The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden (14 page)

Oh well, the boy still seemed to function well for the most part, and despite his young age he seemed interested in politics, so there was probably nothing to worry about.

In the years that followed, the general craziness was put on the back burner to such an extent that Ingmar prioritized education in the home above fluttering around in public. When he did go out, though, he always took the children with him. One of them in particular needed extra supervision: the one who was originally called Holger Two showed signs early on of wavering in his faith. That didn’t seem to be the case for One.

It so happened that Holger One was the one who was registered – he was the one, for example, with a passport, while Two didn’t legally exist. It was as if he were a spare. The only thing Two seemed to have that One didn’t was a gift for studying. So it was always Holger Two who went to school when it was time for an exam, no matter whose turn it was according to the schedule. Except for one time when Two had a fever. He was called to the front to talk to his geography teacher a few days later, to explain how he had managed to place the Pyrenees in Norway.

Henrietta noticed Two’s relative misery, and through him she became more and more miserable herself. Could it really be the case that her beloved fool had no limits whatsoever?

‘Of course I have limits, dear Henrietta,’ said Ingmar. ‘I’ve actually been doing some thinking on that topic. I’m no longer certain that it’s possible to take over the whole country at once.’

‘Take over the whole country?’ said Henrietta.

‘At once,’ said Ingmar.

Sweden was, after all, an impressively oblong country. Ingmar had started to entertain the notion of converting the nation bit by bit, starting in the south and working his way up. He could have started at the other end, of course, but it was so damned cold up in the north. Who could transform the government when it was forty below zero?

What was even worse for Henrietta was that One didn’t seem to have any doubts at all. His eyes would just shine and shine. The crazier the things Ingmar said, the more his eyes shone. She decided she would not accept any more madness, otherwise she would go mad herself.

‘That’s it, you need to stay at home. Or else you’re out of here!’ she said to Ingmar.

Ingmar loved his Henrietta and respected her ultimatum. The boys’ schooling continued according to the every-other-day principle, as did the never-ending accounts of different presidents past and present. The madness remained and continued to torment Henrietta. But Ingmar’s various excursions ceased, up until the children neared graduation.

Then he had a relapse and took off to demonstrate outside the Royal Palace in Stockholm, for within its walls a crown prince had just been born.

With that, enough was enough. Henrietta called Holger and Holger over and asked them to sit down in the kitchen with her.

‘Now I’m going to tell you everything, my dear children,’ she said.

And so she did.

Her story ended up being twenty cigarettes long, starting with the very first time she and Ingmar met in Södertälje District Court in 1943.

She avoided a value judgement of their father’s life work; she just described what had happened up to that point – including how he mixed up the newborns so it was impossible to say which of them had come first.

‘It’s possible that you’re Two, One, but I don’t know – no one knows,’ said Henrietta.

She thought that the story spoke for itself and that her sons would come to the correct conclusions when she was finished.

She was precisely half right.

The two Holgers listened. To one of them, it sounded like a heroic tale, a description of a man who was driven by a passion – someone who fought tirelessly against a constant headwind. To the other, it seemed to be the opposite: the story of a portended death.

‘That’s all I had to say,’ Henrietta concluded. ‘It was important for me to have it said. Think about what I’ve told you; think about where you want life to take you – and then let’s talk about it again at breakfast tomorrow, okay?’

That night, Henrietta prayed to God, however much the daughter of a local Communist leader she was. She prayed that her two sons would forgive her, would forgive Ingmar. She prayed that her children would understand, that things could be set right, that they could start a normal life. She asked for God’s help in the task of going to the authorities and requesting citizenship for an eighteen-year-old newborn man. She prayed that everything would turn out okay.

‘Please, please, God,’ said Henrietta.

And she fell asleep.

The next morning, Ingmar was still gone. Henrietta felt tired as she made porridge for herself and the children. She was only fifty-nine years old, but she looked older.

Things were difficult for her, in every way. She felt anxious about everything. Now the children had heard her side of the story. All that remained was their judgement. And God’s.

Mother and sons sat down at the kitchen table again. Holger Two saw, felt and understood. Holger One didn’t see and didn’t understand. But he did feel. He felt that he wanted to console Henrietta.

‘Don’t worry, Mum,’ he said. ‘I promise never to give up! As long as I live and breathe I will keep fighting in Dad’s name.
As long as I live and breathe!
Do you hear me, Mum?’

Henrietta did hear. And what she heard was too much for her. Her heart broke. Because of sorrow. Because of guilt. Because of repressed dreams, visions and fantasies. Because almost nothing in her life had gone as she’d hoped. Because she had lived with anxiety for thirty-two years. And because one of her sons had just sworn that the madness would continue until the end of time.

But above all, because of 467,200 unfiltered John Silvers since the autumn of 1947.

Henrietta was a warrior. She loved her children. But when a heart breaks, that’s it. The massive heart attack took her life in just a few seconds.

* * *

Holger One never understood that he, along with Ingmar and the cigarettes, had killed his mother. Two considered telling him, but he didn’t think it would make anything better so he refrained. When he read the obituary in the Södertälje county paper, he realized for the first time just how much he really didn’t exist.

O
UR BELOVED WIFE

AND MOTHER

H
ENRIETTA
Q
VIST

HAS LEFT US

IN ENDLESS SORROW AND LOSS

S
ÖDERTÄLJE, THE FIFTEENTH OF
M
AY 1979

INGMAR

H
OLGER

–

Vive la République

CHAPTER 7

On a bomb that didn’t exist and an engineer who soon didn’t, either

Nombeko was back inside the twelve-thousand-volt fences and life went on. Her realization that, in practice, there was no outer limit to her sentence was still less bothersome to her than the fact that she hadn’t realized this from the start.

