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

  “Coffee, then. Black.”

  Adrian scratches his hair under the cap.

  “So . . . espresso?”

  “No. Coffee.”

  Adrian transfers his scratching from hair to chin.

  “What . . . like black coffee?”

  “Yes.”

  “With milk?”

  “If it’s with milk it’s not black coffee.”

  Adrian moves a couple of sugar bowls on the counter. Mainly to have something to do, so he doesn’t look too silly. A bit late for that, thinks Ove.

  “Normal filter coffee. Normal bloody filter coffee,” Ove repeats.

  Adrian nods.

  “Oh, that. . . . Well. I don’t know how to make it.”

  Ove points aggressively at the percolator in the corner, only barely visible behind a gigantic silver spaceship of a machine, which, Ove understands, is what they use for making espresso.

  “Oh, that one, yeah,” says Adrian, as if the penny has just dropped. “Ah . . . I don’t really know how that thing works.”

  “Should have bloody known. . . .” mutters Ove as he walks around the counter and takes matters into his own hands.

  “Can someone tell me what we’re doing here?” calls Parvaneh.

  “This kid here has a bicycle that needs repairing,” explains Ove as he pours water into the carafe.

  “The bicycle hanging off the back of the car?”

  “You brought it here? Thanks, Ove!”

  “You don’t have a car, do you?” he replies, while rummaging around a cupboard for coffee filters.

  “Thanks, Ove!” says Adrian and takes a step towards him, then comes to his senses and stops before he does something silly.

  “So that’s your bicycle?” Parvaneh smiles.

  “Kind of—it’s my girlfriend’s. Or the one I want to be my girlfriend . . . sort of thing.”

  Parvaneh grins.

  “So me and Ove drove all this way just to give you a bike so you can mend it? For a girl?”

  Adrian nods. Parvaneh leans over the counter and pats Ove on the arm.

  “You know, Ove, sometimes one almost suspects you have a heart. . . .”

  “Do you have tools here or not?” Ove says to Adrian, snatching his arm away.

  Adrian nods.

  “Go and get them, then. The bike’s on the Saab in the parking lot.”

  Adrian nods quickly and disappears into the kitchen. After a minute or so he comes back with a big toolbox, which he quickly takes to the exit.

  “And you be quiet,” Ove says to Parvaneh.

  She smirks in a way that suggests she has no intention of keeping quiet.

  “I only brought the bicycle here so he wouldn’t mess about in the sheds back home. . . .” Ove adds.

  “Sure, sure,” says Parvaneh with a laugh.

  “Oh, hey,” says Adrian as the soot-eyed boy appears again a moment later. “This is my boss.”

  “Hi there—ah, what . . . sorry, what are you doing?” asks the “boss,” looking with some interest at the spry stranger who has barricaded himself behind the counter of his café.

  “The kid’s going to fix a bicycle,” answers Ove as if this were something plain and obvious. “Where do you keep the filters for real coffee?”

  The soot-eyed boy points at one of the shelves. Ove squints at him.

  “Is that makeup?”

  Parvaneh hushes him. Ove looks insulted.

  “What? What’s wrong with asking?”

  The boy smiles a little nervously.

  “Yes, it’s makeup.” He nods, rubbing himself around his eyes. “I went dancing last night,” he says, smiling gratefully as Parvaneh with the deftness of a fellow conspirator hauls out a wet-wipe from her handbag and offers it to him.

  Ove nods and goes back to his coffee-making.

  “And do you also have problems with bicycles and love and girls?” he asks absentmindedly.

  “No, no, not with bicycles anyway. And not with love either, I suppose. Well, not with girls, anyway.” He chuckles.

  Ove turns on the percolator and, once it begins to splutter, turns around and leans against the inside of the counter as if this is the most natural thing in the world in a café where one doesn’t work.

  “Bent, are you?”

  “OVE!” says Parvaneh and slaps him on the arm.

  Ove snatches back his arm and looks very offended.

  “What?!”

  “You don’t say . . . you don’t call it that,” Parvaneh says, clearly unwilling to pronounce the word again.

