Jonas Jonasson
The Girls Who Saved the King of Sweden

COPYRIGHT

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2014

First published in the United States by Ecco in 2014

Originally published in Sweden as Analfabeten som kunde räkna by Piratforlaget in 2013

Copyright © Jonas Jonasson 2014

Jonas Jonasson asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work

‘Tonight I Can Write’, from Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda, translated by W. S. Merwin, translation copyright © 1969 by W. S. Merwin; used by permission of Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Random House. Pooh’s Little Instruction Book inspired by A. A. Milne © 1995 the Trustees of the Pooh Properties, original text and compilation of illustrations; used by permission of Egmont UK Ltd, and by permission of Curtis Brown Ltd. How to Cure a Fanatic by Amos Oz; used by permission of Vintage, a division of Random House.

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Cover by Jonathan Pelham

Source ISBN: 9780007557905

Ebook Edition © April 2014 ISBN: 9780007557882

Version: 2018-06-18

EPIGRAPH

The statistical probability that an illiterate in 1970s Soweto will grow up and one day find herself confined in a potato truck with the Swedish king and prime minister is 1 in 45,766,212,810.

According to the calculations of the aforementioned illiterate herself.

PART ONE

The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.

Unknown

CHAPTER 1
On a girl in a shack and the man who posthumously helped her escape it

In some ways they were lucky, the latrine emptiers in South Africa’s largest shantytown. After all, they had both a job and a roof over their heads.

On the other hand, from a statistical perspective they had no future. Most of them would die young of tuberculosis, pneumonia, diarrhoea, pills, alcohol or a combination of these. One or two of them might get to experience his fiftieth birthday. The manager of one of the latrine offices in Soweto was one example. But he was both sickly and worn-out. He’d started washing down far too many painkillers with far too many beers, far too early in the day. As a result, he happened to lash out at a representative of the City of Johannesburg Sanitation Department who had been dispatched to the office. A Kaffir who didn’t know his place. The incident was reported all the way up to the unit director in Johannesburg, who announced the next day, during the morning coffee break with his colleagues, that it was time to replace the illiterate in Sector B.

Incidentally it was an unusually pleasant morning coffee break. Cake was served to welcome a new sanitation assistant. His name was Piet du Toit, he was twenty-three years old, and this was his first job out of college.

The new employee would be the one to take on the Soweto problem, because this was how things were in the City of Johannesburg. He was given the illiterates, as if to be toughened up for the job.

No one knew whether all of the latrine emptiers in Soweto really were illiterate, but that’s what they were called anyway. In any case, none of them had gone to school. And they all lived in shacks. And had a terribly difficult time understanding what one told them.

* * *

Piet du Toit felt ill at ease. This was his first visit to the savages. His father, the art dealer, had sent a bodyguard along to be on the safe side.

The twenty-three-year-old stepped into the latrine office and couldn’t help immediately complaining about the smell. There, on the other side of the desk, sat the latrine manager, the one who was about to be dismissed. And next to him was a little girl who, to the assistant’s surprise, opened her mouth and replied that this was indeed an unfortunate quality of shit – it smelled.

Piet du Toit wondered for a moment if the girl was making fun of him, but that couldn’t be the case.

He let it go. Instead he told the latrine manager that he could no longer keep his job because of a decision higher up, but that he could expect three months of pay if, in return, he picked out the same number of candidates for the position that had just become vacant.

‘Can I go back to my job as a permanent latrine emptier and earn a little money that way?’ the just-dismissed manager wondered.

‘No,’ said Piet du Toit. ‘You can’t.’

One week later, Assistant du Toit and his bodyguard were back. The dismissed manager was sitting behind his desk, for what one might presume was the last time. Next to him stood the same girl as before.

‘Where are your three candidates?’ said the assistant.

The dismissed apologized: two of them could not be present. One had had his throat slit in a knife fight the previous evening. Where number two was, he couldn’t say. It was possible he’d had a relapse.

Piet du Toit didn’t want to know what kind of relapse it might be. But he did want to leave.

‘So who is your third candidate, then?’ he said angrily.

‘Why, it’s the girl here beside me, of course. She’s been helping me with all kinds of things for a few years now. I must say, she’s a clever one.’

‘For God’s sake, I can’t very well have a twelve-year-old latrine manager, can I?’ said Piet du Toit.

‘Fourteen,’ said the girl. ‘And I have nine years’ experience.’

The stench was oppressive. Piet du Toit was afraid it would cling to his suit.

‘Have you started using drugs yet?’ he said.

‘No,’ said the girl.

‘Are you pregnant?’

‘No,’ said the girl.

The assistant didn’t say anything for a few seconds. He really didn’t want to come back here more often than was necessary.

‘What is your name?’ he said.

‘Nombeko,’ said the girl.

‘Nombeko what?’

‘Mayeki, I think.’

Good Lord, they didn’t even know their own names.

‘Then I suppose you’ve got the job, if you can stay sober,’ said the assistant.

‘I can,’ said the girl.

‘Good.’

Then the assistant turned to the dismissed manager.

‘We said three months’ pay for three candidates. So, one month for one candidate. Minus one month because you couldn’t manage to find anything other than a twelve-year-old.’

‘Fourteen,’ said the girl.

Piet du Toit didn’t say goodbye when he left. With his bodyguard two steps behind him.

The girl who had just become her own boss’s boss thanked him for his help and said that he was immediately reinstated as her right-hand man.

‘But what about Piet du Toit?’ said her former boss.

‘We’ll just change your name – I’m sure the assistant can’t tell one black from the next.’

Said the fourteen-year-old who looked twelve.

* * *

The newly appointed manager of latrine emptying in Soweto’s Sector B had never had the chance to go to school. This was because her mother had had other priorities, but also because the girl had been born in South Africa, of all countries; furthermore, she was born in the early 1960s, when the political leaders were of the opinion that children like Nombeko didn’t count. The prime minister at the time made a name for himself by asking rhetorically why the blacks should go to school when they weren’t good for anything but carrying wood and water.

In principle he was wrong, because Nombeko carried shit, not wood or water. Yet there was no reason to believe that the tiny girl would grow up to socialize with kings and presidents. Or to strike fear into nations. Or to influence the development of the world in general.

If, that is, she hadn’t been the person she was.

But, of course, she was.

Among many other things, she was a hardworking child. Even as a five-year-old she carried latrine barrels as big as she was. By emptying the latrine barrels, she earned exactly the amount of money her mother needed in order to ask her daughter to buy a bottle of thinner each day. Her mother took the bottle with a ‘Thank you, dear girl,’ unscrewed the lid, and began to dull the never-ending pain that came with the inability to give oneself or one’s child a future. Nombeko’s dad hadn’t been in the vicinity of his daughter since twenty minutes after the fertilization.

As Nombeko got older, she was able to empty more latrine barrels each day, and the money was enough to buy more than just thinner. Thus her mum could supplement the solvent with pills and booze. But the girl, who realized that things couldn’t go on like this, told her mother that she had to choose between giving up or dying.

Her mum nodded in understanding.

The funeral was well attended. At the time, there were plenty of people in Soweto who devoted themselves primarily to two things: slowly killing themselves and saying a final farewell to those who had just succeeded in that endeavour. Nombeko’s mum died when the girl was ten years old, and, as mentioned earlier, there was no dad available. The girl considered taking over where her mum had left off: chemically building herself a permanent shield against reality. But when she received her first pay cheque after her mother’s death, she decided to buy something to eat instead. And when her hunger was alleviated, she looked around and said, ‘What am I doing here?’

At the same time, she realized that she didn’t have any immediate alternatives. Ten-year-old illiterates were not the prime candidates on the South African job market. Or the secondary ones, either. And in this part of Soweto there was no job market at all, or all that many employable people, for that matter.

But defecation generally happens even for the most wretched people on our Earth, so Nombeko had one way to earn a little money. And once her mother was dead and buried, she could keep her salary for her own use.

To kill time while she was lugging barrels, she had started counting them when she was five: ‘One, two, three, four, five…’

As she grew older, she made these exercises harder so they would continue to be challenging: ‘Fifteen barrels times three trips times seven people carrying, with another one who sits there doing nothing because he’s too drunk… is… three hundred and fifteen.’

Nombeko’s mother hadn’t noticed much around her besides her bottle of thinner, but she did discover that her daughter could add and subtract. So during her last year of life she had started calling upon her each time a delivery of tablets of various colours and strengths was to be divided among the shacks. A bottle of thinner is just a bottle of thinner. But when pills of 50, 100, 250 and 500 milligrams must be distributed according to desire and financial ability, it’s important to be able to tell the difference between the four kinds of arithmetic. And the ten-year-old could. Very much so.

She might happen, for example, to be in the vicinity of her immediate boss while he was struggling to compile the monthly weight and amount report.

‘So, ninety-five times ninety-two,’ her boss mumbled. ‘Where’s the calculator?’

‘Eight thousand seven hundred and forty,’ Nombeko said.

‘Help me look for it instead, little girl.’

‘Eight thousand seven hundred and forty,’ Nombeko said again.

‘What’s that you’re saying?’

‘Ninety-five times ninety-two is eight thousand seven hund—’

‘And how do you know that?’

‘Well, I think about how ninety-five is one hundred minus five, ninety-two is one hundred minus eight. If you turn it round and subtract, it’s eighty-seven together. And five times eight is forty. Eighty-seven forty. Eight thousand seven hundred and forty.’

‘Why do you think like that?’ said the astonished manager.

‘I don’t know,’ said Nombeko. ‘Can we get back to work now?’

From that day on, she was promoted to manager’s assistant.

But in time, the illiterate who could count felt more and more frustrated because she couldn’t understand what the supreme powers in Johannesburg wrote in all the decrees that landed on the manager’s desk. The manager himself had a hard time with the words. He stumbled his way through every Afrikaans text, simultaneously flipping through an English dictionary so that the unintelligible letters were at least presented to him in a language he could understand.

‘What do they want this time?’ Nombeko might ask.

‘For us to fill the sacks better,’ said the manager. ‘I think. Or that they’re planning to shut down one of the sanitation stations. It’s a bit unclear.’

The manager sighed. His assistant couldn’t help him. So she sighed, too.

But then a lucky thing happened: thirteen-year-old Nombeko was accosted by a smarmy man in the showers of the latrine emptiers’ changing room. The smarmy man hadn’t got very far before the girl got him to change his mind by planting a pair of scissors in his thigh.

The next day she tracked down the man on the other side of the row of latrines in Sector B. He was sitting in a camping chair with a bandage round his thigh, outside his green-painted shack. In his lap he had… books?

‘What do you want?’ he said.

‘I believe I left my scissors in your thigh yesterday, Uncle, and now I’d like them back.’

‘I threw them away,’ the man said.

‘Then you owe me some scissors,’ said the girl. ‘How come you can read?’

The smarmy man’s name was Thabo, and he was half toothless. His thigh hurt an awful lot, and he didn’t feel like having a conversation with the ill-tempered girl. On the other hand, this was the first time since he’d come to Soweto that someone seemed interested in his books. His shack was full of them, and for this reason his neighbours called him Crazy Thabo. But the girl in front of him sounded more jealous than scornful. Maybe he could use this to his advantage.

‘If you were a bit more cooperative instead of violent beyond all measure, perhaps Uncle Thabo might consider telling you. Maybe he would even teach you how to interpret letters and words. If you were a bit more cooperative, that is.’

Nombeko had no intention of being more cooperative towards the smarmy man than she had been in the shower the day before. So she replied that, as luck would have it, she had another pair of scissors in her possession, and that she would very much like to keep them rather than use them on Uncle Thabo’s other thigh. But as long as Uncle kept himself under control – and taught her to read – thigh number two would remain in good health.

Thabo didn’t quite understand. Had the girl just threatened him?

* * *

One couldn’t tell by looking at him, but Thabo was rich. He had been born under a tarpaulin in the harbour of Port Elizabeth in Eastern Cape Province. When he was six years old, the police had taken his mother and never given her back. The boy’s father thought the boy was old enough to take care of himself, even though the father had problems doing that very thing.

‘Take care of yourself’ was the sum of his father’s advice for life before he clapped his son on the shoulder and went to Durban to be shot to death in a poorly planned bank robbery.

The six-year-old lived on what he could steal in the harbour, and in the best case one could expect that he would grow up, be arrested and eventually either be locked up or shot to death like his parents.

But another long-term resident of the slums was a Spanish sailor, cook and poet who had once been thrown overboard by twelve hungry seamen who were of the opinion that they needed food, not sonnets, for lunch.

The Spaniard swam to shore and found a shack to crawl into, and since that day he had lived for poetry, his own and others’. As time went by and his eyesight grew worse and worse, he hurried to snare young Thabo, then forced him to learn the art of reading in exchange for bread. Subsequently, and for a little more bread, the boy devoted himself to reading to the old man, who had not only gone completely blind but also half senile and fed on nothing more than Pablo Neruda for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

The seamen had been right that it is not possible to live on poetry alone. For the old man starved to death and Thabo decided to inherit all his books. No one else cared, anyway.

The fact that he was literate meant that the boy could get by in the harbour with various odd jobs. At night he would read poetry or fiction – and, above all, travelogues. At the age of sixteen, he discovered the opposite sex, which discovered him in return two years later. So it wasn’t until he was eighteen that Thabo found a formula that worked. It consisted of one-third irresistible smile; one-third made-up stories about all the things he had done on his journeys across the continent, which he had thus far not undertaken other than in his imagination; and one-third flat-out lies about how eternal their love would be.

