Chapter 8
On a match that ended in a draw and an entrepreneur who didn’t get to live his life
Ingmar and Holger One were in agreement that the best way to honour Mum was to continue their fight. Two was sure that his father and brother were wrong about that, but he settled for asking who they thought was going to bring money into the household, in that case.
Ingmar frowned and admitted that he hadn’t prioritized that part, in the midst of everything he’d had to consider recently. There were still a few hundred-krona notes left in Henrietta’s sugar bowl, but they would soon be just as gone as Henrietta herself.
For lack of a better idea, the former postal clerk decided to reapply for his job as assistant to the accountant, who now had only two years left until retirement. And who replied that under no circumstances was he planning to let Mr Qvist spoil them.
The situation was rather troublesome – for another few days. And then Ingmar’s father-in-law died.
The angry Communist who had never met his grand-children (and who couldn’t get his hands on Ingmar) died at the age of eighty-eight, full of bitterness, with a lost daughter, a wife who had disappeared, and capitalism blooming around him. At least he didn’t have to watch everything he owned be taken over by the Holgers and Ingmar, though, since he no longer existed. Holger One, the one who did exist, inherited it all.
Alongside his political activities, the leader of S?dert?lje’s Communists had imported and sold products from the Soviet union . Until the very end he had travelled around Swedish marketplaces to promote his goods along with his opinions of the greatness of the Soviet union . Things went so-so with both the former and the latter, but in any case, his profits were enough to cover the bare necessities of life plus a colour TV, two visits a week to the off-licence and three thousand kronor per month as a gift to the party.
Included in One’s inheritance from his grandfather was a truck in good condition and a garage-slash-warehouse bursting with stuff; for all these years the old man had made purchases at a slightly greater pace than he had managed to sell them.
Among the goods were black and red caviar, pickles and smoked krill. There was Georgian tea, Belarusian linen, Russian felted boots and Inuit sealskins. There were all sorts of enamel containers, including the classic green rubbish bin with a pedal. There were furashki, the Russian military caps, and ushanki, the fur hats that are impossible to freeze in. There were rubber hot-water bottles, and shot glasses with mountain-ash berries painted on them. And size forty-seven braided straw hats.
There were five hundred copies of The Communist Manifesto in Russian and two hundred goat-hair shawls from the Urals. And four Siberian tiger traps.
Ingmar and the boys found all of this and more in the garage. And, last but not least:
An eight-foot-tall statue of Lenin, made of Karelian granite.
If Ingmar’s father-in-law had still been alive, and if moreover he had wished to converse with his son-in-law instead of strangling him, he could have told him that he had bought the statue on the cheap from an artist in Petrozavodsk who had made the mistake of giving the great leader human features. The steely grey gaze of Lenin had turned out somewhat abashed, and the hand that was meant to point straight into the future seemed to be waving at the people Lenin was meant to lead. The mayor of the city, who had ordered the statue, became upset when he saw the result, and he told the artist to vanish immediately, or else the mayor would see to it that he did.
Just then Ingmar’s father-in-law had shown up on one of his shopping rounds. Two weeks later, the statue was lying there and waving straight at a garage wall in S?dert?lje.
Ingmar and One browsed through the riches as they chuckled happily. This would be enough to support the family for years!
Two was not as delighted about this development. He had been hoping that his mother hadn’t died in vain, and that things would change for real.
‘Lenin might not have the world’s highest market value,’ he tried, but he was immediately snapped at.
‘God, you’re so negative,’ his father, Ingmar, said.
‘Yeah, God, you’re so negative,’ said Holger One.
‘Or The Communist Manifesto in Russian,’ Two added.
* * *
The goods in the garage were enough to support the family for eight whole years. Ingmar and the twins followed in Ingmar’s father-in-law’s footsteps from marketplace to marketplace, making enough to support a tolerable standard of living by a certain margin. This was in large part because the Communists in S?dert?lje no longer received a portion of this income. Neither did the tax authorities, for that matter.
Two constantly longed to get away, but he took comfort in the fact that during their years of marketing, at least there wasn’t any extra time for the republican tomfoolery.
After those eight years, all that remained was the eight-foot-tall Lenin statue in Karelian granite as well as 498 of the 500 copies of The Communist Manifesto in Russian. Ingmar had managed to sell one copy to a blind man during the market days in Mariestad. They had needed the other on the way to Malma Market, when Ingmar got a stomach bug and had to stop the car to squat in a ditch.
