The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden (34 page)

In order to deal with this, she put Gertrud behind the wheel for a trip to the city of Västerås and Pontus Widén Machinery Inc. She let the old woman do the talking with the seller.

‘Hello there, I’m Gertrud Virtanen from Norrtälje, and I have a potato patch to potter around in. I pick and sell them as best I can.’

‘I see,’ said the salesman, wondering what he could possibly have to do with this old lady Virtanen’s potato patch. None of his machines cost less than 800,000 kronor.

‘It seems that you sell potato machinery of all sorts here. Is that right?’ said Gertrud.

The salesman felt that this might turn into an unnecessarily long conversation; it was best to nip it in the bud as soon as possible.

‘Yes, I have de-stoners; four-, six- and eight-row planters; four-row mounders; and one- and two-row harvesters. You would receive a special price if you were to purchase all of them for your potato patch, ma’am.’

‘A special price? How nice. How much would that be?’

‘Four point nine million,’ the salesman said nastily.

Gertrud counted on her fingers as the salesman lost patience.

‘Now listen here, Mrs Virtanen, I really don’t have time to—’

‘I’ll take two of each,’ said Gertrud. ‘When can they be delivered?’

* * *

Both a lot and not much at all happened during the following six years. Out in the world, Pakistan joined the exclusive club of nuclear nations, because it needed protection from neighbouring India, which had joined the club twenty-four years earlier as protection against Pakistan. The relationship between the two countries was just what one would expect.

Things were calmer in the nuclear nation of Sweden.

One and Celestine were satisfied with being dissatisfied. Every week they put in great effort for the proper cause. No demonstrations, but plenty of things in secret. They sprayed anarchist slogans on as many public-toilet doors as they could; they surreptitiously put up flyers at institutions and museums. Their main political message was that politics were shit, but Holger also made sure that the king got his share.

Along with their political anti-involvement, Holger and Celestine carried out their chores on the potato farm with a certain amount of competence. Thus they drew a limited income, and they did need money. Markers, spray bottles and flyers were not free.

Nombeko tried to keep an eye on the two loons, but she was careful not to worry Two. Even without her help, he was a clever, industrious and happy student. Seeing Holger so content made her feel the same way.

It was also interesting to watch Gertrud liven up after what one could say had essentially been a life lost. She had, after all, got pregnant at eighteen, thanks to her first and last encounter with a pig and his lukewarm spiked Loranga. A single mother, even more solitary after her own mother died of cancer and after her father, Tapio, got his fingers caught in Norrtälje’s first cashpoint one winter night in 1971 and wasn’t found until the next day, long after he had frozen to death.

Potato farmer, mother and grandmother. She had seen absolutely nothing of the world. But she had allowed herself to dream of how things might have been, if only her own grandmother, the noble Anastasia Arapova, hadn’t been so unchristian as to send Tapio to Helsinki so that she could devote her life to God.

But that was all gone. Nombeko understood why Gertrud was careful not to look too closely into her father’s history. The risk was, of course, that there would be nothing left. Except for the potato farm.

In any case, the return of her grandchild and the presence of Nombeko had awakened something in the old woman. She was sometimes radiant during their dinners together, which she made herself for the most part. She would cut a chicken’s head off and make herself a casserole. Or she would set out nets to make baked pike with horseradish. Once she even shot a pheasant in the garden with her father Tapio’s moose-hunting rifle, and was surprised when the rifle worked. And that she hit the target. It worked so well, in fact, that all that was left of the pheasant was a few stray feathers.

The world went on revolving around its sun at the constant speed and with the inconstant temper it always had. Nombeko read about big things and small, small things and big. And she felt a certain amount of intellectual stimulation as she delivered the news every evening at dinner. Among the events that occurred over the years was that Boris Yeltsin announced his retirement. In Sweden, the Russian president had become most famous for the state visit on which he was so blotto that he demanded that the country, which had no coal power plants, must close all its coal power plants.

