PART FIVE
If the person you are talking to doesn’t appear to be listening, be patient. It may simply be that he has a small piece of fluff in his ear.
Winnie-the-Pooh
CHAPTER 17
On the dangers of having an exact copy of oneself
It so happened that in South Africa a man who had been deemed a terrorist was set free after twenty-seven years, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and elected president of the country.
At around the same time, much less was going on at Sj?lida.
Days became weeks, which became months. Summer became autumn, which became winter and spring.
No ill-tempered agents from intelligence agencies in foreign countries showed up (one was in the Baltic Sea, at a depth of 650 feet; the other was sitting all by himself behind a desk in Tel Aviv).
Nombeko and Holger Two let themselves forget the bomb and other miseries for a while. Walks in the forest, mushroom picking, fishing in Gertrud’s rowing-boat in the bay – all of these had a restful effect.
Furthermore when warmth returned to the earth, they received permission from the old woman to revive the potato fields.
The tractor and the machinery were old-fashioned, but Nombeko had done some calculations and arrived at the conclusion that their efforts still ought to bring in a profit of 225,623 kronor per year, while at the same time making sure that One and Celestine had something to do (other than acts of stupidity). A little bit of revenue to complement the quiet life in the countryside couldn’t hurt, now that both the pillow operation and the 19.6 million gone up in flames.
It wasn’t until the first snowfall in November 1995 that Nombeko once again brought up the eternal issue of their future with her Two.
‘We have it pretty good here, don’t you think?’ she said during their slow Sunday walk together.
‘We do have it good here.’ Two nodded.
‘It’s just too bad we don’t really exist,’ Nombeko continued.
‘And that the bomb in the barn still does,’ said Two.
So they discussed the chances of permanently changing both of these situations for so long that their discussion ended up revolving instead around how many times they had discussed it before.
No matter how they looked at it, they came to the same conclusion time after time: they really couldn’t hand the bomb over to just any old Norrt?lje municipal commissioner. They had to make direct contact at the top level of government.
‘Should I call the prime minister again?’ said Holger Two.
‘What would be the point?’ said Nombeko.
They had, after all, already tried three times with two different assistants and twice with one and the same marshal of the court – and they had received the same answer each time. The prime minister and the king would receive neither man nor beast. Although it was possible that the former would receive them, provided that their errand was first described in detail in a letter, something that Nombeko and Holger Two could not imagine doing.
Nombeko revived the old idea of Holger going to college in his brother’s name in order subsequently to get a job close to the prime minister.
This time, their alternative was not to stay in a condemned building until it collapsed on its own because, of course, that building no longer existed. Instead they would have to farm potatoes at Sj?lida. And no matter how pleasant that was, it didn’t make a very good life goal.
‘But you can’t finish a degree just like that,’ said Holger. ‘At least I can’t. Maybe you could. It will take a few years. Are you prepared to wait?’
No problem. Years had already gone by, and Nombeko was used to waiting. Even henceforth she could pass the time somehow. She was nowhere near finished reading the books in Norrt?lje library, for example. And besides, keeping track of the scatterbrains and the old woman was a part-time job in itself. Plus, of course, there was the potato farm, which could be demanding.
‘So economics or political science,’ said Holger Two.
‘Or both,’ said Nombeko, ‘while you’re at it. I’m happy to help. I’m pretty good with numbers.’
* * *
Two finally took his entrance exams the following spring. The combination of brains and enthusiasm brought him high marks, and by the next autumn he was enrolled in both the economic and political sciences programmes at Stockholm University. His lectures occasionally coincided with one another, but then Nombeko would sneak in and take Holger’s economics spot in order to reproduce the day’s lecture that evening, nearly verbatim, with a comment here and there about how Professor Bergman or Associate Professor J?reg?rd had got the wrong end of the stick.