  “Queer?” Ove offers.

  Parvaneh tries to hit his arm again but Ove is too quick.

  “Don’t talk like that!” she orders him.

  Ove turns to the sooty boy, genuinely puzzled.

  “Can’t one say ‘bent’? What are you supposed to say nowadays?”

  “You say homosexual. Or an LGBT person,” Parvaneh interrupts before she can stop herself.

  “Ah, you can say what you want, it’s cool.” The boy smiles as he walks around the counter and puts on an apron.

  “Right, good. Good to be clear. One of those gays, then,” mumbles Ove. Parvaneh shakes her head apologetically; the boy just laughs. “Well then,” says Ove with a nod, and starts pouring himself a coffee while it’s still going through.

  Then he takes the cup and without another word goes outside and across the street to the parking area. The sooty boy doesn’t comment on his taking the cup outside. It would seem a little unnecessary, under the circumstances, when this man within five minutes of his arrival at the boy’s café has already appointed himself as barista and interrogated him about his sexual preferences.

  Adrian is standing by the Saab, looking as if he just got lost in a forest.

  “Is it going well?” asks Ove rhetorically, taking a sip of coffee and looking at the bicycle, which Adrian hasn’t even unhooked yet from the back of the car.

  “Nah . . . you know. Sort of. Well,” Adrian begins, compulsively scratching his chest.

  Ove observes him for half a minute or so. Takes another mouthful of his coffee. Nods irritably, like someone squeezing an avocado and finding it overly ripe. He forcefully presses his cup of coffee into the hands of the boy, and then steps forward to unhitch the bicycle. Turns it upside down and opens the toolbox the youth has brought from the café.

  “Didn’t your dad ever teach you how to fix a bike?” he says without looking at Adrian, while he hunches over the punctured tire.

  “My dad’s in the slammer,” Adrian replies almost inaudibly and scratches his shoulder, looking around as if he’d like to find a big black hole to sink into. Ove stops himself, looks up, and gives him an evaluating stare. The boy stares at the ground. Ove clears his throat.

  “It’s not so bloody difficult,” he mutters at long last and gestures at Adrian to sit on the ground.

  It takes them ten minutes to repair the puncture. Ove barks monosyllabic instructions; Adrian remains silent throughout. But he’s attentive and dextrous and in a certain sense does not make a complete fool of himself, Ove has to admit. Maybe he’s not quite as fumbling with his hands as he is with words. They wipe off the dirt with a rag from the trunk of the Saab, avoiding eye contact with each other.

  “I hope the lady’s worth it,” says Ove and closes the trunk.

  Now it’s Adrian’s turn to look nonplussed.

  When they go back into the café, there’s a short cube-shaped man in a stained shirt standing on a stepladder, tinkering with something that Ove suspects is a fan heater. The sooty boy stands below the stepladder with a selection of screwdrivers held aloft. He keeps mopping the remnants of makeup around his eyes, peering at the fat man on the ladder and looking a little on the nervous side. As if worried that he may be caught out. Parvaneh turns excitedly to Ove.

  “This is Amel! He owns the café!” she says in a suitably gushing manner. She points to the cubic man on the ladder.

  Amel doesn’t turn around, but he emits
a long sequence of hard consonants that, even though Ove does not understand them, he suspects to be various combinations of four-letter words and body parts.

  “What’s he saying?” asks Adrian.

  The sooty boy twists uncomfortably.

  “Ah . . . he . . . something about the fan heater being a bit of a fairy . . .”

  He looks over at Adrian, then quickly turns his face down.

  “What’s that?” asks Ove, wandering over to him.

  “He means it’s worthless, like a homo,” he says in such a low voice that only Ove catches his words.

  Parvaneh, on the other hand, is busy pointing at Amel with delight.

  “You can’t hear what he’s saying but you sort of know that almost all of it is swear words! He’s like a dubbed version of you, Ove!”

  Ove doesn’t look particularly delighted. Nor does Amel.

  He stops tinkering with the fan heater and points at Ove with the screwdriver.

