A Man Called Ove

by Fredrik Backman

The assistant gives him a quick nod, then disappears and comes back after a few moments with a colleague. The colleague looks very happy, as people do when they have not been working for a sufficient stretch of time as sales assistants.

He nods and kicks the ground again. He can’t understand people who long to retire. How can anyone spend their whole life longing for the day when they become superfluous? Wandering about, a burden on society, what sort of man would ever wish for that? Staying at home, waiting to die. Or even worse: waiting for them to come and fetch you and put you in a home.

When they reached the top of a hill the Mercedes overtook him with a roar. The driver, a man in his forties in a tie and white cables trailing from his ears, held up his finger through the window at Ove. Ove responded to the gesture in the manner of all men of a certain age who’ve been properly raised: by slowly tapping the tip of his finger against the side of his head. The man in the Mercedes shouted until his saliva spattered against the inside of his windshield, then put his foot down and disappeared.

Now Ove is standing in front of his wife with two plants. Because it was a question of principle. ‘There was no way I was going to pay three crowns,’ rails Ove, his eyes looking down into the gravel. Ove’s wife often quarrels with Ove because he’s always arguing about everything. But Ove isn’t bloody arguing. He just thinks right is right. Is that such an unreasonable attitude to life?

Ove wasn’t one to engage in small talk. He had come to realise that, these days at least, this was a serious character flaw.

He was well liked down at the railway, quiet but kind. There were some who said he was ‘too kind’. Ove remembers how as a child he could never understand how this could be something bad.

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

Ove’s wife decided in principle that she’d let Ove repaint one of the rooms in their house every six months. Or, to be more exact, she decided she wanted a different colour in one of the rooms once every six months. And when she said as much to Ove he told her that she might as well forget it. And then she called a decorator for an estimate. And then she told Ove how much she was going to pay the decorator. And then Ove went to fetch his painting stool.

You miss the strangest things when you lose someone. Little things. Smiles. The way she turned round in her sleep. Even repainting a room for her.

He sinks down on the stool, breathing heavily. His hands are still shaking as if he was standing waist-deep in ice-cold water. His chest thumps. It happens more and more these days. He has to sort of struggle for a mouthful of air, like a fish in an overturned bowl. His company doctor said it was chronic, and that he mustn’t work himself up. Easy for him to say.

There’s a photo on the wall beside the front door, of Ove and Sonja. It’s almost forty years old. That time they were in Spain on a coach tour. She’s sun-tanned, wearing a red dress and looking so happy. Ove is standing next to her, holding her hand. He sits there for what must be an hour, just staring at that photo. Of all the imaginable things he most misses about her, the thing he really wishes he could do again is hold her hand in his. She had a way of folding her index finger into his palm, hiding it inside. And he always felt that nothing in the world was impossible when she did that. Of all the things he could miss, that’s what he misses most.

He had plenty of time to think his life over as he walked one last time to the office, a bundle of work clothes clutched in his arms. He had liked working here. Proper tasks, proper tools, a real job.

‘Men are what they are because of what they do. Not what they say,’ said Ove.

And so it turned out that Ove became a night-cleaner instead. And if this hadn’t happened, he would never have come off his shift that morning and caught sight of her. With those red shoes and the gold brooch and all her burnished brown hair. And that laughter of hers which, for the rest of his life, would make him feel as if someone was running around barefoot on the inside of his breast.

She often said that ‘all roads lead to something you were always predestined to do’ . And for her, perhaps, it was something. But for Ove it was someone.

That evening Rune and Ove had drunk a glass of whisky each on Rune’s patio. They didn’t seem overly happy about winning, their wives pointed out. Both men were rather disappointed that the council had given up so quickly. These had been some of the most enjoyable eighteen months of their lives.

Ove wasn’t hopeless, in his own view. He just had a sense of there needing to be a bit of order in the greater scheme of things. He felt one should not go through life as if everything was exchangeable. As if loyalty was worthless. Nowadays people changed their stuff so often that any expertise in how to make things last was becoming superfluous. Quality: no one cared about that any more.

a man was not a proper man until he had bought his own car, felt Ove.

Slowly, the house took shape. Screw by screw and floorboard by floorboard. No one saw it, of course, but there was no need for anyone to see it. A job well done is a reward in its own right,

Ove weighed on his heels as he watched the embers stealing their way through the grass. In all honesty he was probably not thinking so much about what he wanted to do, but what his father would have done. And as soon as that thought had taken root there was not much choice about it.

