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

  “Yes?” demands Ove.

  The youth looks like he can’t come up with an answer. He fiddles with a newspaper and a letter. And that’s when Ove notices that it’s the same youth who argued with him about that bicycle a few days ago, by the storage shed. The bicycle the youth said he was going to “fix.” Of course Ove knows what that means. “Fix” means “steal and sell on the Internet” to these rascals, that’s the long and short of it.

  The youth looks, if possible, even less thrilled about recognizing Ove than vice versa. He looks a little like a waiter sometimes does, when he’s undecided about whether to serve you your food or take it into the kitchen and spit on it. The lad looks coolly at Ove before reluctantly handing the mail over with a grumpy “There y’go.” Ove accepts it without taking his eyes off him.

  “Your mailbox is mashed, so I was gonna give you these,” says the youth.

  He nods at the folded-double pile of junk that used to be Ove’s mailbox until the Lanky One who can’t back up with a trailer backed his trailer into it—then nods at the letter and newspaper in Ove’s hand. Ove looks down at them. The newspaper is one of those local rags they hand out for nothing even when one puts up a sign quite expressly telling them to do no such bloody thing. And the letter is most likely advertising, Ove imagines. Admittedly his name and address have been written in longhand on the front, but that’s a typical advertising trick. To make one think it’s a letter from a real person, and then one opens it and in a flash one has been subjected to marketing. That trick won’t work on Ove.

  The youth stands there rocking on his heels and looking down at the ground. As if he’s struggling with something inside that wants to come out.

  “Was there something else?” Ove wonders.

  The youth pulls his hand through his greasy, late-pubescent shock of hair.

  “Ah, what the hell. . . . I was just wondering if you have a wife called Sonja,” he manages to say.

  Ove looks suspicious. The lad points at the envelope.

  “I saw the surname. I had a teacher with that name. Was just wondering. . . .”

  He seems to be cursing himself for having said anything. He spins around on the spot and starts walking away. Ove clears his throat and kicks the threshold.

  “Wait . . . that could be right. What about Sonja?”

  The lad stops a yard farther away.

  “Ah, shit. . . . I just liked her, that’s all I wanted to say. I’m . . . you know . . . I’m not so good at reading and writing and all that.”

  Ove almost says, “I’d never have guessed,” but he leaves it. The youth twists awkwardly. Runs his hand through his hair, somewhat disoriented, as if he’s hoping to find the appropriate words up there somewhere.

  “She’s the only teacher I ever had who didn’t think I was thick as a plank,” he mumbles, almost choking on his emotion. “She got me reading that . . . Shakespeare, you know. I didn’t know I could even read, sort of thing. She got me reading the most hard-core thick book an’ all. It felt really shit when I heard she died, you know.”

  Ove doesn’t answer. The youth looks down at the ground. Shrugs.

  “That’s it. . . .”

  He’s silent. And then they both stand there, the fifty-nine-year-old and the teenager, a few yards apart, kicking at the snow. As if they were kicking a memory back and forth, a memory of a woman who insisted on seeing more potential in certain men than they saw in themselves. Neither of them knows what to do with their shared experience.

  “What are you doing with that bike?” says Ove at last.

  “I promised to fix it up for my girlfriend. She lives there,” the youth answers, nodding at the house at the far end of their row, opposite Anita and Rune’s place. The one where those recycling types live when they’re not in Thailand or wherever they go.

  “Or, you know. She’s not my girlfriend yet. But I’m thinking I’m wanting her to be. Sort of thing.”

  Ove scrutinizes the youth as middle-aged men often scrutinize younger men who seem to invent their own grammar as they go along.

  “So have you got any tools, then?” he asks.

  The youth shakes his head.

  “How are you going to repair a bike without tools?” Ove marvels, more with genuine surprise than agitation.

  The youth shrugs.

  “Dunno.”

  “Why did you promise to repair it, then?”

  The youth kicks the snow. Scratches his face with his entire hand, embarrassed.

  “Because I love her.”

  Ove can’t quite decide what to say to that one. So he rolls up the local newspaper and envelope and slaps it into his palm, like a baton.

