The Fredrik Backman Collection: A Man Called Ove, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry, and Britt-Marie Was Here

by Fredrik Backman

  He tore down the angry notice from the wall. He would have liked to propose to the steering committee that a proper “No Leafleting” sign should be put up on this wall. People nowadays seemed to think they could swan around with angry signs here, there, and anywhere they liked. This was a wall, not a bloody ­notice board.

  Ove walked down the little footpath between the houses. He stopped outside his own house, stooped over the paving stones, and sniffed vehemently along the cracks.

  Piss. It smelled of piss.

  And with this observation he went into his house, locked his door, and drank his coffee.

  When he was done he canceled his telephone line rental and his newspaper subscription. He mended the tap in the small bathroom. Put new screws into the handle of the door from the kitchen to the veranda. Reorganized boxes in the attic. Rearranged his tools in the shed and moved the Saab’s winter tires to a new place. And now here he is.

  Life was never meant to turn into this.

  It’s four o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon in November. He’s turned off the radiators, the coffee percolator, and all the lights. Oiled the wooden countertop in the kitchen, in spite of those mules at IKEA saying the wood does not need oiling. In this house all wooden worktops get an oiling every six months, whether it’s necessary or not. Whatever some girlie in a yellow sweatshirt from the self-service warehouse has to say about it.

  He stands in the living room of the two-story row house with the half-size attic at the back and stares out the window. The forty-year-old beard-stubbled poser from the house across the street comes jogging past. Anders is his name, apparently. A recent arrival, probably not lived here for more than four or five years at most. Already he’s managed to wheedle his way onto the steering group of the Residents’ Association. The snake. He thinks he owns the street. Moved in after his divorce, apparently, paid well over the market value. Typical of these bastards, they come here and push up the property prices for honest people. As if this was some sort of upper-class area. Also drives an Audi, Ove has noticed. He might have known. Self-employed people and other idiots all drive Audis. Ove tucks his hands into his pockets. He directs a slightly imperious kick at the baseboard. This row house is slightly too big for Ove and his wife, really, he can just about admit that. But it’s all paid for. There’s not a penny left in loans. Which is certainly more than one could say for the clotheshorse. It’s all loans nowadays; everyone knows the way people carry on. Ove has paid his mortgage. Done his duty. Gone to work. Never taken a day of sick leave. Shouldered his share of the burden. Taken a bit of responsibility. No one does that anymore, no one takes responsibility. Now it’s just computers and consultants and council bigwigs going to strip clubs and selling apartment leases under the table. Tax havens and share portfolios. No one wants to work. A country full of people who just want to have lunch all day.

  “Won’t it be nice to slow down a bit?” they said to Ove yesterday at work. While explaining that there was a lack of employment ­prospects and so they were “retiring the older generation.” A third of a century in the same workplace, and that’s how they refer to Ove. Suddenly he’s a bloody “generation.” Because nowadays people are all thirty-one and wear too-tight trousers and no longer drink ­normal coffee. And don’t want to take responsibility. A shed-load of men with elaborate beards, changing jobs and changing wives and changing their car makes. Just like that. Whenever they feel like it.

  Ove glares out of the window. The poser is jogging. Not that Ove is provoked by jogging. Not at all. Ove couldn’t give a damn about people jogging. What he can’t understand is why they have to make such a big thing of it. With those smug smiles on their faces, as if they were out there curing pulmonary emphysema. Either they walk fast or they run slowly, that’s what joggers do. It’s a forty-year-old man’s way of telling the world that he can’t do anything right. Is it really necessary to dress up as a fourteen-year-old Romanian gymnast in order to be able to do it? Or the Olympic tobogganing team? Just because one shuffles aimlessly around the block for three quarters of an hour?

  And the poser has a girlfriend. Ten years younger. The Blond Weed, Ove calls her. Tottering around the streets like an ­inebriated panda on heels as long as box wrenches, with clown paint all over her face and sunglasses so big that one can’t tell whether they’re a pair of glasses or some kind of helmet. She also has one of those handbag animals, running about off the leash and pissing on the paving stones outside Ove’s house. She thinks Ove doesn’t notice, but Ove always notices.

