“He looked like that when he came,” he clarifies, a sudden defensive note in his voice. Then, with a nod at the cat and the gravestone:
“So it wasn’t me who broke him. He was already broken,” he adds to Sonja.
Both the gravestone and the cat wait in silence beside him. Ove stares at his shoes for a moment. Grunts. Sinks onto his knees in the snow and brushes a bit more snow off the stone. Carefully lays his hand on it.
“I miss you,” he whispers.
There’s a quick gleam in the corner of Ove’s eye. He feels something soft against his arm. It takes a few seconds before he realizes that the cat is gently resting its head in the palm of his hand.
20
A MAN CALLED OVE AND AN INTRUDER
For almost twenty minutes, Ove sits in the driver’s seat of the Saab with the garage door open. For the first five minutes the cat stares at him impatiently from the passenger seat. During the next five it begins to look properly worried. In the end it tries to open the door itself; when this fails, it promptly lies down on the seat and goes to sleep.
Ove glances at it as it rolls onto its side and starts snoring. He has to concede that the Cat Annoyance has a very direct approach to problem-solving.
He looks out over the parking area again at the garage opposite. He must have stood out there with Rune a hundred times. They were friends once. Ove can’t think of very many people in his life he could describe as such. Ove and Ove’s wife were the first people to move into this street of row houses all those years ago, when it had only recently been built and was still surrounded by trees. That same day, Rune and Rune’s wife moved in. Anita was also pregnant and, of course, immediately became best friends with Ove’s wife in that way only women knew how. And just like all women who become best friends they both had the idea that Rune and Ove had to become best friends. Because they had so many “interests in common.” Ove couldn’t really understand what they meant by that. After all, Rune drove a Volvo.
Not that Ove exactly had anything against Rune apart from that. He had a proper job and he didn’t talk more than he had to. Admittedly he did drive that Volvo but, as Ove’s wife kept insisting, this did not necessarily make a person immoral. So Ove put up with him. After a period he even lent him tools. And one afternoon, standing in the parking area, thumbs tucked into their belts, they got caught up in a conversation about lawn mower prices. When they parted they shook hands. As if the mutual decision to become friends was a business agreement.
When the two men later found out that all sorts of people were moving into the area, they sat down in Ove and Sonja’s kitchen for consultations. By the time they emerged from these, they had established a shared framework of rules, signs clarifying what was permitted or not, and a newly setup steering group for the Residents’ Association. Ove was the chairman; Rune, the vice chairman.
In the months that followed they went to the dump together. Grumbled at people who had parked their cars incorrectly. Bargained for better deals on paint and drainpipes at the hardware store, stood on either side of the man from the telephone company when he came to install telephones and jacks, brusquely pointing out where and how he should best go about it. 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. That was all there was to it.
Sometimes the two couples had dinner together. Insofar as one could have dinner when Ove and Rune mostly just stood about in the parking area the whole evening, kicking the tires of their cars and comparing their load capacity, turning radius, and other significant matters. And that was all there was to it.
Sonja’s and Anita’s bellies kept growing steadily, which, according to Rune, made Anita “doolally in the brain.” Apparently he had to look for the coffeepot in the fridge more or less daily once she was in her third month. Sonja, not to be outdone, developed a temper that could flare up quicker than a pair of saloon doors in a John Wayne film, which made Ove reluctant to open his mouth at all. This, of course, gave further cause for irritation. When she wasn’t breaking out in a sweat she was freezing. And as soon as Ove tired of arguing with her and agreed to turn up the radiators by a half step she started sweating again, and he had to run around and turn them back down again. She also ate bananas in such quantities that the people at the supermarket must have thought Ove had started a zoo.
“The hormones are on the warpath,” Rune said with an insightful nod during one of the nights when he and Ove sat in the outside space behind his house, while the women kept to Sonja and Ove’s kitchen, talking about whatever it is women talk about.
Rune told him that he had found Anita crying her eyes out by the radio the day before, for no other reason than that it “was a nice song.”
“A . . . nice song?” said Ove, perplexed.
“A nice song,” Rune answered.
The two men shook their heads in mutual disbelief and stared out into the darkness. Sat in silence.
“The grass needs cutting,” said Rune at last.
“I bought new blades for the mower.” Ove nodded.
“How much did you pay for them?”
And so their friendship went on.
In the evenings, Sonja played music for her belly, because she said it made the child move. Ove mostly just sat in his armchair on the other side of the room and pretended to be watching television while she was doing it. In his innermost thoughts he was worried about what it would be like once the child finally decided to come out. What if, for example, the kid disliked Ove because Ove wasn’t so fond of music?
It wasn’t that Ove was afraid. He just didn’t know how to prepare himself for fatherhood. He had asked for some sort of manual but Sonja had just laughed at him. Ove didn’t understand why. There were manuals for everything else.
He was doubtful about whether he’d be any good at being someone’s dad. He didn’t like children an awful lot. He hadn’t even been very good at being a child. Sonja thought he should talk to Rune about it because they were “in the same situation.” Ove couldn’t quite understand what she meant by that. Rune was not in fact going to be the father of Ove’s child, but of an altogether different one. At least Rune agreed with Ove about the point of not having much to discuss, and that was something. So when Anita came over in the evenings and sat in the kitchen with Sonja, talking about the aches and pains and all those things, Ove and Rune made the excuse of having “things” to talk about and went out to Ove’s shed and just stood there in silence, picking at various bits on Ove’s workbench.
Standing there next to each other behind a closed door for the third night running without knowing what they were supposed to do with themselves, they agreed that they needed to get busy with something before, as Rune put it, “the new neighbors start thinking there’s some sort of monkey business going on in here.”
Ove agreed that it might be best to do as he said. And so it was. They didn’t talk much while they were doing it, but they helped each other with the drawings and measuring the angles and ensuring that the corners were straight and properly done. And late one evening when Anita and Sonja were in the fourth month, two light blue cribs were installed in the prepared nurseries of their row houses.
“We can sand it down and repaint it pink if we get a girl,” mumbled Ove when he showed it to Sonja. Sonja put her arms around him, and he felt his neck getting all wet with her tears. Completely irrational hormones.
“I want you to ask me to be your wife,” she whispered.
And so it was. They married in the Town Hall, very simply. Neither of them had any family, so only Rune and Anita came. Sonja and Ove put on their rings and then all four of them went to a restaurant. Ove paid but Rune helped check the bill to make sure it “had been done properly.” Of course it hadn’t. So after conferring with the waiter for about an hour, the two men managed to convince him it would be easier for him if he halved the bill or they’d “report him.” Obviously it was a bit hazy exactly who would report whom for what, but eventually, with a certain amount of swearing and arm-waving, the waiter gave up and went into the kitchen and wrote them a new bill. In the meantime Rune and Ove nodded grimly at one another without noticing that their wives, as usual, had taken a taxi home twenty minutes earlier.