‘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 hippy 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.

a time comes in all men’s lives when they decide what sort of men they’re going to be: the kind that lets other people walk all over them, or not.

A time comes in all men’s lives when they decide what sort of men they are going to be. Whether they are the kind that let other people tread on them, or not.

‘You like reading?’ she asked him brightly. Ove shook his head with some insecurity, but it didn’t seem to concern her very much. She just smiled, said that she loved books more than anything, and started telling him excitedly what each of the ones in her lap was about. And Ove realised that he wanted to hear her talking about the things she loved for the rest of his life.

She liked talking and Ove liked keeping quiet. Retrospectively, Ove assumed that was what people meant when they said that people were compatible.

She was studying to be a teacher. Came on the train every day, after ten or twenty kilometres she changed to another train, then a bus. All in all, it was a one and a half hour journey in the wrong direction for Ove.

On the following day the man from the cash desk at the train station intervened and made it clear to Ove that he couldn’t sleep here like some loafer, surely he could understand that? Ove saw the point he was making, but explained that there was a woman at stake here. When he heard this, the man from the ticket desk gave him a little nod and from then on let him sleep in the left luggage room. Even men at train station ticket desks have been in love.

Ove had never been asked how he lived before he met her. But if anyone had asked him, he would have answered that he didn’t.

He was sceptical about people who came late. ‘If you can’t depend on someone being on time, you shouldn’t trust ’em with anything more important either,’

While she was ordering, the waiter smiled ingratiatingly. Ove knew all too well what both he and the other diners in the restaurant had thought when they came in. She was too good for Ove, that’s what they’d thought. And Ove felt very silly about that. Mostly because he entirely agreed with their opinion.

And then she asked him what he really wanted to do with his life, if he could choose anything he wanted. And then he answered, without even thinking about it, that he wanted to build houses. Construct them. Draw the plans. Calculate the best way to make them stand where they stood. And then she didn’t start laughing as he thought she would. She got angry. ‘But why don’t you do it, then?’ she demanded to know.

And one day she was lying there in a hospital and holding his hand and telling him not to worry. Everything was going to be all right. Easy for her to say, thought Ove, his breast pulsating with anger and sorrow. But she just whispered, ‘Everything will be fine, darling Ove,’ and leaned her arm against his arm. And then gently pushed her index finger into the palm of his hand. And then closed her eyes and died.

On the Sunday she was buried. On the Monday he went to work. But if anyone had asked, he would have told them that he never lived before he met her. And not after, either.

And when she died the bank simply sent Ove a new card in his name, connected to her account. And now, after he’s been buying flowers for her grave for the past six months there’s a sum of 136 crowns and 54 öre left on it. And Ove knows very well that this money will disappear into the pocket of some bank director if Ove dies without spending it first.

But it was always like that with women. They couldn’t stick to a plan even if you glued them to it,

In the end she found out how he got the scars. And when one of her girlfriends asked why she loved him she answered that most men ran away from an inferno. But men like Ove ran into it.

He cleared his throat and looked around with a certain desperation to find something to ask this old man about. Because this was what Ove had learned: if one didn’t have anything to say one had to find something to ask. If there was one thing that made people forget to dislike one, it was when they were given the opportunity to talk about themselves.

‘Does it run well?’ he asked. ‘No,’ muttered the old man irascibly and went back to his plate. ‘None of their models run well. None of ’em are built right. Mechanics want half a fortune to fix anything on it,’ he added, as if he was actually explaining it to someone sitting under the table. ‘I can have a look at it if you’ll let me,’ said Ove and looked enthusiastic all of a sudden. It was the first time Sonja could ever remember him actually sounding enthusiastic about anything. The two men looked at each other for a moment. Then Sonja’s father nodded. And Ove nodded curtly back. And then they rose to their feet, objective and determined, in the way two men might behave if they had just agreed to go and kill a third man.