  His life was never supposed to be like this. Full stop. “Won’t it be nice taking it a bit easy?” they said to him at work yesterday. And now Ove stands here by his oiled kitchen countertop. It’s not supposed to be a job for a Tuesday afternoon.

  He looks out the window at the identical house opposite. A family with children has just moved in there. Foreigners, apparently. He doesn’t know yet what sort of car they have. Probably something Japanese, God help them. Ove nods to himself, as if he just said something which he very much agrees with. Looks up at the living room ceiling. He’s going to put up a hook there today. And he doesn’t mean any kind of hook. Every IT consultant ­trumpeting some data-code diagnosis and wearing one of those non-gender-specific cardigans they all have to wear these days would put up a hook any old way. But Ove’s hook is going to be as solid as a rock. He’s going to screw it in so hard that when the house is demolished it’ll be the last thing standing.

  In a few days there’ll be some stuck-up real estate agent standing here with a tie knot as big as a baby’s head, banging on about “renovation potential” and “spatial efficiency,” and he’ll have all sorts of opinions about Ove, the bastard. But he won’t be able to say a word about Ove’s hook.

  On the floor in the living room is one of Ove’s “useful-stuff” boxes. That’s how they divide up the house. All the things Ove’s wife has bought are “lovely” or “homey.” Everything Ove buys is useful. Stuff with a function. He keeps them in two different boxes, one big and one small. This is the small one. Full of screws and nails and wrench sets and that sort of thing. People don’t have useful things anymore. People just have shit. Twenty pairs of shoes but they never know where the shoehorn is; houses filled with microwave ovens and flat-screen televisions, yet they couldn’t tell you which anchor bolt to use for a concrete wall if you threatened them with a box cutter.

  Ove has a whole drawer in his useful-stuff box just for concrete-wall anchor bolts. He stands there looking at them as if they were chess pieces. He doesn’t stress about decisions concerning anchor bolts for concrete. Things have to take their time. Every anchor bolt is a process; every anchor bolt has its own use. People have no respect for decent, honest functionality anymore, they’re happy as long as everything looks neat and dandy on the computer. But Ove does things the way they’re supposed to be done.

  He came into his office on Monday and they said they hadn’t wanted to tell him on Friday as it would have “ruined his weekend.”

  “It’ll be good for you to slow down a bit,” they’d drawled. Slow down? What did they know about waking up on a Tuesday and no longer having a purpose? With their Internets and their espresso coffees, what did they know about taking a bit of responsibility for things?

  Ove looks up at the ceiling. Squints. It’s important for the hook to be centered, he decides.

  And while he stands there immersed in the importance of it, he’s mercilessly interrupted by a long scraping sound. Not at all unlike the type of sound created by a big oaf backing up a Japanese car hooked up to a trailer and scraping it against the exterior wall of Ove’s house.

  3

  A MAN CALLED OVE BACKS UP WITH A TRAILER

  Ove whips open the green floral curtains, which for many years Ove’s wife has been nagging him to change. He sees a short, black-haired, and obviously foreign woman aged about thirty. She stands there gesticulating furiously at a similarly aged oversize blond lanky man squeezed into the driver’s s
eat of a ludicrously small Japanese car with a trailer, now scraping against the exterior wall of Ove’s house.

  The Lanky One, by means of subtle gestures and signs, seems to want to convey to the woman that this is not quite as easy as it looks. The woman, with gestures that are comparatively unsubtle, seems to want to convey that it might have something to do with the moronic nature of the Lanky One in question.

  “Well, I’ll be bloody . . .” Ove thunders through the window as the wheel of the trailer rolls into his flower bed. A few seconds later his front door seems to fly open of its own accord, as if afraid that Ove might otherwise walk straight through it.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Ove roars at the woman.