An exciting follow-up to this event was the many ups and downs when the most developed country in the world made such a mess of its own presidential election that it took several weeks for the Supreme Court to decide 5–4 that the candidate with the most votes had lost. With this, George W. Bush became the president of the United States, while Al Gore was reduced to an environmental agitator to whom not even the anarchists in Stockholm paid much attention. Incidentally, Bush later invaded Iraq in order to eliminate all the weapons Saddam Hussein didn’t have.

Among the more marginal news items was the one about how a former bodybuilder from Austria became the governor of California. Nombeko felt a twinge in her heart when she saw a picture of him in the paper, standing there with his wife and four children, smiling into the camera with white teeth. She thought that it must be an unjust world when certain people received an excess of certain things, while others got nothing. And she didn’t even know, then, that the governor in question had managed to procure a fifth child in collaboration with his own housekeeper.

All in all, it was still a hopeful and relatively happy time at Sjölida, while the rest of the world behaved as it always had.

And while the bomb sat where it was.

* * *

In the spring of 2004, life looked brighter than it had at perhaps any time before. Holger had almost attained his goal in political science, while at the same time he was about to complete a doctorate in economics. What had soon turned into an entire dissertation had started out as self-therapy in Two’s head. It was hard to bear the thought that, with the bomb, every single day he risked being partly responsible for the destruction of half a region and an entire nation. To deal with this, he had started to look at another side of the issue, and had realized that, from a strictly economic perspective, Sweden and the world would rise from the ashes. Thus the dissertation
The Atom Bomb as Growth Factor: Dynamic Benefits of a Nuclear Catastrophe
.

The obvious disadvantages had kept Holger Two awake at night; they, too, had been researched to death several times over. Even a nuclear squabble limited to India and Pakistan would, according to the experts, kill twenty million people, before the total number of kilotons even surpassed what Two and Nombeko happened to have on hand. Computer models showed that, within a few weeks, so much smoke would have risen into the stratosphere that it would take ten years before the sun managed to penetrate it fully again. Not only above the two squabbling countries, but all over the world.

But this – according to Holger Two – was where market forces would triumph. Thanks to the 200,000 per cent increase in the incidence of thyroid cancer, unemployment would go down. Massive population shifts from sunny vacation paradises (which of course would no longer have any sun to offer) to large cities around the world would create increased wealth distribution. A large number of mature markets would become immature in a single blow, which would make markets dynamic. It was clear, for example, that the de facto Chinese monopoly on solar cells would become irrelevant.

Furthermore, by mutual effort, India and Pakistan could eliminate the entire runaway greenhouse effect. Deforestation and the use of fossil fuels could continue, with the benefit of neutralizing the two- or three-degree decrease in the Earth’s temperature that the nuclear war between the countries would otherwise have caused.

These thoughts kept Holger’s head above water. At the same time, Nombeko and Gertrud had made good headway on the potato business. They’d had good luck along the way – indeed – because the Russian crops had failed for several years in a row. And because one of Sweden’s most discussed (and, for that matter, most meaningless) celebrities had a new, slim figure thanks to the OP diet (Only Potatoes).

The response was immediate. The Swedes were eating potatoes like never before.

Countess Virtanen Inc., previously swimming in debt, was now nearly debt-free. Meanwhile, Holger Two was just a few weeks from a double degree and, thanks to his excellent achievements as a student, was ready to start his journey towards a private meeting with the Swedish prime minister. Incidentally, there was a new one since last time. His name was Göran Persson now. He was just as unwilling as the others to answer the telephone.

In short: the eight-year plan was nearing completion. So far, everything had gone as it should. All signs indicated that it would continue to do so. The feeling that nothing could go wrong was very similar to what Ingmar Qvist had felt in his day, just before he went to Nice.

Only to be assaulted by Gustaf V.

* * *

On Thursday, 6 May 2004, the latest batch of five hundred flyers was ready to be picked up at the printer’s in Solna. Holger and Celestine thought they’d really done something special this time. The flyers had a picture of the king, and next to him was a picture of a wolf. The text underneath drew parallels between the Swedish wolf population and the various royal families of Europe. The inbreeding problems were said to be the same.

The solution in the first case might be to introduce Russian wolves. In the second case, thinning the herd was considered one alternative. Or across-the-board deportation to Russia. The authors went so far as to suggest an exchange: one Russian wolf per deported royal.