He did not achieve true success, however, until he added literature to the smiling, storytelling and lying. Among the things he inherited, he found a translation the sailor had done of Pablo Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. Thabo tore out the song of despair, but he practised the twenty love poems on twenty different women in the harbour district and was able to experience temporary love nineteen times over. There would probably have been a twentieth time, too, if only that idiot Neruda hadn’t stuck in a line about ‘I no longer love her, that’s certain’ towards the end of a poem; Thabo didn’t discover this until it was too late.

A few years later, most of the neighbourhood knew what sort of person Thabo was; the possibilities for further literary experiences were slim. It didn’t help that he started telling lies about everything he had done in life that were worse than those King Leopold II had told in his day, when he had said that the natives of the Belgian Congo were doing fine even as he had the hands and feet chopped off anyone who refused to work for free.

Oh well, Thabo would get what was coming to him (as did the Belgian king, incidentally – first he lost his colony, then he wasted all his money on his favourite French-Romanian prostitute, and then he died). But first Thabo made his way out of Port Elizabeth: he went directly north and ended up in Basutoland where the women with the roundest figures were said to be.

There he found reason to stay for several years; he switched villages when the circumstances called for it, always found a job thanks to his ability to read and write, and eventually went so far as to become the chief negotiator for all the European missionaries who wanted access to the country and its uninformed citizens.

The chief of the Basotho people, His Excellence Seeiso, didn’t see the value in letting his people be Christianized, but he realized that the country needed to free itself from all the Boers in the area. When the missionaries – on Thabo’s urging – offered weapons in exchange for the right to hand out Bibles, the chief jumped at the opportunity.

And so pastors and lay missionaries streamed in to save the Basotho people from evil. They brought with them Bibles, automatic weapons and the occasional land mine.

The weapons kept the enemy at bay while the Bibles were burned by frozen mountain-dwellers. After all, they couldn’t read. When the missionaries realized this, they changed tactics and built a great number of Christian temples in a short amount of time.

Thabo took odd jobs as a pastor’s assistant and developed his own form of the laying on of hands, which he practised selectively and in secret.

Things on the romance front only went badly once. This occurred when a mountain village discovered that the only male member of the church choir had promised everlasting fidelity to at least five of the nine young girls in the choir. The English pastor there had always suspected what Thabo was up to. Because he certainly couldn’t sing.

The pastor contacted the five girls’ fathers, who decided that the suspect should be interrogated in the traditional manner. This is what would happen: Thabo would be stuck with spears from five different directions during a full moon, while sitting with his bare bottom in an anthill. While waiting for the moon to reach the correct phase, Thabo was locked in a hut over which the pastor kept constant watch, until he got sunstroke and instead went down to the river to save a hippopotamus. The pastor cautiously laid a hand on the animal’s nose and said that Jesus was prepared to—

This was as far as he got before the hippopotamus opened its mouth and bit him in half.

With the pastor-cum-jailer gone, and with the help of Pablo Neruda, Thabo managed to get the female guard to unlock the door so he could escape.

‘What about you and me?’ the prison guard called after him as he ran as fast as he could out onto the savannah.

‘I no longer love you, that’s certain,’ Thabo called back.

If one didn’t know better, one might think that Thabo was protected by God, because he encountered no lions, leopards, rhinoceroses or anything else during his twelve-mile night-time walk to the capital city, Maseru. Once there, he applied for a job as adviser to Chief Seeiso, who remembered him from before and welcomed him back. The chief was negotiating with the high-and-mighty Brits for independence, but he didn’t make any headway until Thabo joined in and said that if the gentlemen intended to keep being this stubborn, Basutoland would have to think about asking for help from Joseph Mobutu in Congo.

The Brits went stiff. Joseph Mobutu? The man who had just informed the world that he was thinking about changing his name to the All-Powerful Warrior Who, Thanks to His Endurance and Inflexible Will to Win, Goes from Victory to Victory, Leaving Fire in His Wake?

‘That’s him,’ said Thabo. ‘One of my closest friends, in fact. To save time, I call him Joe.’

The British delegation requested deliberation in camera, during which it was agreed that what the region needed was peace and quiet, not some almighty warrior who wanted to be called what he had decided he was. The Brits returned to the negotiating table and said:

‘Take the country, then.’

Basutoland became Lesotho; Chief Seeiso became King Moshoeshoe II, and Thabo became the new king’s absolute favourite person. He was treated like a member of the family and was given a bag of rough diamonds from the most important mine in the country; they were worth a fortune.

But one day he was gone. And he had an unbeatable twenty-four-hour head start before it dawned on the king that his little sister and the apple of his eye, the delicate princess Maseeiso, was pregnant.

A person who was black, filthy and by that point half toothless in 1960s South Africa could not blend into the white world by any stretch of the imagination. Therefore, after the unfortunate incident in the former Basutoland, Thabo hurried on to Soweto as soon as he had exchanged the most trifling of his diamonds at the closest jeweller’s.

There he found an unoccupied shack in Sector B. He moved in, stuffed his shoes full of money, and buried about half the diamonds in the trampled dirt floor. The other half he put in the various cavities in his mouth.

Before he began to make too many promises to as many women as possible, he painted his shack a lovely green; ladies were impressed by such things. And he bought linoleum with which to cover the floor.

The seductions were carried out in every one of Soweto’s sectors, but after a while Thabo eliminated his own sector so that between times he could sit and read outside his shack without being bothered more than was necessary.

Besides reading and seduction, he devoted himself to travelling. Here and there, all over Africa, twice a year. This brought him both life experience and new books.

But he always came back to his shack, no matter how financially independent he was. Not least because half of his fortune was one foot below the linoleum; Thabo’s lower row of teeth was still in far too good condition for all of it to fit in his mouth.

It took a few years before mutterings were heard among the shacks in Soweto. Where did that crazy man with the books get all his money from?

In order to keep the gossip from taking too firm a hold, Thabo decided to get a job. The easiest thing to do was become a latrine emptier for a few hours a week.

Almost all of his colleagues were young, alcoholic men with no futures. But there was also the occasional child. Among them was a thirteen-year-old girl who had planted scissors in Thabo’s thigh just because he had happened to choose the wrong door into the showers. Or the right door, really. The girl was what was wrong. Far too young. No curves. Nothing for Thabo, except in a pinch.

The scissors had hurt. And now she was standing there outside his shack, and she wanted him to teach her to read.

‘I would be more than happy to help you, if only I weren’t leaving on a journey tomorrow,’ said Thabo, thinking that perhaps things would go most smoothly for him if he did what he’d just claimed he was going to do.

‘Journey?’ said Nombeko, who had never been outside Soweto in all her thirteen years. ‘Where are you going?’

‘North,’ said Thabo. ‘Then we’ll see.’

* * *

While Thabo was gone, Nombeko got one year older and promoted. And she quickly made the best of her managerial position. By way of an ingenious system in which she divided her sector into zones based on demography rather than geographical size or reputation, making the deployment of outhouses more effective.

‘An improvement of thirty per cent,’ her predecessor said in praise.

‘Thirty point two,’ said Nombeko.

Supply matched demand and vice versa, and there was enough money left over in the budget for four new washing and sanitation stations.

The fourteen-year-old was fantastically verbal, considering the language used by the men in her daily life (anyone who has ever had a conversation with a latrine emptier in Soweto knows that half the words aren’t fit to print and the other half aren’t even fit to think). Her ability to formulate words and sentences was partially innate. But there was also a radio in one corner of the latrine office, and ever since she was little, Nombeko had made sure to turn it on as soon as she was in the vicinity. She always tuned in to the talk station and listened with interest, not only to what was said but also to how it was said.

The weekly show View on Africa was what first gave her the insight that there was a world outside Soweto. It wasn’t necessarily more beautiful or more promising. But it was outside Soweto.

Such as when Angola had recently received independence. The independence party PLUA had joined forces with the independence party PCA to form the independence party MPLA, which, along with the independence parties FNLA and UNITA, caused the Portuguese government to regret ever having discovered that part of the continent. A government that, incidentally, had not managed to build a single university during its four hundred years of rule.

The illiterate Nombeko couldn’t quite follow which combination of letters had done what, but in any case the result seemed to have been change, which, along with food, was Nombeko’s favourite word.

Once she happened to opine, in the presence of her colleagues, that this change thing might be something for all of them. But then they complained that their manager was talking politics. Wasn’t it enough that they had to carry shit all day? Did they have to listen to it, too?

As the manager of latrine emptying, Nombeko was forced to handle not only all of her hopeless latrine colleagues, but also Assistant Piet du Toit from the sanitation department of the City of Johannesburg. During his first visit after having appointed her, he informed her that there would under no circumstances be four new sanitation stations – there would be only one, because of serious budgetary problems. Nombeko took revenge in her own little way:

‘From one thing to the next: what do you think of the developments in Tanzania, Mr Assistant? Julius Nyerere’s socialist experiment is about to collapse, don’t you think?’

‘Tanzania?’

‘Yes, the grain shortage is probably close to a million tons by now. The question is, what would Nyerere have done if it weren’t for the International Monetary Fund? Or perhaps you consider the IMF to be a problem in and of itself, Mr Assistant?’

Said the girl who had never gone to school or been outside Soweto. To the assistant who was one of the authorities. Who had gone to a university. And who had no knowledge of the political situation in Tanzania. The assistant had been white to start with. The girl’s argument turned him as white as a ghost.

Piet du Toit felt demeaned by a fourteen-year-old illiterate. Who was now rejecting his document on the sanitation funds.

‘By the way, how did you calculate this, Mr Assistant?’ said Nombeko, who had taught herself how to read numbers. ‘Why have you multiplied the target values together?’

An illiterate who could count.

He hated her.

He hated them all.

* * *

A few months later, Thabo was back. The first thing he discovered was that the girl with the scissors had become his boss. And that she wasn’t much of a girl any more. She had started to develop curves.

This sparked an internal struggle in the half-toothless man. On the one hand, his instinct told him to trust his by now gap-ridden smile, his storytelling techniques and Pablo Neruda. On the other hand, there was the part where she was his boss. Plus his memory of the scissors.

Thabo decided to act with caution, but to get himself into position.

‘I suppose by now it’s high time I teach you to read,’ he said.

‘Great!’ said Nombeko. ‘Let’s start right after work today. We’ll come to your shack, me and the scissors.’

Thabo was quite a capable teacher. And Nombeko was a quick learner. By day three she could write the alphabet using a stick in the mud outside Thabo’s shack. From day five on she spelled her way to whole words and sentences. At first she was wrong more often than right. After two months, she was more right than wrong.

In their breaks from studying, Thabo told her about the things he had experienced on his journeys. Nombeko soon realized that in doing so he was mixing two parts fiction with at the most one part reality, but she thought that was just as well. Her own reality was miserable enough as it was. She could do without much more of the same.

Most recently he had been in Ethiopia to depose His Imperial Majesty, the Lion of Judah, Elect of God, the King of Kings.

‘Haile Selassie,’ said Nombeko.

Thabo didn’t answer; he preferred speaking to listening.

The story of the emperor who had started out as Ras Tafari, which became rastafari, which became a whole religion, not least in the West Indies, was so juicy that Thabo had saved it for the day it was time to make a move.

Anyway, by now the founder had been chased off his imperial throne, and all over the world confused disciples were sitting around smoking while they wondered how it could be possible that the promised Messiah, God incarnate, had suddenly been deposed. Depose God?

Nombeko was careful not to ask about the political background of this drama. Because she was pretty sure that Thabo had no idea, and too many questions might disrupt the entertainment.

‘Tell me more!’ she encouraged him instead.

Thabo thought that things were shaping up very nicely (it’s amazing how wrong a person can be). He moved a step closer to the girl and continued his story by saying that on his way home he had swung by Kinshasa to help Muhammad Ali before the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ – the heavyweight match with the invincible George Foreman.

‘Oh wow, that’s so exciting,’ said Nombeko, thinking that, as a story, it actually was.

Thabo gave such a broad smile that she could see things glittering among the teeth he still had left. ‘Well, it was really the invincible Foreman who wanted my help, but I felt that…’ Thabo began, and he didn’t stop until Foreman was knocked out in the eighth round and Ali thanked his dear friend Thabo for his invaluable support.

And Ali’s wife had been delightful, by the way.

‘Ali’s wife?’ said Nombeko. ‘Surely you don’t mean that…’

Thabo laughed until his jaws jingled; then he grew serious again and moved even closer.

‘You are very beautiful, Nombeko,’ he said. ‘Much more beautiful than Ali’s wife. What if you and I were to get together? Move somewhere together.’

And then he put his arm round her shoulders.

Nombeko thought that ‘moving somewhere’ sounded lovely. Anywhere, actually. But not with this smarmy man. The day’s lesson seemed to be over. Nombeko planted a pair of scissors in Thabo’s other thigh and left.

The next day, she returned to Thabo’s shack and said that he had failed to come to work and hadn’t sent word, either.

Thabo replied that both of his thighs hurt too much, one in particular, and that Miss Nombeko probably knew why this was.

Yes, and it could be even worse, because next time she was planning to plant her scissors not in one thigh or the other, but somewhere in between, if Uncle Thabo didn’t start to behave himself.

‘What’s more, I saw and heard what you have in your ugly mouth yesterday. If you don’t shape up, starting now, I promise to tell as many people as possible.’

