The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden

by Jonas Jonasson

  This was why they went south. And made it all the way to the excellent hideout of Soweto, outside Johannesburg.

  If the advantage to South Africa’s largest shantytown was that one could get lost in the crowds (as long as one was black), the disadvantage was that each individual white farmer in Portuguese East Africa probably had greater resources than all the 800,000 inhabitants of Soweto combined (with the exception of Thabo). But still, the women each swallowed a few pills of various colours and set out on a killing spree. After a while they made their way to Sector B, and there, behind the row of latrines, they caught sight of a green shack among all the rusty brown and grey ones. A person who paints his shack green (or any other colour) surely has too much money for his own good, the women thought, and they broke in during the middle of the night, planted a knife in Thabo’s chest and twisted it. The man who had broken so many hearts found his own cut to pieces.

  Once he was dead, the women searched for his money among all the damn books that were piled everywhere. What kind of fool had they killed this time?

  But finally they found a wad of banknotes in one of the victim’s shoes, and another in the other one. And, imprudently enough, they sat down outside the shack to divide them up. The particular mixture of pills they had swallowed along with half a glass of rum caused the women to lose their sense of time and place. Thus they were still sitting there, each with a grin on her face, when the police, for once, showed up.

  The women were seized and transformed into a thirty-year cost item in the South African correctional system. The banknotes they had tried to count disappeared early on in the chain of custody. Thabo’s corpse ended up lying where it was until the next day. In the South African police corps, it was a sport to make the next shift take care of each dead darky whenever possible.

  Nombeko had been woken up in the night by the ruckus on the other side of the row of latrines. She got dressed, walked over, and realized more or less what had happened.

  Once the police had departed with the murderers and all of Thabo’s money, Nombeko went into the shack.

  ‘You were a horrible person, but your lies were entertaining. I will miss you. Or at least your books.’

  Upon which she opened Thabo’s mouth and picked out fourteen rough diamonds, just the number that fitted in the gaps left by all the teeth he’d lost.

  ‘Fourteen holes, fourteen diamonds,’ said Nombeko. ‘A little too perfect, isn’t it?’

  Thabo didn’t answer. But Nombeko pulled up the linoleum and started digging.

  ‘Thought so,’ she said when she found what she was looking for.

  Then she fetched water and a rag and washed Thabo, dragged him out of the shack, and sacrificed her only white sheet to cover the body. He deserved a little dignity, after all. Not much. But a little.

  Nombeko immediately sewed all of Thabo’s diamonds into the seam of her only jacket, and then she went back to bed.

  The latrine manager let herself sleep in the next day. She had a lot to process. When she stepped into the office at last, all of the latrine emptiers were there. In their boss’s absence they were on their third morning beer, and they had been underprioritizing work since the second beer, preferring instead to sit around judging Indians to be an inferior race. The cockiest of the men was in the middle of telling the story of the man who had tried to fix the leaky ceiling of his shack with cardboard.

  Nombeko interrupted the goings-on, gathered up all the beer bottles that hadn’t yet been emptied, and said that she suspected her colleagues had nothing in their heads besides the very contents of the latrine barrels they were meant to be emptying. Were they really so stupid that they didn’t understand that stupidity was race-neutral?

  The cocky man said that apparently the boss couldn’t understand that a person might want to have a beer in peace and quiet after the first seventy-five barrels of the morning, without also being forced to listen to nonsense about how we’re all so goddamn alike and equal.

  Nombeko considered throwing a roll of toilet paper at his head in reply, but she decided that the roll didn’t deserve it. Instead she ordered them to get back to work.

  Then she went home to her shack. And said to herself once again: What am I doing here?

  She would turn fifteen the next day.

  * * *

  On her fifteenth birthday, Nombeko had a meeting with Piet du Toit of the sanitation department of the City of Johannesburg; it had been scheduled long ago. This time he was better prepared. He had gone through the accounting in detail. Take that, twelve-year-old.

  ‘Sector B has gone eleven per cent over budget,’ said Piet du Toit, and he looked at Nombeko over the reading glasses he really didn’t need, but which made him look older than he was.

  ‘Sector B has done no such thing,’ said Nombeko.

  ‘If I say that Sector B has gone eleven per cent over budget, then it has,’ said Piet du Toit.

  ‘And if I say that the assistant can only calculate according to his own lights, then he does. Give me a few seconds,’ said Nombeko, and she yanked Piet du Toit’s calculations from his hand, quickly looked through his numbers, pointed at row twenty, and said, ‘We received the discount I negotiated here in the form of excess delivery. If you assess that at the discounted de facto price instead of an imaginary list price, you will find that your eleven mystery percentage points no longer exist. In addition, you have confused plus and minus. If we were to calculate the way you want to do it, we would have been under budget by eleven per cent. Which would be just as incorrect, incidentally.’