Celestine wanted to take One and fetch the flyers as soon as they received word from the printer in Solna, so that they could paper as many institutions as possible that very day. Holger One didn’t want to wait, either, but he said that Two had booked the car for this Thursday. This was an objection that Celestine waved away.

‘He doesn’t own the car any more than we do, does he? Come on, my love. We have a world to change.’

It so happened that Thursday, 6 May 2004, was also supposed to be the biggest day in Two’s life so far. His dissertation defence was scheduled for eleven o’clock.

When Holger, in suit and tie, went to get into the Blomgrens’ old Toyota just after nine in the morning – it was gone.

Two realized that his disaster of a brother had been up to mischief, surely under the guidance of Celestine. Since there was no mobile-phone coverage at Sjölida, he couldn’t immediately call them and order them to come back. Nor could he call a taxi, for that matter. It was at least a third of a mile to the country road where there was intermittent mobile-phone coverage, depending on its mood. There was no question of running there; he couldn’t arrive at his defence sweating through his suit. So he took the tractor.

At 9.25 he finally got hold of them. It was Celestine who answered.

‘Yes, hello?’

‘Did you take the car?’

‘Why? Is this Holger?’

‘Answer the damn question! I need it now! I have an important meeting in town at eleven.’

‘Oh, I see. So your meetings are more important than ours?’

‘That’s not what I said. But I had booked the car. Turn round right now, damn it. I’m in a hurry.’

‘God. Stop swearing so much.’

Two gathered his thoughts and tried a new tactic.

‘Dear, sweet Celestine. When we get a chance, let’s sit down and discuss the car issue. And who had booked it for today. But I beg you, turn round right now and pick me up. My meeting is truly impo—’

At that point Celestine hung up. And turned off the phone.

‘What did he say?’ wondered Holger One, who was behind the wheel.

‘He said, “Dear, sweet Celestine, let’s sit down and discuss the car issue.” In short.’

One didn’t think that sounded so bad. He had been worried about how his brother would react.

Desperate, Holger Two stood on the country road in his suit for more than ten minutes, hoping to hitch a ride with a passer-by. But in order for that to happen, there would have to be passing cars in the first place, which there weren’t. By the time Two realized that he ought to have called a taxi a long time ago, it dawned on him that his coat and wallet were still hanging on a hook in the hall. With 120 kronor in his breast pocket, he made the decision to drive the tractor to Norrtälje and take the bus from there. It would probably have been faster to turn round, get his wallet, go back again, and then call a taxi. Or even better: call the taxi first, and while it was on its way, make the trip to the house and back on the tractor.

But Two, as gifted as he was, had a stress-tolerance level that wasn’t much better than the potter’s, may God bless him. He was about to miss his own dissertation defence. After years of preparation. It was awful.

And yet it was only the beginning.

The first and last tiny piece of luck Holger Two had that day involved the transfer from tractor to bus in Norrtälje. At the next-to-last possible second, he managed to block the bus’s way so he could catch it. The driver stepped down to give the tractor driver in question a mouthful, but he stopped short when the yokel farmer he had expected was a well-groomed man in a suit, tie and patent leather shoes.

Once on board, Holger got hold of the dean of the university, Professor Berner, and he apologized and said that some extraordinarily unfortunate circumstances would cause him to be half an hour late.

The professor replied acidly that delays of dissertation defences were not in line with university traditions, but by all means. He promised to try to hold the opponents and the audience.

* * *

Holger One and Celestine had arrived in Stockholm and had already signed for their flyers. Celestine, who was the better strategist of the two, decided that their first target should be the Museum of Natural History. It had a whole section on Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution. Darwin had stolen the concept of ‘survival of the fittest’ from a colleague, and he used it to claim that the way of nature was such that the strong survived while the weak did not. Thus Darwin was a Fascist and now he would be punished for it, 120 years after his death. Celestine and Holger did not reflect upon the fact that there were some considerably Fascistic elements to their flyers as well. Time to put up posters on the sly. All over the museum. In the holy name of anarchy.