Thabo became quite upset. He knew all too well that he wouldn’t survive for many minutes after such time as his fortune in diamonds became general knowledge.

‘What do you want from me?’ he said in a pitiful voice.

‘I want to be able to come here and spell my way through books without the need to bring a new pair of scissors each day. Scissors are expensive for those of us who have mouths full of teeth instead of other things.’

‘Can’t you just go away?’ said Thabo. ‘You can have one of the diamonds if you leave me alone.’

He had bribed his way out of things before, but not this time. Nombeko said that she wasn’t going to demand any diamonds. Things that didn’t belong to her didn’t belong to her.

Much later, in another part of the world, it would turn out that life was more complicated than that.

* * *

Ironically enough, it was two women who ended Thabo’s life. They had grown up in Portuguese East Africa and supported themselves by killing white farmers in order to steal their money. This enterprise went well as long as the civil war was going on.

But when independence came and the country’s name changed to Mozambique, the farmers who were still left had forty-eight hours to leave. The women then had no other choice than to kill well-to-do blacks instead. As a business idea it was a much worse one, because nearly all the blacks with anything worth stealing belonged to the Marxist-Leninist Party, which was now in power. So it wasn’t long before the women were wanted by the state and hunted by the new country’s dreaded police force.

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 again 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.

‘Did you say “thank you”, Ingmar?’ asked his mother once she’d recovered from the fact that the king had touched her son – and given him a present.

‘No-o,’ Ingmar stammered as he stood there with stamps in hand. ‘No, I didn’t say anything. It was like he was… too grand to talk to.’

The stamps became Ingmar’s most cherished possession, of course. And two years later he started working at the post office in Södertälje. He started out as a clerk of the lowest rank possible in the accounting department; sixteen years later he had climbed absolutely nowhere.

Ingmar was infinitely proud of the tall, stately monarch. Every day, Gustaf V stared majestically past him from all the stamps the subject had reason to handle at work. Ingmar gazed humbly and lovingly back as he sat there in the Royal Mail Service’s royal uniform, even though it was not at all necessary to wear it in the accounting department.

But there was just this one issue: the king was looking past Ingmar. It was as if he didn’t see his subject and therefore couldn’t receive the subject’s love. Ingmar so terribly wanted to be able to look the king in the eye. To apologize for not saying ‘thank you’ that time when he was fourteen. To proclaim his eternal loyalty.

‘So terribly’ was right. It became more and more important… the desire to look him in the eye, speak with him, shake his hand.

More and more important.

And even more important.

His Majesty, of course, was only getting older. Soon it would be too late. Ingmar Qvist could no longer just wait for the king to march into the Södertälje Post Office one day. That had been his dream all these years, but now he was about to wake up from it.

The king wasn’t going to seek out Ingmar.

Ingmar had no choice but to seek out the king.

Then he and Henrietta would make a baby, he promised.

* * *

The Qvist family’s already poor existence kept getting poorer and poorer. The money kept disappearing, thanks to Ingmar’s attempts to meet the king. He wrote veritable love letters (with an unnecessarily large number of stamps on them); he called (without getting further than some poor royal secretary, of course); he sent presents in the form of Swedish silversmith products, which were the king’s favourite things (and in this way he supported the not entirely honest father of five who had the task of registering all incoming royal gifts). Beyond this, he went to tennis matches and nearly all of the functions one could imagine the king might attend. This meant many expensive trips and admission tickets, yet Ingmar never came very close to meeting his king.

Nor were the family finances fortified when Henrietta, as a result of all her worrying, started doing what almost everyone else did at the time – that is, smoking one or more packets of John Silvers per day.

Ingmar’s boss at the accounting department of the post office was very tired of all the talk about the damn monarch and his merits. So whenever junior clerk Qvist asked for time off, he granted it even before Ingmar had managed to finish formulating his request.

‘Um, boss, do you think it might be possible for me to have two weeks off work, right away? I’m going to—’

‘Granted.’

People had started calling Ingmar by his initials instead of his name. He was ‘IQ’ among his superiors and colleagues.

‘I wish you good luck in whatever kind of idiocy you’re planning to get up to this time, IQ,’ said the head clerk.

Ingmar didn’t care that he was being made fun of. Unlike the other workers at postal headquarters in Södertälje, his life had meaning and purpose.

It took another three considerable undertakings on Ingmar’s part before absolutely everything went topsy-turvy.

First he made his way to Drottningholm Palace, stood up straight in his postal uniform, and rang the bell.

‘Good day. My name is Ingmar Qvist. I am from the Royal Mail Service, and it so happens that I need to see His Majesty himself. Could you be so kind as to notify him? I will wait here,’ said Ingmar to the guard at the gate.

‘Do you have a screw loose or something?’ the guard said in return.

A fruitless dialogue ensued, and in the end Ingmar was asked to leave immediately; otherwise the guard would make sure that Mr Postal Clerk was packaged up and delivered right back to the post office whence he came.

Ingmar was offended and in his haste happened to mention the size he would estimate the guard’s genitalia to be, whereupon he had to run away with the guard on his tail.

He got away, partly because he was a bit faster than the guard, but most of all because the latter had orders never to leave the gate and so had to turn back.

After that, Ingmar spent two whole days sneaking around outside the ten-foot fence, out of sight of the oaf at the gate, who refused to understand what was best for the king, before he gave up and went back to the hotel that served as his base for the entire operation.

‘Should I prepare your bill?’ asked the receptionist, who had long since suspected that this particular guest was not planning to do the right thing and pay.

‘Yes, please,’ said Ingmar, and he went to his room, packed his suitcase, and checked out via the window.

The second considerable undertaking before everything went topsy-turvy began when Ingmar read a news item in Dagens Nyheter while hiding from work by sitting on the toilet. The news item said that the king was in Tullgarn for a few days of relaxing moose hunting. Ingmar rhetorically asked himself where there were moose if not out in God’s green nature, and who had access to God’s green nature if not… everyone! From kings to simple clerks at the Royal Mail Service.

Ingmar flushed the toilet for the sake of appearances and went to ask for another leave of absence. The head clerk granted his request with the frank comment that he hadn’t even noticed that Mr Qvist was already back from the last one.

It had been a long time since Ingmar had been entrusted to rent a car in Södertälje, so first he had to take the bus all the way to Nyköping, where his honest looks were enough to get him a decent second-hand Fiat 518. He subsequently departed for Tullgarn at the speed allowed by the power of forty-eight horses.

But he didn’t get more than halfway there before he met a black 1939 Cadillac V8 coming from the other direction. The king, of course. Finished hunting. About to slip out of Ingmar’s hands yet again.

Ingmar turned his borrowed Fiat round in the blink of an eye, was helped along by several downhill stretches in a row, and caught up with the hundred-horsepower-stronger royal car. The next step would be to try to pass the car and maybe pretend to break down in the middle of the road.

But the anxious royal chauffeur speeded up so he wouldn’t have to endure the wrath he expected the king to exhibit should they be passed by a Fiat. Unfortunately, he was looking at the rear-view mirror more than he was looking ahead, and at a curve in the road, the chauffeur, along with Cadillac, king, and companions, kept going straight, down into a waterlogged ditch.

Neither Gustaf V nor anyone else was harmed, but Ingmar had no way of knowing this from behind his steering wheel. His first thought was to jump out and help, and also shake the king’s hand. But his second thought was: what if he had killed the old man? And his third thought: thirty years of hard labour – that might be too high a price for a handshake. Especially if the hand in question belonged to a corpse. Ingmar didn’t think he would be very popular in the country, either. Murderers of kings seldom were.

So he turned round.

He left the hire car outside the Communists’ meeting hall in Södertälje, in the hope that his father-in-law would get the blame. From there he walked all the way home to Henrietta and told her that he might have just killed the king he loved so dearly.

Henrietta consoled him by saying that everything was probably fine down there at the king’s curve, and in any case it would be a good thing for the family finances if she were wrong.

The next day, the press reported that King Gustaf V had ended up in the ditch after his car had been driven at high speeds, but that he was unharmed. Henrietta had mixed feelings upon hearing this, but she thought that perhaps her husband had learned an important lesson. And so she asked, full of hope, if Ingmar was done chasing the king.

He was not.

The third considerable undertaking before everything went topsy-turvy involved a journey to the French Riviera for Ingmar; he was going to Nice, where Gustaf V, age eighty-eight, always spent the late autumn to get relief from his chronic bronchitis. In a rare interview, the king had said that when he wasn’t taking his daily constitutional at a leisurely pace along the Promenade des Anglais, he spent the days sitting on the terrace of his state apartment at the Hôtel d’Angleterre.

This was enough information for Ingmar. He would travel there, run across the king while he was on his walk and introduce himself.

It was impossible to know what would happen next. Perhaps the two men would stand there for a while and have a chat, and if they hit it off perhaps Ingmar could buy the king a drink at the hotel that evening. And why not a game of tennis the next day?

‘Nothing can go wrong this time,’ Ingmar said to Henrietta.

‘That’s nice,’ said his wife. ‘Have you seen my cigarettes?’

Ingmar hitchhiked his way through Europe. It took a whole week, but once he was in Nice it took only two hours of sitting on a bench on the Promenade des Anglais before he caught sight of the tall, stately gentleman with the silver cane and the monocle. God, he was so grand! He was approaching slowly. And he was alone.

What happened next was something Henrietta could describe in great detail many years later, because Ingmar would dwell on it for the rest of her life.

Ingmar stood up from his bench, walked up to His Majesty, introduced himself as the loyal subject from the Royal Mail Service that he was, broached the possibility of a drink together and maybe a game of tennis – and concluded by suggesting that the two men shake hands.

The king’s reaction, however, had not been what Ingmar expected. For one thing, he refused to take this unknown man’s hand. For another, he didn’t condescend to look at him. Instead he looked past Ingmar into the distance, just as he had already done on all the tens of thousands of stamps Ingmar had had reason to handle in the course of his work. And then he said that he had no intention, under any circumstances, of socializing with a messenger boy from the post office.

Strictly speaking, the king was too stately to say what he thought of his subjects. He had been drilled since childhood in the art of showing his people the respect they generally didn’t deserve. But he said what he thought now, partly because he hurt all over and partly because keeping it to himself all his life had taken its toll.

‘But Your Majesty, you don’t understand,’ Ingmar tried.

‘If I were not alone I would have asked my companions to explain to the scoundrel before me that I certainly do understand,’ said the king, and in this way even managed to avoid speaking directly to the unfortunate subject.

‘But,’ Ingmar said – and that was all he managed to say before the king hit him on the forehead with his silver cane and said, ‘Come, come!’

Ingmar landed on his bottom, thus enabling the king to pass safely. The subject remained on the ground as the king walked away.

Ingmar was crushed.

For twenty-five seconds.

Then he cautiously stood up and stared after his king for a long time. And he stared a little longer.

‘Messenger boy? Scoundrel? I’ll show you messenger boy and scoundrel.’

And thus everything had gone topsy-turvy.

CHAPTER 3
On a strict sentence, a misunderstood country and three multifaceted girls from China

According to Engelbrecht van der Westhuizen’s lawyer, the black girl had walked right out into the street, and the lawyer’s client had had no choice but to swerve. Thus the accident was the girl’s fault, not his. Engineer van der Westhuizen was a victim, nothing more. Besides, she had been walking on a pavement meant for whites.

The girl’s assigned lawyer offered no defence because he had forgotten to show up in court. And the girl herself preferred not to say anything, largely because she had a jaw fracture that was not conducive to conversation.

Instead, the judge was the one to defend Nombeko. He informed Mr van der Westhuizen that he’d had at least five times the legal limit of alcohol in his bloodstream, and that blacks were certainly allowed to use that pavement, even if it wasn’t considered proper. But if the girl had wandered into the street – and there was no reason to doubt that she had, since Mr van der Westhuizen had said under oath that this was the case – then the blame rested largely on her.

Mr van der Westhuizen was awarded five thousand rand for bodily injury as well as another two thousand rand for the dents the girl had caused to appear on his car.

Nombeko had enough money to pay the fine and the cost of any number of dents. She could also have bought him a new car, for that matter. Or ten new cars. The fact was, she was extremely wealthy, but no one in the courtroom or anywhere else would have had reason to assume this. Back in the hospital she had used her one functioning arm to make sure that the diamonds were still in the seam of her jacket.

But her main reason for keeping this quiet was not her fractured jaw. In some sense, after all, the diamonds were stolen. From a dead man, but still. And as yet they were diamonds, not cash. If she were to remove one of them, all of them would be taken from her. At best, she would be locked up for theft; at worst, for conspiracy to robbery and murder. In short, the situation she found herself in was not simple.

The judge studied Nombeko and read something else in her expression of concern. He stated that the girl didn’t appear to have any assets to speak of and that he could sentence her to pay off her debt in the service of Mr van der Westhuizen, if the engineer found this to be a suitable arrangement. The judge and the engineer had made a similar arrangement once before, and that was working out satisfactorily, wasn’t it?

Engelbrecht van der Westhuizen shuddered at the memory of what had happened when he ended up with three Chinks in his employ, but these days they were useful to a certain extent – and by all means, perhaps throwing a darky into the mix would liven things up. Even if this particular one, with a broken leg, broken arm and her jaw in pieces might mostly be in the way.

‘At half salary, in that case,’ he said. ‘Just look at her, Your Honour.’ Engineer Engelbrecht van der Westhuizen suggested a salary of five hundred rand per month minus four hundred and twenty rand for room and board. The judge nodded his assent.