He sat there for a good while stuffing his pipe with care, then at last nodded at the saucepans and managed to say: ‘Nice.’ ‘Thanks, Dad.’ She smiled. ‘You cooked it. Not me,’ he said. ‘The thanks was not for the food,’ she answered and took away the plates, kissing her father tenderly on his forehead at the same time as she saw Ove diving in under the bonnet of the truck in the yard. Her father said nothing, just stood up with a quiet snort and took the newspaper from the kitchen top. Halfway to his armchair in the living room he stopped himself, however, and stood there slightly unresolved, leaning on his stick. ‘Does he fish?’ he finally grunted without looking at her. ‘I don’t think so,’ Sonja answered. Her father nodded gruffly. Stood silent for a long while. ‘I see. He’ll have to learn, then,’ he grumbled at long last, before putting his pipe in his mouth and disappearing into the living room. Sonja had never heard him give anyone a higher compliment.

‘He’s getting warmer,’ she exclaims, turning to Ove in triumph. Ove nods. He was about to say something sarcastic to her. Now he finds, uneasily, that he’s relieved at the news. He distracts himself from this emotion by assiduously inspecting the TV remote control. Not that he’s concerned about the cat. It’s just that Sonja would have been happy. Nothing more than that.

Ove learned to fish. In the two autumns that followed their first visit, the roof of the house for the first time ever did not leak. And the truck started every time the key was turned without as much as a splutter. Of course Sonja’s father was not openly grateful about this. But on the other hand he never again brought up his reservations about Ove ‘being from town’. And this, from Sonja’s father, was as good a proof of affection as any.

‘I feel so much loss, Ove. Loss, as if my heart was beating outside my body.’ They stood in silence for a long time, with their arms around each other. And at long last she lifted her face towards his, and looked into his eyes with great seriousness. ‘You have to love me twice as much now,’ she said. And then Ove lied to her for the second – and last – time: he said that he would. Even though he knew it wasn’t possible for him to love her any more than he already did.

Now, when it’s gone quarter to six and Ove has got up, the cat is sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor. It sports a disgruntled expression, as if Ove owes it money.

‘I’ve brought some flowers with me,’ he mumbles. ‘Pink. Which you like. They say they die in the frost but they only tell you that to trick you into buying the more expensive ones.’

Ove sinks onto the stool in his hall. Shaking with humiliation. He had almost forgotten that feeling. The humiliation of it. The powerlessness. The realisation that one cannot fight men in white shirts.

Ove did his best not to like any of it. But Sonja got so worked up about it all that in the end it inevitably affected him too. She laughed so loudly when he held her that he felt it through his whole body. Not even Ove could avoid liking it.

On the other hand he tried to point out to her that she shouldn’t give money to the beggars in the street, as they’d only buy schnapps with it. But she kept doing it. ‘They can do what they like with the money,’ she said. When Ove protested she just smiled and took his big hands in hers and kissed them, explaining that when a person gives to another person it’s not just the receiver who’s blessed. It’s the giver.

Parvaneh looks at Ove in shock. ‘What does she mean, a hero?’ ‘She’s just prattling on!’ Ove protested. ‘He saved a man’s life; he’d fallen on the track!’ yelled the garage door. ‘Are you sure you’ve got the right Ove?’ said Parvaneh. Ove looked insulted.

And after that she came home every evening for as long as Ove could remember and told him, with fire in her eyes, about her boys and girls. The ones who arrived in the classroom with police escorts yet when they left could recite four-hundred-year-old poetry. The ones who could make her cry and laugh and sing until her voice was bouncing off the ceilings of their little house. Ove could never make head nor tail of those impossible kids, but he was not beyond liking them for what they did to Sonja. Every human being needs to know what she’s fighting for. That was what they said. And she fought for what was good. For the children she never had. And Ove fought for her. Because that was the only thing in this world he really knew.

‘She’s drawn you,’ Parvaneh replies, and shoves it into his hands. Ove gives the paper a reluctant look. It’s filled with lines and swirls. ‘That’s Jimmy, and that’s the cat and that’s Patrick and me. And that’s you,’ explains Parvaneh. When she says that last bit she points at a figure in the middle of the drawing. Everything else on the paper is drawn in black, but the figure in the middle is a veritable explosion of colour. A riot of yellow and red and blue and green and orange and purple. ‘You’re the funniest thing she knows. That’s why she always draws you in colour,’ says Parvaneh. Then she closes the passenger door and walks off. It takes several seconds before Ove collects himself enough to call out after her: ‘What do you mean, “always”?’ But by then they have all started walking back to the houses.