The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden. Jonas Jonasson

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ drugs or one of the other illiterates killed her.

      ‘Ugh,’ said Piet du Toit, nodding at the bodyguard his father paid for.

      Time to return to civilization.

      Of course, Nombeko’s managerial position wasn’t the only thing to go up in smoke after that conversation with the assistant – so did her job, such as it was. And her last pay cheque, for that matter.

      Her backpack was filled with her meagre possessions. It contained a change of clothes, three of Thabo’s books, and the twenty sticks of dried antelope meat she had just bought with her last few coins.

      She had already read the books, and she knew them by heart. But there was something pleasant about books, about their very existence. It was sort of the same with her latrine-emptying colleagues, except the exact opposite.

      It was evening, and there was a chill in the air. Nombeko put on her only jacket. She lay down on her only mattress and pulled her only blanket over her (her only sheet had just been used as a shroud). She would leave the next morning.

      And she suddenly knew where she would go.

      She had read about it in the paper the day before. She was going to 75 Andries Street in Pretoria.

      The National Library.

      As far as she knew, it wasn’t an area that was forbidden for blacks, so with a little luck she could get in. What she could do beyond that, aside from breathing and enjoying the view, she didn’t know. But it was a start. And she felt that literature would lead her onward.

      With that certainty, she fell asleep for the last time in the shack she had inherited from her mother five years previously. And she did so with a smile.

      That had never happened before.

      When morning came, she took off. The road before her was not a short one. Her first-ever walk beyond Soweto would be fifty-five miles long.

      After just over six hours, and after sixteen of the fifty-five miles, Nombeko had arrived in central Johannesburg. It was another world! Just take the fact that most of the people around her were white and strikingly similar to Piet du Toit, every last one. Nombeko looked around with great interest. There were neon signs, traffic lights and general chaos. And shiny new cars, models she had never seen before. As she turned round to discover more, she saw that one of them was headed straight for her, speeding along the pavement.

      Nombeko had time to think that it was a nice car.

      But she didn’t have time to move out of the way.

      * * *

      Engineer Engelbrecht van der Westhuizen had spent the afternoon in the bar of the Hilton Plaza Hotel on Quartz Street. Then he got into his new Opel Admiral and set off, heading north.

      But it is not and never has been easy to drive a car with a litre of brandy in one’s body. The engineer didn’t make it farther than the next intersection before he and the Opel drifted onto the pavement and – shit! – wasn’t he running over a Kaffir?

      The girl under the engineer’s car was named Nombeko and was a former latrine emptier. Fifteen years and one day earlier she had come into the world in a tin shack in South Africa’s largest shantytown. Surrounded by liquor, thinner and pills, she was expected to live for a while and then die in the mud among the latrines in Soweto’s Sector B.

      Out of all of them, Nombeko was the one to break loose. She left her shack for the first and last time.

      And then she didn’t make it any farther than central Johannesburg before she was lying under an Opel Admiral, ruined.

      Was that all? she thought before she faded into unconsciousness.

      But it wasn’t.

CHAPTER 2

      On how everything went topsy-turvy in another part of the world

      Nombeko was run over on the day after her fifteenth birthday. But she survived. Things would get better. And worse. Above all, they would get strange.

      Of all the men she would be subjected to in the years to come, Ingmar Qvist from Södertälje, Sweden, six thousand miles away, was not one of them. But all the same, his fate would hit her with full force.

      It’s hard to say exactly when Ingmar lost his mind, because it sneaked up on him. But it is clear that by the autumn of 1947 it was well on its way. It is also clear that neither he nor his wife realized what was going on.

      Ingmar and Henrietta got married while almost all of the world was still at war and moved to a plot of land in the forest outside Södertälje, almost twenty miles southwest of Stockholm.

      He was a low-level civil servant; she was an industrious seamstress who took in work at home.

      They met for the first time outside Room 2 of Södertälje District Court, where a dispute between Ingmar and Henrietta’s father was being handled: the former had happened, one night, to paint LONG LIVE THE KING! in three-foot-high letters along one wall of the meeting hall of Sweden’s Communist Party. Communism and the royal family don’t generally go hand in hand, of course, so naturally there was quite an uproar at dawn the next day when the Communists’ main man in Södertälje – Henrietta’s father – discovered what had happened.

      Ingmar was quickly seized – extra quickly, since after his prank he had lain down to sleep on a park bench not far from the police station, with paint and brush in hand.

      In the courtroom, sparks had flown between the defending Ingmar and the spectating Henrietta. This was probably partly because she was tempted by the forbidden fruit, but above all it was because Ingmar was so . . . full of life . . . unlike her father, who just went around waiting for everything to go to hell so that he and Communism could take over, at least in Södertälje. Her father had always been a revolutionary, but after 7 April 1937, when he signed what turned out to be the country’s 999,999th radio licence, he also became bitter and full of dark thoughts. A tailor in Hudiksvall, two hundred miles away, was celebrated the very next day for having signed the millionth licence. The tailor received not only fame (he got to be on the radio!) but also a commemorative silver trophy worth six hundred kronor. All while Henrietta’s dad got nothing more than a long face.

      He never got over this event; he lost his (already limited) ability to see the humour in anything, not least the prank of paying tribute to King Gustaf V on the wall of the Communist Party’s meeting place. He argued the party’s case in court himself and demanded eighteen years of prison for Ingmar Qvist, who was instead sentenced to a fine of fifteen kronor.

      Henrietta’s father’s misfortune knew no bounds. First the radio licences. And the relative disappointment in Södertälje District Court. And his daughter, who subsequently fell into the arms of the Royalist. And, of course, the cursed capitalism, which always seemed to land on its feet.

      When Henrietta went on to decide that she and Ingmar would marry in the church, Södertälje’s Communist leader broke off contact with his daughter once and for all, upon which Henrietta’s mother broke off contact with Henrietta’s father, met a new man – a German military attaché – at Södertälje Station, moved to Berlin with him just before the war ended, and was never heard from СКАЧАТЬ