“Whose is it?” he wondered aloud as he straightened up and wiped the oil from his fingers with a rag.
“It belonged to a relative of mine,” said the director, digging out a key from his suit trousers and pressing it into his palm. “And now it’s yours.”
With a pat on his shoulder, the director returned to the office. Ove’s father stayed where he was in the courtyard, trying to catch his breath. That evening he had to explain everything over and over again to his goggle-eyed son and show all there was to know about this magical monster now parked in their garden. He sat in the driver’s seat half the night, with the boy on his lap, explaining how all the mechanical parts were connected. He could account for every screw, every little tube. Ove had never seen a man as proud as his father was that night. He was eight years old and decided that night he would never drive any car but a Saab.
Whenever he had a Saturday off, Ove’s father brought him out into the yard, opened the hood, and taught him all the names of the various parts and what they did. On Sundays they went to church. Not because either of them had any excessive zeal for God, but because Ove’s mum had always been insistent about it. They sat at the back, each of them staring at a patch on the floor until it was over. And, in all honesty, they spent more time missing Ove’s mum than thinking about God. It was her time, so to speak, even though she was no longer there. Afterwards they’d take a long drive in the countryside with the Saab. It was Ove’s favorite part of the week.
That year, to stop him rattling around the house on his own, he also started going with his father to work at the railway yard after school. It was filthy work and badly paid, but, as his father used to mutter, “It’s an honest job and that’s worth something.”
Ove liked all the men at the railway yard except Tom. Tom was a tall, noisy man with fists as big as flatbed carts and eyes that always seemed to be looking for some defenseless animal to kick around.
When Ove was nine years old, his dad sent him to help Tom clean out a broken-down railway car. With sudden jubilation, Tom snatched up a briefcase left by some harassed passenger. It had fallen from the luggage rack and distributed its contents over the floor. Before long Tom was darting about on all fours, scrabbling together everything he could see.
“Finders keepers,” he spat at Ove. Something in his eyes made Ove feel as if there were insects crawling under his skin.
As Ove turned to go, he stumbled over a wallet. It was made of such soft leather that it felt like cotton against his rough fingertips. And it didn’t have a rubber band around it like Dad’s old wallet, to keep it from falling to bits. It had a little silver button that made a click when you opened it. There was more than six thousand kronor inside. A fortune to anyone in those days.
Tom caught sight of it and tried to tear it out of Ove’s hands. Overwhelmed by an instinctive defiance, the boy resisted. He saw how shocked Tom was at this, and out of the corner of his eye he had time to see the huge man clenching his fist. Ove knew he’d never be able to get away, so he closed his eyes, held on to the wallet as hard as he could, and waited for the blow.
But the next thing either of them knew, Ove’s father was standing between them. Tom’s furious, hateful eyes met his for an instant, but Ove’s father stood where he stood. And at last Tom lowered his fist and took a watchful step back.
“Finders keepers, it’s always been like that,” he growled, pointing at the wallet.
“That’s up to the person who finds it,” said Ove’s father without looking away.
Tom’s eyes had turned black. But he retreated another step, still clutching the briefcase in his hands. Tom had worked many years at the railway, but Ove had never heard any of his father’s colleagues say one good word about Tom. He was dishonest and malicious, that was what they said after a couple of bottles of pilsner at their parties. But he’d never heard it from his dad. “Four children and a sick wife,” was all he used to say to his workmates, looking each of them in the eye. “Better men than Tom could have ended up worse for it.” And then his workmates usually changed the subject.
His father pointed to the wallet in Ove’s hand.
“You decide,” he said.
Ove determinedly fixed his gaze on the ground, feeling Tom’s eyes burning holes into the top of his head. Then he said in a low but unwavering voice that the lost property office would seem to be the best place to leave it. His father nodded without a word, and then took Ove’s hand as they walked back for almost half an hour along the track without a word passing between them. Ove heard Tom shouting behind them, his voice filled with cold fury. Ove never forgot it.
The woman at the desk of the lost property office could hardly believe her eyes when they put the wallet on the counter.
“And it was just lying there on the floor? You didn’t find a bag or anything?” she asked. Ove gave his dad a searching look, but he just stood there in silence, so Ove did the same.
The woman behind the counter seemed satisfied enough with the answer.
“Not many people have ever handed in this much money,” she said, smiling at Ove.
“Many people don’t have any decency either,” said his father in a clipped voice, and took Ove’s hand. They turned around and went back to work.
A few hundred yards down the track Ove cleared his throat, summoned some courage, and asked why his father had not mentioned the briefcase that Tom had found.
“We’re not the sort of people who tell tales about what others do,” he answered.
Ove nodded. They walked in silence.
“I thought about keeping the money,” Ove whispered at long last, and took his father’s hand in a firmer grip, as if he was afraid of letting go.
“I know,” said his father, and squeezed his hand a little harder.
“But I knew you would hand it in, and I knew a person like Tom wouldn’t,” said Ove.
His father nodded. And not another word was said about it.
Had Ove been the sort of man who contemplated how and when one became the sort of man one was, he might have said this was the day he learned that right has to be right. But he wasn’t one to dwell on things like that. He contented himself with remembering that on this day he’d decided to be as little unlike his father as possible.
He had only just turned sixteen when his father died. A hurtling carriage on the track. Ove was left with not much more than a Saab, a ramshackle house a few miles out of town, and a dented old wristwatch. He was never able to properly explain what happened to him that day. But he stopped being happy. He wasn’t happy for several years after that.
At the funeral, the vicar wanted to talk to him about foster homes, but he found out soon enough that Ove had not been brought up to accept charity. At the same time, Ove made it clear to the vicar that there was no need to reserve a place for him in the pews at Sunday service for the foreseeable future. Not because Ove did not believe in God, he explained to the vicar, but because in his view this God seemed to be a bit of a bloody swine.
The next day he went down to the wages office at the railway and handed back the wages for the rest of the month. The ladies at the office didn’t understand, so Ove had to impatiently explain that his father had died on the sixteenth, and obviously wouldn’t be able to come in and work for the remaining fourteen days of that month. And because he got his wages in advance, Ove had come to pay back the balance.