Nombeko almost burst out laughing. But only almost, because she hurt all over. What that fat-arse of a judge and liar of an engineer had just suggested was that she work for free for the engineer for more than seven years. This, instead of paying a fine that would hardly add up to a measurable fraction of her collected wealth, no matter how absurdly large and unreasonable it was.

But perhaps this arrangement was the solution to Nombeko’s dilemma. She could move in with the engineer, let her wounds heal and run away on the day she felt that the National Library in Pretoria could no longer wait. After all, she was about to be sentenced to domestic service, not prison.

She was considering accepting the judge’s suggestion, but she bought herself a few extra seconds to think by arguing a little bit, despite her aching jaw: ‘That would mean eighty rand per month net pay. I would have to work for the engineer for seven years, three months and twenty days in order to pay it all back. Your Honour, don’t you think that’s a rather harsh sentence for a person who happened to get run over on a pavement by someone who shouldn’t even have been driving on the street, given his alcohol intake?’

The judge was completely taken aback. It wasn’t just that the girl had expressed herself. And expressed herself well. And called the engineer’s sworn description of events into question. She had also calculated the extent of the sentence before anyone else in the room had been close to doing so. He ought to chastise the girl, but… he was too curious to know whether her calculations were correct. So he turned to the court aide, who confirmed, after a few minutes, that ‘Indeed, it looks like we’re talking about – as we heard – seven years, three months, and… yes… about twenty days or so.’

Engelbrecht van der Westhuizen took a gulp from the small brown bottle of cough medicine he always had with him in situations where one couldn’t simply drink brandy. He explained this gulp by saying that the shock of the horrible accident must have exacerbated his asthma.

But the medicine did him good: ‘I think we’ll round down,’ he said. ‘Exactly seven years will do. And anyway, the dents on the car can be hammered out.’

Nombeko decided that a few weeks or so with this Westhuizen was better than thirty years in prison. Yes, it was too bad that the library would have to wait, but it was a very long walk there, and most people would prefer not to undertake such a journey with a broken leg. Not to mention all the rest. Including the blister that had formed as a result of the first sixteen miles.

In other words, a little break couldn’t hurt, assuming the engineer didn’t run her over a second time.

‘Thanks, that’s generous of you, Engineer van der Westhuizen,’ she said, thereby accepting the judge’s decision.

‘Engineer van der Westhuizen’ would have to do. She had no intention of calling him ‘baas.’

* * *

Immediately following the trial, Nombeko ended up in the passenger seat beside Engineer van der Westhuizen, who headed north, driving with one hand while swigging a bottle of Klipdrift brandy with the other. The brandy was identical in odour and colour to the cough medicine Nombeko had seen him drain during the trial.

This took place on 16 June 1976.

On the same day, a bunch of school-aged adolescents in Soweto got tired of the government’s latest idea: that their already inferior education should henceforth be conducted in Afrikaans. So the students went out into the streets to air their disapproval. They were of the opinion that it was easier to learn something when one understood what one’s instructor was saying. And that a text was more accessible to the reader if one could interpret the text in question. Therefore – said the students – their education should continue to be conducted in English.

The surrounding police listened with interest to the youths’ reasoning, and then they argued the government’s point in that special manner of the South African authorities.

By opening fire.

Straight into the crowd of demonstrators.

Twenty-three demonstrators died more or less instantly. The next day, the police advanced their argument with helicopters and tanks. Before the dust had settled, another hundred human lives had been extinguished. The City of Johannesburg’s department of education was therefore able to adjust Soweto’s budgetary allocations downward, citing lack of students.

Nombeko avoided experiencing any of this. She had been enslaved by the state and was in a car on the way to her new master’s house.

‘Is it much farther, Mr Engineer?’ she asked, mostly to have something to say.

‘No, not really,’ said Engineer van der Westhuizen. ‘But you shouldn’t speak out of turn. Speaking when you are spoken to will be sufficient.’

Engineer Westhuizen was a lot of things. The fact that he was a liar had become clear to Nombeko back in the courtroom. That he was an alcoholic became clear in the car after leaving the courtroom. In addition, he was a fraud when it came to his profession. He didn’t understand his own work, but he kept himself at the top by telling lies and exploiting people who did understand it.

This might have been an aside to the whole story if only the engineer hadn’t had one of the most secret and dramatic tasks in the world. He was the man who would make South Africa a nuclear weapons nation. It was all being orchestrated from the research facility of Pelindaba, about an hour north of Johannesburg.

Nombeko, of course, knew nothing of this, but her first inkling that things were a bit more complicated than she had originally thought came as they approached the engineer’s office.

Just as the Klipdrift ran out, she and the engineer arrived at the facility’s outer perimeter. After showing identification they were allowed to enter the gates, passing a ten-foot, twelve-thousand-volt fence. Next there was a fifty-foot stretch that was controlled by double guards with dogs before it was time for the inner perimeter and the next ten-foot fence with the same number of volts. In addition, someone had thought to place a minefield around the entire facility, in the space between the ten-foot fences.

‘This is where you will atone for your crime,’ said the engineer. ‘And this is where you will live, so you don’t take off.’

Electric fences, guards with dogs and minefields were variables Nombeko hadn’t taken into account in the courtroom a few hours earlier.

‘Looks cosy,’ she said.

‘You’re talking out of turn again,’ said the engineer.

* * *

The South African nuclear weapons programme was begun in 1975, the year before a drunk Engineer van der Westhuizen happened to run over a black girl. There were two reasons he had been sitting at the Hilton Hotel and tossing back brandies until he was gently asked to leave. One was that part about being an alcoholic. The engineer needed at least a full bottle of Klipdrift per day to keep the works going. The other was his bad mood. And his frustration. The engineer had just been pressured by Prime Minister Vorster, who complained that no progress had been made yet even though a year had gone by.

The engineer tried to maintain otherwise. On the business front, they had begun the work exchange with Israel. Sure, this had been initiated by the prime minister himself, but in any case uranium was heading in the direction of Jerusalem, while they had received tritium in return. There were even two Israeli agents permanently stationed at Pelindaba for the sake of the project.

No, the prime minister had no complaints about their collaboration with Israel, Taiwan and others. It was the work itself that was limping along. Or, as the prime minister put it:

‘Don’t give us a bunch of excuses for one thing and the next. Don’t give us any more teamwork right and left. Give us an atomic bomb, for fuck’s sake, Mr van der Westhuizen. And then give us five more.’

* * *

While Nombeko settled in behind Pelindaba’s double fence, Prime Minister Balthazar Johannes Vorster was sitting in his palace and sighing. He was very busy from early in the morning to late at night. The most pressing matter on his desk right now was that of the six atomic bombs. What if that obsequious Westhuizen wasn’t the right man for the job? He talked and talked, but he never delivered.

Vorster muttered to himself about the damn UN, the Communists in Angola, the Soviets and Cuba sending hordes of revolutionaries to southern Africa, and the Marxists who had already taken over in Mozambique. Plus those CIA bastards who always managed to figure out what was going on, and then couldn’t shut up about what they knew.

Oh, fuck it, thought B. J. Vorster about the world in general.

The nation was under threat now, not once the engineer chose to take his thumb out of his arse.

The prime minister had taken the scenic route to his position. In the late 1930s, as a young man, he had become interested in Nazism. Vorster thought that the German Nazis had interesting methods when it came to separating one sort of people from the next. He also liked to pass this on to anyone who would listen.

Then a world war broke out. Unfortunately for Vorster, South Africa took the side of the Allies (it being part of the British Empire), and Nazis like Vorster were locked up for a few years until the war had been won. Once he was free again, he was more cautious; neither before nor since have Nazi ideals gained ground by being called what they actually are.

By the 1950s, Vorster was considered to be housebroken. In 1961, the same year that Nombeko was born in a shack in Soweto, he was promoted to the position of minister of justice. One year later, he and his police managed to reel in the biggest fish of all – the African National Congress terrorist Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela.

Mandela received a life sentence, of course, and was sent to an island prison outside Cape Town, where he could sit until he rotted away. Vorster thought it might go rather quickly.

While Mandela commenced his anticipated rotting-away, Vorster himself continued to climb the ladder of his career. He had some help with the last crucial step when an African with a very specific problem finally cracked. The man had been classed as white by the system of apartheid, but it was possible they had been wrong, because he looked more black – and therefore he didn’t fit in anywhere. The solution to the man’s inner torment turned out to be finding B. J. Vorster’s predecessor and stabbing him in the stomach with a knife – fifteen times.

The man who was both white and something else was locked up in a psychiatric clinic, where he sat for thirty-three years without ever finding out which race he belonged to.

Only then did he die. Unlike the prime minister with fifteen stab wounds, who, on the one hand, was absolutely certain he was white but, on the other hand, died immediately.

So the country needed a new prime minister. Preferably someone tough. And soon enough, there sat former Nazi Vorster.

When it came to domestic politics, he was content with what he and the nation had achieved. With the new anti-terrorism laws, the government could call anyone a terrorist and lock him or her up for as long as they liked, for any reason they liked. Or for no reason at all.

Another successful project was to create homelands for the various ethnic groups – one country for each sort, except the Xhosa, because there were so many of them that they got two. All they had to do was gather up a certain type of darky, bus them all to a designated homeland, strip them of their South African citizenship, and give them a new one in the name of the homeland. A person who is no longer South African can’t claim to have the rights of a South African. Simple mathematics.

When it came to foreign politics, things were a bit trickier. The world outside continually misunderstood the country’s ambitions. For example, there was an appalling number of complaints because South Africa was operating on the simple truth that a person who is not white will remain that way once and for all.

Former Nazi Vorster got a certain amount of satisfaction from the collaboration with Israel, though. They were Jews, of course, but in many ways they were just as misunderstood as Vorster himself.

Oh, fuck it, B. J. Vorster thought for the second time.

What was that bungler Westhuizen up to?

* * *

Engelbrecht van der Westhuizen was pleased with the new servant Providence had given him. She had managed to get some things done even while limping around with her leg in a brace and her right arm in a sling. Whatever her name was.

At first he had called her ‘Kaffir Two’ to distinguish her from the other black woman at the facility, the one who cleaned in the outer perimeter. But when the bishop of the local Reformed Church learned of this name, the engineer was reprimanded. Blacks deserved more respect than that.

The Church had first allowed blacks to attend the same communion services as whites more than one hundred years ago, even if the former had to wait their turn at the very back until there were so many of them that they might as well have their own churches. The bishop felt that it wasn’t the Church’s fault that the blacks bred like rabbits.

‘Respect,’ he repeated. ‘Think about it, Mr Engineer.’

The bishop did make an impression on Engelbrecht van der Westhuizen, but that didn’t make Nombeko’s name any easier to remember. So when spoken to directly she was called ‘whatsyourname,’ and indirectly… there was essentially no reason to discuss her as an individual.

Prime Minister Vorster had come to visit twice already, always with a friendly smile, but the implied message was that if there weren’t six bombs at the facility soon, then Engineer Westhuizen might not be there, either.

Before his first meeting with the prime minister, the engineer had been planning to lock up whatshername in the broom cupboard. Certainly it was not against the rules to have black and coloured help at the facility, as long as they were never granted leave, but the engineer thought it looked dirty.

The drawback to having her in a cupboard, however, was that then she couldn’t be in the vicinity of the engineer, and he had realized early on that it wasn’t such a bad idea to have her nearby. For reasons that were impossible to understand, things were always happening in that girl’s brain. Whatshername was far more impudent than was really permissible, and she broke as many rules as she could. Among the cheekiest things she’d done was to be in the research facility’s library without permission, going so far as to take books with her when she left. The engineer’s first instinct was to put a stop to this and get the security division involved for a closer investigation. What would an illiterate from Soweto want with books?

But then he noticed that she was actually reading what she had brought with her. This made the whole thing even more remarkable – literacy was, of course, not a trait one often found among the country’s illiterate. Then the engineer saw what she was reading, and it was everything, including advanced mathematics, chemistry, electronic engineering and metallurgy (that is, everything the engineer himself should have been brushing up on). On one occasion, when he took her by surprise with her nose in a book instead of scrubbing the floor, he could see that she was smiling at a number of mathematical formulas.

Looking, nodding and smiling.

Truly outrageous. The engineer had never seen the point in studying mathematics. Or anything else. Luckily enough, he had still received top grades at the university to which his father was the foremost donor.

The engineer knew that a person didn’t need to know everything about everything. It was easy to get to the top with good grades and the right father, and by taking serious advantage of other people’s competence. But in order to keep his job this time, the engineer would have to deliver. Well, not literally him, but the researchers and technicians he had made sure to hire and who were currently toiling day and night in his name.

And the team was really moving things forward. The engineer was sure that in the not-too-distant future they would solve the few technical conflicts that remained before the nuclear weapons tests could begin. The research director was no dummy. He was, however, a pain – he insisted on reporting each development that occurred, no matter how small, and he expected a reaction from the engineer each time.

That’s where whatshername came in. By letting her page freely through the books in the library, the engineer had left the mathematical door wide open, and she absorbed everything she could on algebraic, transcendental, imaginary and complex numbers, on Euler’s constant, on differential and Diophantine equations, and on an infinite (∞) number of other complex things, all more or less incomprehensible to the engineer himself.

In time, Nombeko would have come to be called her boss’s right hand, if only she hadn’t been a she and above all hadn’t had the wrong colour skin. Instead she got to keep the vague title ‘help’, but she was the one who (alongside her cleaning) read the research director’s many brick-size tomes describing problems, test results and analyses. That is, what the engineer couldn’t manage to do on his own.