  “I have to get going,” the youth mumbles almost inaudibly and makes a movement to turn around again.

  “Come over after work, then, and I’ll get the bike out for you.”

  Ove’s words seem to pop up out of nowhere. “But you have to bring your own tools,” he adds.

  The youth brightens up.

  “You serious, man?”

  Ove continues slapping the paper baton into his hand. The youth swallows.

  “Awesome! Wait . . . ah, shit . . . I can’t pick it up today! I have to go to my other job! But tomorrow, man, I can come tomorrow. Is it cool if I pick it up tomorrow, like, instead?”

  Ove tilts his head and looks as if everything that’s just been said came from the mouth of a character in an animated film. The youth takes a deep breath and pulls himself together.

  “What other job?” asks Ove, as if he’s had an incomplete answer in the final of Jeopardy!

  “I sort of work in a café in the evenings and at the weekends,” says the youth, with that new-won hope in his eyes about perhaps being able to rescue his fantasy relationship with a girlfriend who doesn’t even know that she’s his girlfriend—the sort of relationship that only a boy in late puberty with greasy hair can have. “I need both jobs because I’m saving money,” he explains.

  “For what?”

  “A car.”

  Ove can’t avoid noticing how he straightens up slightly when he says “car.” Ove looks dubious for a moment. Then he slowly but watchfully slaps the baton into his palm again.

  “What sort of car?”

  “I had a look at a Renault,” the youth says brightly, stretching a little more.

  The air around the two men stops for a hundredth of a breath or so. An eerie silence suddenly envelops them. If this were a scene from a film, the camera would very likely have time to pan 360 degrees around them before Ove finally loses his composure.

  “Renault? Renault? That’s bloody FRENCH! You can’t bloody well go and buy a FRENCH car!!!”

  The youth seems just about to say something but he doesn’t get the chance before Ove shakes his whole upper body as if trying to get rid of a persistent wasp.

  “Christ, you puppy! Don’t you know anything about cars?”

  The youth shakes his head. Ove sighs deeply and puts his hand on his forehead as if he’s been struck by a sudden migraine.

  “And how are you going to get the bicycle to the café if you don’t have a car?” he says at long last, visibly struggling to regain his composure.

  “I hadn’t . . . thought about that,” says the youth.

  Ove shakes his head.

  “Renault? Christ almighty. . . .”

  The youth nods. Ove rubs his eyes in frustration.

  “Where’s this sodding café you work at, then?” he mutters.

  Twenty minutes later, Parvaneh opens her front door in surprise. Ove is standing outside, thoughtfully striking his hand with a paper baton.

  “Have you got one of those green signs?”

  “What?”

  “You have to have one of those green signs when you’re a student driver. Do you have one or not?”

  She nods.

  “Yeah . . . yes, I have, but wh—”

  “I’ll come and pick you up in two hours. We’ll take my car.”

  Ove tur
ns around and tramps back across the little road without waiting for an answer.

  27

  A MAN CALLED OVE AND A DRIVING LESSON

  It happened now and then in the almost forty years they lived in the row of row houses that some thoughtless and recently moved-in neighbor was bold enough to ask Sonja what the real cause was for the deep animosity between Ove and Rune. Why had two men who had once been friends suddenly started hating one another with such overpowering intensity?

  Sonja usually answered that it was quite straightforward. It was simply about how when the two men and their wives moved into their houses, Ove drove a Saab 96 and Rune a Volvo 244. A year or so later Ove bought a Saab 95 and Rune bought a Volvo 245. Three years later Ove bought a Saab 900 and Rune bought a Volvo 265. In the decades that followed, Ove bought another two Saab 900s and then a Saab 9000. Rune bought another Volvo 265 and then a Volvo 745, but a few years later he went back to a sedan model and acquired a Volvo 740. Whereupon Ove bought yet one more Saab 9000 and Rune eventually went over to a Volvo 760, after which Ove got himself a Saab 9000i and Rune part-exchanged to a Volvo 760 Turbo.

  And then the day came when Ove went to the car dealer to look at the recently launched Saab 9-3, and when he came home in the evening, Rune had bought a BMW.