  “Yes, that’s what I’m asking myself!” she roars back.

  Ove is momentarily thrown off-balance. He glares at her. She glares back.

  “You can’t drive a car here! Can’t you read?”

  The little foreign woman steps towards him and only then does Ove notice that she’s either very pregnant or suffering from what Ove would categorize as selective obesity.

  “I’m not driving the car, am I?”

  Ove stares silently at her for a few seconds. Then he turns to her husband, who’s just managed to extract himself from the Japanese car and is approaching them with two hands thrown expressively into the air and an apologetic smile plastered across his face. He’s wearing a knitted cardigan and his posture seems to indicate a very obvious calcium deficiency. He must be close to six and a half feet tall. Ove feels an instinctive skepticism towards all people taller than six feet; the blood can’t quite make it all the way up to the brain.

  “And who might you be?” Ove inquires.

  “I’m the driver,” says the Lanky One expansively.

  “Oh, really? Doesn’t look like it!” rages the pregnant woman, who is probably a foot and a half shorter than him. She tries to slap his arm with both hands.

  “And who’s this?” Ove asks, staring at her.

  “This is my wife.” He smiles.

  “Don’t be so sure it’ll stay that way,” she snaps, her pregnant belly bouncing up and down.

  “It’s not as easy as it loo—” the Lanky One tries to say, but he’s immediately cut short.

  “I said RIGHT! But you went on backing up to the LEFT! You don’t listen! You NEVER listen!”

  After that, she immerses herself in half a minute’s worth of haranguing in what Ove can only assume to be a display of the complex vocabulary of Arabic cursing.

  The husband just nods back at her with an indescribably harmonious smile. The very sort of smile that makes decent folk want to slap Buddhist monks in the face, Ove thinks to himself.

  “Oh, come on. I’m sorry,” he says cheerfully, hauling out a tin of chewing tobacco from his pocket and packing it in a ball the size of a walnut. “It was only a little accident, we’ll sort it out!”

  Ove looks at the Lanky One as if the Lanky One has just squatted over the hood of Ove’s car and left a turd on it.

  “Sort it out? You’re in my flower bed!”

  The Lanky One looks ponderously at the trailer wheels.

  “That’s hardly a flower bed, is it?” He smiles, undaunted, and adjusts his tobacco with the tip of his tongue. “Naah, come on, that’s just soil,” he persists, as if Ove is having a joke with him.

  Ove’s forehead compresses itself into one large, threatening wrinkle.

  “It. Is. A. Flower bed.”

  The Lanky One scratches his head, as if he’s got some tobacco caught in his tangled hair.

  “But you’re not growing anything in it—”

  “Never you bloody mind what I do with my own flower bed!”

  The Lanky One nods quickly, clearly keen to avoid further provocation of this unknown man. He turns to his wife as if he’s expecting her to come to his aid. She doesn’t look at all likely to do so. The Lanky One looks at Ove again.

  “Pregnant, you know. Hormones and all that . . .” he tries, with a grin.

  The Pregnant One does not grin. Nor does Ove. She crosses her arms. Ove tucks his hands into his belt. The Lanky One clearly doesn’t know what to do with his massive hands, so he swings them back and forth across his body, slightly shamefully, as if they’re made of cloth, fluttering in the breeze.

  “I’ll move it and have another go,” he finally says and smiles disarmingly at Ove again.

  Ove does not reciprocate.

  “Motor vehicles are not allowed in the area. There’s a sign.”

  The Lanky One steps back and nods eagerly. Jogs back and once again contorts his body into the under-dimensioned Japanese car. “Christ,” Ove and the pregnant woman mutter wearily in unison. Which actually makes Ove dislike her slightly less.

  The Lanky One pulls forward a few yards; Ove can see very clearly that he does not straighten up the trailer properly. Then he starts backing up again. Right into Ove’s mailbox, buckling the green sheet metal.

  Ove storms forward and throws the car door open.

  The Lanky One starts flapping his arms again.