To some extent, then, Holger Two had been correct.
‘What do we do now?’ said Holger One, who had never had an idea in all his life.
‘Anything you want, as long as it has nothing to do with the royal family,’ said Holger Two.
‘No, that’s exactly what it has to do with,’ said Ingmar. ‘There’s been far too little of that sort of thing recently.’
Ingmar’s idea for continued survival involved modifying the statue of Lenin. The fact was, he had recently realized that this particular Lenin and the King of Sweden had a considerable number of common features. All they had to do was hack the moustache and beard off the old man, tap a little here and there at his nose, and turn his cap into wavy hair – and presto! Vladimir Ilyich would be the spitting image of His Majesty!
‘You’re planning on selling an eight-foot-tall statue of the king?’ Holger Two said to his father. ‘Have you no principles?’
‘Now, don’t be cheeky, my dear renegade of a son. Necessity knows no law. I learned that back when I was young and strong and had no choice but to commandeer a Salvationist’s new bicycle. Incidentally, his name was Holger, too.’
And then he went on, saying that the Holgers had no idea how many wealthy royalists there were in this country. A statue of the king could go for twenty or thirty thousand. Maybe forty. And then all they had to do was sell the truck.
Ingmar got to it. He hacked and filed and polished for an entire week. And he succeeded beyond all expectations. When Holger Two saw the result, he thought that one could say a lot of things about his father, but irresolute he was not. Neither did he lack a gift for artistry.
The sale itself remained. Ingmar’s idea was to winch the statue into the back of the truck and then drive around to all the counts and barons in all the manors around Stockholm until one of them realized that he could not live without a Swedish-Karelian granite king in his very own garden.
But the winching was a delicate operation; after all, the king mustn’t fall on his arse. Holger One was eager to help, if his father would just tell him what to do. Two stood with his hands in his pockets and didn’t say anything.
Ingmar looked at his boys and decided that, this time, he couldn’t afford for one of them to bungle things. Dad would take care of it himself.
‘Just take a few steps back and don’t pester me,’ he said, fastening cables here and there in his advanced pulley system.
And then he started winching. And he actually managed to lift the statue of the king all the way up to the edge of the truck bed, all on his own.
‘All that’s left is the rest,’ said the pleased king-hater, a split second before one of the cables snapped.
Then and there, Ingmar Qvist’s lifelong struggle came to an end.
For the king bowed humbly towards him, met his gaze for the first time, and fell slowly but inevitably right on top of his creator.
Ingmar died instantly under the weight of the king, while the king himself broke into four pieces.
Holger One was completely stricken with grief. Two stood next to him, ashamed that he couldn’t seem to feel anything at all. He looked at his dead father, and next to him, the pieces of the king.
The match seemed to have ended in a draw.
A few days later, one could read in L?nstidningen S?dert?lje:
MY BELOVED FATHER
INGMAR QVIST
HAS LEFT ME
IN ENDLESS SORROW AND LOSS
S?DERT?LJE, 4 JUNE 1987
HOLGER
–
Vive la République
* * *
Holgers One and Two were identical copies of one another. And they were each other’s opposites.
One had never questioned his father’s calling for a second. Two’s doubt had manifested itself when he was only seven, and it continued to grow. By the time Two was twelve, he knew that things just weren’t right in his father’s head. Beginning with his mother’s death, he questioned Ingmar’s ideas more and more often.
But he never left. As the years went on, he felt an ever-greater sense of responsibility towards his father and brother. And then there was the fact that One and Two were twins. That was a bond that was not easy to break.
It was hard to say why the brothers had turned out so differently. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that Holger Two – the one who didn’t really exist – was generally gifted in a way that the first brother was not.
So it was natural that Two was the one who took care of essays and exams during their school years, and that it was Two who passed his brother’s driving test and taught him the art of driving. And what’s more, it was a truck-driving licence. Their grandfather’s Volvo F406 was the brothers’ only possession worth mentioning. That is to say, it was Holger One who owned it. Because to own something, one must exist.
Once their father was gone, Two thought about going to the authorities to let them know he existed, so that he might be able to apply to a school of higher education. And find a girl to love. And make love with. Wonder what that would feel like?
