A woman was dispatched to the hospital from one of the municipal authorities, where she bullishly explained that Sonja could be placed in “a service home for other people in her situation.” Something about how “the strain of everyday life” quite understandably could be “excessive” for Ove. She didn’t say it right out, but it was clear as crystal what she was driving at. She did not believe that Ove could see himself staying with his wife now. “Under present conditions,” she kept repeating, nodding discreetly at the bedside. She spoke to Ove as if Sonja were not even in the room.
Admittedly Ove opened the door this time, but she was ejected all the same.
“The only home we’re going to is our own! Where we LIVE!” Ove roared at her, and in pure frustration and anger he threw one of Sonja’s shoes out of the room.
Afterwards he had to go and ask the nurses, who’d almost been hit by it, if they knew where it had gone. Which of course made him even angrier. It was the first time since the accident that he heard Sonja laughing. As if it was pouring out of her, without the slightest possibility of stopping it, like she was being wrestled to the ground by her own giggling. She laughed and laughed and laughed until the vowels were rolling across the walls and floors, as if they meant to do away with the laws of time and space. It made Ove feel as if his chest was slowly rising out of the ruins of a collapsed house after an earthquake. It gave his heart space to beat again.
He went home and rebuilt the whole house, ripped out the old countertop and put in a new, lower one. Even managed to find a specially made stove. Reconstructed the doorframes and fitted ramps over all the thresholds. The day after Sonja was allowed to leave the hospital, she went back to her teacher training. In the spring she sat her examination. There was an advertisement in the newspaper for a teaching position in a school with the worst reputation in town, with the sort of class that no qualified teacher with all the parts of her brain correctly screwed together would voluntarily face. It was attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder before attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder had been invented. “There’s no hope for these boys and girls,” the headmaster soberly explained in the interview. “This is not education, this is storage.” Maybe Sonja understood how it felt to be described as such. The vacant position attracted only one applicant, and she got those boys and girls to read Shakespeare.
In the meantime Ove was so weighed down with anger that Sonja sometimes had to ask him to go outside so he didn’t demolish the furniture. It pained her infinitely to see his shoulders so loaded down with the will to destroy. Destroy that bus driver. The travel agency. The crash barrier of that highway. The wine producer. Everything and everyone. Punch and keep punching until every bastard had been obliterated. That was all he wanted to do. He put that anger in his shed. He put it in the garage. He spread it over the ground during his inspection rounds. But that wasn’t all. In the end he also started putting it in letters. He wrote to the Spanish government. To the Swedish authorities. To the police. To the court. But no one took responsibility. No one cared. They answered by reference to legal texts or other authorities. Made excuses. When the council refused to build a ramp at the stairs of the school where Sonja worked, Ove wrote letters and complaints for months. He wrote letters to newspapers. He tried to sue the council. He literally inundated them with the unfathomable vengefulness of a father who has been robbed.
But everywhere, sooner or later, he was stopped by men in white shirts with strict, smug expressions on their faces. And one couldn’t fight them. Not only did they have the state on their side, they were the state. The last complaint was rejected. The fighting was over because the white shirts had decided so. And Ove never forgave them that.
Sonja saw everything. She understood where he was hurting. So she let him be angry, let all that anger find its outlet somewhere, in some way. But on one of those early summer evenings in May that always come along bearing gentle promises about the summer ahead, she rolled up to him, the wheels leaving soft marks on the parquet floor. He was sitting at the kitchen table writing one of his letters, and she took his pen away from him, slipped her hand into his, and pressed her finger into his rough palm. Leaned her forehead tenderly against his chest.
“That’s enough now, Ove. No more letters. There’s no space for life with all these letters of yours.”
And she looked up, softly caressed his cheek, and smiled.
“It’s enough now, my darling Ove.”
And then it was enough.
The next morning Ove got up at dawn, drove the Saab to her school, and with his own bare hands built the disabled ramp the council was refusing to put up. And after that she came home every evening for as long as Ove could remember and told him, with fire in her eyes, about her boys and girls. The ones who arrived in the classroom with police escorts yet when they left could recite four-hundred-year-old poetry. The ones who could make her cry and laugh and sing until her voice was bouncing off the ceilings of their little house. Ove could never make head nor tail of those impossible kids, but he was not beyond liking them for what they did to Sonja.
Every human being needs to know what she’s fighting for. That was what they said. And she fought for what was good. For the children she never had. And Ove fought for her.
Because that was the only thing in this world he really knew.
24
A MAN CALLED OVE AND A BRAT WHO DRAWS IN COLOR
The Saab is so full of people when Ove drives away from the hospital that he keeps checking the fuel gauge, as if he’s afraid that it’s going to break into a scornful dance. In his rearview mirror he sees Parvaneh unconcernedly giving the three-year-old paper and color crayons.
“Does she have to do that in the car?” barks Ove.
“Would you rather have her restless, so she starts wondering how to pull the upholstery off of the seats?” Parvaneh says calmly.
Ove doesn’t answer. Just looks at the three-year-old in his mirror. She’s shaking a big purple crayon at the cat in Parvaneh’s lap and yelling: “DROORING!” The cat observes the child with great caution, clearly reluctant to make itself available as a decorative surface.
Patrick sits between them, turning and twisting his body to try to find a comfortable position for his leg cast, which he’s wedged up on the armrest between the front seats.
It’s not easy, because he’s doing his best not to dislodge the newspapers that Ove has placed both on his seat and under the cast.
The three-year-old drops a color crayon, which rolls forward under the front passenger seat, where Jimmy is sitting. In what must surely be a move worthy of an Olympian acrobat for a man of his physique, Jimmy manages to bend forward and scoop up the crayon from the mat in front of him. He checks it out for a moment, grins, then turns to Patrick’s propped-up leg and draws a large, smiling man on the cast. The toddler shrieks with joy when she notices.
“So you’re going to start making a mess as well?” says Ove.
“Pretty neat, isn’t it?” Jimmy crows and looks as if he’s about to make a high-five at Ove.
Ove rolls his eyes.
“Sorry, man, couldn’t stop myself,” says Jimmy and, somewhat shamefaced, gives back the crayon to Parvaneh.
There’s a plinging sound in Jimmy’s pocket. He hauls out a cell phone as large as a full-grown man’s hand and occupies himself with frenetically tapping the display.
“Whose is the cat?” Patrick asks from the back.