‘What is this crap about?’ Engineer Westhuizen said one day, pressing another pile of papers into his cleaning woman’s hands.

Nombeko read it and returned with the answer.

‘It’s an analysis of the consequences of the static and dynamic overpressure of bombs with different numbers of kilotons.’

‘Tell me in plain language,’ said the engineer.

‘The stronger the bomb is, the more buildings blow up,’ Nombeko clarified.

‘Come on, the average mountain gorilla would know that. Am I completely surrounded by idiots?’ said the engineer, who poured himself a brandy and told his cleaning woman to go away.

* * *

Nombeko thought that Pelindaba, as a prison, was just short of exceptional. She had her own bed, access to a bathroom instead of being responsible for four thousand outhouses, two meals a day and fruit for lunch. And her own library. Or… it wasn’t actually her own, but no one besides Nombeko was interested in it. And it wasn’t particularly extensive; it was far from the class she imagined the one in Pretoria to be in. And some of the books on the shelves were old or irrelevant or both. But still.

For these reasons she continued rather cheerfully to serve her time for her poor judgement in allowing herself to be run over on a pavement by a plastered man that winter day in Johannesburg in 1976. What she was experiencing now was in every way better than emptying latrines in the world’s largest human garbage dump.

When enough months had gone by, it was time to start counting years instead. Of course, she gave a thought or two to how she might be able to spirit herself out of Pelindaba prematurely. It would be a challenge as good as any to force her way through the fences, the minefield, the guard dogs and the alarm.

Dig a tunnel?

No, that was such a stupid thought that she dropped it immediately.

Hitchhike?

No, any hitchhiker would be discovered by the guards’ German shepherds, and then all one could do was hope that they went for the throat first so that the rest wasn’t too bad.

Bribery?

Well, maybe… but she would have only one chance, and whomever she tried this on would probably take the diamonds and report her, in South African fashion.

Steal someone else’s identity, then?

Yes, that might work. But the hard part would be stealing someone else’s skin colour.

Nombeko decided to take a break from her thoughts of escape. Anyway, it was possible that her only chance would be to make herself invisible and equip herself with wings. Wings alone wouldn’t suffice: she would be shot down by the eight guards in the four towers.

She was just over fifteen when she was locked up within the double fences and the minefield, and she was well on her way to seventeen when the engineer very solemnly informed her that he had arranged a valid South African passport for her, even though she was black. The fact was, without one she could no longer have access to all the corridors that the indolent engineer felt she ought to have access to. The rules had been issued by the South African intelligence agency, and Engineer Westhuizen knew how to pick his battles.

He kept the passport in his desk drawer and, thanks to his incessant need to be domineering, he made lots of noise about how he was forced to keep it locked up.

‘That’s so you won’t get it into your head to run away, whatsyourname. Without a passport you can’t leave the country, and we can always find you, sooner or later,’ said the engineer, giving an ugly grin.

Nombeko replied that it said in the passport whathernamewas, in case the engineer was curious, and she added that he had long since given her the responsibility for his key cabinet. Which included the key to his desk drawer.

‘And I haven’t run away because of it,’ said Nombeko, thinking that it was more the guards, the dogs, the alarm, the minefields and the twelve thousand volts in the fence that kept her there.

The engineer glared at his cleaning woman. She was being impudent again. It was enough to make a person crazy. Especially since she was always right.

That damned creature.

Two hundred and fifty people were working, at various levels, on the most secret of all secret projects. Nombeko could state with certainty early on that the man at the very top lacked talent in every area except feathering his own nest. And he was lucky (up until the day he wasn’t any more).

During one phase of the project development, one of the most difficult problems that needed to be solved was the constant leakage in experiments with uranium hexafluoride. The engineer had a blackboard on the wall of his office upon which he drew lines and made arrows, fumbling his way through formulas and other things to make it appear as if he were thinking. The engineer sat in his easy chair mumbling ‘hydrogen-bearing gas’, ‘uranium hexafluoride’ and ‘leakage’ interspersed with curses in both English and Afrikaans. Perhaps Nombeko should have let him mumble away: she was there to clean. But at last she said, ‘Now, I don’t know much about what a “hydrogen-bearing gas” is, and I’ve hardly even heard of uranium hexafluoride. But I can see from the slightly hard-to-interpret attempts on the wall that you are having an autocatalytic problem.’

The engineer said nothing, but he looked past whatshername at the door into the hallway in order to make sure that no one was standing there and listening, since he was about to be befuddled by this strange being for the umpteenth time in a row.

‘Should I take your silence to mean that I have permission to continue? After all, you usually wish me to answer when I’m spoken to and only then.’

‘Yes, get on with it then!’ said the engineer.

Nombeko gave a friendly smile and said that as far as she was concerned, it didn’t really matter what the different variables were called, it was still possible to do mathematics with them.

‘We’ll call hydrogen-bearing gas A, and uranium hexafluoride can be B,’ Nombeko said.

And she walked over to the blackboard on the wall, erased the engineer’s nonsense, and wrote the rate equation for an autocatalytic reaction of the first order.

When the engineer just stared blankly at the blackboard, she explained her reasoning by drawing a sigmoid curve.

When she had done that, she realized that Engineer van der Westhuizen understood no more of what she had written than any latrine emptier would have in the same situation. Or, for that matter, an assistant from the City of Johannesburg’s department of sanitation.

‘Please, Engineer,’ she said. ‘Try to understand. I have floors to scrub. The gas and the fluoride don’t get along and their unhappiness runs away with itself.’

‘What’s the solution?’ said the engineer.

‘I don’t know,’ said Nombeko. ‘I haven’t had time to think about it. Like I said, I’m the cleaning woman here.’

In that instant, one of Engineer van der Westhuizen’s many qualified colleagues came through the door. He had been sent by the research director to share some good news: the team had discovered that the problem was autocatalytic in nature; this resulted in chemical impurities in the filter of the processing machine, and they would soon be able to present a solution.

There was no reason for the colleague to say any of this, because just behind the Kaffir with the mop he saw what the engineer had written on his blackboard.

‘Oh, I see that you have already figured out what I came to tell you, boss. I won’t disturb you, then,’ said the colleague, and he turned round in the doorway.

Engineer van der Westhuizen sat behind his desk in silence and poured another tumbler full of Klipdrift.

Nombeko said that this certainly was lucky, wasn’t it? She would leave him alone in just a minute, but first she had a few questions. The first was whether the engineer thought it would be appropriate for her to deliver a mathematical explanation for how the team could increase the capacity from twelve thousand SWUs per year to twenty thousand, with a tail assay of 0.46 per cent.

The engineer did.

The other question was whether the engineer might be so kind as to order a new scrubbing brush for the office, since his dog had chewed the old one to pieces.

The engineer replied that he wasn’t making any promises, but he would see what he could do.

Nombeko thought she might as well appreciate the bright spots in her existence, as long as she was locked up with no possibility for escape. It would, for example, be exciting to see how long that sham of an engineer Westhuizen would last.

And all told, she did have it pretty good. She read her books, preferably while no one was looking; she mopped a few hallways and emptied a few ashtrays; and she read the research team’s analyses and explained them to the engineer as plainly as she could.

She spent her free time with the other help. They belonged to a minority that the regime of apartheid found more difficult to categorize; according to the rules they were ‘miscellaneous Asians’. More precisely, they were Chinese.

Chinese people as a race had ended up in South Africa almost a hundred years earlier, at a time when the country needed cheap labour (that also didn’t complain too bloody much) in the gold mines outside Johannesburg. That was history now, but Chinese colonies remained, and the language flourished.

The three Chinese girls (little sister, middle sister and big sister) were locked in with Nombeko at night. At first they were standoffish, but since mah-jongg is so much better with four than with three, it was worth a try, especially when the girl from Soweto didn’t seem to be as stupid as they had reason to believe, given that she wasn’t yellow.

Nombeko was happy to play, and she had soon learned almost everything about pong, kong and chow, as well as all possible winds in every imaginable direction. She had the advantage of being able to memorize all 144 of the tiles, so she won three out of four hands and let one of the girls win the fourth.

The Chinese girls and Nombeko also spent some time each week with the latter telling them all that had happened in the world since the last time, according to what she had been able to pick up here and there in the hallways and through the walls. On the one hand, it was not a comprehensive news report; on the other, the audience’s standards weren’t all that high. For example, when Nombeko reported that China had just decided that Aristotle and Shakespeare would no longer be forbidden in the country, the girls replied that this was sure to make both of them happy.

The sisters in misfortune became friends by way of the news reports and the game. And thanks to the characters and symbols on all of the tiles, the girls were inspired to teach Nombeko their Chinese dialect, upon which everyone had a good laugh at how quickly she learned and at the sisters’ less-successful attempts at the Xhosa Nombeko had learned from her mother.

From a historical perspective, the three Chinese girls’ morals were more dubious than Nombeko’s. They had ended up in the engineer’s possession in approximately the same way, but for fifteen years instead of seven. They had happened to meet the engineer at a bar in Johannesburg; he had made a pass at all three of them at the same time but was told that they needed money for a sick relative and wanted to sell… not their bodies, but rather a valuable family heirloom.

The engineer’s first priority was his horniness, but his second priority was the suspicion that he could make a killing, so he followed the girls home. There they showed him a patterned pottery goose from the Han dynasty, from approximately one hundred years before Christ. The girls wanted twenty thousand rand for the goose; the engineer realized that it must be worth at least ten times more, maybe a hundred! But the girls weren’t just girls – they were also Chinese, so he offered them fifteen thousand in cash outside the bank the next morning (‘Five thousand each, or nothing!’) and the idiots agreed to it.

The unique goose was given a place of honor on a pedestal in the engineer’s office until a year later when an Israeli Mossad agent, also a participant in the nuclear weapons project, took a closer look at the piece and declared it to be junk within ten seconds. The investigation that followed, led by an engineer with murder in his eyes, found that the goose had in fact been produced not by craftsmen in the province of Zhejiang during the Han dynasty approximately one hundred years before Christ, but rather by three young Chinese girls in a suburb of Johannesburg, during no dynasty at all, approximately one thousand, nine hundred and seventy five years after Christ.

But the girls had been careless enough to show him the goose in their own home. So the engineer and the legal system got hold of all three of them. Only two rand were left of the fifteen thousand, which was why the girls were now locked up at Pelindaba for at least ten more years. ‘Among ourselves, we call the engineer “鹅”,’ said one of the girls.

‘The goose,’ Nombeko translated.

What the Chinese girls wanted most of all was to return to the Chinese quarter of Johannesburg and continue producing geese from the time before Christ, but just do it a bit more elegantly than last time.

In the meantime, they had as little to complain about as Nombeko. Their work responsibilities were, among other things, to serve food to the engineer and the guards, as well as handle incoming and outgoing post. Especially the outgoing post. Everything, large and small, that could be stolen without being missed too much was quite simply addressed to the girls’ mother and placed in the out-box. Their mother received it all gratefully and sold it on, pleased with herself for once having made the investment of letting her girls learn to read and write in English.

Now and then they made a mess of things, though, because their methods were sloppy and risky. Like the time one of them mixed up the address labels and the prime minister himself called Engineer Westhuizen to ask why he had received eight candles, two hole-punches and four empty binders in his package – just as the Chinese girls’ mother received and immediately burned a four-hundred-page technical report on the disadvantages of using neptunium as a base for a fission charge.

* * *

Nombeko was irritated that it had taken her so long to realize what a fix she was in. In practice, given the way things had unfolded, she hadn’t been sentenced to seven years in the engineer’s service at all. She was there for life. Unlike the three Chinese girls, she had full insight into what was the world’s most top secret project. As long as there were twelve-thousand-volt fences between her and anyone else she could tattle to, it was no problem. But what if she were released? She was a combination of worthless black woman and security risk. So how long would she be allowed to live? Ten seconds. Or twenty. If she was lucky.

Her situation could be described as a mathematical equation with no solution. Because if she helped the engineer to succeed in his task, he would be praised, retire and receive a gilt-edged pension from the state, while she – who knew everything she shouldn’t know – received a shot to the back of the head.

If, however, she did her best to make him fail, the engineer would be disgraced, get fired and receive a much more modest pension, while she herself would still receive a shot to the back of the head.

In short: this was the equation she could not solve. All she could do was try to walk a tightrope – that is, do her best to make sure the engineer wasn’t revealed as the sham he was while at the same time trying to prolong the project as much as possible. That in itself wouldn’t protect her from that shot to the back of the head, but the longer she could put it off, the greater chance there was that something would happen in the meantime. Like a revolution or a staff mutiny or something else impossible to believe in.

Assuming she couldn’t find a way out after all.

In the absence of other ideas, she sat at the window in the library as often as she could, in order to study the activity at the gates. She hung around there at various times of day and made note of the guards’ routines.

What she quickly discovered, among other things, was that every vehicle that came in or went out was searched by both guards and dog – except when the engineer was in it. Or the research director. Or one of the two Mossad agents. Apparently these four were above suspicion. Unfortunately, they also had better parking spots than the others. Nombeko could make her way to the big garage, crawl into a boot – and be discovered by both guard and dog on duty. The latter was under instructions to bite first and ask master later. But the small garage, where the important people parked, where there were boots one might survive in – she didn’t have access to that. The garage key was one of the few that the engineer did not keep in the cupboard Nombeko was responsible for. He needed it every day, so he carried it with him.