  “My fault, my fault! Sorry about that, didn’t see the mailbox in the rearview mirror, you know. It’s difficult, this trailer thing, just can’t figure out which way to turn the wheel . . .”

  Ove thumps his fist on the roof of the car so hard that the Lanky One jumps and bangs his head on the doorframe. “Out of the car!”

  “What?”

  “Get out of the car, I said!”

  The Lanky One gives Ove a slightly startled glance, but he doesn’t quite seem to have the nerve to reply. Instead he gets out of his car and stands beside it like a schoolboy in the dunce’s corner. Ove points down the footpath between the row houses, towards the bicycle shed and the parking area.

  “Go and stand where you’re not in the way.”

  The Lanky One nods, slightly puzzled.

  “Holy Christ. A lower-arm amputee with cataracts could have backed this trailer more accurately than you,” Ove mutters as he gets into the car.

  How can anyone be incapable of reversing with a trailer? he asks himself. How? How difficult is it to establish the basics of right and left and then do the opposite? How do these people make their way through life at all?

  Of course it’s an automatic, Ove notes. Might have known. These morons would rather not have to drive their cars at all, let alone reverse into a parking space by themselves. He puts it into drive and inches forward. Should one really have a driver’s license if one can’t drive a real car rather than some Japanese robot vehicle? he wonders. Ove doubts whether someone who can’t park a car properly should even be allowed to vote.

  When he’s pulled forward and straightened up the trailer—as civilized people do before backing up with a trailer—he puts it into reverse. Immediately it starts making a shrieking noise. Ove looks around angrily.

  “What the bloody hell are you . . . why are you making that noise?” he hisses at the instrument panel and gives the steering wheel a whack.

  “Stop it, I said!” he roars at a particularly insistent flashing red light.

  At the same time the Lanky One appears at the side of the car and carefully taps the window. Ove rolls the window down and gives him an irritated look.

  “It’s just the reverse radar making that noise,” the Lanky One says with a nod.

  “Don’t you think I know that?” Ove seethes.

  “It’s a bit unusual, this car. I was thinking I could show you the controls if you like . . .”

  “I’m not an idiot, you know!” Ove snorts.

  The Lanky One nods eagerly.

  “No, no, of course not.”

  Ove glares at the instrument panel.

  “What’s it doing now?”

  The Lanky One nods enthusiastically.

  “It’s measuring how much power’s left in the battery. You know, before it switches from the electric motor to the gas-driven motor. Because it’s a hybrid. . . .”

  Ove doesn’t answer
. He just slowly rolls up the window, leaving the Lanky One outside with his mouth half-open. Ove checks the left wing mirror. Then the right wing mirror. He reverses while the Japanese car shrieks in terror, maneuvers the trailer perfectly between his own house and his incompetent new neighbor’s, gets out, and tosses the cretin his keys.

  “Reverse radar and parking sensors and cameras and crap like that. A man who needs all that to back up with a trailer shouldn’t be bloody doing it in the first place.”

  The Lanky One nods cheerfully at him.

  “Thanks for the help,” he calls out, as if Ove hadn’t just spent the last ten minutes insulting him.

  “You shouldn’t even be allowed to rewind a cassette,” grumbles Ove. The pregnant woman just stands there with her arms crossed, but she doesn’t look quite as angry anymore. She thanks him with a wry smile, as if she’s trying not to laugh. She has the biggest brown eyes Ove has ever seen.

  “The Residents’ Association does not permit any driving in this area, and you have to bloody go along with it,” Ove huffs, before stomping back to his house.

  He stops halfway up the paved path between the house and his shed. He wrinkles his nose in the way men of his age do, the wrinkle traveling across his entire upper body. Then he sinks down on his knees, puts his face right up close to the paving stones, which he neatly and without exception removes and re-lays every other year, whether necessary or not. He sniffs again. Nods to himself. Stands up.

  His new neighbors are still watching him.

  “Piss! There’s piss all over the place here!” Ove says gruffly.