The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden. Jonas Jonasson

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СКАЧАТЬ then he would make sure that his descendants were ready when the time came. All in all, this made him both cunning and patient.

      ‘Not descendants,’ said Ingmar. ‘Descendant. His name will be Holger.’

      * * *

      As it turned out, however, Holger was nowhere near as eager as his father. During the next fourteen years, Ingmar ended up spending his time on essentially two things:

      1 Reading everything he could get his hands on about infertility, and

      2 Comprehensive and unconventional defamation of the king as a phenomenon and as a person.

      In addition to this, he did not neglect his work as a clerk of the lowest possible rank at the Södertälje Post Office any more than to the extent that his boss could put up with; thus he avoided being fired.

      Once he had gone through the entire city library in Södertälje, Ingmar regularly took the train back and forth to Stockholm, to the Royal Library. A hell of a name, but they had books to spare there.

      Ingmar learned all that was worth knowing about ovulation problems, chromosomal abnormalities and dysfunctional sperm. As he dug deeper into the archive, he also took in information of more dubious scientific merit.

      So, for example, on certain days he would walk around the house naked from the waist down between the time he got home from work (usually fifteen minutes before his shift was over) until it was time to go to bed. This way he kept his scrotum cool and, according to what Ingmar had read, this was good for the motility of his sperm.

      ‘Can you stir the soup while I hang up the laundry, Ingmar?’ Henrietta might say.

      ‘No, my scrotum would be too close to the stove,’ Ingmar answered.

      Henrietta still loved her husband because he was so full of life, but she needed to balance things out with an extra John Silver now and then. And one more. And, incidentally, yet another one that time Ingmar was trying to be nice by going to the grocery store to buy cream – naked down below out of sheer forgetfulness.

      Otherwise he was more crazy than he was forgetful. For example, he had learned when to expect Henrietta’s periods. This way he could take off during those futile days in order to make life miserable for his head of state. Which he did indeed, in big ways and small.

      Among other things, he managed to honour His Majesty on the king’s ninetieth birthday on 16 June 1948, by unfurling a thirty-yard-wide banner that read DIE, YOU OLD GOAT, DIE! over Kungsgatan and the king’s motorcade at just the right moment. By this point, Gustaf V’s sight was very poor, but a blind person practically could have seen what the banner said. According to the next day’s Dagens Nyheter, the king had said that ‘The guilty party shall be arrested and brought to me!’

      So now he wanted to see Ingmar.

      After his success on Kungsgatan, Ingmar lay relatively low until October 1950, when he hired a young and unsuspecting tenor from the Stockholm Opera to sing ‘Bye, Bye, Baby’ outside the window of Drottningholm Palace, where Gustaf V lay on his deathbed. The tenor took a licking from the group of people keeping vigil outside, while Ingmar, who was familiar with the surrounding shrubbery, managed to get away. The battered tenor wrote him an angry letter in which he demanded not only the fee of two hundred kronor as previously agreed, but also five hundred kronor for pain and suffering. But because Ingmar had hired the tenor under a fake name and an even faker address, the demand went nowhere except to the Lövsta rubbish dump, where the site manager read it, crumpled it up, and threw it into Incinerator Number Two.

      In 1955, Ingmar followed the new king’s royal tour around the country without managing to cause any problems at all. He was near despair, and he decided that he had to be bolder and not settle for just opinion building. For the king’s fat arse was more secure on the throne than ever.

      ‘Can’t you let it go now?’ said Henrietta.

      ‘You’re being negative again, my darling. I’ve heard that it takes positive thinking to become pregnant. By the way, I also read that you shouldn’t drink mercury – it’s harmful to an early pregnancy.’

      ‘Mercury?’ said Henrietta. ‘Why on earth would I drink mercury?’

      ‘That’s what I’m saying! And you can’t have soy in your food.’

      ‘Soy? What’s that?’

      ‘I don’t know. But don’t put it in your food.’

      In August 1960, Ingmar had a new pregnancy idea; once again it was something he’d read. It was just that it was a bit embarrassing to bring up with Henrietta.

      ‘Um, if you stand on your head while we . . . do it . . . then it’s easier for the sperm to . . .’

      ‘On my head?’

      Henrietta asked her husband if he was nuts, and she realized that the thought had actually occurred to her. But by all means. Nothing would come of it anyway. She had become resigned.

      What was even more surprising was that the bizarre position made the whole thing more pleasant than it had been in a long time. The adventure was full of delighted cries from both parties. Once she discovered that Ingmar hadn’t fallen asleep right away, Henrietta went so far as to make a suggestion:

      ‘That wasn’t half bad, darling. Should we try once more?’

      Ingmar surprised himself by still being awake. He considered what Henrietta had just said, and replied, ‘Yes, what the heck.’

      Whether it was the first time that night or the next time was impossible to know, but after thirteen infertile years, Henrietta was finally pregnant.

      ‘Holger, my Holger, you’re on your way!’ Ingmar hollered at her belly when she told him.

      Henrietta, who knew enough about both birds and bees not to rule out an Elsa, went to the kitchen to have a cigarette.

      * * *

      In the months that followed, Ingmar ramped things up. Each evening, sitting before Henrietta’s growing belly, he read aloud from Vilhelm Moberg’s Why I Am a Republican. At breakfast each morning, he made small talk with Holger through his wife’s navel, discussing whichever republican thoughts filled him at the moment. More often than not, Martin Luther was made a scapegoat for having thought that ‘We must fear and love God, so that we will neither look down on our parents or superiors nor irritate them.’

      There were at least two faults in Luther’s reasoning. The first was that part about God – he wasn’t chosen by the people. And he couldn’t be deposed. Sure, a person could convert if he wished, but gods all seemed to be cut from the same cloth.

      The other was that we shouldn’t ‘irritate our superiors’. Who were the superiors in question, and why shouldn’t we irritate them?

      Henrietta seldom interfered with Ingmar’s monologues to her stomach, but now and then she had to interrupt the activity because otherwise the food would burn on the stove.

      ‘Wait, I’m not finished,’ Ingmar would say.

      ‘But it’s the porridge,’ Henrietta replied. ‘You and my navel will have to continue your СКАЧАТЬ