He came into his office on Monday and they said they hadn’t wanted to tell him on Friday as it would have “ruined his weekend.”

“It’ll be good for you to slow down a bit,” they’d drawled. Slow down? What did they know about waking up on a Tuesday and no longer having a purpose? With their Internets and their espresso coffees, what did they know about taking a bit of responsibility for things?

Ove looks up at the ceiling. Squints. It’s important for the hook to be centered, he decides.

And while he stands there immersed in the importance of it, he’s mercilessly interrupted by a long scraping sound. Not at all unlike the type of sound created by a big oaf backing up a Japanese car hooked up to a trailer and scraping it against the exterior wall of Ove’s house.

3

A MAN CALLED OVE BACKS UP WITH A TRAILER

Ove whips open the green floral curtains, which for many years Ove’s wife has been nagging him to change. He sees a short, black-haired, and obviously foreign woman aged about thirty. She stands there gesticulating furiously at a similarly aged oversize blond lanky man squeezed into the driver’s seat of a ludicrously small Japanese car with a trailer, now scraping against the exterior wall of Ove’s house.

The Lanky One, by means of subtle gestures and signs, seems to want to convey to the woman that this is not quite as easy as it looks. The woman, with gestures that are comparatively unsubtle, seems to want to convey that it might have something to do with the moronic nature of the Lanky One in question.

“Well, I’ll be bloody . . .” Ove thunders through the window as the wheel of the trailer rolls into his flowerbed. A few seconds later his front door seems to fly open of its own accord, as if afraid that Ove might otherwise walk straight through it.

“What the hell are you doing?” Ove roars at the woman.

“Yes, that’s what I’m asking myself!” she roars back.

Ove is momentarily thrown off-balance. He glares at her. She glares back.

“You can’t drive a car here! Can’t you read?”

The little foreign woman steps towards him and only then does Ove notice that she’s either very pregnant or suffering from what Ove would categorize as selective obesity.

“I’m not driving the car, am I?”

Ove stares silently at her for a few seconds. Then he turns to her husband, who’s just managed to extract himself from the Japanese car and is approaching them with two hands thrown expressively into the air and an apologetic smile plastered across his face. He’s wearing a knitted cardigan and his posture seems to indicate a very obvious calcium deficiency. He must be close to six and a half feet tall. Ove feels an instinctive skepticism towards all people taller than six feet; the blood can’t quite make it all the way up to the brain.