Holger One and Celestine helped with the potatoes and regularly went to Stockholm to attend meetings of the Stockholm Anarchists’ union . This was something Two and Nombeko had agreed to, as long as they promised not to take part in any public events. Moreover, the Anarchists’ union was anarchical enough not to have a list of members. One and Celestine could be just as anonymous as the situation warranted.
Both of them enjoyed socializing with like-minded people; the Stockholm anarchists disapproved of everything.
Capitalism must be crushed, along with most of the other -isms. Socialism. And Marxism, to the extent they could find it. Fascism and Darwinism, of course (they were considered to be the same thing). Cubism, on the other hand, could be allowed to remain, as long as it wasn’t fenced in by any rules.
Furthermore, the king must also go. Some members of the group suggested that anyone who wanted to could be king, but this brought protest, not least from Holger. Wasn’t one king bad enough?
And would you believe it? When Holger spoke, the group listened. Just as they did when Celestine told them that she had been faithful to the self-invented ‘Tear All This Shit Down’ Party for her entire adult life.
Holger and Celestine had found their way home.
* * *
Nombeko thought that as long as she was going to be a potato farmer, she might as well do it right. She and Gertrud got on well. Even though the old woman grumbled about the name of the business, she really had nothing against Nombeko’s choice to register Countess Virtanen Inc. in her name.
Together they set about buying up the land surrounding their potato fields to increase their planting. Gertrud knew exactly which former farmer was oldest and most worn-out. She biked over to see him with an apple cake and a Thermos of coffee, and the farmer’s field changed hands even before their second cup. At this, Nombeko requested an assessment of the newly purchased land, and then she drew in an imaginary house and added two zeroes on the appraisal form.
Thus Countess Virtanen Inc. was able to borrow nearly 10 million kronor against a field valued at 130 thousand. Nombeko and Gertrud used the borrowed money to purchase more land with the help of more apple cakes and Thermoses of coffee. After two years, Gertrud was the biggest producer of potatoes in the area by acreage, but her debts exceeded current sales by at least five times.
They still had to get under way with the actual harvest. Thanks to Nombeko’s loan design, the business had no monetary problems; there were problems, however, with the machinery, which was both small and outdated.
In order to deal with this, she put Gertrud behind the wheel for a trip to the city of V?ster?s and Pontus Widén Machinery Inc. She let the old woman do the talking with the seller.
‘Hello there, I’m Gertrud Virtanen from Norrt?lje, and I have a potato patch to potter around in. I pick and sell them as best I can.’
‘I see,’ said the salesman, wondering what he could possibly have to do with this old lady Virtanen’s potato patch. None of his machines cost less than 800,000 kronor.
‘It seems that you sell potato machinery of all sorts here. Is that right?’ said Gertrud.
The salesman felt that this might turn into an unnecessarily long conversation; it was best to nip it in the bud as soon as possible.
‘Yes, I have de-stoners; four-, six- and eight-row planters; four-row mounders; and one- and two-row harvesters. You would receive a special price if you were to purchase all of them for your potato patch, ma’am.’
‘A special price? How nice. How much would that be?’
‘Four point nine million,’ the salesman said nastily.
Gertrud counted on her fingers as the salesman lost patience.
‘Now listen here, Mrs Virtanen, I really don’t have time to—’
‘I’ll take two of each,’ said Gertrud. ‘When can they be delivered?’
* * *
Both a lot and not much at all happened during the following six years. Out in the world, Pakistan joined the exclusive club of nuclear nations, because it needed protection from neighbouring India, which had joined the club twenty-four years earlier as protection against Pakistan. The relationship between the two countries was just what one would expect.
Things were calmer in the nuclear nation of Sweden.
One and Celestine were satisfied with being dissatisfied. Every week they put in great effort for the proper cause. No demonstrations, but plenty of things in secret. They sprayed anarchist slogans on as many public-toilet doors as they could; they surreptitiously put up flyers at institutions and museums. Their main political message was that politics were shit, but Holger also made sure that the king got his share.