  “The cat? Is that your cat?”

  “No,” says Ove.

  Not so much because he wants to point out that it isn’t his cat, but because he wants to clarify that it’s no one’s cat.

  “Cat out! No animals in café!” Amel slashes at the consonants so that they hop about like naughty children caught inside the sentence.

  Ove looks with interest at the fan heater above Amel’s head. Then at the cat on the bar stool. Then at the toolbox, which Adrian is still holding in his hand. Then at the fan heater again. And at Amel.

  “If I repair that for you, the cat stays.”

  He offers this more as a statement than a question. Amel seems to lose his self-possession for a few moments. By the time he ­regains it, in a way he could probably not explain afterwards, he has become the man holding the stepladder rather than the man standing on the stepladder. Ove digs about up there for a few minutes, climbs down, brushes the palm of his hand against his trouser leg, and hands the screwdriver and a little adjustable wrench to the sooty boy.

  “You fixed!” cries Amel suddenly as the fan heater splutters back to life.

  In an effusive manner, he grabs Ove’s shoulders.

  “Whiskey? You want? In my kitchen I have the whiskey!”

  Ove checks his watch. It’s quarter past two in the afternoon. He shakes his head while looking a little uncomfortable, partly about the whiskey and partly because of Amel, who is still holding on to him. The sooty boy disappears through the kitchen door behind the counter, still frenetically rubbing his eyes.

  Adrian catches up with Ove and the cat on their way back to the Saab.

  “Ove, mate, you won’t say anything about Mirsad being . . .”

  “Who?”

  “My boss,” says Adrian. “The one with the makeup.”

  “The bent person?” says Ove.

  Adrian nods.

  “I mean his dad . . . I mean Amel . . . he doesn’t know Mirsad is . . .”

  Adrian fumbles for the right word.

  “A bender?” Ove adds.

  Adrian nods. Ove shrugs. Parvaneh comes wagging along behind them, out of breath.

  “Where did you get to?” Ove asks her.

  “I gave my change to him,” says Parvaneh, with a nod at the man with the dirty beard by the house wall.

  “You know he’ll only spend it on schnapps,” Ove states.

  Parvaneh opens her eyes wide with something Ove strongly suspects to be sarcasm. “Really? Will he? And I was sooo hoping he would use it to pay off his student loans from his university education in particle physics!”

  Ove snorts and opens the Saab. Adrian stays where he is on the other side of the car.

  “Yes?” Ove wonders.

  “You won’t say anything about Mirsad, will you? Seriously?”

  “Why the hell would I say anything?” Ove points at him with exasperation. “You! You want to buy a French car. Don’t worry so much about others, you have enough problems of your own.”

  30

  A MAN CALLED OVE AND A SOCIETY WITHOUT HIM

  Ove brushes the snow off the gravestone. Digs determinedly into the frozen ground and carefully replenishes the flowers. He stands up, dusts himself off, and looks helplessly at her name, feeling ashamed of himself. He who always used to nag at her about being late. Now he stands here himself, apparently quite incapable of following her as he’d planned.

  “It’s just been bloody mayhem,” he mumbles to the stone.

  And then he’s silent again.

  He doesn’t know what happened to him after her funeral. The days and weeks floated together in such a way, and in such utter silence, that he could hardly describe what exactly he was doing. Before Parvaneh and that Patrick backed into his mailbox he could barely remember saying a word to another human being since Sonja died.