Another thing Nombeko observed was that the black cleaning woman in the outer perimeter actually did set foot within the boundaries of Pelindaba each time she emptied the green rubbish bin just beside the inner of the two twelve-thousand-volt fences. This took place every other day, and it fascinated Nombeko, because she was pretty sure that the cleaning woman didn’t have clearance to go there but that the guards let it go in order to avoid emptying their own crap.

This gave rise to a bold thought. Nombeko could make her way unseen to the rubbish bin via the big garage, crawl into it, and hitch a ride with the black woman past the gates and out to the skips on the free side. The woman emptied the bin according to a strict schedule at 4.05 p.m. every other day, and she survived the manoeuvre only because the guard dogs had learned not to tear this particular darky apart without asking first. On the other hand, they did nose suspiciously at the bin each time.

So she would have to put the dogs out of commission for an afternoon or so. Then, and only then, would the stowaway have a chance of surviving her escape. A tiny bit of food poisoning – might that work?

Nombeko involved the three Chinese girls because they were responsible for feeding the entire staff of guards and all of Sector G, both people and animals.

‘Of course!’ said the big sister when Nombeko brought it up. ‘We happen to be experts in dog poisoning, all three of us. Or at least two of us.’

By now, Nombeko had ceased being surprised by whatever the Chinese girls did or said, but this was still exceptional. She asked the big sister for details about what she’d just said so that Nombeko wouldn’t have to wonder for the rest of her life. However long that might be.

Well, before the Chinese girls and their mother started working in the lucrative counterfeiting industry, their mother had run a dog cemetery right next to the white neighbourhood of Parktown West outside Johannesburg. Business was bad; dogs ate as well and as nutritiously as people generally did in that area, so they lived far too long. But then their mother realized that the big sister and the middle sister could increase their turnover by putting out poisoned dog food here and there in the surrounding parks, where the whites’ poodles and Pekinese ran free. At the time, the little sister was too young and might easily have got it into her head to taste the dog food if she got hold of it.

In a short time the owner of the dog cemetery had twice as much to do. And the family would probably still be making a good living today, if only they hadn’t become, to tell the truth, a bit too greedy. Because when there were more dead dogs in the park than living ones, those white racists had pointed straight at the only Chink in the area and her daughters.

‘Yes, that was certainly prejudiced of them,’ said Nombeko.

Their mother had had to pack her bags quickly, and she hid herself and her children in central Johannesburg and changed careers.

That was a few years ago now, but the girls could probably remember the various ways of dosing dog food.

‘Well, now we’re talking about eight dogs – and about poisoning them just enough,’ said Nombeko. ‘So they get a little bit sick for a day or two. No more than that.’

‘Sounds like a typical case of antifreeze poisoning,’ said the middle sister.

‘I was just thinking the same thing,’ said the big sister.

And then they argued about the appropriate dose. The middle sister thought that a cup and a half should do, but the big sister pointed out that they were dealing with large German shepherds here, not some little Chihuahua.

In the end, the girls agreed that two cups was the right amount to put the dogs in a dreadful condition until the next day.

The girls approached the problem in such a carefree manner that Nombeko already regretted asking for their help. Didn’t they realize how much trouble they would be in when the poisoned dog food was traced back to them?

‘Nah,’ said the little sister. ‘It will all work out. We’ll have to start by ordering a bottle of antifreeze, otherwise we can’t poison anything.’

Now Nombeko was twice as regretful. Didn’t they realize that the security personnel would figure out it was them in just a few minutes, once they discovered what had been added to their usual shopping list?

And then Nombeko thought of something.

‘Wait a minute,’ she said. ‘Don’t do anything until I get back. Nothing!’

The girls watched Nombeko go in surprise. What was she up to?

The fact was that Nombeko had thought of something she’d read in one of the research director’s countless reports to the engineer. It wasn’t about antifreeze, but ethylene glycol. It said in the report that the researchers were experimenting with liquids that had a boiling point of over one hundred degrees Celsius in order to gain a few tenths of a second by raising the temperature at which critical mass would be reached. That was where the ethylene glycol came in. Didn’t antifreeze and ethylene glycol have similar properties?

If the research facility’s library was at its worst when it came to the latest news, it was at its best when it came to more general information. Such as confirmation that ethylene glycol and antifreeze were more than almost the same thing. They were the same thing.

Nombeko borrowed two of the keys in the engineer’s cupboard and sneaked down to the big garage and into the chemicals cupboard next to the electrical station. There she found a nearly full seven-gallon barrel of ethylene glycol. She poured a gallon into the bucket she’d brought along and returned to the girls.

‘Here you go – this is plenty, with some to spare,’ she said.

Nombeko and the girls decided that they would start by mixing a very mild dose into the dog food to see what would happen, and then they would increase the dose until all eight dogs were off sick without causing the guards to become suspicious.

Therefore the Chinese girls lowered the dose from two cups to one and three-quarters, upon Nombeko’s recommendation, but they made the mistake of letting the little sister take care of the dosing itself – that is, the one sister of the three who had been too little in the good old days. Thus she mixed in one and three-quarters cups of ethylene glycol per dog in the first, conservative round. Twelve hours later, all eight dogs were as dead as those in Parktown West a few years earlier. Furthermore, the guard commander’s food-sneaking cat was in a critical condition.

One characteristic of ethylene glycol is that it rapidly enters the bloodstream via the intestines. Then the liver turns it into glycolaldehyde, glycolic acid and oxalate. If there is enough of these, they take out the kidneys before affecting the lungs and heart. The direct cause of death in the eight dogs was cardiac arrest.

The immediate results of the youngest Chinese girl’s miscalculation were that the alarm was sounded, that the guards went on high alert, and that it was, of course, impossible for Nombeko to smuggle herself out in a rubbish bin.

It was only day two before the girls were called in for interrogation, but while they were sitting there and flatly denying involvement, the security personnel found a nearly empty bucket of ethylene glycol in the boot of one of the 250 workers’ cars. Nombeko had access to the garage, thanks to the engineer’s key cupboard, of course; the boot in question was the only one that happened to be unlocked, and she had to put the bucket somewhere. The owner of the car was a half-ethical sort of guy – on the one hand, he would never betray his country; on the other hand, as luck would have it, he had chosen that very day to swipe his department director’s briefcase and the money and chequebook it contained. This was found alongside the bucket, and when all was said and done, the man had been seized, interrogated, fired… and sentenced to six months in prison for theft, plus thirty-two years for an act of terror.

‘That was close,’ said the little sister once the three sisters were no longer suspects.

‘Shall we try again?’ the middle sister wondered.

‘But then we’d have to wait for them to get new dogs,’ said the big sister. ‘The old ones are all gone.’

Nombeko didn’t say anything. But she thought that her prospects for the future weren’t much brighter than those of the director’s cat, who had started having convulsions.

CHAPTER 4
On a Good Samaritan, a bicycle thief and a wife who smoked more and more

Since Henrietta’s money was gone, Ingmar had to do most of his hitchhiking from Nice back to Södertälje without eating. But in Malmö, the dirty, hungry junior post office clerk happened to meet a soldier of the Salvation Army who was on his way home after a long day in the service of the Lord. Ingmar asked if the soldier could spare a piece of bread.

The Salvationist immediately allowed himself to be governed by the spirit of love and compassion, so much so that Ingmar was allowed to come home with him.

Once there, he served mashed turnips with pork and then settled Ingmar in his bed; he himself would sleep on the floor before the stove. Ingmar yawned and said that he was impressed by the soldier’s friendliness. To this the soldier replied that the explanation for his actions was in the Bible, not least in the Gospel of Luke, where one could read about the Good Samaritan. The Salvationist asked Ingmar if he would mind if he read a few lines from the Holy Book.

‘Not at all,’ said Ingmar, ‘but read quietly because I need to sleep.’

And then he dozed off. He woke the next morning to the scent of something baking.

After breakfast he thanked the charitable soldier, said farewell, and then stole the soldier’s bicycle. As he pedalled away, he wondered whether it was the Bible that said something about necessity knowing no law. Ingmar wasn’t sure.

In any case, he sold the stolen goods in Lund and used the money to buy a train ticket all the way home.

Henrietta met him as he stepped through the door. Before she could open her mouth to welcome him home, he informed her that it was now time to make a child.

Henrietta did have a number of questions, not the least of which was why Ingmar suddenly wanted to get into bed without his damned box of American soldiers’ condoms in hand, but she wasn’t so stupid as to deny him. All she asked was that her husband shower first, because he smelled almost as bad as he looked.

The couple’s very first condom-free adventure lasted for four minutes. Then Ingmar was finished. But Henrietta was still pleased. Her beloved fool was home again and he had actually thrown the condoms into the bin before they went to bed. Could this mean that they were done with all the foolishness? And that they might be blessed with a little baby?

Fifteen hours later, Ingmar woke up again. He started by telling her that he had in fact made contact with the king down in Nice. Or the other way round, really. The king had made contact with him. Well, with his forehead. Using his cane.

‘Good heavens,’ said Henrietta.

Yes, you could say that again. But actually, Ingmar was thankful. The king had made him see clearly again. Made him realize that the monarchy was of the devil and must be eradicated.

‘Of the devil?’ said his startled wife.

‘And must be eradicated.’

But such a thing demanded both cunning and patience. And also that Ingmar and Henrietta had a child as part of the plan. His name would be Holger, incidentally.

‘Who?’ said Henrietta.

‘Our son, of course.’

Henrietta, who had spent her entire adult life silently longing for an Elsa, said that it could just as easily be a daughter, if they had a child at all. But then she was informed that she should stop being so negative. If she would instead serve Ingmar a little food, he promised to tell her how everything would be from now on.

So Henrietta did. She served pytt i panna with beetroot and eggs.

Between bites, Ingmar told her about his encounter with Gustaf V in greater detail. For the first but by no means last time he told her about ‘messenger boy’ and ‘scoundrel’. For the second but by no means last time he described the silver cane to the forehead.

‘And that’s why the monarchy must be eradicated?’ said Henrietta. ‘With cunning and patience? How do you mean to use the cunning and patience?’

What she thought – but didn’t say – was that neither patience nor cunning had historically been salient traits of her husband’s.

Well, when it came to patience, Ingmar realized that even if he and Henrietta had created a child as recently as the day before, it would take several months before the kid arrived and, thereafter, years before Holger was old enough to take over from his father.

‘Take over what?’ Henrietta wondered.

‘The battle, my dear Henrietta. The battle.’

Ingmar had had plenty of time to think while he hitchhiked through Europe. It wouldn’t be easy to eradicate the monarchy. It was something of a lifelong project. Or even more than that. That was where Holger came in. Because if Ingmar died before the battle was won, his son would step in.

‘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:

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 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

CHAPTER 5
On an anonymous letter, peace on earth and a hungry scorpion

Engineer Westhuizen’s servant relapsed into the distant hope that a general societal change would come to her rescue. But it wasn’t easy for her to predict the chances of anything that might give her a future at all, whatever the quality of that future might be.

The books in the library of the research facility gave her some context, of course, but most of what was on the shelves was ten or more years old. Among other things, Nombeko had skimmed through a two-hundred-page document from 1924 in which a London professor considered himself to have proved that there would never be another war, thanks to a combination of the League of Nations and the spread of the increasingly popular jazz.

It was easier to keep track of what was going on within the fences and walls of the facility. Unfortunately the latest reports said that the engineer’s clever colleagues had solved the autocatalytic issue and others besides, and they were now ready for a test detonation. A successful test would bring the whole project far too close to completion for Nombeko’s comfort, because she wanted to keep living for a while longer.

The only thing she could do there and then was try to slow their progress down a bit. Preferably in such a way that the government in Pretoria would not start to suspect that Westhuizen was as useless as he was. Perhaps it would be enough to put a temporary stop to the drilling that had just begun in the Kalahari Desert.

Even though things had gone as they had with the antifreeze, Nombeko once again turned to the Chinese girls for help. She asked if she could send a letter through them, via the girls’ mother. How did that all work, by the way? Wasn’t outgoing post checked at all?

Yes, of course it was. There was a white on the guard staff who did nothing but go through everything that wasn’t being sent to an addressee who already had security clearance. At the least suspicion he would open the outgoing post. And he would interrogate the sender, no exceptions.

This would, of course, have been an insurmountable problem if the director of security hadn’t held a briefing a few years ago with those responsible for the post. Once he had told the Chinese girls in great detail about the security measures in place, adding that such measures were necessary because not a single person could be trusted, he excused himself to go to the bathroom. Whereupon the Chinese girls proved him right: as soon as they were alone in the room, they skipped around his desk, fed the correct paper into the typewriter, and added another addressee with security clearance to the 114 that already existed.

‘Your mother,’ said Nombeko.

The girls smiled and nodded. To be on the safe side, they had given their mother a nice title before her name. Cheng Lian looked suspicious. Professor Cheng Lian inspired confidence. The logic of racism was no more complicated than that.

Nombeko thought that a Chinese name ought to have caused someone to react, even with the title of professor, but taking risks and getting away with them seemed once and for all to be part of the girls’ nature – aside from the reason they were as locked up as she was. And the name had already been working for several years, so it ought to work for one more day. So did this mean that Nombeko could send a letter in a letter to Professor Cheng Lian, and the girls’ mother would forward it?

‘Absolutely,’ said the girls, showing no curiosity about whom Nombeko wanted to send a message to.

