But there was a time for everything, she also said. Often. For example, when the doctors gave her the diagnosis four years ago. She found it easier to forgive than Ove did. Forgive God and the universe and everything. Ove got angry instead. Maybe because he felt someone had to be angry on her behalf, when everything that was evil seemed to assail the only person he’d ever met who didn’t deserve it.
So he fought the whole world. He fought with hospital personnel and he fought with specialists and chief physicians. He fought with men in white shirts and the council representatives who in the end grew so numerous that he could barely remember their names. There was an insurance policy for this, another insurance policy for that; there was one contact person because Sonja was ill and another because she was in a wheelchair. Then a third contact person so she did not have to go to work and a fourth contact person to try to persuade the bloody authorities that this was precisely what she wanted: to go to work.
And it was impossible to fight the men in white shirts. And one could not fight a diagnosis.
Sonja had cancer.
“We have to take it as it comes,” said Sonja. And that was what they did. She carried on working with her darling troublemakers for as long as she could, until Ove had to push her into the classroom every morning because she no longer had the strength to do it herself. After a year she was down to 75 percent of her full working week. After two years she was on 50 percent. After three years she was on 25 percent. When she finally had to go home she wrote a long personal letter to each of her students and exhorted them to call her if they ever needed anyone to talk to.
Almost everyone did call. They came to visit in long lines. One weekend there were so many of them in the row house that Ove had to go outside and sit in his toolshed for six hours. When the last of them had left that evening he went around the house carefully assuring himself that nothing had been stolen. As usual. Until Sonja called out to him not to forget to count the eggs in the fridge. Then he gave up. Carried her up the stairs while she laughed at him. He put her in the bed, and then, just before they went to sleep, she turned to him. Hid her finger in the palm of his hand. Burrowed her nose under his collarbone.
“God took a child from me, darling Ove. But he gave me a thousand others.”
In the fourth year she died.
Now he stands there running his hand over her gravestone. Again and again. As if he’s trying to rub her back to life.
“I’m really going to do it this time. I know you don’t like it. I don’t like it either,” he says in a low voice.
He takes a deep breath. As if he has to steel himself against her trying to convince him not to do it.
“See you tomorrow,” he says firmly and stamps the snow off his shoes, as if not wanting to give her a chance to protest.
Then he takes the little path down to the parking area, with the cat padding along beside him. Out through the black gates, around the Saab, which still has the learner plate stuck to the back door. He opens the passenger door. Parvaneh looks at him, her big brown eyes filled with empathy.
“I’ve been thinking about something,” she says carefully, as she puts the Saab into gear and pulls off.
“Don’t.”
But she can’t be stopped.
“I was just thinking that maybe I could help you clean out the house. Maybe put Sonja’s things in boxes and—”
She hardly has time to speak Sonja’s name before Ove’s face darkens, anger stiffening it into a mask.
“Not another word,” he roars, with a booming sound inside the car.
“But I was only thi—”
“Not another bloody WORD. Have you got it?!”
Parvaneh nods and goes silent. Shaking with anger, Ove stares out the window all the way home.
31
A MAN CALLED OVE BACKS UP A TRAILER. AGAIN.
The next morning, after letting the cat out, he fetched Sonja’s father’s old rifle from the attic. He’d decided that his dislike of weapons could never be greater than his dislike of all the empty places she has left behind in their silent little house. It was time now.
But it seems that someone, somewhere, knows the only way of stopping him is to put something in his way that makes him angry enough not to do it.
For this reason, he stands now in the little road between the houses, his arms defiantly crossed, looking at the man in the white shirt and saying:
“I am here because there was nothing good on the TV.”
The man in the white shirt has been observing him without the slightest hint of emotion through the entire conversation. In fact, whenever Ove has met him, he has been more like a machine than a person. Just like all the other white shirts Ove has run into in his life. The ones who said Sonja was going to die after the coach accident, the ones who refused to take responsibility afterwards and the ones who refused to hold others responsible. The ones who would not build an access ramp at the school. The ones who did not want to let her work. The ones who went through paragraphs of small print to root out some clause meaning they wouldn’t have to pay out any insurance money. The ones who wanted to put her in a home.
They had all had the same empty eyes. As if they were nothing but shiny shells walking around, grinding away at normal people and pulling their lives to pieces.
But when Ove says that thing about there being nothing good on TV, he sees a little twitch at the temple of the white shirt. A flash of frustration, perhaps. Amazed anger, possibly. Pure disdain, very likely. It’s the first time Ove has noticed that he’s managed to get under the skin of the white shirt. Of any white shirt at all.
The man snaps his jaws shut, turns around, and starts to walk away. Not with the measured, objective steps of a council employee in full control, but something else. With anger. Impatience. Vengefully.
Ove can’t remember anything having made him feel so good in a long, long time.
Of course, he was supposed to have died today. He had been planning to calmly and peacefully shoot himself in the head just after breakfast. He’d tidied the kitchen and let the cat out and made himself comfortable in his favorite armchair. He’d planned it this way because the cat routinely asked to be let out at this time. One of the few traits of the cat that Ove was highly appreciative of was its reluctance to crap in other people’s homes. Ove was a man of the same ilk.
But then of course Parvaneh came banging on his door as if it were the last functioning toilet in the civilized world. As if that woman had nowhere to wee at home. Ove put the rifle away behind the radiator so she wouldn’t see it and start interfering. He opened the door and she more or less had to press her telephone into his hand by violent means before he accepted it.
“What is this?” Ove wanted to know, the telephone held between his index finger and his thumb, as if it smelled bad.
“It’s for you,” groaned Parvaneh, holding her stomach and mopping sweat from her forehead even though it was below freezing outside. “That journalist.”