A Man Called Ove: A Novel

He stands in the middle of the living room. Everywhere, Sonja looks back at him. Only now does it strike him that he’s positioned the photographs so they follow him through the house wherever he goes. She’s on the table in the kitchen, hangs on the wall in the hall and halfway up the stairs. She’s on the window shelf in the living room, where the cat has now jumped up and sits right beside her. It sends Ove a disgruntled look as it sweeps the pills onto the floor, with a crash. When Ove picks up the bottle, the cat looks at him in horror, as if about to shout, “J’accuse!”

Ove kicks a little at a baseboard, then turns around and goes into the kitchen to put the pill bottle in a cupboard. Then he makes coffee and pours water in a bowl for the cat.

They drink in silence.

Ove picks up the empty bowl and puts it next to his coffee cup in the sink. He stands with his hands on his hips for a good while. Then turns around and goes into the hall.

“Tag along, then,” he urges the cat without looking at it. “Let’s give that village cur something to think about.”

Ove puts on the navy winter jacket, steps into his clogs, and lets the cat walk out the door first. He looks at the photo of Sonja on the wall. She laughs back at him. Maybe it’s not so enormously important to die that it can’t wait another hour, thinks Ove, and follows the cat into the street.

He goes to Rune’s house, where it takes several minutes before the door opens. There’s a slow, dragging sound inside before anything happens with the lock, as if a ghost is approaching with heavy chains rattling behind it. Then, finally, it opens and Rune stands there looking at Ove and the cat with an empty stare.

“You got any corrugated iron?” wonders Ove, without allowing any time for small talk.

Rune gives him a concentrated stare for a second or two, as if his brain is fighting desperately to produce a memory.

“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.

“Corrugated iron; that’s it,” says Ove with a nod.

Rune looks at him, or rather he looks straight through him. His eyes have the gleam of a newly waxed car hood. He’s emaciated and hunchbacked; his beard is gray, bordering on white. This used to be a solid bloke commanding a bit of respect, but now his clothes hang on his body in rags. He’s grown old: very, very old, Ove realizes, and it hits him with a force he hadn’t quite counted on. Rune’s gaze flickers for a moment. Then his mouth starts twitching.

“Ove?” he exclaims.

“Yeah, well . . . one thing’s for sure, I’m not the pope,” Ove replies.

The baggy skin on Rune’s face cracks into a sleepy smile. Both men, once as close as men of that sort could be, stare at each other. One of them a man who refuses to forget the past, and one who can’t remember it at all.

“You look old,” says Ove.

Rune grins.

Then Anita’s anxious voice makes itself heard and in the next moment her small, drumming feet are bearing her at speed towards the door.

“Is there someone at the door, Rune? What are you doing there?” she calls out, terrified, as she appears in the doorway. Then she sees Ove.

“Oh . . . hello, Ove,” she says and stops abruptly.

Ove stands there with his hands in his pockets. The cat beside him looks as if it would do the same, if it had pockets. Or hands. Anita is small and colorless in her gray trousers, gray knitted cardigan, gray hair, and gray skin. But Ove notices that her face is slightly red-eyed and swollen. Quickly she wipes her eyes and blinks away the pain. As women of that generation do. As if they stood in the doorway every morning, determinedly driving sorrow out of the house with a broom. Tenderly she takes Rune by the shoulders and leads him to his wheelchair by the window in the living room.

“Hello, Ove,” she repeats in a friendly, also surprised, voice when she comes back to the door. “What can I do for you?”

“Do you have any corrugated iron?” he asks back.

She looks puzzled.

“Corrected iron?” she mumbles, as if the iron has somehow been wrong and now someone has to put it right.

Ove sighs deeply.

“Good God, corrugated iron.”

Anita doesn’t look the slightest bit less puzzled.

“Am I supposed to have some?”

“Rune will have some in his shed, definitely,” says Ove and holds out his hand.

Anita nods. Takes down the shed key from the wall and puts it in Ove’s hand.

“Corrugated. Iron?” she says again.

“Yes,” says Ove.

“But we don’t have a metal roof.”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

Anita shakes her head.

“No . . . no, maybe it doesn’t, of course.”

“One always has a bit of sheet metal,” says Ove, as if this was absolutely beyond dispute.

Anita nods. As one does when faced with the undeniable fact that a bit of corrugated iron is the sort of thing that all normal, right-thinking people keep lying about in their sheds, just in case there’s call for it.

“But don’t you have any of that metal yourself, then?” she tries, mainly to have something to talk about.

“I’ve used mine up,” says Ove.