  Some evenings he forgets to eat. That’s never happened before, as far as he can remember. Not since he sat down with her on that train almost forty years ago. As long as Sonja was there they had their routines. Ove got up at quarter to six, made coffee, went off for his inspection. By half past six Sonja had showered and then they had breakfast and drank coffee. Sonja had eggs; Ove had bread. At five past seven, Ove carried her to the passenger seat of the Saab, stowed her wheelchair in the trunk, and gave her a lift to school. Then he drove to work. At quarter to ten they took coffee breaks separately. Sonja took milk in her coffee; Ove had it black. At twelve they had lunch. At quarter to three another coffee break. At quarter past five Ove picked up Sonja in the school courtyard, hoisted her into the passenger seat and the wheelchair into the trunk. By six o’clock they were at the kitchen table having their dinner, usually meat and ­potatoes and gravy. Ove’s favorite meal. Then she solved crosswords with her legs drawn up beneath her on the sofa while Ove pottered about in the toolshed and watched the news. At half past nine Ove carried her upstairs to the bedroom. She nagged him for years about moving into the empty downstairs guest room, but Ove refused. After a decade or so she realized that this was his way of showing her that he had no intention of giving up. That God and the universe and all the other things would not be allowed to win. That the swine could go to hell. So she stopped nagging.

  On Friday nights they sat up until half past ten watching television. On Saturdays they had a late breakfast, sometimes as late as eight. Then they went out to do their errands. The building supply store, furniture shop, and garden center. Sonja would buy potting soil and Ove liked to look at tools. They only had a small row house with a tiny outside space, yet there always seemed to be something to plant and something to build. On the way home they’d stop for ice cream. Sonja would have one with chocolate and Ove one with nuts. Once a year the shop raised the price by one krona per ice cream and then, as Sonja put it, Ove would “have a tantrum.” When they got back to the house she’d roll out the little terrace door onto the patio and Ove would help her out of the chair and gently put her on the ground so she could do some gardening in her beloved flower beds. In the meantime Ove would fetch a screwdriver and disappear into the house. That was the best thing about the house. It was never finished. There was always a screw somewhere for Ove to tighten.

  On Sundays they went to a café and drank coffee. Ove read the newspaper and Sonja talked. And then it was Monday.

  And one Monday she was no longer there.

  And Ove didn’t know exactly when he became so quiet. He’d always been taciturn, but this was something quite different. Maybe he had started talking more inside his own head. Maybe he was going insane (he did wonder sometimes). It was as if he didn’t want other people to talk to him, he was afraid that their chattering voices would drown out the memory of her voice.

  He lets his fingers run gently across the gravestone, as if running them through the long tassels of a very thick rug. He’s never understood young people who natter on about “finding themselves.” He used to hear that nonstop from all those thirty-year-olds at work. All they ever talked about was how they wanted more “leisure time,” as if that was
the only point of working: to get to the point when one didn’t have to do it. Sonja used to laugh at Ove and call him “the most inflexible man in the world.” Ove refused to take that as an insult. He thought there should be some order in things. There should be routines and one should be able to feel secure about them. He could not see how it could be a bad attribute.

  Sonja used to tell people about the time that Ove, in a moment of temporary mental dislocation in the middle of the 1980s, had been persuaded by her to get himself a red Saab, even though in all the years she’d known him he’d always driven a blue one. “They were the worst three years of Ove’s life,” Sonja tittered. Since then, Ove had never driven anything but a blue Saab. “Other wives get annoyed because their husbands don’t notice when they have their hair cut. When I have a haircut my husband is annoyed with me for days because I don’t look the same,” Sonja used to say.

  That’s what Ove misses most of all. Having things the same as usual.

  People need a function, he believes. And he has always been functional, no one can take that away from him.

  It’s thirteen years since Ove bought his blue Saab 9-5 station wagon. Not long after, the Yanks at General Motors bought up the last Swedish-held shares in the company. Ove closed the newspaper that morning with a long string of swear words that continued into a good part of the afternoon. He never bought a car again. He had no intention of placing his foot in an American car, unless his foot and the rest of his body had first been placed in a coffin, they should be bloody clear about that. Sonja had of course also read the article and she had certain objections to Ove’s exact version of events regarding the company’s nationality, but it made no difference. Ove had made up his mind and now he was fixed on it. He was going to drive his car until either he, or it, broke down. Either way, proper cars were not being made anymore, he’d decided. There was only a lot of electronics and crap inside them now. Like driving a computer. You couldn’t even take them apart without the manufacturers whining about “invalid warranties.” So it was just as well. Sonja said once that the car would break down with sorrow the day Ove was buried. And maybe that was true.