‘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.
The more I see of men, the more I like my dog.
Madame de Staël
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