Along with their political anti-involvement, Holger and Celestine carried out their chores on the potato farm with a certain amount of competence. Thus they drew a limited income, and they did need money. Markers, spray bottles and flyers were not free.
Nombeko tried to keep an eye on the two loons, but she was careful not to worry Two. Even without her help, he was a clever, industrious and happy student. Seeing Holger so content made her feel the same way.
It was also interesting to watch Gertrud liven up after what one could say had essentially been a life lost. She had, after all, got pregnant at eighteen, thanks to her first and last encounter with a pig and his lukewarm spiked Loranga. A single mother, even more solitary after her own mother died of cancer and after her father, Tapio, got his fingers caught in Norrt?lje’s first cashpoint one winter night in 1971 and wasn’t found until the next day, long after he had frozen to death.
Potato farmer, mother and grandmother. She had seen absolutely nothing of the world. But she had allowed herself to dream of how things might have been, if only her own grandmother, the noble Anastasia Arapova, hadn’t been so unchristian as to send Tapio to Helsinki so that she could devote her life to God.
But that was all gone. Nombeko understood why Gertrud was careful not to look too closely into her father’s history. The risk was, of course, that there would be nothing left. Except for the potato farm.
In any case, the return of her grandchild and the presence of Nombeko had awakened something in the old woman. She was sometimes radiant during their dinners together, which she made herself for the most part. She would cut a chicken’s head off and make herself a casserole. Or she would set out nets to make baked pike with horseradish. Once she even shot a pheasant in the garden with her father Tapio’s moose-hunting rifle, and was surprised when the rifle worked. And that she hit the target. It worked so well, in fact, that all that was left of the pheasant was a few stray feathers.
The world went on revolving around its sun at the constant speed and with the inconstant temper it always had. Nombeko read about big things and small, small things and big. And she felt a certain amount of intellectual stimulation as she delivered the news every evening at dinner. Among the events that occurred over the years was that Boris Yeltsin announced his retirement. In Sweden, the Russian president had become most famous for the state visit on which he was so blotto that he demanded that the country, which had no coal power plants, must close all its coal power plants.
An exciting follow-up to this event was the many ups and downs when the most developed country in the world made such a mess of its own presidential election that it took several weeks for the Supreme Court to decide 5–4 that the candidate with the most votes had lost. With this, George W. Bush became the president of the United States, while Al Gore was reduced to an environmental agitator to whom not even the anarchists in Stockholm paid much attention. Incidentally, Bush later invaded Iraq in order to eliminate all the weapons Saddam Hussein didn’t have.
Among the more marginal news items was the one about how a former bodybuilder from Austria became the governor of California. Nombeko felt a twinge in her heart when she saw a picture of him in the paper, standing there with his wife and four children, smiling into the camera with white teeth. She thought that it must be an unjust world when certain people received an excess of certain things, while others got nothing. And she didn’t even know, then, that the governor in question had managed to procure a fifth child in collaboration with his own housekeeper.
All in all, it was still a hopeful and relatively happy time at Sj?lida, while the rest of the world behaved as it always had.
And while the bomb sat where it was.
* * *
In the spring of 2004, life looked brighter than it had at perhaps any time before. Holger had almost attained his goal in political science, while at the same time he was about to complete a doctorate in economics. What had soon turned into an entire dissertation had started out as self-therapy in Two’s head. It was hard to bear the thought that, with the bomb, every single day he risked being partly responsible for the destruction of half a region and an entire nation. To deal with this, he had started to look at another side of the issue, and had realized that, from a strictly economic perspective, Sweden and the world would rise from the ashes. Thus the dissertation The Atom Bomb as Growth Factor: Dynamic Benefits of a Nuclear Catastrophe.
The obvious disadvantages had kept Holger Two awake at night; they, too, had been researched to death several times over. Even a nuclear squabble limited to India and Pakistan would, according to the experts, kill twenty million people, before the total number of kilotons even surpassed what Two and Nombeko happened to have on hand. Computer models showed that, within a few weeks, so much smoke would have risen into the stratosphere that it would take ten years before the sun managed to penetrate it fully again. Not only above the two squabbling countries, but all over the world.
