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

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