  Piet du Toit’s face turned red. Didn’t the girl know her place? What would things be like if just anyone could define right and wrong? He hated her more than ever, but he couldn’t think of anything to say. So he said, ‘We have been talking about you quite a bit at the office.’

  ‘Is that so,’ said Nombeko.

  ‘We feel that you are uncooperative.’

  Nombeko realized that she was about to be fired, just like her predecessor.

  ‘Is that so,’ she said.

  ‘I’m afraid we must transfer you. Back to the permanent workforce.’

  This was, in fact, more than her predecessor had been offered. Nombeko suspected that the assistant must have been in a good mood on this particular day.

  ‘Is that so,’ she said.

  ‘Is “is that so” all you have to say?’ Piet du Toit said angrily.

  ‘Well I could have told Mr du Toit what an idiot Mr du Toit is, of course, but getting him to understand this would be verging on the hopeless. Years among the latrine emptiers has taught me that. You should know that there are idiots here as well, Mr du Toit. Best just to leave so I never have to see you again,’ said Nombeko, and did just that.

  She said what she said at such speed that Piet du Toit didn’t have time to react before the girl had slipped out of his hands. And going in among the shacks to search for her was out of the question. As far as he was concerned, she could keep herself hidden in all that rubbish until tuberculosis, 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 again.

  Henrietta wanted to have children, preferably as many as possible. Ingmar thought this was basically a good idea, not least because he appreciated the method of production. Just think of that very first time, in the back of Henrietta’s father’s car, two days after the trial. That had been something, all right, although Ingmar had had to pay for it – he hid in his aunt’s cellar while his father-in-law-to-be searched all over Södertälje for him. Ingmar shouldn’t have left that used condom in the car.

  Oh well, what’s done is done. And anyway, it was a blessing that he’d happened across that box of condoms for American soldiers, because things had to be done in the proper order so that nothing would go wrong.

  But by this Ingmar did not mean making himself a career so he could support a family. He worked at the post office in Södertälje, or the ‘Royal Mail Service’, as he liked to say. His salary was average, and there was every chance that it would stay that way.

  Henrietta earned nearly double what her husband did, because she was clever and quick with both needle and thread. She had a large and regular clientele; the family would have lived very comfortably if it weren’t for Ingmar and his ever-growing talent for squandering everything Henrietta managed to save.

  Again, children would be great, but first Ingmar had to fulfil his life’s mission, and that took focus. Until his mission was completed, there mustn’t be any extraneous side projects.

  Henrietta protested her husband’s choice of words. Children were life itself and the future – not a side project.

  ‘If that’s how you feel, then you can take your box of American soldiers’ condoms and sleep on the kitchen sofa,’ she said.

  Ingmar squirmed. Of course he didn’t mean that children were extraneous, it was just that . . . well, Henrietta already knew what. It was, of course, this matter of His Majesty the King. He just had to get that out of the way first. It wouldn’t take for ever.

  ‘Dear, sweet Henrietta. Can’t we sleep together agai
n tonight? And maybe do a little practising for the future?’

  Henrietta’s heart melted, of course. As it had so many times before and as it would many times yet to come.

  What Ingmar called his life’s mission was to shake the hand of the King of Sweden. It had started as a wish, but had developed into a goal. The precise moment at which it became a true obsession was, as previously mentioned, not easy to say. It was easier to explain where and when the whole thing started.

  On Saturday, 16 June 1928, His Majesty King Gustaf V celebrated his seventieth birthday. Ingmar Qvist, who was fourteen at the time, went with his mother and father to Stockholm to wave the Swedish flag outside the palace and then go to Skansen Museum and Zoo – where they had bears and wolves!

  But their plans changed a bit. It turned out to be far too crowded at the palace; instead the family stood along the procession route a few hundred yards away, where the king and his Victoria were expected to pass by in an open carriage.

  And so they did. At which point everything turned out better than Ingmar’s mother and father could ever have imagined. Because just next to the Qvist family were twenty students from Lundsbergs Boarding School; they were there to give a bouquet of flowers to His Majesty as thanks for the support the school received, not least because of the involvement of Crown Prince Gustaf Adolf. It had been decided that the carriage would stop briefly so that His Majesty could step down, receive the flowers and thank the children.

  Everything went as planned and the king received his flowers, but when he turned to step up into the carriage again he caught sight of Ingmar. And stopped short.

  ‘What a beautiful lad,’ he said, and he took two steps up to the boy and tousled his hair. ‘Just a second – here you go,’ he went on, and from his inner pocket he took a sheet of commemorative stamps that had just been released for the king’s special day.

  He handed the stamps to young Ingmar, smiled, and said, ‘I could eat you right up.’ Then he tousled the boy’s hair once more before he climbed up to the furiously glaring queen.