But this – according to Holger Two – was where market forces would triumph. Thanks to the 200,000 per cent increase in the incidence of thyroid cancer, unemployment would go down. Massive population shifts from sunny vacation paradises (which of course would no longer have any sun to offer) to large cities around the world would create increased wealth distribution. A large number of mature markets would become immature in a single blow, which would make markets dynamic. It was clear, for example, that the de facto Chinese monopoly on solar cells would become irrelevant.
Furthermore, by mutual effort, India and Pakistan could eliminate the entire runaway greenhouse effect. Deforestation and the use of fossil fuels could continue, with the benefit of neutralizing the two- or three-degree decrease in the Earth’s temperature that the nuclear war between the countries would otherwise have caused.
These thoughts kept Holger’s head above water. At the same time, Nombeko and Gertrud had made good headway on the potato business. They’d had good luck along the way – indeed – because the Russian crops had failed for several years in a row. And because one of Sweden’s most discussed (and, for that matter, most meaningless) celebrities had a new, slim figure thanks to the OP diet (Only Potatoes).
The response was immediate. The Swedes were eating potatoes like never before.
Countess Virtanen Inc., previously swimming in debt, was now nearly debt-free. Meanwhile, Holger Two was just a few weeks from a double degree and, thanks to his excellent achievements as a student, was ready to start his journey towards a private meeting with the Swedish prime minister. Incidentally, there was a new one since last time. His name was G?ran Persson now. He was just as unwilling as the others to answer the telephone.
In short: the eight-year plan was nearing completion. So far, everything had gone as it should. All signs indicated that it would continue to do so. The feeling that nothing could go wrong was very similar to what Ingmar Qvist had felt in his day, just before he went to Nice.
Only to be assaulted by Gustaf V.
* * *
On Thursday, 6 May 2004, the latest batch of five hundred flyers was ready to be picked up at the printer’s in Solna. Holger and Celestine thought they’d really done something special this time. The flyers had a picture of the king, and next to him was a picture of a wolf. The text underneath drew parallels between the Swedish wolf population and the various royal families of Europe. The inbreeding problems were said to be the same.
The solution in the first case might be to introduce Russian wolves. In the second case, thinning the herd was considered one alternative. Or across-the-board deportation to Russia. The authors went so far as to suggest an exchange: one Russian wolf per deported royal.
Celestine wanted to take One and fetch the flyers as soon as they received word from the printer in Solna, so that they could paper as many institutions as possible that very day. Holger One didn’t want to wait, either, but he said that Two had booked the car for this Thursday. This was an objection that Celestine waved away.
‘He doesn’t own the car any more than we do, does he? Come on, my love. We have a world to change.’
It so happened that Thursday, 6 May 2004, was also supposed to be the biggest day in Two’s life so far. His dissertation defence was scheduled for eleven o’clock.
When Holger, in suit and tie, went to get into the Blomgrens’ old Toyota just after nine in the morning – it was gone.
Two realized that his disaster of a brother had been up to mischief, surely under the guidance of Celestine. Since there was no mobile-phone coverage at Sj?lida, he couldn’t immediately call them and order them to come back. Nor could he call a taxi, for that matter. It was at least a third of a mile to the country road where there was intermittent mobile-phone coverage, depending on its mood. There was no question of running there; he couldn’t arrive at his defence sweating through his suit. So he took the tractor.
At 9.25 he finally got hold of them. It was Celestine who answered.
‘Yes, hello?’
‘Did you take the car?’
‘Why? Is this Holger?’
‘Answer the damn question! I need it now! I have an important meeting in town at eleven.’
‘Oh, I see. So your meetings are more important than ours?’
‘That’s not what I said. But I had booked the car. Turn round right now, damn it. I’m in a hurry.’
