A Man Called Ove: Chapters 13–20

“Do you know you have to pay them here to go to the bathroom?” Ove exclaims incredulously.

Ove looks at the book more or less as if it just sent him a chain letter insisting that the book was really a Nigerian prince who had a “very lucrative investment opportunity” for Ove and now only needed Ove’s account number “to sort something out.”

Ove gives her a dour glance.

But then he saw her on the platform with all her rich auburn hair and her blue eyes and all her effervescent laughter.

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

“I’ll be waiting here tomorrow evening at eight o’clock. I want you to be wearing a suit and I’d like you to invite me out for dinner,” she said succinctly as she stepped off the train one Friday evening.

While she was ordering, the waiter smiled ingratiatingly.

As if it isn’t enough to look like someone has slapped a pack of margarine over his head, he has to cover himself in doodles as well. There’s not even a proper motif, as far as Ove can see, just a lot of patterns.

Chastened by recent experiences, he did not take the Saab, but walked instead to the station. Because this time neither Pregnant Foreign Woman, Blond Weed, Rune’s wife, nor low-quality rope would be given any opportunity of ruining Ove’s morning.

On Ove’s side of the track it’s empty but for three over-dimensioned municipal employees in their mid-thirties in workmen’s trousers and hard hats, standing in a ring and staring down into a hole. Around them is a carelessly erected loop of cordon tape.

The sun is just up; it shines obstinately into his eyes like a child who has just been given a flashlight.

His arms shake convulsively.

The drug-taking youths stare at the track, their hands enmeshed in their backpack straps as if fearing that they might otherwise fall over.

The stultified youth drags himself slowly to the edge.

Ove hoists up the suit-wearing man in a way that men who have never put their foot in a gym yet have spent their entire lives carrying a concrete plinth under each arm tend to be able to do.

Ove makes a sound like a heavy bureau that’s got a rusted-up hinge.

The man lifts a smoldering cigarette towards Ove through the windshield, and offers a superior half smile.

They had both protested about the whole arrangement, insistently and vociferously, but without success.

“No,” muttered the old man irascibly and went back to his plate.

Ove stands there for a few moments, catching his breath; he furtively scoops up the envelope with his final instructions from the mat before he ambles off after her.

“Be quiet, Ove!” says Parvaneh and looks entreatingly at the young man. “What shall we do, then? He’s ice-cold!”

He distracts himself from this emotion by assiduously inspecting the TV remote control.

“I didn’t know, Ove,” she whispers, contrite.

She lets her enervated hand rest on his shoulder.

When he peers in her direction and she looks ready to throw the cat at him, he looks down again and groans disconsolately. All I want is to die, he thinks and presses his toes into one of the floorboards.

"Rules are rules, you know,” says Ove truculently as she heads off to the parking area, but she doesn’t answer.

Ove, for someone who had run into death as much as he had in his life, had a very paltry relationship to his feelings about it, and he pushed it all away in some confusion in the kitchen of the forest cottage.

He meandered about the farm, looking for things to do.

And just as many times the cat woke up when Ove, with more than a bit of brusqueness, booted it down to the floor again.

When Ove comes back with the flowers and discovers that his whole car is full of cat saliva, he waves his forefinger in a threatening manner, as if it were a scimitar. And then the cat bites his scimitar.

Not that either of them knew exactly how telephone cables should be installed, but they were both well versed in keeping an eye on whippersnappers like this one, to stop them pulling a fast one.

The woman blunders into his garage and looks around with interest.

The man just sighs, as if Ove is a cheeky child refusing to stop riding his skateboard on the sidewalk.

“How do you know my name?” he demands.
She takes a step back. Pushes a few evasive wisps of hair out of her face without taking her eyes off Ove’s clenched fists.

Ove rivets his eyes into her even harder.