  “A BMW!” Ove had roared at Sonja. “How can you reason with a human being like that? How?”

  And possibly it was not the entire explanation for why these two men loathed one another, Sonja used to explain. Either you understood it or you didn’t. And if you didn’t understand, there was no point even trying to clarify the rest.

  Most people never did understand, Ove often commented. But then people had no idea of loyalty these days. The car was just “a means of transport” and the road just a complication arising between two points. Ove is convinced this is why the roads are as bad as they are. If people were a little more careful with their cars they wouldn’t drive like idiots, he thinks, watching with concern as Parvaneh pushes away the newspaper he has spread across her seat. She has to retract the driver’s seat as far as it’ll go, so she can maneuver her pregnant belly into the car, then bring it forward all the way so she can reach the wheel.

  The driving lesson doesn’t start so well. Or, to be precise, it begins with Parvaneh trying to get into the Saab with a bottle of carbonated juice in her hand. She shouldn’t have done that. Then she tries to fiddle with Ove’s radio to find “a more entertaining station.” She shouldn’t have done that either.

  Ove picks up the newspaper from the floor, rolls it up, and starts nervously striking it against his hand, like a more aggressive version of a stress ball. She grabs the wheel and looks at the instruments like a curious child.

  “Where do we start?” she yells eagerly, after at long last agreeing to hand over the juice.

  Ove sighs. The cat sits in the backseat and looks as if it wished, with intensity, that cats knew how to strap on safety belts.

  “Press the clutch pedal,” says Ove, slightly grim.

  Parvaneh looks around her seat as if searching for something. Then she looks at Ove and smiles ingratiatingly.

  “Which one’s the clutch?”

  Ove’s face fills with disbelief.

  She looks around the seat again, turns toward the seat belt fixture in the back rest, as if she may find the clutch there. Ove holds his forehead. Parvaneh’s facial expression immediately sours.

  “I told you I want a driver’s license for an automatic! Why did you make me use your car?”

  “Because you’re getting a proper license!” Ove cuts her short, emphasizing “proper” in a way that makes it plain that a license for an automatic is as much a “proper driver’s license” as a car with an automatic gearbox is a “proper car.”

  “Stop shouting at me!” shouts Parvaneh.

  “I’m not shouting!” Ove shouts back.

  The cat curls up in the backseat, clearly anxious not to end up in the middle of this, whatever it is. Parvaneh crosses her arms and glares out of the side window. Ove strikes his paper baton rhythmically into the palm of his hand.

  “The pedal on the far left is the clutch,” he grunts in the end.

  After taking a breath so deep that he has to stop halfway for a rest before he inhales again, he continues:

  “The one in the middle is the brake. On the far right is the accelerator. You release the clutch slowly until you find the point where it engages, then give it a bit of gas, release the clutch, and move off.”

  Parvaneh seems to accept this as an apology. She nods and calms down. Takes hold of the steering wheel, starts the car, and follows his instructions. The Saab lurches forward with a little jump, then pauses before catapulting itself with a loud roar towards the guest parking and very nearly crashing into another car. Ove tugs at the hand brake. Parvaneh lets go of the steering wheel and yells in panic, covering her eyes with her hands until the Saab finally comes to an abrupt stop. Ove is puffing as if he’d had to make his way to the hand brake by forcing himself through a military obstacle course. His facial muscles twitch like a man whose eyes are being sprayed with lemon juice.

  “What do I do now?!” roars Parvaneh when she realizes that the Saab is an inch from the taillights of the car in front.

  “Reverse. You put it in reverse,” Ove manages to say through his teeth.

  “I almost smashed into that car!” pants Parvaneh.

  Ove peers over the edge of the hood. And then, suddenly, a sort of calm comes over his face. He turns and nods at her, very matter-of-fact.

  “Doesn’t matter. It’s a Volvo.”

  It takes them fifteen minutes to get out of the parking area and onto the main road. Once they’re there, Parvaneh revs the first gear until the Saab vibrates like it’s about to explode. Ove tells her to change gear and she replies that she doesn’t know how. Meanwhile the cat seems to be trying to open the back door.