‘God. Stop swearing so much.’
Two gathered his thoughts and tried a new tactic.
‘Dear, sweet Celestine. When we get a chance, let’s sit down and discuss the car issue. And who had booked it for today. But I beg you, turn round right now and pick me up. My meeting is truly impo—’
At that point Celestine hung up. And turned off the phone.
‘What did he say?’ wondered Holger One, who was behind the wheel.
‘He said, “Dear, sweet Celestine, let’s sit down and discuss the car issue.” In short.’
One didn’t think that sounded so bad. He had been worried about how his brother would react.
Desperate, Holger Two stood on the country road in his suit for more than ten minutes, hoping to hitch a ride with a passer-by. But in order for that to happen, there would have to be passing cars in the first place, which there weren’t. By the time Two realized that he ought to have called a taxi a long time ago, it dawned on him that his coat and wallet were still hanging on a hook in the hall. With 120 kronor in his breast pocket, he made the decision to drive the tractor to Norrt?lje and take the bus from there. It would probably have been faster to turn round, get his wallet, go back again, and then call a taxi. Or even better: call the taxi first, and while it was on its way, make the trip to the house and back on the tractor.
But Two, as gifted as he was, had a stress-tolerance level that wasn’t much better than the potter’s, may God bless him. He was about to miss his own dissertation defence. After years of preparation. It was awful.
And yet it was only the beginning.
The first and last tiny piece of luck Holger Two had that day involved the transfer from tractor to bus in Norrt?lje. At the next-to-last possible second, he managed to block the bus’s way so he could catch it. The driver stepped down to give the tractor driver in question a mouthful, but he stopped short when the yokel farmer he had expected was a well-groomed man in a suit, tie and patent leather shoes.
Once on board, Holger got hold of the dean of the university, Professor Berner, and he apologized and said that some extraordinarily unfortunate circumstances would cause him to be half an hour late.
The professor replied acidly that delays of dissertation defences were not in line with university traditions, but by all means. He promised to try to hold the opponents and the audience.
* * *
Holger One and Celestine had arrived in Stockholm and had already signed for their flyers. Celestine, who was the better strategist of the two, decided that their first target should be the Museum of Natural History. It had a whole section on Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution. Darwin had stolen the concept of ‘survival of the fittest’ from a colleague, and he used it to claim that the way of nature was such that the strong survived while the weak did not. Thus Darwin was a Fascist and now he would be punished for it, 120 years after his death. Celestine and Holger did not reflect upon the fact that there were some considerably Fascistic elements to their flyers as well. Time to put up posters on the sly. All over the museum. In the holy name of anarchy.
This is indeed what happened, and it went off without a hitch. Holger One and Celestine were able to work undisturbed. Swedish museums are far from crowded.
Their next stop was Stockholm University, a stone’s throw away. Celestine tackled the Ladies and left the Gents to Holger. It happened as One stepped through the first door and met a certain someone.
‘Oh, are you here already after all?’ said Professor Berner.
Then he dragged the surprised Holger One down the hall and into Room 4 while Celestine was still busy doing her thing in the Ladies.
Without understanding what was going on, One found himself standing at a lectern in front of an audience of at least fifty people.
Professor Berner made some preliminary remarks in English, and he made use of words both plentiful and complicated; Holger had a hard time following. Apparently he was expected to say something about the benefits of detonating a nuclear weapon. Why? one might wonder.
But he was happy to do it, even if his English wasn’t so great. And anyway, wasn’t the most important thing not what one said, but what one meant?
He had had quite a bit of time to daydream as he picked potatoes, and he had come to the conclusion that the best thing to do would be to transport the Swedish royal family to the wilderness of Lapland and set the bomb off there, if they wouldn’t all abdicate voluntarily. Hardly any innocent people would bite the dust in such a manoeuvre, and in general the damage would be minimal. Furthermore, any increase in temperature that might result from the detonation would be beneficial, since it was terribly cold up there in the north.
