The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden by Jonas Jonasson Page A

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