  When they get to the first red light, a big black SUV with two shaven-headed young men in the front pulls up so close to their rear bumper that Ove is pretty sure he’ll have their license number etched into his paintwork when they get home. Parvaneh glances nervously in the mirror. The SUV revs its engine, as if giving vent to some sort of opinion. Ove turns and looks out the back window. The two men have tattoos all over their throats, he notes. As if the SUV is not a clear enough advertisement for their stupidity.

  The light turns green. Parvaneh brings up the clutch, the Saab splutters, and the instrument panel goes black. Stressed, Parvaneh turns the key in the ignition, which only makes it grind in a heartrending manner. The engine makes a roar, coughs, and dies anew. The men with the shaved heads and tattooed throats sound the horn. One of them gestures.

  “Press down the clutch and give it more gas,” says Ove.

  “That’s what I’m doing!” she answers.

  “That’s not what you’re doing.”

  “Yes I am!”

  “Now you’re shouting.”

  “I’M NOT BLOODY SHOUTING!” she shouts.

  The SUV blares its horn. Parvaneh presses down the clutch. The Saab rolls backwards a few inches and bumps into the front of the SUV. The Throat Tattoos are now hanging on the horn as if it’s an air raid alarm.

  Parvaneh tugs despairingly at the key, only to be rewarded by yet another stall. Then suddenly she lets go of everything and hides her face in her hands.

  “Good Go— Are you crying now?” Ove asks in amazement.

  “I’M NOT BLOODY CRYING!” she howls, her tears spattering over the dashboard.

  Ove leans back and looks down at his knee. Fingers the end of the paper baton.

  “It’s just such a strain, this, do you understand?” she sobs and leans her forehead against the wheel as if hoping it might be soft and fluffy. “I’m sort of PREGNANT! I’m just a bit STRESSED, can no one show a bit of understanding for a pregnant bloody woman who’s a bit STRESSED?!”

  Ove twists uncomfortably in the passenger seat. She punches the steering whe
el several times, mumbles something about how all she wants is to “drink some bloody lemonade,” flops her arms over the top of the steering wheel, buries her face in her sleeves, and starts crying again.

  The SUV behind them honks until it sounds as if the Finland ferry is about to run them down. And then something in Ove snaps. He throws the door open, gets out of the car, walks slowly around the SUV, and rips the driver’s door open.

  “Have you never been a student driver or what?”

  The driver doesn’t have time to answer.

  “You stupid little bastard!” Ove roars in the face of the shaven-headed young man with throat tattoos, his spittle cascading over their seats.

  The Throat Tattoo doesn’t have time to answer and Ove doesn’t wait for him either. Instead he grabs the young man by his collar and pulls him up so hard that his body tumbles clumsily out of the car. He’s a muscular sort, easily weighing in at two hundred pounds, but Ove holds his collar in an immovable steel grip. Evidently, Throat Tattoo is so surprised by the strength in the old man’s grip that it doesn’t occur to him to put up any resistance. Fury burns in Ove’s eyes as he presses the probably thirty-five-years-younger man so hard against the side of the SUV that the bodywork creaks. He places the tip of his index finger in the middle of the shaved head and positions his eyes so close to Throat ­Tattoo’s face that they feel each other’s breath.

  “If you sound that horn one more time, it’ll be the LAST thing you do on this earth. Got it?”

  Throat Tattoo allows his eyes to divert quickly towards his equally muscular friend inside the car, and then at the growing line of other cars behind the SUV. No one is making the slightest move to come to his assistance. No one beeps. No one moves. Everyone seems to be thinking the same thing: If a non-throat-tattooed man of Ove’s age without any hesitation steps up to a throat-tattooed man of the age of this Throat Tattoo and presses him up against a car in this manner, then it’s very likely not the throat-tattooed man one should be most worried about annoying.

  Ove’s eyes are black with anger. After a short moment of reflection, Throat Tattoo seems convinced by the argument that the old man unmistakably means business. The tip of his nose, almost unnoticeably, moves up and down.