It was perhaps bad enough to have these sorts of thoughts in the first place. But now Holger One was expressing them from his lectern.
His first opponent was a Professor Lindkvist from Linnaeus University in V?xj?. He began paging through his notes in time with Holger’s speech. Lindkvist, too, chose to speak in English and he began by asking if what he had just heard was some sort of introduction to what would come next.
An introduction? Yes, one might call it that. A republic would be born and grow out of the demise of the royal family. Was that what the gentleman meant?
What Professor Lindkvist meant was that he didn’t understand what was going on, but what he said was that it struck him as immoral to take the lives of an entire royal family. Not to mention the method Mr Qvist had just described.
But now Holger felt insulted. Why, he was no murderer! His basic argument was that the king and his lot should resign. Nuclear-weapons-related consequences ought to come into play only if they refused, and in that case as a direct result of the royal family’s own choice, and no one else’s.
When One was subsequently met by silence from Professor Lindkvist (the cause being tongue-tiedness), he decided to add another dimension to his argument: an alternative to no king at all might be that anyone who wanted to be king could do so.
‘This isn’t something I would argue for personally, but it’s an interesting thought nonetheless,’ said Holger One.
It was possible that Professor Lindkvist didn’t agree, because he shot a beseeching look at his colleague Berner, who in turn tried to remember if he had ever felt as unhappy as at this moment. This defence was meant to be a showpiece for the benefit of the audience’s two guests of honour, namely the Swedish minister for higher education and research, Lars Leijonborg, and his newly appointed French counterpart Valérie Pécresse. The two of them had long been working to establish a joint educational programme, with the possibility in the future of bi-national diplomas. Leijonborg had personally contacted Professor Berner to ask for suggestions for a good defence that he and his minister colleague might attend. The professor had immediately thought of model student Holger Qvist.
And now this.
Berner decided to interrupt the spectacle. It was clear that he had misjudged the candidate, and it was best that said candidate leave the podium now. And after that, the room. And the university, as such. Preferably also the country.
But because he said what he did in English, One didn’t quite catch it.
‘Shall I start my argument again from the beginning?’
‘No, you shall not,’ said Professor Berner. ‘I have aged ten years in the past twenty minutes, and I was quite old to begin with, so that will do. Please just leave.’
And One did. On the way out, it occurred to him that he had just spoken in public, and that was something he’d promised his brother he wouldn’t do. Would Two be angry with him now? Maybe he didn’t need to know.
One caught sight of Celestine in the hall. He put his arm around her and said it was best that they work somewhere else. He promised to try to explain on the way.
Five minutes later, Holger Two came running through the doors of the same university. Professor Berner had just had to apologize to the Swedish minister for higher education, who in turn did the same before his French counterpart, who replied that, based upon what she’d just seen, she thought it would be better for Sweden to turn to Burkina Faso in its search for a partner of equal standing in educational matters.
And then the professor caught sight of that bastard Holger Qvist in the hall. Did Qvist think all he had to do was change from jeans to a suit and everything would be forgotten?
‘I truly must apologize—’ began the well-dressed and out-of-breath Holger Two.
Professor Berner interrupted him and said that it wasn’t a matter of apologizing but of going away. As permanently as possible.
‘The defence is over, Qvist. Go home. And sit down and think about the economic risks of your own existence.’
* * *
Holger Two did not pass the defence. But it took him an entire day to work out what had happened, and another day to understand the extent of his misfortune. He couldn’t call the professor to tell him the truth: that for all these years he had been studying in someone else’s name and that this other person had happened to take over on the very day of his defence. This would lead to nothing but even greater misery.
What Two wanted most of all was to strangle his brother. But this didn’t come to pass, because One was at the Anarchists’ union ’s Saturday meeting when Two had his lightbulb moment. And by the time One and Celestine were back that afternoon, Two’s condition had already turned into depression.