The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden

‘Why Holger in particular?’ Henrietta wondered, among all the other things she was still wondering.

Well, the boy could be called whatever he wanted, really; the battle was more important than the name. But it would be impractical not to call him something. At first Ingmar had considered Wilhelm after the famous author and republican Vilhelm Moberg, but then he had realized that one of the king’s sons had the same name, with the addition of ‘Prince and Duke of Södermanland’.

Instead he had gone through other names, from A onwards, and when he got to H, while biking from Malmö to Lund, he happened to think of that Salvationist he had got to know just the day before. The soldier’s name was Holger, and he certainly did have a good heart, even if he was careless with the amount of air in his tyres. The honesty and decency Holger had shown him was really something, and Ingmar couldn’t think of a single nobleman on Earth with that name. Holger was precisely as far from the book of nobility as the situation demanded.

With that, Henrietta got just about the whole picture: Sweden’s leading monarchist would from now on devote his life to bringing the royal family crashing down. He intended to follow this vocation to the grave, and before 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 talk tomorrow if you don’t want the house to burn down.’

And 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

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