A Man Called Ove: A Novel

“Yes,” said Ove, lifting the telephone to within a couple of inches of his ear, slightly unclear about whether he was still talking to Parvaneh or the person at the other end.

“Hi!” yelled the journalist woman, Lena. Ove felt it might be wise to move the phone farther away from his ear. “So, are you ready to give me an interview now?” she went on in a gung-ho tone.

“No,” said Ove, holding the telephone in front of him to work out how to hang up.

“Did you read the letter I sent you? Or the newspaper? Have you read the newspaper? I thought I’d let you see it, so you can form an impression of our journalistic style!”

Ove went into the kitchen. Picked up the newspaper and letter that Adrian fellow had brought over a few days earlier.

“Have you got it?” roared the journalist woman.

“Calm yourself down. I’m reading it, aren’t I!” Ove said out loud to the telephone and leaned over the kitchen table.

“I was just wondering if—” she continued valiantly.

“Can you CALM DOWN, woman!” Ove raged.

Suddenly, out the window, Ove noticed a man in a white shirt in a Škoda, driving past his house.

“Hello?” the journalist woman called just before Ove flew out the front door.

“Oh, dear, dear,” Parvaneh mumbled anxiously when she came out of the bathroom and caught sight of him careering along between the houses.

The man in the white shirt got out of the Škoda on the driver’s side outside Rune and Anita’s house.

“It’s enough now! You hear? You’re NOT driving your car inside the residential area! Not another bloody YARD! You got it?” shouted Ove in the distance, long before he’d even reached him.

The little man in the white shirt, in a most superior manner, adjusted the cigarette packet in his breast pocket while calmly meeting Ove’s gaze.

“I have permission.”

“Like hell you do!”

The man in the white shirt shrugged. As if to chase away an irritating insect more than anything.

“And what exactly are you going to do about it, Ove?”

The question actually caught Ove off-balance. Again. He stopped, his hands trembling with anger, at least a dozen pieces of invective at his disposal. But to his own surprise he could not bring himself to use any of them.

“I know who you are, Ove. I know everything about all the letters you’ve written about your wife’s accident and your wife’s illness. You’re something of a legend in our offices, you should know,” said the man in the white shirt, his voice quite unwavering.

Ove’s mouth opened into a crack. The man in the white shirt nodded at him.

“I know who you are. And I’m only doing my job. A decision is a decision. You can’t do anything about it, you should have learned that by now.”

Ove took a step towards him but the man put up a hand against his chest and pressed him back. Not violently. Not aggressively. Just softly and firmly, as if the hand did not belong to him but was directly controlled by some robot at the computer center of a municipal authority.

“Go and watch some TV instead. Before you have more problems with that heart of yours.”

On the passenger side of the Škoda the determined woman, wearing an identical white shirt, stepped out with a pile of paper in her arms. The man locked the car with a loud bleep. Then he turned his back on Ove as if Ove had never stood there talking to him.

Ove stayed where he was, his fists clenched at his sides and his chin jutting out as if he were an outraged bull elk. The white shirts disappeared into Anita and Rune’s house. It took a minute before he recovered himself enough to even turn around. But then he did so with determined fury and started walking towards Parvaneh’s house. Parvaneh was standing halfway up the little road.

“Is that useless husband of yours at home?” Ove growled, walking past her without waiting for an answer.

Parvaneh didn’t have time to do more than nod before Ove, in four long strides, reached their front door. Patrick opened it, standing there on crutches, casts apparently covering half of his body.

“Hi, Ove!” he called out cheerfully, trying to wave with a crutch, with the immediate effect that he lost his balance and stumbled into the wall.

“That trailer you had when you moved in. Where did you get it?” Ove demanded.

Patrick leaned with his functioning arm against the wall. Almost as if he wanted it to look as if he’d meant to stumble into it.

“What? Oh . . . that trailer. I borrowed it off a guy at work—”

“Call him. You need to borrow it again.”

And this was the reason why Ove did not die today. Because he was detained by something that made him sufficiently angry to hold his attention.

When the man and woman in the white shirts come out of Anita and Rune’s house almost an hour later, they find that their little white car with the council logo has been boxed into the little cul-de-sac by a large trailer. A trailer that someone, while they were inside the house, must have parked exactly so it blocks the entire road behind them. One could almost think it had been done on purpose.