“Why are you here in the first place?” Ove demanded of Parvaneh as he handed over the little bundle like a sack of potatoes.
“We’re taking the bus to the hospital to pick up Patrick and Jimmy,” she answered.
She saw the way Ove’s face twitched above his cheekbones when she said “bus.”
“We . . .” Parvaneh began, as if articulating the beginnings of a thought.
She looked at the garage door, then looked at Ove.
“I can’t hear what you’re saying! Talk louder!” yelled the garage door.
Ove immediately took two steps away from it. At once, Parvaneh smiled confidently at him. As if she had just worked out the solution to a crossword.
“Hey, Ove! How about this: if you give us a lift to the hospital, I’ll help you get rid of this journalist! Okay?”
Ove looked up. He didn’t look a bit convinced. Parvaneh threw out her arms.
“Or I’ll tell the journalist that I can tell a story or two about you, Ove,” she said, raising her eyebrows.
“Story? What story?” the garage door called out and started banging in an excitable manner.
Ove looked dejectedly at the garage door.
“This is blackmail,” he said desperately to Parvaneh.
Parvaneh nodded cheerfully.
“Ove ackatted de clauwn!” said the three-year-old and nodded in an initiated way at the cat, clearly because she felt that Ove’s aversion to the hospital needed further explanation to whoever was not there the last time they went.
The cat seemed not to know what this meant. But if the clown had been anywhere near as tiresome as this three-year-old, the cat didn’t take an entirely negative view of Ove hitting someone.
And so this is the reason why Ove is sitting here now. The cat looks personally let down by Ove for making it travel all the way in the backseat with the three-year-old. Ove adjusts the newspapers on the seats. He feels he’s been tricked. When Parvaneh said she’d “get rid of” the journalist, he didn’t have a very clear idea of exactly how she’d manage it. Obviously he didn’t have expectations of the woman being conjured away in a puff of smoke or knocked out with a spade or buried in the desert or anything of that kind.
In fact the only thing Parvaneh had done was to open the garage door, give that journalist her card, and say, “Call me and we’ll talk about Ove.” Was that really a way of getting rid of anyone? Ove doesn’t think, properly speaking, that it’s a way of getting rid of anyone at all.
But now it’s too late, of course. Now, damn it, he’s sitting here waiting outside the hospital for the third time in less than a week. Blackmail, that’s what it is.
Added to this, Ove has the cat’s resentful stares to contend with. Something in its eyes reminds him of the way Sonja used to look at him.
“They won’t be coming to take Rune away. They say they’re going to do it, but they’ll be busy with the process for many years,” says Ove to the cat.
Maybe he’s also saying it to Sonja. And maybe to himself. He doesn’t know.
“At least stop feeling so sorry for yourself. If it wasn’t for me you’d be living with the kid, and then you wouldn’t have much left of what you have now for a tail. Think about that!” He snorts at the cat, in an attempt to change the subject.
The cat rolls onto its side, away from Ove, and goes to sleep in protest. Ove looks out the window again. He knows very well that the three-year-old isn’t allergic at all. He knows very well that Parvaneh just lied to him so she wouldn’t have to take care of the Cat Annoyance.
He’s not some bloody senile old man.
23
A MAN WHO WAS OVE AND A BUS THAT NEVER GOT THERE
Every man needs to know what he’s fighting for.” That was apparently what people said. Or at least it was what Sonja had once read out aloud to Ove from one of her books. Ove couldn’t remember which one; there were always so many books around that woman. In Spain she had bought a whole bag of them, despite not even speaking Spanish. “I’ll learn while I’m reading,” she said. As if that was the way you did it. Ove told her he was a bit more about thinking for himself rather than reading what a lot of other clots had on their minds. Sonja just smiled and caressed his cheek.
Then he carried her absurdly oversize bags to the bus. Felt the driver smelling of wine as he went by, but concluded that maybe this was the way they did things in Spain and left it at that. Sat there in the seat as Sonja moved his hand to her belly and that was when he felt his child kicking, for the first and last time. He stood up and went to the bathroom and when he was halfway down the aisle the bus lurched, scraped against the central barrier, and then there was a moment of silence. As if time was taking a deep breath. Then: an explosion of splintering glass. The merciless screeching of twisting metal. Violent crunches as the cars behind the bus slammed into it.
And all the screams. He’d never forget them.
Ove was thrown about and only remembered falling on his stomach. He looked around for her, terrified, among the tumult of human bodies, but she was gone. He threw himself forward, cutting himself under a rain of glass from the ceiling, but it was as if a furious wild animal were holding him back and forcing him down on the floor in unreflecting humiliation. It would pursue him every night for the rest of his life: his utter impotence in the situation.
He sat by her bed every moment of the first week. Until the nurses insisted that he shower and change his clothes. Everywhere they looked at him with sympathetic stares and expressed their “condolences.” A doctor came in and spoke to Ove in an indifferent, clinical voice about the need to “prepare himself for the likelihood of her not waking up again.” Ove threw that doctor through a door. A door that was locked and shut. “She isn’t dead,” he raved down the corridor. “Stop behaving as if she was dead!” No one at the hospital dared make that mistake again.
On the tenth day, as the rain smattered against the windows and the radio spoke of the worst storm in several decades, Sonja opened her eyes in torturous little slits, caught sight of Ove, and stole her hand into his. Enfolded her finger in the palm of his hand.
Then she fell asleep and slept through the night. When she woke up again the nurses offered to tell her, but Ove grimly insisted that he was the one who would do it. Then he told her everything in a composed voice, while caressing her hands in his, as if they were very, very cold. He told her about the driver smelling of wine and the bus veering into the crash barrier and the collision. The smell of burned rubber. The earsplitting crashing sound.
And about a child that would never come now.
And she wept. An ancient, inconsolable despair that screamed and tore and shredded them both as countless hours passed. Time and sorrow and fury flowed together in stark, long-drawn darkness. Ove knew there and then that he would never forgive himself for having got up from his seat at that exact moment, for not being there to protect them. And knew that this pain was forever.
But Sonja would not have been Sonja if she had let the darkness win. So, one morning, Ove did not know how many days had passed since the accident, expressing herself quite succinctly, she declared that she wanted to start having physiotherapy. And when Ove looked at her as if it were his own spine screaming like a tortured animal every time she moved, she gently leaned her head against his chest and whispered: “We can busy ourselves with living or with dying, Ove. We have to move on.”
And that’s how it was.
In the following months, back in Sweden, Ove met innumerable men in white shirts. They sat behind desks made of light-colored wood in various municipal offices and they apparently had endless amounts of time to instruct Ove in what documents had to be filled in for various purposes, but no time at all to discuss the measures that were needed for Sonja to get better.