“The decision has been made. The investigation has been going on for two years. There’s nothing you can do, Ove. Nothing. At all.”
And then he hung up.
Ove looked at Parvaneh. Looked at Patrick. Slammed Parvaneh’s cell phone into their kitchen table and boomed that they needed a “New plan! Immediately!” Parvaneh looked deeply unhappy but Patrick nodded at once, grabbed his crutches, and hobbled quickly out the door. As if he’d just been waiting for Ove to say that. Five minutes later, to Ove’s deep dissatisfaction, he came back with that silly fop Anders from the neighboring house. With Jimmy cheerfully tagging along.
“What’s he doing here?” said Ove, pointing at the fop.
“I thought you needed a plan?” said Patrick, nodding at the fop and looking very pleased with himself.
“Anders is our plan!” Jimmy threw in.
Anders looked around the hall a little awkwardly, apparently slightly dissuaded by Ove’s expression. But Patrick and Jimmy insistently pushed him into the living room.
“Go on, tell him,” Patrick prompted.
“Tell me what?”
“Okay, so I heard you had some problems with the owner of that Škoda, yeah?” began Anders, giving Patrick a nervous glance. Ove nodded impatiently for him to continue.
“Well, I don’t think I’ve ever told you what sort of company I have, have I?” Anders went on tentatively.
Ove put his hands in his pockets. Adopted a slightly more relaxed position. And then Anders told him. And even Ove had to admit that it sounded almost more than decently opportune.
“Where are you keeping that blond bimbo—” he started saying once Anders had finished, but he stopped himself when Parvaneh kicked his leg. “Your girlfriend,” he corrected himself.
“Oh. We split up. She moved out,” said Anders and looked at his shoes.
Whereupon he had to explain that apparently she’d become a bit upset about Ove feuding so much with her and the dog. But her annoyance had been small beer compared to her agitation when Anders found out that Ove called her dog “Mutt” and had not quite been able to stop himself smiling about it.
And so it came to pass that when the chain-smoking man in the white shirt turned up on their road that afternoon accompanied by a police officer to demand that Ove release the white Škoda from its captivity, both the trailer and the white Škoda were already gone. Ove stood outside his house with his hands calmly tucked into his pockets, while his adversary finally lost his composure altogether and started roaring expletives at him. Ove maintained that he had no idea how this had happened, but pointed out in a friendly manner that none of this would have happened in the first place if he’d just respected the sign that made it clear that cars were prohibited in the area. He obviously left out the detail that Anders owned a car towing company, and that one of his tow trucks had picked up the Škoda at lunchtime and then placed it in a large gravel pit twenty-five miles outside town. And when the police officer tactfully asked if he had really not seen anything, Ove looked right into the eyes of the man in the white shirt and answered:
“I don’t know. I may have forgotten. You start losing your memory at my age.”
When the policeman looked around and then wondered why Ove was standing about here in the street if he had nothing to do with the disappearance of the Škoda, Ove just innocently shrugged his shoulders and peered at the man in the white shirt.
“There’s still nothing good on TV.”
Anger drained the man’s face of color until, if possible, his face was even whiter than his shirt. He stormed off, raging that this was “far from over.” And of course it wasn’t. Only an hour or so later, Anita opened the door to a courier, who gave her a certified letter from the council. Signed, confirmed, with the time and date of the “transfer into care.”
And now Ove stands by Sonja’s gravestone and manages to say something about how sorry he is.
“You get so damned worked up when I fight with people, I know that. But the reality of it is this. You’ll just have to wait a bit longer for me up there. I don’t have time to die right now.”
Then he digs up the old, frozen pink flowers out of the ground, plants the new ones, straightens up, folds up his deck chair, and walks towards the parking area while muttering something that sounds suspiciously like “because there’s a bloody war on.”
35
A MAN CALLED OVE AND SOCIAL INCOMPETENCE
When Parvaneh, with panic in her eyes, runs right into Ove’s hall and continues into the bathroom without even bothering to say “Good morning,” Ove immediately disputes how one can become so acutely in need of a pee in the space of the twenty seconds it takes her to walk from her own house to his. But “hell has no fury like a pregnant woman in need,” Sonja once informed him. So he keeps his mouth shut.
The neighbors are saying he’s been “like a different person” these last days, that they’ve never seen him so “engaged” before. But as Ove irritably explains to them, that’s only because Ove has never bloody engaged himself in their particular business before. He’s always been a bloody “engaged” person.
Patrick says the way he walks between the houses and slams the doors the whole time is like “a really angry avenging robot from the future.” Ove doesn’t know what he means by that. But, anyway, he’s spent hours at a time in the evenings sitting with Parvaneh and Patrick and the girls, while Patrick to the best of his abilities has tried to get Ove not to put angry fingerprints all over Patrick’s computer monitor whenever he wants to show them something. Jimmy, Mirsad, Adrian, and Anders have also been there. Jimmy has repeatedly tried to get everyone to call Parvaneh and Patrick’s kitchen “The Death Star” and Ove “Darth Ove.” They’ve considered countless plans over the last few days—including planting marijuana in the white-shirted man’s shed, as Rune might have suggested—but after a few nights Ove seems to give up. He nods grimly, demands to use the telephone, and shuffles off into the next room to make a call.
He didn’t like doing it. But when there’s a war on, there’s a war.
Parvaneh comes out of the bathroom.
“Are you done?” Ove wonders, as if he’s suspecting this to be some sort of halftime interval.
She nods, but just as they’re on their way out the door she notices something in his living room and stops. Ove is standing in the doorway but he knows very well what she’s staring at.
“It’s . . . Pah! What the hell, it’s nothing special,” he mumbles and tries to wave her out the door.
When she fails to move he gives the edge of the doorframe a hard kick.
“It was only gathering dust. I sanded it down and repainted it and applied another layer of lacquer, that’s all. It’s no big bloody deal,” he grumbles, irritated.
“Oh, Ove,” whispers Parvaneh.
Ove occupies himself checking the threshold with a couple of kicks.
“We can sand it down and repaint it pink. If it’s a girl, I mean,” he mutters.