The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden. Jonas Jonasson

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СКАЧАТЬ then it was time. A whole month early. Luckily, Ingmar had just returned home when Henrietta’s waters broke; he had been at the far-too-goddamned-Royal Mail Service where he had finally agreed – upon threat of reprisals – to stop drawing horns on the forehead of Gustaf VI Adolf on all the stamps he could get his hands on. And then things progressed rapidly. Henrietta crawled into bed while Ingmar made such a mess of things when he went to call the midwife that he pulled the telephone out of the wall, cord and all. He was still standing in the kitchen doorway and swearing when Henrietta gave birth to their child in the next room.

      ‘When you’re finished swearing, you’re welcome to come in,’ she panted. ‘But bring scissors. You have an umbilical cord to cut.’

      Ingmar couldn’t find any scissors (he didn’t really know his way around the kitchen), but he did find wire cutters in the toolbox.

      ‘Boy or girl?’ the mother wondered.

      For the sake of formality, Ingmar glanced at where the answer to that question lay, and then he said, ‘Sure enough, it’s Holger.’

      And then, just as he was about to kiss his wife on the lips, she said:

      ‘Ow! I think another one is on the way.’

      The new father was confused. First he nearly got to experience the birth of his son – if only he hadn’t got caught in the telephone cord in the hall. And then, within the next few minutes, came . . . another son!

      Ingmar didn’t have time to process this fact straightaway, because Henrietta’s weak but clear voice gave him a number of instructions concerning the things he had to do so as not to risk the lives of mother and children.

      But then things calmed down; everything had gone well, except that Ingmar was sitting there with two sons on his lap when he’d been so clear that there should be only one. They shouldn’t have done it twice in one night, because look how complicated everything was now.

      But Henrietta told her husband to stop talking nonsense, and she looked at her two sons: first one and then the other. And then she said, ‘I think it seems like the one on the left is Holger.’

      ‘Yes,’ mumbled Ingmar. ‘Or the one on the right.’

      This could have been solved by deciding that it was reasonable to say the firstborn was the real one, but in the general chaos with the placenta and everything, Ingmar had mixed up who was first and who second, and now he couldn’t tell up from down.

      ‘Damn it!’ he said, and was immediately reprimanded by his wife.

      Just because there happened to be too many of them didn’t mean that the first words their sons heard should be curses.

      Ingmar stopped talking. He thought through their situation again. And he made a decision.

      ‘That one is Holger,’ he said, pointing to the child on the right.

      ‘All right, absolutely,’ said Henrietta. ‘And who is the other one?’

      ‘That one is Holger, too.’

      ‘Holger and Holger?’ said Henrietta, becoming acutely in need of a cigarette. ‘Are you really sure, Ingmar?’

      He said that he was.

PART TWO

      The more I see of men, the more I like my dog.

      Madame de Staël

CHAPTER 5

      On an anonymous letter, peace on earth and a hungry scorpion

      Engineer Westhuizen’s servant relapsed into the distant hope that a general societal change would come to her rescue. But it wasn’t easy for her to predict the chances of anything that might give her a future at all, whatever the quality of that future might be.

      The books in the library of the research facility gave her some context, of course, but most of what was on the shelves was ten or more years old. Among other things, Nombeko had skimmed through a two-hundred-page document from 1924 in which a London professor considered himself to have proved that there would never be another war, thanks to a combination of the League of Nations and the spread of the increasingly popular jazz.

      It was easier to keep track of what was going on within the fences and walls of the facility. Unfortunately the latest reports said that the engineer’s clever colleagues had solved the autocatalytic issue and others besides, and they were now ready for a test detonation. A successful test would bring the whole project far too close to completion for Nombeko’s comfort, because she wanted to keep living for a while longer.

      The only thing she could do there and then was try to slow their progress down a bit. Preferably in such a way that the government in Pretoria would not start to suspect that Westhuizen was as useless as he was. Perhaps it would be enough to put a temporary stop to the drilling that had just begun in the Kalahari Desert.

      Even though things had gone as they had with the antifreeze, Nombeko once again turned to the Chinese girls for help. She asked if she could send a letter through them, via the girls’ mother. How did that all work, by the way? Wasn’t outgoing post checked at all?

      Yes, of course it was. There was a white on the guard staff who did nothing but go through everything that wasn’t being sent to an addressee who already had security clearance. At the least suspicion he would open the outgoing post. And he would interrogate the sender, no exceptions.

      This would, of course, have been an insurmountable problem if the director of security hadn’t held a briefing a few years ago with those responsible for the post. Once he had told the Chinese girls in great detail about the security measures in place, adding that such measures were necessary because not a single person could be trusted, he excused himself to go to the bathroom. Whereupon the Chinese girls proved him right: as soon as they were alone in the room, they skipped around his desk, fed the correct paper into the typewriter, and added another addressee with security clearance to the 114 that already existed.

      ‘Your mother,’ said Nombeko.

      The girls smiled and nodded. To be on the safe side, they had given their mother a nice title before her name. Cheng Lian looked suspicious. Professor Cheng Lian inspired confidence. The logic of racism was no more complicated than that.

      Nombeko thought that a Chinese name ought to have caused someone to react, even with the title of professor, but taking risks and getting away with them seemed once and for all to be part of the girls’ nature – aside from the reason they were as locked up as she was. And the name had already been working for several years, so it ought to work for one more day. So did this mean that Nombeko could send a letter in a letter to Professor Cheng Lian, and the girls’ mother would forward it?

      ‘Absolutely,’ said the girls, showing no curiosity about whom Nombeko wanted to send a message to.

      To:

      President James Earl Carter Jr

      The White House, Washington

      Hello, Mr President. СКАЧАТЬ