market price now that there’s no longer a house on the land,” clarified the other.
Ove took the papers. Started reading.
“You don’t have much of a choice,” said the first.
“This is not so much your choice as the council’s,” said the other.
The first man tapped his pen impatiently against the papers, pointing at a line at the bottom where it said “signature.”
Ove stood at his gate and read their document in silence. He became aware of an ache in his breast; it took a long, long time before he understood what it was.
Hate.
He hated those men in white shirts. He couldn’t remember having hated anyone before, but now it was like a ball of fire inside. Ove’s parents had bought this house. Ove had grown up here. Learned to walk. His father had taught him everything there was to know about a Saab engine here. And after all that, someone at a municipal authority decided something else should be built here. And a man with a round face sold insurance that was not insurance. A man in a white shirt prevented Ove from putting out a fire and now two other white shirts stood here talking about a “market price.”
But Ove really did not have a choice. He could have stood there until the sun had completely risen, but he could not change the situation.
So he signed their document. While keeping his fist clenched in his pocket.
He left the plot where once his parental home had stood, and he never looked back. Rented a little room from an old lady in town. Sat and stared desolately at the wall all day. In the evening he went to work. Cleaned the train compartments. In the morning, he and the other workers were told not to go to their usual changing rooms; they had to go back to the head office to pick up new sets of work clothes.
As Ove was walking down the corridor he met Tom. It was the first time they had seen each other since Ove got blamed for the theft from the carriage. A more sensible man than Tom would probably have avoided eye contact. Or tried to pretend that the incident had never happened. But Tom was not a more sensible sort of man.
“Well, if it isn’t the little thief!” he exclaimed with a combative smile.
Ove didn’t answer. Tried to get past but got a hard elbow from one of the younger colleagues Tom surrounded himself with. Ove looked up. The younger colleague was smiling disdainfully at him.
“Hold on to your wallets, the thief’s here!” Tom called out so loudly that his voice echoed through the corridors.
With one hand, Ove took a firmer grip on the pile of clothes in his arm. But he clenched his fist in his pocket. Went into an empty changing room. Took off his dirty old work clothes, unclipped his father’s dented wristwatch and put it on the bench. When he turned around to go into the shower, Tom was standing in the doorway.
“We heard about the fire,” he said. Ove could see that Tom was hoping he’d answer.
“That father of yours would have been proud of you! Not even he was useless enough to burn down his own bloody house!” Tom called out to him as he was stepping into the shower.
Ove heard his younger colleagues all laughing together. He closed his eyes, leaned his forehead against the wall, and let the hot water flow over him. Stood there for more than twenty minutes. The longest shower he’d ever had.
When he came out, his father’s watch was gone. Ove rooted among the clothes on the bench, searched the floor, fine-combed all the lockers.
A time comes in every man’s life when he decides what sort of man he is going to be. Whether he is the kind who lets other people tread on him, or not.
Maybe it was because Tom had put the blame on him for the theft in the carriage. Maybe it was the fire. Maybe it was the bogus insurance agent. Or the white shirts. Or maybe it was just enough now. There and then, it was as if someone had removed a fuse in Ove’s mind. Everything in his eyes grew a shade darker. He walked out of the changing room, still naked
and with water dripping from his flexing muscles. Walked to the end of the corridor to the foremen’s changing room, kicked the door open, and cleared a way through the astonished press of men inside. Tom was standing in front of a mirror at the far end, trimming his bushy beard. Ove gripped him by the shoulder and roared so loudly that the sheet-metal-covered walls echoed.
“Give me back my watch!”
Tom, with a superior expression, looked down at his face. His dark figure towered over Ove like a shadow.
“I don’t have your bloo—”
“GIVE IT HERE!” Ove bellowed before Tom had reached the end of the sentence, so fiercely that the other men in the room saw fit to move a little closer to their lockers.
A second later Tom’s jacket had been ripped away from him with such power that he didn’t even think of protesting. He just stood there like a punished child as Ove hauled out his wristwatch from the inside pocket.
And then Ove hit him. Just once. It was enough. Tom collapsed like a sack of wet flour. By the time the heavy body hit the floor, Ove had already turned and walked away.
A time like that comes for every man, when he chooses what sort of man he wants to be. And if you don’t know the story, you don’t know the man.
Tom was taken to the hospital. Again and again he was asked what had happened, but Tom’s eyes just flickered and he mumbled something about having slipped. And strangely enough, none of the other men who’d been in the changing rooms at the time had any recollection of what had happened.
That was the last time Ove saw Tom. And, he decided, the last time he’d let anyone trick him.
He kept his job as a night cleaner, but he gave up his job at the construction site. He no longer had a house to build, and anyway he’d learned so much about construction by this point that the men in their hard hats no longer had anything to teach him.
They gave him a toolbox as a farewell present. This time with new-bought tools. “To the puppy. To help you build something that lasts,” they’d written on a piece of paper.