After bomb one, bombs two and three were built simultaneously and finished a few years later. After another twenty months, bombs four and five were ready, too.

These days the teams were completely separate; neither even knew that the other existed. The engineer alone was still the one who did the final inspection of each finished bomb. Since they were stored in one of the armoured storerooms within the engineer’s office, he was able to be alone for each inspection. Thus he could allow himself to be assisted by his cleaning woman without any raised eyebrows. Though the question was, who was assisting whom?

Again, an order for six three-megaton bombs in all had been agreed upon and budgeted. But the project’s top man, Engineer Engelbrecht van der Westhuizen, no longer had control over what went on, if he’d ever had it in the first place, because as a rule he was incredibly drunk by ten o’clock each morning. And his servant was too busy cleaning and reading on the sly in the library to be able to cover for him at all times. Furthermore, she never received a new scrubbing brush, so it took much longer to clean the floors.

As a result, as luck would have it, the double production continued after numbers four and five, which meant bombs six –
and seven
!

One atomic bomb too many had been produced by mistake. It was a bomb outside protocol.

A bomb that didn’t exist now existed.

When the engineer’s cleaning woman discovered this snafu, she informed her boss, who became just as concerned as he had reason to be. Bombs that didn’t exist ought to stay that way, otherwise problems might arise. The engineer couldn’t exactly start the dismantling process in secret, behind the backs of the president and the government. Anyway, he didn’t know how to. And he had no intention of revealing the miscalculation to the research team.

Nombeko consoled Engineer Westhuizen by saying that more bombs might be ordered in time, and that the one that didn’t exist could just continue to do so where no one would find it until it was allowed to exist.

‘I was just thinking the same thing,’ said the engineer, when what he had really been thinking was that the cleaning woman had grown up nicely and was really a looker.

So the bomb that didn’t exist was locked up in an empty storeroom next to its six fully existing sibling bombs. No one but the engineer himself had access to it. Except for whatshername, of course.

After more than a decade within the double fences of the research facility, Nombeko had read everything that was worth reading in Pelindaba’s limited library. And most of what wasn’t worth reading.

It didn’t help that she’d had time to grow into a real woman; she would soon be twenty-six. At the same time, as far as she knew, blacks and whites were still not allowed to mix, because God had decreed it so according to Genesis, according to the Reformed Church. Not that she’d found anyone interesting to mix with at the facility, but still. She did dream of a man, about what they could do together. Not least from certain perspectives. She had seen pictures of it, in literature that was of a negligibly higher quality than what the British peace-on-earth professor had produced in 1924.

Oh well, better to be without something that resembled love inside the fence at the research facility than to be without life itself outside that same fence. Otherwise she wouldn’t be close to anything but the worms in the earth she was buried in.

So Nombeko obeyed herself and continued not to remind the engineer that her seven years had already turned into eleven years. She stayed where she was.

For a little while longer.

* * *

The South African armed forces received ever-higher amounts of funding from an economy that couldn’t afford it. In the end, a fifth of the country’s hopelessly unbalanced budget was going to the military, all while the rest of the world came up with new embargoes. One of the most painful results for the soul of the South African people was that the country had to play cricket and rugby with itself, because no one else wanted to play with it.

But the country still managed to get on, because the trade embargo was far from global. And there were many who argued
against
increased sanctions. Prime Minister Thatcher in London and President Reagan in Washington expressed roughly the same opinion on this matter: that each new embargo ought to have the greatest effect on the poorest citizens. Or as Ulf Adelsohn, party leader of the Swedish Moderates, so elegantly put it, ‘If we boycott goods from South Africa, the poor Negroes down there will become unemployed.’

In reality, the shoe was pinching elsewhere. The thorny issue for Thatcher and Reagan (and Adelsohn, for that matter) wasn’t a dislike of apartheid; racism hadn’t been politically marketable for several decades. No, the problem was what would appear in its place. It wasn’t easy to choose between apartheid and Communism, for instance. Or rather: of course it was, not least for Reagan, who had already fought to make sure that no Communists would be let into Hollywood during his time as a union leader for the Screen Actors Guild. What would people think if he spent billions upon billions of dollars arms-racing Soviet Communism to death while simultaneously allowing a variant of the same to take over in South Africa? Plus, the South Africans had nuclear weapons now, those bastards, even if they denied it.

Among those who didn’t agree one bit with Thatcher’s and Reagan’s hemming and hawing when faced with apartheid politics was the Swedish prime minister, Olof Palme, and Libya’s guide through socialism, Muammar Gaddafi. Palme roared, ‘Apartheid cannot be reformed; apartheid must be eliminated!’ Soon after that he himself was eliminated by a confused man who didn’t fully comprehend where he was or why he did what he did. Or by the exact opposite of that man; the mystery was never quite solved.

Gaddafi, on the other hand, would remain in good health for many more years. He allowed tons of weapons to be shipped to the South African resistance movement ANC, and he spoke vociferously about the noble fight against the white regime of oppression in Pretoria, all while hiding mass murderer Idi Amin in his very own palace.

This was more or less the way things stood when the world showed once more how strange it can be when it wants to. In the United States, the Democrats and Republicans joined forces and threw in their lot with Palme and Gaddafi, simultaneously creating a congressional revolt against their president. Congress passed a law that forbade all forms of trade with South Africa, as well as all types of investments in it. It was no longer even possible to fly directly from Johannesburg to the United States; anyone who tried to do so could choose between turning back or being shot down.

Thatcher and other leaders in Europe and the rest of the world realized what was about to happen. No one wants to be on a losing team, of course; more and more countries got behind the United States, Sweden and Libya.

South Africa as the world knew it was starting to crack at the edges.