The light turns green. Parvaneh brings up the clutch, the Saab splutters, and the instrument panel goes black. Stressed, Parvaneh turns the key in the ignition, which only makes it grind in a heartrending manner. The engine makes a roar, coughs, and dies anew. The men with the shaved heads and tattooed throats sound the horn. One of them gestures.
“Press down the clutch and give it more gas,” says Ove.
“That’s what I’m doing!” she answers.
“That’s not what you’re doing.”
“Yes I am!”
“Now you’re shouting.”
“I’M NOT BLOODY SHOUTING!” she shouts.
The SUV blares its horn. Parvaneh presses down the clutch. The Saab rolls backwards a few inches and bumps into the front of the SUV. The Throat Tattoos are now hanging on the horn as if it’s an air raid alarm.
Parvaneh tugs despairingly at the key, only to be rewarded by yet another stall. Then suddenly she lets go of everything and hides her face in her hands.
“Good Go— are you crying now?” Ove asks in amazement.
“I’M NOT BLOODY CRYING!” she howls, her tears spattering over the dashboard.
Ove leans back and looks down at his knee. Fingers the end of the paper baton.
“It’s just such a strain, this, do you understand?” she sobs and leans her forehead against the wheel as if hoping it might be soft and fluffy. “I’m sort of PREGNANT! I’m just a bit STRESSED, can no one show a bit of understanding for a pregnant bloody woman who’s a bit STRESSED?!”
Ove twists uncomfortably in the passenger seat. She punches the steering wheel several times, mumbles something about how all she wants is to “drink some bloody lemonade,” flops her arms over the top of the steering wheel, buries her face in her sleeves, and starts crying again.
The SUV behind them honks until it sounds as if the Finland ferry is about to run them down. And then something in Ove snaps. He throws the door open, gets out of the car, walks slowly around the SUV, and rips the driver’s door open.
“Have you never been a student driver or what?”
The driver doesn’t have time to answer.
“You stupid little bastard!” Ove roars in the face of the shaven-headed young man with throat tattoos, his spittle cascading over their seats.
The Throat Tattoo doesn’t have time to answer and Ove doesn’t wait for him either. Instead he grabs the young man by his collar and pulls him up so hard that his body tumbles clumsily out of the car. He’s a muscular sort, easily weighing in at two hundred pounds, but Ove holds his collar in an immovable steel grip. Evidently, Throat Tattoo is so surprised by the strength in the old man’s grip that it doesn’t occur to him to put up any resistance. Fury burns in Ove’s eyes as he presses the probably thirty-five-years-younger man so hard against the side of the SUV that the bodywork creaks. He places the tip of his index finger in the middle of the shaved head and positions his eyes so close to Throat Tattoo’s face that they feel each other’s breath.
“If you sound that horn one more time, it’ll be the LAST thing you do on this earth. Got it?”
Throat Tattoo allows his eyes to divert quickly towards his equally muscular friend inside the car, and then at the growing line of other cars behind the SUV. No one is making the slightest move to come to his assistance. No one beeps. No one moves. Everyone seems to be thinking the same thing: If a non-throat-tattooed man of Ove’s age without any hesitation steps up to a throat-tattooed man of the age of this Throat Tattoo and presses him up against a car in this manner, then it’s very likely not the throat-tattooed man one should be most worried about annoying.
Ove’s eyes are black with anger. After a short moment of reflection, Throat Tattoo seems convinced by the argument that the old man unmistakably means business. The tip of his nose, almost unnoticeably, moves up and down.
Ove nods by way of confirmation and lets him back down on the ground. Then turns around, walks around the SUV, and gets back into the Saab. Parvaneh stares at him, with her mouth hanging open.
“Now, you listen to me,” says Ove calmly while he carefully closes the door. “You’ve given birth to two children and quite soon you’ll be squeezing out a third. You’ve come here from a land far away and most likely you fled war and persecution and all sorts of other nonsense. You’ve learned a new language and got yourself an education and you’re holding together a family of obvious incompetents. And I’ll be damned if I’ve seen you afraid of a single bloody thing in this world before now.”
Ove rivets his eyes into her. Parvaneh is still agape. Ove points imperiously at the pedals under her feet.
“I’m not asking for brain surgery. I’m asking you to drive a car. It’s got an accelerator, a brake, and a clutch. Some of the greatest twits in world history have sorted out how it works. And you will as well.”
And then he utters seven words, which Parvaneh will always remember as the loveliest compliment he’ll ever give her.
“Because you are not a complete twit.”
Parvaneh pushes a ringlet of hair out of her face, sticky with tears. Clumsily she once again grabs hold of the steering wheel with both hands. Ove nods, puts on his safety belt, and makes himself comfortable.
“Now, push the clutch down and do what I say.”
And that afternoon Parvaneh learns to drive.
28
A MAN WHO WAS OVE AND A MAN WHO WAS RUNE
Sonja used to say that Ove was “unforgiving.” For instance, he refused to go back to the local bakery eight years after they gave him the wrong change when he bought pastries once at the end of the 1990s. Ove called it “having firm principles.” They were never quite in agreement when it came to words and their meanings.
He knows that she is disappointed that he and Rune could not keep the peace. He knows that the animosity between him and Rune to some extent ruined the possibility of Sonja and Anita becoming the great friends they could have been. But when a conflict has been going on for long enough it can be impossible to sort out, for the simple reason that no one can remember how it first started. And Ove didn’t know how it first started.
He only knew how it ended.
A BMW. There must have been some people who understood it and some who didn’t. There were probably people who thought there was no connection between cars and emotions. But there would never be a clearer explanation as to why these two men had become enemies for life.
Of course, it had started innocently enough, not long after Ove and Sonja came back from Spain and the accident. Ove laid new paving stones in their little garden that summer, whereupon Rune put up a new fence around his. Whereupon Ove put up an even higher fence around his garden, whereupon Rune went off to the building supply store and a few days later started boasting all over the street that he had “built a swimming pool.” That was no bloody swimming pool, Ove raged to Sonja. It was a little splash pool for Rune and Anita’s newborn urchin, that was all it was. For a while Ove had plans to report it to the Planning Department as an illegal construction, but at that point Sonja put her foot down and sent him out to “mow the lawn” and calm himself down. And so Ove did just that, although it certainly did not calm him down very much at all.
The lawn was oblong, about five yards wide, and ran along the backs of Ove’s and Rune’s houses and the house in between, which Sonja and Anita had quickly named “the neutral zone.” No one quite knew what that lawn was for or what function it was expected to fill, but when row housing was put up in those days, some city architect must have got the idea that there had to be lawns here and there, for no other reason than that they looked so very nice in the drawings. When Ove and Rune formed the Residents’ Association and were still friends, the two men decided that Ove should be the “grounds man” and responsible for keeping the grass mowed. It had always been Ove before. On one occasion the other neighbors had proposed that the association should put out tables and benches on the lawn to create a sort of “common space for all the neighbors,” but obviously Ove and Rune put a stop to that at once. It would only turn into a bloody mess and lots of noise.