“Hello,” he says, stretching, shifting his body weight back to the first foot.
“Hello, Dad,” mumbles Mirsad.
That evening Ove has his dinner with Parvaneh and Patrick, while a father and son talk about disappointments and hopes and masculinity in two languages in Ove’s kitchen. Maybe most of all they speak of courage. Sonja would have liked it, Ove knows that much. But he tries not to smile so much that Parvaneh notices.
Before the seven-year-old goes to bed she presses a paper into Ove’s hand, on which is written “Birthday Party Invitation.” Ove reads through it as if it were a legal transfer of rights for a leasehold agreement.
“I see. And then you’ll be wanting presents, I expect?” he huffs at last.
She looks down at the floor and shakes her head.
“You don’t have to buy anything. I only want one thing anyway.”
Ove folds up the invitation and puts it in the back pocket of his trousers. Then, with a degree of authority, presses the palms of his hands against his sides.
“Right?”
“Mum says it’s too expensive anyway so it doesn’t matter,” she says without looking up, and then shakes her head again.
Ove nods conspiratorially, like a criminal who has just made a sign to another criminal that the telephone they are using is wiretapped. He and the girl look around the hall to check that neither her mother nor her father have their nosy ears around some corner, surreptitiously listening to them. And then Ove leans forward and the girl forms her hands in a funnel round her face and whispers into his ear:
“An iPad.”
Ove looks a little as if she just said, “An awyttsczyckdront!”
“It’s a sort of computer. There are special drawing programs for it. For children,” she whispers a little louder.
And something is shining in her eyes.
Something that Ove recognizes.
38
A MAN CALLED OVE AND THE END OF A STORY
Broadly speaking there are two kinds of people. Those who understand how extremely useful white cables can be, and those who don’t. Jimmy is the first of these. He loves white cables. And white telephones. And white computer monitors with fruit on the back. That’s more or less the sum of what Ove has absorbed during the car journey into town, when Jimmy natters on excitedly about the sorts of things every rational person ought to be so insuperably interested in, until Ove at last sinks into a sort of deeply meditative state of mind, in which the overweight young man’s babbling turns to a dull hissing in his ears.
As soon as the young man thundered into the passenger seat of the Saab with a large sandwich in his hand, Ove obviously wished he hadn’t asked for Jimmy’s help with this. Things are not improved by Jimmy aimlessly shuffling off to “check a few leads” as soon as they enter the shop.
If you want something done you have to do it yourself, as usual, Ove confirms to himself as he steers his steps alone towards the sales assistant. And not until Ove roars, “Have you been frontally lobotomized or what?!” to the young man who’s trying to show him the shop’s range of portable computers does Jimmy come hurrying to his aid. And then it’s not Ove but rather the shop assistant who needs to be aided.
“We’re together.” Jimmy nods to the assistant with a glance that sort of functions as a secret handshake to communicate the message, “Don’t worry, I’m one of you!”
The sales assistant takes a long, frustrated breath and points at Ove.
“I’m trying to help him but—”
“You’re just trying to fob me off with a load of CRAP, that’s what you’re doing!” Ove yells back at him without letting him get to a full stop, and menacing him with something he spontaneously snatches off the nearest shelf.
Ove doesn’t quite know what it is, but it looks like a white electrical plug of some sort and it feels like the sort of thing he could throw very hard at the sales assistant if the need arises. The sales assistant looks at Jimmy with a sort of twitching around his eyes that Ove seems adept at generating in people with whom he comes into contact. This is so frequent that one could possibly name a syndrome after him.
“He didn’t mean any harm, man,” Jimmy tries to say pleasantly.
“I’m trying to show him a MacBook and he’s asking me what sort of car I drive,” the sales assistant bursts out, looking genuinely hurt.
“It’s a relevant question,” mutters Ove, with a firm nod at Jimmy.
“I don’t have a car! Because I think it’s unnecessary and I want to use more environmentally friendly modes of transportation!” says the sales assistant in a tone of voice pitched somewhere between intransigent anger and the fetal position.
Ove looks at Jimmy and throws out his arms, as if this should explain everything.
“You can’t reason with a person like that.” He nods and evidently expects immediate support. “Where the hell have you been, anyway?”
“I was just checking out the monitors over there, you know,” explains Jimmy.
“Are you buying a monitor?” asks Ove.
“No,” says Jimmy and looks at Ove as if it was a really strange question, more or less in the way that Sonja used to ask, “What’s that got to do with it?” when Ove asked her if she really “needed” another pair of shoes.
The sales assistant tries to turn around and steal away, but Ove quickly puts his leg forward to stop him.
“Where are you going? We’re not done here.”
The sales assistant looks deeply unhappy now. Jimmy pats him on the back, to encourage him.
“Ove here just wants to check out an iPad—can you sort us out?”
The sales assistant gives Ove a grim look.
Okay, but as I was trying to ask him earlier, what model do you want? The 16-, 32-, or 64-gigabyte?”
Ove looks at the sales assistant as if he feels the latter should stop regurgitating random combinations of letters.
“There are different versions with different amounts of memory,” Jimmy translates for Ove as if he were an interpreter for the Department of Immigration.
“And I suppose they want a hell of a lot of extra money for it,” Ove snorts back.
Jimmy nods his understanding of the situation and turns to the sales assistant.
“I think Ove wants to know a little more about the differences between the various models.”
The sales assistant groans.
“Well, do you want the normal or the 3G model, then?”
Jimmy turns to Ove.
“Will it be used mainly at home or will she use it outdoors as well?”
Ove pokes his flashlight finger into the air and points it dead straight at the sales assistant.
“Hey! I want her to have the BEST ONE! Understood?”
The sales assistant takes a nervous step back. Jimmy grins and opens his massive arms as if preparing himself for a big hug.
“Let’s say 3G, 128-gig, all the bells and whistles you’ve got. And can you throw in a cable?”
A few minutes later Ove snatches the plastic bag with the iPad box from the counter, mumbling something about “eightthousandtwohundredandninetyfivekronor and they don’t even throw in a keyboard!” followed by “thieves,” “bandits,” and various obscenities.
And so it turns out that the seven-year-old gets an iPad that evening from Ove. And a lead from Jimmy.
She stands in the hall just inside the door, not quite sure what to do with that information, and in the end she just nods and says, “Really nice . . . thanks.” Jimmy nods expansively.
“You got any snacks?”
She points to the living room, which is full of people. In the middle of the room is a birthday cake with eight lit candles, towards which the well-built young man immediately navigates. The girl, who is now an eight-year-old, stays in the hall, touching the iPad box with amazement. As if she hardly dares believe that she’s actually got it in her hands. Ove leans towards her.