...a bespectacled young doctor wearing plastic slippers who, in Ove's view, has the distinct appearance of someone with a stick up his ass, comes into the room and stands dozily by the bed. He looks down at a paper.
"Parr...nava...?" He broods, and gives Parvaneh a distracted look.
"Parvaneh," she corrects.
"You're listed here as the 'next of kin,'" he says, glancing briefly at this emphatically Iranian thirty-year-old woman on the chair, and this emphatically un-Iranian swede in the bed.
...neither of them makes the slightest effort to explain how this can be, other than Parvaneh giving Ove a little shove and sniggering, "Aaah, next of kin!" and Ove responding, "Shut it, will you!"
"Ove has a heart problem..." he begins in an anodyne voice, following this up with a series of terms that no human being with less than ten years medical training...could ever be expected to understand.
When Parvaneh gives him a look studded with a long line of question marks and exclamation marks, the doctor sighs again in that way young doctors with glasses and plastic slippers and a stick up their ass often do when confronted by people who do not even have the common decency to attend medical school before they come to the hospital.
"His heart is too big," the doctor states crassly.
Parvaneh stares blankly at him for a very long time. And then she looks at Ove in the bed...And then she looks at the doctor again...
and...she starts to laugh. First it's more like a cough, then as if she's holding back a sneeze, and before long it's a long, sustained, raucous bout of giggling. She holds on to the side of the bed, waves her hand in front of her face as if to fan herself into stopping, but it doesn't help. And then at last it turns into one loud, long-drawn belly laugh that bursts out of the room and makes the nurses in the corridor stick their heads through the door and ask in wonder, "What's going on in here?"
"You see what I have to put with?" Ove hisses wearily at the doctor, rolling his eyes...
The doctor looks as if there was never a seminar on how to deal with this...so in the end he clears his throat loudly and sort of brings his foot down with a quick stamping motion, in order to remind them of his authority, so to speak. It doesn't do much good, of course, but after many more attempts, Parvaneh gets herself into order enough to manage to say: "Ove's hear is too big; I think I'm going to die."
"It's me who's bloody dying!" Ove objects.
Parvaneh shakes her head and smiles warmly at the doctore.
"Was that all?"
The doctor closes his file with resignation.