A Man Called Ove: A Novel

Tom’s eyes had turned black. But he retreated another step, still clutching the briefcase in his hands. Tom had worked many years at the railway, but Ove had never heard any of his father’s colleagues say one good word about Tom. He was dishonest and malicious, that was what they said after a couple of bottles of pilsner at their parties. But he’d never heard it from his dad. “Four children and a sick wife,” was all he used to say to his workmates, looking each of them in the eye. “Better men than Tom could have ended up worse for it.” And then his workmates usually changed the subject.

His father pointed to the wallet in Ove’s hand.

“You decide,” he said.

Ove determinedly fixed his gaze on the ground, feeling Tom’s eyes burning holes into the top of his head. Then he said in a low but unwavering voice that the lost property office would seem to be the best place to leave it. His father nodded without a word, and then took Ove’s hand as they walked back for almost half an hour along the track without a word passing between them. Ove heard Tom shouting behind them, his voice filled with cold fury. Ove never forgot it.

The woman at the desk of the lost property office could hardly believe her eyes when they put the wallet on the counter.

“And it was just lying there on the floor? You didn’t find a bag or anything?” she asked. Ove gave his dad a searching look, but he just stood there in silence, so Ove did the same.

The woman behind the counter seemed satisfied enough with the answer.

“Not many people have ever handed in this much money,” she said, smiling at Ove.

“Many people don’t have any decency either,” said his father in a clipped voice, and took Ove’s hand. They turned around and went back to work.

A few hundred yards down the track Ove cleared his throat, summoned some courage, and asked why his father had not mentioned the briefcase that Tom had found.

“We’re not the sort of people who tell tales about what others do,” he answered.

Ove nodded. They walked in silence.

“I thought about keeping the money,” Ove whispered at long last, and took his father’s hand in a firmer grip, as if he was afraid of letting go.

“I know,” said his father, and squeezed his hand a little harder.

“But I knew you would hand it in, and I knew a person like Tom wouldn’t,” said Ove.

His father nodded. And not another word was said about it.

Had Ove been the sort of man who contemplated how and when one became the sort of man one was, he might have said this was the day he learned that right has to be right. But he wasn’t one to dwell on things like that. He contented himself with remembering that on this day he’d decided to be as little unlike his father as possible.

He had only just turned sixteen when his father died. A hurtling carriage on the track. Ove was left with not much more than a Saab, a ramshackle house a few miles out of town, and a dented old wristwatch. He was never able to properly explain what happened to him that day. But he stopped being happy. He wasn’t happy for several years after that.

At the funeral, the vicar wanted to talk to him about foster homes, but he found out soon enough that Ove had not been brought up to accept charity. At the same time, Ove made it clear to the vicar that there was no need to reserve a place for him in the pews at Sunday service for the foreseeable future. Not because Ove did not believe in God, he explained to the vicar, but because in his view this God seemed to be a bit of a bloody swine.

The next day he went down to the wages office at the railway and handed back the wages for the rest of the month. The ladies at the office didn’t understand, so Ove had to impatiently explain that his father had died on the sixteenth, and obviously wouldn’t be able to come in and work for the remaining fourteen days of that month. And because he got his wages in advance, Ove had come to pay back the balance.

Hesitantly the ladies asked him to sit down and wait. After fifteen minutes or so the director came out and looked at the peculiar sixteen-year-old sitting on a wooden chair in the corridor with his dead father’s pay packet in his hand. The director knew very well who this boy was. And after he’d convinced himself that there was no way of persuading him to keep the money he felt he had no right to, the director saw no alternative but to propose to Ove that he should work for the rest of the month and earn his right to it. Ove thought this seemed a reasonable offer and notified his school that he’d be absent for the next two weeks. He never went back.

He worked for the railways for five years. Then one morning he boarded a train and saw her for the first time. That was the first time he’d laughed since his father’s death.

And life was never again the same.

People said Ove saw the world in black and white. But she was color. All the color he had.

6

A MAN CALLED OVE AND A BICYCLE THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN LEFT WHERE BICYCLES ARE LEFT