To:

President James Earl Carter Jr

The White House, Washington

Hello, Mr President. You might be interested to know that South Africa, under leadership of a regularly intoxicated ass, is planning to detonate one atomic bomb of approximately three megatons within the next three months. This will take place in early 1978 in the Kalahari Desert, more specifically, at these exact coordinates: 26°44′26″S, 22°11′32″E. Afterwards, the plan is for South Africa to equip itself with five more of the same type, to use as it sees fit.

Sincerely,

A Friend

Wearing rubber gloves, Nombeko closed the envelope, addressed it and added ‘Death to America!’ in one corner. Then she put it all in another envelope that was expedited the very next day to a professor in Johannesburg who had security clearance and a Chinese-sounding name.

* * *

The White House in Washington was constructed by black slaves imported from Nombeko’s Africa. It was a majestic building from the start, and it was even more impressive 177 years later. The building contained 132 rooms, 35 bathrooms, 6 levels, a bowling alley and a cinema. And an awful lot of staff, who between them received more than thirty-three thousand pieces of post per month.

Each one was X-rayed, subjected to the sensitive noses of specially trained dogs, and visually inspected before they went to each individual recipient.

Nombeko’s letter made it through both X-ray and dogs, but when a sleepy yet observant inspector saw ‘Death to America’ on an envelope addressed to the president himself, the alarm was sounded. Twelve hours later, the letter had been flown to Langley, Virginia, where it was shown to CIA director Stansfield M. Turner. The debriefing agent described the envelope and informed him that the fingerprints on it were limited in extent and placed in such a way that they were unlikely to lead to anything more than various postal workers; that the letter had not caused the radiation sensors to react; that the postmark appeared to be authentic; that it had been sent from postal zone nine in Johannesburg, South Africa, eight days earlier; and that a computer analysis indicated that the text had been formed from words cut out of the book Peace on Earth, which had been written by a British professor who first argued that the combination of the League of Nations and jazz would bring good fortune to the world and then, in 1939, took his own life.

‘Jazz is supposed to bring peace on earth?’ was the CIA director’s first comment.

‘Like I said, sir, he took his own life,’ the agent answered.

The CIA director thanked the agent and was left alone with the letter. Three phone calls and twenty minutes later, it was clear that the contents of the letter were in complete agreement with the information he had, embarrassingly enough, received from the Soviets three weeks earlier but had not believed at the time. The only difference was the exact coordinates in the anonymous letter. All in all, the information appeared to be extremely credible. Now there were two main thoughts in the CIA director’s head:

Who the hell had sent the letter?

Time to contact the president. The letter had been addressed to him, after all.

Stansfield M. Turner was not popular at the agency because he was trying to exchange as many of his colleagues as possible for computers. And it was one of them – not a person – that had been able to trace the cut-out words to the book Peace on Earth.

‘Jazz is supposed to bring peace on earth?’ said President Carter to his old schoolmate Turner when they met the next day in the Oval Office.

‘He took his own life a few years later, Mr President,’ said the director of the CIA.

President Carter – who loved jazz – still couldn’t let the thought go. What if the poor professor had been right? And then the Beatles and the Rolling Stones showed up and ruined everything?

The director of the CIA said that the Beatles could be blamed for a lot of things, but not for starting the Vietnam War. And then he said that he was sceptical of the theory, because if the Beatles and Rolling Stones hadn’t already destroyed peace on earth, there was always the Sex Pistols.

‘The Sex Pistols?’ the president wondered.

‘“God Save the Queen”, you remember?’ the CIA director quoted.

‘Oh, I see,’ said the president.

Now to the question at hand. Were the idiots in South Africa about to detonate an atomic bomb? And was this work being led by an ass?

‘I don’t know about the ass part, sir. We have indications that the work is being supervised by an Engineer Westhuizen, who graduated with top grades from one of South Africa’s best universities. He must have been handpicked.’

But there were many indications that the rest of the information was correct. The KGB had, of course, already been so kind as to tip them off about what was going on. And now this letter, formulated in such a way that the CIA director was prepared to bet his life that the KGB wasn’t behind it this time. Plus, the CIA’s own satellite images showed activity in the desert exactly where the mystery sender said it would be.

‘But why this “Death to America” on the envelope?’ said President Carter.

‘It meant that the letter landed on my desk immediately, and I think that was the point. The letter writer seems to have great insight into how security around the president works. That makes us even more curious about who he is. Cleverly executed, in any case.’

The president hemmed and hawed. He had trouble seeing what was so clever about ‘Death to America’. Or, for that matter, the assertion that Elizabeth II was of any race other than the human one.

But he thanked his old friend and asked his secretary to call up Prime Minister Vorster in Pretoria. President Carter was directly responsible for 32,000 nuclear missiles that pointed in a number of directions. Brezhnev in Moscow was in a similar situation. The world did not need another six weapons of the same magnitude. Someone was going to get a talking-to!

* * *

Vorster was furious. The president of the United States, that peanut farmer and Baptist, had had the nerve to call and claim that preparations were under way for a weapons test in the Kalahari Desert. Furthermore, he had recited the coordinates of the exact location of the test site. The accusation was completely baseless and incredibly, terribly insulting! In a rage, Vorster slammed down the phone in Jimmy Carter’s ear, but he had enough sense not to go any further. Instead he called Pelindaba right away to order Engineer Westhuizen to test his weapons somewhere else.

‘But where?’ said Engineer Westhuizen while his cleaning woman swabbed the floor around his feet.

‘Anywhere but the Kalahari,’ said Prime Minister Vorster.

‘That will delay us by several months, maybe a year or more,’ said the engineer.

‘Just do as I say, dammit.’

* * *

The engineer’s servant let him spend two whole years thinking about where the weapons test could be done, now that the Kalahari Desert was no longer available. The best idea Westhuizen had was to shoot the thing off in one of the many homelands, but not even he thought this sounded good enough.

Nombeko sensed that the engineer’s share value was on its way to a new low, and that it would soon be time to drive his price up again. But then something lucky happened – an external factor that gave the engineer, and by extension his cleaning woman, another six months of respite.

It turned out that Prime Minister B. J. Vorster was tired of being met with complaints and ingratitude in nearly every context in his own country. So with a little help, he magically made seventy-five million rand disappear from the country’s coffers, and he started the newspaper The Citizen. Unlike most citizens, this one had a uniquely, completely positive attitude towards the South African government and its ability to keep a tight rein on the natives and the rest of the world.

Unfortunately enough, an extra-treacherous citizen happened to let this come to the attention of the general public. Around the same time, the goddamn world conscience referred to a successful military operation in Angola as the slaughter of six hundred civilians – and thus it was time for Vorster to go.

Oh, fuck it, he thought one last time, and left the world of politics in 1979. All that was left to do was to go home to Cape Town and sit on the terrace of his luxury home with a whisky in his hand and a view of Robben Island where that terrorist Mandela was sitting.

Mandela was supposed to be the one who rotted away, not me, Vorster thought as he rotted away.

His successor as prime minister, P. W. Botha, was called Die Groot Krokodil – the big crocodile – and he had scared the engineer out of his wits in their very first phone call. Nombeko realized that the weapons test couldn’t wait any longer. So she brought it up one late afternoon when the engineer was still able to speak.

‘Um, Engineer…’ she said as she reached for the ashtray on his desk.

‘What is it now?’ said the engineer.

‘Well, I was just thinking…’ Nombeko began, without being interrupted. ‘I was just thinking that if all of South Africa is too crowded, except for the Kalahari Desert, why couldn’t the bomb be detonated at sea?’

South Africa was surrounded by practically endless amounts of sea in three directions. Nombeko had long been of the opinion that the best choice for a test site should have been obvious to a child, now that the desert was no longer an option. Sure enough, the childlike Westhuizen lit up. For one second. Then he realized that the intelligence service had warned him not to collaborate with the navy under any circumstances. There had been a detailed investigation after President Carter in the United States had obviously been informed of the planned test in the Kalahari, and it had singled out Vice Admiral Johan Charl Walters as the prime suspect. Admiral Walters had visited Pelindaba just three weeks before Carter’s phone call, and he had gained a clear picture of the project. He had also been alone in Engineer Westhuizen’s office for at least seven minutes while the engineer was stuck in heavy traffic one morning (the engineer had edited this last bit during the interrogation, because he had spent a little too much time at the bar where he always drank breakfast). The leading theory was that Walters had become pouty and tattled to the United States once it became clear to him that he would not be allowed to arm his submarines with nuclear warheads.

‘I don’t trust the navy,’ the engineer mumbled to his cleaning woman.

‘So get the Israelis to help,’ said Nombeko.

At that moment, the phone rang.

‘Yes, Mr Prime Minister… Of course I’m aware of the importance of… Yes, Mr Prime Minister… No, Mr Prime Minister… I don’t quite agree with that, if you’ll excuse me, Mr Prime Minister. Here on my desk is a detailed plan to carry out a test in the Indian Ocean, along with the Israelis. Within three months, Mr Prime Minister. Thank you, Mr Prime Minister, you are far too kind. Thanks again. Well, goodbye then.’

Engineer Westhuizen hung up and tossed back the whole glass of brandy he had just poured. And then he said to Nombeko:

‘Don’t just stand there. Get me the two Israelis.’

Sure enough, the test was carried out with the help of Israel. Engineer Westhuizen aimed a kind thought in the direction of former Prime Minister-slash-former-Nazi Vorster for his genius in establishing cooperation with Jerusalem. Israel’s on-site representatives were two pompous Mossad agents. Unfortunately, the engineer would come to meet with them more often than was necessary, and he never learned to tolerate that superior smile, the one that said, ‘How could you be so fucking stupid as to buy a clay goose that was hardly dry and believe it to be two thousand years old?’

When suspected traitor Vice Admiral Walters was kept out of the loop, America couldn’t keep up. Ha! Sure, the detonation was registered by an American Vela satellite, but it was a bit too late by then.

New Prime Minister P. W. Botha was so delighted by the results of the weapons test that he came to visit the research facility and brought three bottles of sparkling wine from Constantia. Then he threw a cheers-and-thanks party in Engineer Westhuizen’s office, along with the engineer, two Israeli Mossad agents, and a local darky to do the actual serving. Prime Minister Botha would never allow himself to call the darky a darky; his position demanded otherwise. But there was no rule against thinking what one thought.

In any case, she served what she was supposed to and otherwise made sure to blend into the white wallpaper as best she could.

‘Here’s to you, Engineer,’ Prime Minister Botha said, raising his glass. ‘Here’s to you!’

Engineer Westhuizen looked fittingly embarrassed about being a hero, and he discreetly asked for a refill from whatshername while the prime minister had a friendly conversation with the Mossad agents.

But then, in an instant, the relatively pleasant situation became rather the opposite. The prime minister turned to Westhuizen again and said, ‘By the way, what is your opinion on the tritium problem?’

* * *

Prime Minister P. W. Botha’s background was not entirely different from that of his predecessor. It was possible that the country’s new leader was a bit cleverer, because he had given up Nazism once he saw the direction it was heading, and started referring to his convictions as ‘Christian Nationalism’ instead. So he had avoided internment when the Allies got a foothold in the war, and he was able to start a political career without a waiting period.

Botha and his Reform Church knew that the Truth could be read in the Bible, if one only read very carefully. After all, the Tower of Babel – man’s attempt to build his way to Heaven – came up in Genesis. God found this attempt presumptuous; he became indignant and scattered the people all over the world and created language confusion as punishment.

Different people, different languages. It was God’s intention to keep people separate. It was a green light from on high to divide people up according to colour.

The big crocodile also felt that it was God’s help that let him climb in his career. Soon he was the minister of defence in his predecessor Vorster’s cabinet. From this position, he commanded air raids on the terrorists who were hiding in Angola, the incident that the stupid rest of the world called a slaughter of innocents. ‘We have photographic evidence!’ said the world. ‘It’s what you can’t see that’s important,’ said the crocodile, but the only person he convinced with this was his mother.

Anyway, Engineer Westhuizen’s current problem was that P. W. Botha’s father had been the commanding officer in the Second Boer War and that Botha himself had military strategies and issues in his blood. Therefore he also had some knowledge of all that technical stuff for which Engineer Westhuizen was the nuclear weapons programme’s top representative. Botha had no reason to suspect that the engineer was the fraud he was. He had asked his question out of conversational curiosity.

* * *

Engineer Westhuizen hadn’t spoken for ten seconds, and the situation was about to become awkward for him – and downright dangerous for Nombeko, who thought that if the idiot didn’t answer the world’s simplest question soon, he would be toast. She was tired of having to save him time and again, but all the same she fished the plain brown spare bottle of Klipdrift from her pocket, stepped up to the engineer, and said she had noticed that Mr Westhuizen was having trouble with his asthma again.

‘Here, take a big gulp and you’ll soon regain the ability to talk so that you can tell Mr Prime Minister that the short half-life of tritium isn’t a problem because it is unrelated to the bomb’s explosive effect.’

The engineer drained the entire medicine bottle and immediately felt better. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Botha looked wide-eyed at the servant.

‘You know about the tritium problem?’

‘Goodness, no.’ Nombeko laughed. ‘You see, I clean this room every day and the engineer spends almost all his time rattling off formulas and other strange things to himself. And apparently some of it got stuck even in my little brain. Would you like a refill, Mr Prime Minister?’

