But then he looks at the cat. And he turns off the engine.
The next morning they get up at quarter to six. Drink coffee and eat tuna fish respectively. When they’ve finished their inspection round, Ove carefully shovels snow outside his house. When he’s done with that he stands outside his shed, leaning on his snow shovel, looking at the line of row houses.
Then he crosses the road and starts clearing snow in front of the other houses.
25
A MAN CALLED OVE AND A PIECE OF CORRUGATED IRON
Ove waits till after breakfast, once he’s let the cat out. Only then does he take down a plastic bottle from the top shelf in the bathroom. He weighs it in his hand as if he’s about to throw it somewhere, rattles it lightly to see if many pills are left.
Towards the end the doctors prescribed so many painkillers for Sonja. Their bathroom still looks like a storage facility for the Colombian mafia. Ove obviously doesn’t trust medicine, has always been convinced its only real effects are psychological and, as a result, it only works on people with feeble brains.
But it’s only just struck him that chemicals are not at all an unusual way of taking one’s life.
He hears something outside the front door—the cat is back surprisingly quickly, scraping its paws by the threshold and sounding like it’s been caught in a steel trap. As if it knows what’s going through Ove’s mind. Ove can understand that it’s disappointed in him. He can’t possibly expect it to understand his actions.
He thinks about how it would feel, doing it this way. He has never taken any narcotics. Has hardly even been affected by alcohol. Has never liked the feeling of losing control. He’s come to realize over the years that it’s this very feeling that normal folk like and strive for, but as far as Ove is concerned only a complete bloody airhead could find loss of control a state worth aiming for. He wonders if he’ll feel nauseated, if he’ll feel pain when his body’s organs give up and stop functioning. Or will he just go to sleep when his body becomes unfit for use?
By now, the cat is howling out there in the snow. Ove closes his eyes and thinks of Sonja. It’s not that he’s the sort of man who gives up and dies; he doesn’t want her to think that. But it’s actually wrong, all this. She married him. And now he doesn’t quite know how to carry on without the tip of her nose in the pit between his throat and his shoulder. That’s all.
He unscrews the lid and distributes the pills along the edge of the washbasin. Watches them as if expecting them to transform into little murderous robots. Of course they don’t. Ove is unimpressed. He finds it quite inexplicable how those little white dots could do him any harm, regardless of how many of them he takes. The cat sounds as if it’s spitting snow all over Ove’s front door. But then it’s interrupted by another, quite different sound.
A dog barking.
Ove looks up. It’s quiet for a few seconds, and then he hears the cat yowling with pain. Then more barking. And Blond Weed roaring something.
Ove stands there gripping the washbasin. Closes his eyes as if he could blink the sound out. It doesn’t work. Then at last he sighs and straightens up. Unscrews the lid of the bottle, pushes the pills back into it. Goes down the stairs. As he crosses the living room he puts the jar on the windowsill. And through the window he sees Blond Weed in the road, taking aim and then rushing towards the cat.
Ove opens the door exactly as she’s about to kick the animal in the head with all her strength. The cat quickly dodges her needle-sharp heel and backs away towards Ove’s toolshed. Mutt growls hysterically, saliva flying around its head as if it were a rabies-infected beast. There’s fur in its jaws. This is the first time Ove can remember having seen Weed without her sunglasses. Malevolence glitters in her green eyes. She pulls back, preparing for another kick, then catches sight of Ove and stops herself midflow. Her lower lip is trembling with anger.
“I’ll have that thing shot!” she hisses and points at the cat.
Very slowly Ove shakes his head without taking his eyes off her. She swallows. Something about his expression, as if sculpted from a seam of rock, makes her murderous assurance falter.
“It’s a f-f-fucking street cat and . . . and it’s going to die! It scratched Prince!” she stammers.
Ove doesn’t say anything but his eyes turn black. And in the end even the dog backs away from him.
“Come on, Prince,” she says, disappearing around the corner as if Ove had physically shoved her from behind.
Ove stays where he is, breathing heavily. He presses his fist to his chest, feels the uncontrolled beating of his heart. He groans a little. Then he looks at the cat. The cat looks back at him. There’s a new wound down its flank. Blood in its fur again.
“Nine lives won’t last you very long, will they?” says Ove.
The cat licks its paw and looks as if it’s not the sort of cat that likes to keep count. Ove nods and steps aside.
“Get inside, then.”
The cat traipses in over the threshold. Ove closes the door.
He stands in the middle of the living room. Everywhere, Sonja looks back at him. Only now does it strike him that he’s positioned the photographs so they follow him through the house wherever he goes. She’s on the table in the kitchen, hangs on the wall in the hall and halfway up the stairs. She’s on the window shelf in the living room, where the cat has now jumped up and sits right beside her. It sends Ove a disgruntled look as it sweeps the pills onto the floor, with a crash. When Ove picks up the bottle, the cat looks at him in horror, as if about to shout, “J’accuse!”
Ove kicks a little at a baseboard, then turns around and goes into the kitchen to put the pill bottle in a cupboard. Then he makes coffee and pours water in a bowl for the cat.
They drink in silence.
Ove picks up the empty bowl and puts it next to his coffee cup in the sink. He stands with his hands on his hips for a good while. Then turns around and goes into the hall.
“Tag along, then,” he urges the cat without looking at it. “Let’s give that village cur something to think about.”
Ove puts on the navy winter jacket, steps into his clogs, and lets the cat walk out the door first. He looks at the photo of Sonja on the wall. She laughs back at him. Maybe it’s not so enormously important to die that it can’t wait another hour, thinks Ove, and follows the cat into the street.
He goes to Rune’s house, where it takes several minutes before the door opens. There’s a slow, dragging sound inside before anything happens with the lock, as if a ghost is approaching with heavy chains rattling behind it. Then, finally, it opens and Rune stands there looking at Ove and the cat with an empty stare.
“You got any corrugated iron?” wonders Ove, without allowing any time for small talk.
Rune gives him a concentrated stare for a second or two, as if his brain is fighting desperately to produce a memory.
“Corrugated iron?” he says to himself, as if tasting the word, like someone who’s just woken up and is intensely trying to remember what he’s been dreaming.
“Corrugated iron; that’s it,” says Ove with a nod.
Rune looks at him, or rather he looks straight through him. His eyes have the gleam of a newly waxed car hood. He’s emaciated and hunchbacked; his beard is gray, bordering on white. This used to be a solid bloke commanding a bit of respect, but now his clothes hang on his body in rags. He’s grown old: very, very old, Ove realizes, and it hits him with a force he hadn’t quite counted on. Rune’s gaze flickers for a moment. Then his mouth starts twitching.
“Ove?” he exclaims.