Chapter 10 A Man Who Was Ove and a House That Ove Built
It was a time of change in the country. People moved and found new jobs and bought televisions, and the newspapers started talking about a “middle class.” Ove didn’t quite know what this was, but he was well aware that he was not a part of it.
The middle classes moved into new housing developments with straight walls and carefully trimmed lawns, and it soon grew clear to Ove that his parental home stood in the way of progress.
And if there was anything this middle class was not enamored of, it was whatever stood in the way of progress.
Ove received several letters from the council about what was called “the redrawing of municipal boundaries.” He didn’t quite understand the content of these letters, but he understood that his parental home did not fit among the new-built houses on the street.
The council notified him of their intention to force him to sell the land to them so the house could be demolished and another built in its place.
Ove wasn’t sure what it was that made him refuse. Maybe because he didn’t like the tone of that letter from the council. Or because the house was all he had left of his family.
Whatever the case, he parked his first very own car in the garden that evening and sat in the driver’s seat for several hours, gazing at the house.
It was, to be blunt, decrepit. His father’s specialty had been machines, not building, and Ove was not much better himself.
These days he used only the kitchen and the little room leading off it, while the entire second floor was slowly being turned into a recreational stamping ground for mice.
He watched the house from the car, as if hoping that it might start repairing itself if he waited patiently enough.
It lay exactly on the boundary between two municipal authorities, on a line on the map that would now be moved one way or the other.
It was the remnant of an extinguished little village at the edge of the forest, next to the shining residential development into which people wearing suits had now moved with their families.
The suits didn’t like the lonely youth in the house due for demolition at the end of the street.
The children were not allowed to play around Ove’s house.
Suits preferred to live in the vicinity of other suits, Ove had come to understand.
He had nothing against that, of course—but they were the ones who had moved into his neighborhood, not the other way around.
And so, filled with a kind of strange defiance that made Ove’s heart beat a little faster for the first time in years, he decided not to sell his house to the council. He decided to do the opposite. Repair it.
Of course, he had no idea of how to do it.
He didn’t know a dovetail joint from a pot of potatoes.
Realizing that his new working hours left him entirely free in the daytime, he went to a nearby construction site and applied for a job.
He imagined this must be the best possible place to learn about building and he didn’t need much sleep anyway.
The only thing they could offer him was a laboring job, said the foreman. Ove took it.
So he spent his nights picking up litter on the line heading south out of town; then, after three hours of sleep, he used what time remained to dart up and down the scaffolding, listening to the men in hard hats talking about construction techniques.
One day a week he was free, and then he dragged sacks of cement and wooden beams back and forth for eighteen hours at a stretch, perspiring and lonely, demolishing and rebuilding the only thing his parents had left him apart from the Saab and his father’s wristwatch.
Ove’s muscles grew and he was a fast learner.
The foreman at the building site took a liking to the hard-working youth, and one Friday afternoon took Ove to the pile of discarded planks, made-to-measure timber that had cracked and was due for burning.
“If I happen to look the other way and something you need goes walking, I’ll assume you’ve burned it,” said the foreman and walked off.
Once the rumors of his house-building had spread among his older colleagues, one or other of them occasionally asked Ove about it.
When he damaged the wall in the living room, a wiry colleague with wonky front teeth, after spending twenty minutes telling Ove what an idiot he was for not knowing better from the start, taught him how to calculate the load-bearing parameters.
When he laid the floor in the kitchen, a more heavy-built colleague with a missing little finger on one hand, after calling him a bonehead three dozen times, showed him how to take proper measurements.
One afternoon, as he was about to head home at the end of his shift, Ove found a little toolbox full of used tools by his clothes. It came with a note that simply read: “To the puppy.”
Slowly, the house took shape. Screw by screw and floorboard by floorboard. No one saw it, of course, but there was no need for anyone to see it. A job well done is a reward in its own right, as his father always used to say.
He kept out of the way of his neighbors as much as he could. He knew they didn’t like him and he saw no reason to give them further ammunition. The only exception was an elderly man and his wife who lived next door to Ove. This man was the only one on their whole street who did not wear a tie.
Ove had religiously fed the birds every other day since his father died.
He only forgot to do it one morning. When the following morning he came out to compensate for his omission, he almost collided headfirst into the older man by the fence under the bird-table.
His neighbor gave him an insulted glance; he had birdseed in his hands.
They did not say anything to one another.
Ove merely nodded and the older man gave him a little nod back.
Ove went back into his house and from that time on made sure he kept to his own days.
They never spoke to one another. But one morning when the older man stepped onto his front step, Ove was painting his fence.
And when he was done with that, he also painted the other side of the fence.
The older man didn’t say anything about it, but when Ove went past his kitchen window in the evening they nodded at one another.
And the next day there was a home-baked apple pie on Ove’s front step.
Ove had not eaten homemade apple pie since his mother died.
Ove received more letters from the council.
They became increasingly threatening in their tone and displeased that he still hadn’t contacted them about the sale of his property.
In the end he started throwing the letters away without even opening them.
If they wanted his father’s house they could come here and try to take it, the same way Tom had tried to take that wallet from him all those years ago.
A few mornings later Ove walked past the neighbor’s house and saw the elderly man feeding the birds in the company of a little boy.
A grandchild of his, Ove realized. He watched them surreptitiously through the bedroom window.
The way the older man and the boy spoke in low voices with each other, as if they were sharing some great secret. It reminded him of something.
That night he had his supper in the Saab.
A few weeks later, Ove drove home the last nail in his house, and when the sun rose over the horizon he stood in the garden with his hands shoved into the pockets of his navy trousers, proudly surveying his work.
He’d discovered that he liked houses. Maybe mostly because they were understandable.
They could be calculated and drawn on paper.
They did not leak if they were made watertight; they did not collapse if they were properly supported.
Houses were fair, they gave you what you deserved.
Which, unfortunately, was more than one could say about people.
And so the days went by. Ove went to work and came home and had sausages and spuds.
He never felt alone despite his lack of company.
Then one Sunday, as Ove was moving some planks, a jovial man with a round face and an ill-fitting suit turned up at his gate.
The sweat ran from his forehead and he asked Ove if there might be a glass of water of the cold variety going spare.
Ove saw no reason to deny him this, and while the man drank it by his gate, some small talk passed between them.
Or rather, it was mostly the man with the round face who did the talking.
It turned out that he was very interested in houses.
Apparently he was in the midst of doing up his own house in another part of town.
And somehow the man with the round face managed to invite himself into Ove’s kitchen for a cup of coffee.
Obviously, Ove was not used to this kind of pushy behavior, but after an hour-long conversation about house-building, he was prepared to admit to himself that it wasn’t so unpleasant having a bit of company in the kitchen for a change.
Just before the man left he asked in passing about Ove’s house insurance. Ove answered candidly that he’d never given it much thought. His father had not been very interested in insurance policies.
The jovial man with the round face was filled with consternation, and he explained to Ove that it would be a veritable catastrophe for him if something happened to the house.
After listening carefully to his many admonishments, Ove felt bound to agree with him.
He had never given much thought to it until then. Which made him feel rather stupid now.