Prime Minister Botha accepted more sparkling wine and gave Nombeko a long look as she returned to her wallpaper. Meanwhile the engineer cleared his throat and apologized for the asthma attack and for the servant’s impudence in opening her mouth.

‘The fact is, the half-life of tritium is not relevant to the bomb’s explosive effect,’ said the engineer.

‘Yes, I just heard that from the waitress,’ the prime minister said acidly.

Botha didn’t ask any difficult follow-up questions; he was soon in a good mood again thanks to Nombeko’s eager refills of bubbly. Engineer Westhuizen had made it through another crisis. And so had his cleaning woman.

When the first bomb was ready, the next phase of production went as follows: two independent, high-quality work teams each built a bomb, using the first one as a model. The teams were instructed to be extremely accurate when it came to accounting for the steps they took. In this way, the production of bombs two and three could be compared in detail – first compared to each other and then compared to number one. It was the engineer himself, and no one else (except a certain woman who didn’t count), who was in charge of the comparison.

If the bombs were identical, then they would also be correct. It was highly unlikely that two independent teams could make identical mistakes at that high level. According to whatshername, the statistical likelihood of that was.0054 per cent.

* * *

Nombeko continued to search for something that would give her hope. The three Chinese girls knew some things, like that the Egyptian pyramids were in Egypt, how to poison dogs, and what to watch out for when stealing a wallet from the inner pocket of a jacket. Things like that.

The engineer frequently mumbled about progress in South Africa and the world, but the information from that source had to be filtered and interpreted, since for the most part all the politicians on earth were idiots or Communists, and all of their decisions were either idiotic or Communistic. And when they were Communistic, they were also idiotic.

When the people chose a former Hollywood actor to be the new American president, the engineer condemned not only the president elect but also all of his people. However, Ronald Reagan avoided being labelled a Communist. Instead the engineer focused on the president’s presumed sexual orientation, based on the hypothesis that all men who stood for anything different from what the engineer stood for were homosexuals.

All due deference to the Chinese girls and the engineer, but as sources of news they couldn’t compete with the TV in the waiting room outside the engineer’s office. On the sly Nombeko would often turn it on and follow the news and debate programmes while she pretended to scrub the floor. That corridor was by far the cleanest in the research facility.

‘Are you here scrubbing again?’ the irritated engineer once said as he came strolling in to work at ten thirty in the morning, fifteen minutes earlier than Nombeko had counted on. ‘And who turned on the TV?’

This could have ended poorly from an information-gathering perspective, but Nombeko knew her engineer. Instead of answering the question, she changed the subject.

‘I saw a half-empty bottle of Klipdrift on your desk when I was in there cleaning, Engineer. I thought it might be old and I should pour it out. But I wasn’t sure; I wanted to check with you first, Engineer.’

‘Poured out? Are you nuts?’ said the engineer, rushing into his office to make sure that those life-giving drops were still there. To make sure that whatshername wouldn’t get any other dumb ideas, he immediately transferred them from the bottle to his bloodstream. And he soon forgot the TV, the floor and the servant.

* * *

Then one day it finally showed up.

The opportunity.

If Nombeko played all her cards right, and also got to borrow a little of the engineer’s luck, she would soon be a free woman. Free and wanted, but still. The opportunity – unbeknown to Nombeko – had its origins on the other side of the globe.

The de facto leader of China, Deng Xiaoping, had early on displayed a talent for outmanoeuvring out his competition – before the senile Mao Tse-tung even had time to die, in fact. Perhaps the most spectacular rumour was that he hadn’t let Mao’s right-hand man, Zhou Enlai, be treated when he got cancer. Being a cancer patient with no cancer treatment seldom leads to a positive outcome. Depending on how you look at it, of course. In any case, Zhou Enlai died twenty years after the CIA failed to blow him to smithereens.

After that, the Gang of Four were about to intervene, with Mao’s last wife at the forefront. But as soon as the old man finally drew his last breath, the four were arrested and locked up, whereupon Deng purposely forgot where he’d put the key.

On the foreign-affairs front, he was deeply irritated by that dullard Brezhnev in Moscow. Who was succeeded by that dullard Andropov. Who was succeeded by Chernenko, the biggest dullard of them all. But luckily, Chernenko didn’t have time to do more than take office before he stepped down permanently. The rumour was that Ronald Reagan had scared him to death with his Star Wars. Now some fellow called Gorbachev had taken over, and… well, from dullards to whippersnappers. The new man certainly had a lot to prove.

Among many other things, China’s position in Africa was a constant concern. For several decades, the Soviets had been poking around in various African liberation movements. The Russians’ current engagement in Angola was a prime example. The MPLA received Soviet weapons in exchange for getting results in the right ideological direction. The Soviet direction, of course. Blast!

The Soviets were moving Angola and other countries in southern Africa in a direction that was the opposite of what the United States and South Africa wanted. So what was China’s position in all this mess? To back up the renegade Communists in the Kremlin? Or walk hand in hand with the American imperialists and the apartheid regime in Pretoria?

Blast, once more.

It might have been possible not to take any side at all, to leave a walkover, as the damn Americans liked to say. If it weren’t for the contacts South Africa was presumed to have with Taiwan.

It was an open secret that the United States had stopped a nuclear weapons test in the Kalahari Desert. So everyone knew what South Africa was up to. In this case, ‘everyone’ meant all intelligence organizations worth their name.

The crucial problem there was that, in addition to the Kalahari information on Deng’s desk, there was an intelligence briefing noting that South Africa had communicated about the weapon with Taipei. It would be completely unacceptable for the Taiwanese to procure missiles to aim at mainland China. If this happened, it would lead to an escalation in the South China Sea, and it was impossible to predict how that might end. And the US Pacific Fleet was right around the corner.

So somehow or another, Deng had to manage the loathsome apartheid regime. His chief intelligence officer had suggested they do nothing and let the South African government die on its own. Thanks to that piece of advice, his chief intelligence officer was no longer a chief intelligence officer – would China really be more secure if Taiwan was doing business with a nuclear nation in freefall? The former chief intelligence officer could ponder this as he worked at his new job as a substitute station attendant in the Beijing subway.

‘Manage’ was the name of the game. Somehow or another.

Deng couldn’t possibly travel there himself and let himself be photographed alongside that old Nazi Botha (even if the idea was a bit tempting: the decadent West did have its charm, in small doses). And he couldn’t send any of his closest men. It must absolutely not appear that Beijing and Pretoria were on friendly terms.

On the other hand, there was no point in sending a pencil-pushing lower official with neither the ability nor the sense to make observations. Of course, it was also important that the Chinese representative was important enough to be granted an audience with Botha.

So: someone who could get things done – but at the same time was not close to the Politburo Standing Committee and who couldn’t be considered an obvious representative of Beijing. Deng Xiaoping found the solution in the young party secretary of the province of Guizhou, which had practically more ethnic groups than people. The young man had just proven that it was possible to bring together peevish minorities like the Yao, Miao, Yi, Qiang, Dong, Zhuang, Bouyei, Bai, Tujia, Gelao and Sui.

Anyone who could keep eleven balls in the air like that also ought to be able to handle the ex-Nazi Botha, Deng thought, and he made sure to send the young man in question to Pretoria.

His task: to get the message to South Africa, between the lines, that collaborating on nuclear weapons with Taiwan was unacceptable, and to get the South Africans to understand who they were picking a fight with, should they choose to pick a fight.

* * *

P. W. Botha was not at all excited to receive the leader of a Chinese province; that was below his station. Furthermore, Botha’s station had just become even higher – the title of prime minister had been replaced by president. What would people think if he – the president! – were to welcome just any old Chinese like that? If he were to receive all of them, for a few seconds each, it would take him more than thirteen thousand years. Botha didn’t think he would live that long. In fact, despite his new title, he felt rather worn-out.

At the same time, he understood why China had chosen the tactic of sending over a minion. Beijing didn’t want to be accused of embracing the government in Pretoria. And vice versa, for that matter.

The question remained: what were they up to? Did it have something to do with Taiwan? That would be funny, because their collaboration with the Taiwanese had been over before it had led anywhere at all.

Oh well, perhaps Botha would go and meet that errand boy after all.

Why, I’m as curious as a child, he said to himself, smiling even though he really didn’t have anything to smile about.

To lessen this great breach of etiquette, a president meeting with a gofer, Botha got the idea of rigging a meeting and a dinner on the Chinese man’s level – and Botha himself would happen to stumble across it. Oh, are you here? May I sit down? Something like that.

So Botha called the director of the top secret nuclear weapons programme and ordered him to receive a Chinese guest who had requested a meeting with the president. He said that the engineer and the guest would go on safari together and then have a fancy, delicious meal in the evening. During the dinner, the engineer must make the Chinese man understand that one oughtn’t underestimate South African military engineering, without actually telling the nuclear truth straight out.

It was important for this message to make it through. They had to show strength without saying anything. It would just so happen that President Botha was in the vicinity, and a person has to eat, so he would be happy to keep the engineer and the Chinese man company.

‘If you don’t mind, of course, Engineer Westhuizen.’ The engineer’s head was spinning. So he was supposed to receive a guest the president didn’t want to meet. He would tell the guest the truth of the matter without saying anything, and in the middle of all this the president, who didn’t want to meet the guest, would show up to meet the guest.

The engineer realized he was getting into a situation in which one might make a fool of oneself. Other than that, he didn’t understand anything beyond that he must immediately invite the president to the dinner the president himself had just decided should take place.

‘Of course you’re welcome to come to the dinner, Mr President!’ said Engineer Westhuizen. ‘You really must be there! When is it, by the way? And where?’

This is how what started out as Deng Xiaoping’s concern in Beijing became a problem for Engineer Westhuizen in Pelindaba. The fact was, of course, that he knew absolutely nothing about the project he was directing. It isn’t easy to sit and chat and seem gifted when you’re rather the opposite. The solution would be to bring along whatshername as a servant and briefcase-carrier. Then she could discreetly feed the engineer clever facts about the project, carefully considered so that he didn’t say too much. Or too little.

That sort of consideration was something whatshername would manage splendidly. Just like everything else that cursed person set out to do.

* * *

The engineer’s cleaning woman received strict instructions before the Chinese safari and the following dinner, at which they would be joined by the president himself. To be on the safe side, Nombeko helped the engineer with the instructions so that they would turn out correctly.

She was to remain an arm’s length away from the engineer. Each time an opportunity presented itself, she would whisper conversationally appropriate wisdom in his ear. The rest of the time, she would keep quiet and act like the nonentity that she basically was.

Nombeko had been sentenced to seven years in service to the engineer nine years ago. When her sentence came to an end, she didn’t bother to remind him, since she’d decided it was better to be alive and imprisoned than dead and free.

But soon she would be outside the fences and the minefield; she would be miles from the guards and their new German shepherds. If she managed to break away from her chaperon, she would turn into one of South Africa’s most wanted. Police, intelligence agents, and the military would look for her everywhere. Except maybe in the National Library in Pretoria. And that was where she would go first of all.

If she managed to break away, that is.

The engineer had been kind enough to inform her that the chauffeur-slash-safari guide was carrying a rifle and he was instructed to shoot not only attacking lions but also fleeing cleaning ladies, should any appear. And as an extra precaution, the engineer made sure to carry a pistol in a holster. A Glock 17, nine by nineteen millimetres with seventeen bullets in the magazine. Not something you can take down an elephant or a rhinoceros with, but it would do for a 120-pound servant.

‘One hundred and fifteen, if you please,’ said Nombeko.

She considered waiting for a convenient moment to unlock the safe in the engineer’s office where he kept his pistol and empty it of the seventeen bullets, but she didn’t. She would be blamed if the drunk happened to discover it in time, and then her escape would be over before it had even begun.

Instead she decided not to be too eager, to wait for the right moment – but when it came, she would take off into the bush as fast as she could. Without taking a bullet in the back from either the chauffeur or the engineer. And preferably without encountering any of the animals that were the point of going on a safari.

So when would the right moment be? Not in the morning, when the chauffeur was on his toes and the engineer was still sober enough to manage to shoot something other than himself in the foot. Maybe right after the safari, just before the dinner, when Westhuizen was sufficiently blotto and nervous about the meeting with his president. And when the chauffeur was done being a guide after many hours on the job.

Yes, then the time would be right. She just had to recognize the moment and seize it when it came.

* * *

They were ready to start the safari. The Chinese official had brought along his own interpreter. It all began in the worst possible way when the interpreter was foolish enough to walk into the tall grass to take a leak. It was even more foolish to do this in sandals.

‘Help, I’m dying,’ he said as he felt a sting on his left big toe and saw a scorpion crawling away in the grass.

‘You shouldn’t have walked into five-inch grass without real shoes – or at all, really. Especially not when it’s windy,’ said Nombeko.

‘Help, I’m dying,’ the interpreter said again.

‘Why not when it’s windy?’ wondered the engineer, who didn’t care about the interpreter’s health but was curious.

Nombeko explained that insects take shelter in the grass when the wind blows, and this means that the scorpions crawl out of their holes for a bit of food. And today there was a big toe in the way.

‘Help, I’m dying,’ the interpreter said once more.

Nombeko realized that the whimpering interpreter actually believed what he was saying.

‘No, I’m pretty sure you’re not,’ she said. ‘The scorpion was little, and you’re big. But we might as well send you to the hospital so they can wash your wound properly. Your toe will soon swell up to three times its size and turn blue, and it will hurt like hell, if you’ll pardon my language. You’re not going to be much good as an interpreter, anyway.’

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