Jimmy clucks gratefully when Ove comes out of the kitchen and hands him a sausage sandwich. Ove parks himself a few yards away and looks a bit grim.
“So how is he, then?” he says with a curt nod at the cat in Jimmy’s arms.
Water is dripping liberally onto the floor now, but the animal is slowly but surely regaining both its shape and color.
“Seems better, no?” Jimmy grins as he wolfs down the sandwich in a single bite.
Ove gives him a skeptical look. Jimmy is perspiring like a bit of pork left on a sauna stove. There’s something mournful in his eyes when he looks back at Ove.
“You know it was . . . pretty bad with your wife, Ove. I always liked her. She made, like, the best chow in town.”
Ove looks at him, and for the first time all morning he doesn’t look a bit angry.
“Yes. She . . . cooked very well,” he agrees.
He goes over to the window and, with his back to the room, tugs at the latch as if to check it. Pokes the rubber seal.
Parvaneh stands in the kitchen doorway, wrapping her arms around herself and her belly.
“He can stay here until he’s completely defrosted, then you have to take him,” says Ove, shrugging towards the cat.
He can see in the corner of his eye how she’s peering at him. As if she’s trying to figure out what sort of hand he has from the other side of a casino table. It makes him uneasy.
“I’m afraid I can’t,” she says after that. “The girls are . . . allergic,” she adds.
Ove hears a little pause before she says “allergic.” He scrutinizes her suspiciously in the reflection in the window, but does not answer. Instead he turns to the overweight young man.
“So you’ll have to take care of it,” he says.
Jimmy, who’s not only sweating buckets now but also turning blotchy and red in his face, looks down benevolently at the cat. It’s slowly started moving its stump of a tail and burrowing its dripping nose deeper into Jimmy’s generous folds of upper-arm fat.
“Don’t think it’s such a cool idea me taking care of the puss, sorry, man,” says Jimmy and shrugs tremulously, so that the cat makes a circus tumble and ends up upside down. He holds out his arms. His skin is red, as if he’s on fire.
“I’m a bit allergic as well. . . .”
Parvaneh gives off a little scream, runs up to him, and takes the cat away from him, quickly enfolding it in the blanket again.
“We have to get Jimmy to a hospital!” she yells.
“I’m barred from the hospital,” Ove replies, without thinking.
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.
It flexes slightly. Ove looks up at Jimmy. Looks at the cat.
Surveys the wet floor. Shakes his head at Parvaneh.
“We’ll have to take my car then,” he mutters.
He takes his jacket from the hook and opens the front door. After a few seconds he sticks his head back into the hall. Glares at Parvaneh.
“But I’m not bringing the car to the house because it’s prohibit—”
She interrupts him with some words in Farsi which Ove can’t understand. Nonetheless he finds them unnecessarily dramatic. She wraps the cat more tightly in the blanket and walks past him into the snow.
“Rules are rules, you know,” says Ove truculently as she heads off to the parking area, but she doesn’t answer.
Ove turns around and points at Jimmy.
“And you put on a sweater. Or you’re not going anywhere in the Saab, let’s be clear about that.”
Parvaneh pays for the parking at the hospital. Ove doesn’t make a fuss about it.
18
A MAN WHO WAS OVE AND A CAT CALLED ERNEST
Ove didn’t dislike this cat in particular. It’s just that he didn’t much like cats in general. He’d always perceived them as untrustworthy. Especially when, as in the case of Ernest, they were as big as mopeds. It was actually quite difficult to determine whether he was just an unusually large cat or an outstandingly small lion. And you should never befriend something if there’s a possibility it may take a fancy to eating you in your sleep.
But Sonja loved Ernest so unconditionally that Ove managed to keep this kind of perfectly sensible observation to himself. He knew better than to speak ill of what she loved; after all he understood very keenly how it was to receive her love when no one else could understand why he was worthy of it. So he and Ernest learned to get along reasonably well when they visited the cottage in the forest, apart from the fact that Ernest bit Ove once when he sat on his tail on one of the kitchen chairs. Or at least they learned to keep their distance. Just like Ove and Sonja’s father.
Even if Ove’s view was that this Cat Annoyance was not entitled to sit on one chair and spread his tail over another, he let it go. For Sonja’s sake.
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.
Two springs passed and two summers. And in the third year, one cool June night, Sonja’s father died. And Ove had never seen anyone cry like Sonja cried then. The first few days she hardly got out of bed. 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. The pastor from the village church came by and ran through the details of the burial.
“A good man,” stated the pastor succinctly and pointed at one of the photos of Sonja and her father on the living room wall. Ove nodded. Didn’t know what he was expected to say to that one. Then he went outside to see if anything on the truck needed fiddling with.
On the fourth day Sonja got out of bed and started cleaning the cottage with such frenetic energy that Ove kept out of her way, in the way that insightful folk avoid an oncoming tornado. He meandered about the farm, looking for things to do. He rebuilt the woodshed, which had collapsed in one of the winter storms. In the coming days he filled it with newly cut wood. Mowed the grass. Lopped overhanging branches from the surrounding forest. Late on the evening of the sixth day they called from the grocery store.
Everyone called it an accident, of course. But no one who had met Ernest could believe that he had run out in front of a car by accident. Sorrow does strange things to living creatures. Ove drove faster than he had ever driven on the roads that night. Sonja held Ernest’s big head in her hands all the way. He was still breathing when they made it to the vet, but his injuries were far too serious, the loss of blood too great.
After two hours crouching at his side in the operating room, Sonja kissed the cat’s wide brow and whispered, “Good-bye, darling Ernest.” And then, as if the words were coming out of her mouth wrapped in whisks of cloud: “And good-bye to you, my darling father.”
And then the cat closed his eyes and died.
When Sonja came out of the waiting room she rested her forehead heavily against Ove’s broad chest.
“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.