But when Two thought about it, he realized it wasn’t quite that simple. Could he even make use of the good grades he’d got in upper secondary school? Didn’t they belong to his brother? By definition, Holger Two hadn’t even finished his basic schooling.
Besides this, there were more immediate issues to deal with. Such as how the Holgers could afford enough food to eat. Holger One existed for real: he had a passport and a driver’s licence, and he ought to be able to look for a job.
‘A job?’ said One when the matter came up.
‘Yes, as in employment. It’s not unusual for people who are twenty-six years old to pursue such a thing.’
Holger One suggested that Two could have a go at that instead, in One’s name. Pretty much like the way they had done it during all those years of school. But Two said that now the king had killed their father, it was time to leave their youth behind. Two had no intention of running his brother’s errands – and definitely not his father’s.
‘It wasn’t the king, it was Lenin,’ Holger One said sulkily.
Two said that the person who had fallen on top of Ingmar could be anyone One wanted it to be, including Mahatma Gandhi. That was history. Now it was time to build a future. He would prefer to do so with his dear brother, but only if One promised to drop all of his ideas involving a change of government. One mumbled that he didn’t have any ideas anyway.
Holger Two was content with that answer and spent the next few days thinking about what their next step in life should be.
The most pressing issue was putting food on the table.
The solution would have to be to sell the table in question. The whole house, in fact.
The family plot outside S?dert?lje changed ownership, and the brothers moved into the back of the Volvo F406 truck.
But they had sold a cottage, not a castle, and it had, to all intents and purposes, not been maintained since Ingmar had started losing his mind forty years earlier. Holger One, the formal owner, received only 150,000 kronor for his parental home. The money would soon be gone again if the Holgers didn’t do something about it.
One wondered what Two thought the top quarter of Dad’s statue might be worth. To make sure that One never brought it up again, Two took out a chisel and a hammer and hacked it to pieces. When he was done, he promised that he would also burn the 498 remaining copies of The Communist Manifesto in Russian, but first he was going to take a walk because he needed some time to himself.
‘Please don’t think too much while I’m gone.’
* * *
Holger & Holger Incorporated? Would that work? A transport service? They did have a truck, after all. That was all they had. A truck.
Holger Two placed an ad in the paper for a SMALL TRANSPORT SERVICE SEEKING JOBS and was immediately contacted by a pillow entrepreneur in Gnesta who needed help because the distributor he’d been using until now had forgotten to complete not only every fifth transport but also every other tax payment, so he’d been forced to move into the Arn? Prison for rehabilitation. The state believed it would take the distributor eighteen months to be rehabilitated. The pillow entrepreneur, who knew the true nature of the distributor, thought that it might take longer than that. In any case, the distributor was where he was and the entrepreneur needed an immediate substitute.
Gnesta Down & Featherbed Inc. had made pillows for the hotel industry as well as various county councils and authorities for ages and ages. At first things had gone well for the company, then less well, and finally things didn’t go at all. Then the entrepreneur had fired his four employees and started importing pillows from China instead. This made his life more tolerable, but it was hard work, and he was starting to feel old. The overworked man was tired of everything, and he only kept going because he had long since forgotten that life could consist of anything else.
Holgers One and Two met the entrepreneur at his industrial building on the outskirts of Gnesta. It looked like a miserable area, with a warehouse and a condemned building facing a yard, and on the other side of the street there was a pottery factory that had been abandoned many years ago. The closest neighbour was a scrapyard; other than that, the area was deserted.
Because Holger Two could speak for himself and because Holger One remained silent on Two’s orders, the entrepreneur felt that he could trust this potential new distribution solution. The apartments in the condemned building weren’t the world’s greatest, but if the brothers wanted to move into one of them, or two of them, that would be fine. The entrepreneur himself lived in the centre of the small town.
Everything seemed to be working out for the best, but then the pension board sent a letter saying that the entrepreneur was about to turn sixty-five and thus had the right to start drawing a pension. He hadn’t thought of that. What luck! Now it was time to enjoy the life of a pensioner. Doing nothing full-time – that was something the entrepreneur was looking forward to. And maybe even some boogie-woogie? He hadn’t tried to kick up his heels since the late summer of ’67 when he went to Stockholm to visit Nalen, only to find that the famous dance hall had closed and become a Free Church.
The information about his upcoming pension was nice for the entrepreneur. For Holger and Holger it was more problematic.
Oh well, the brothers had nothing to lose, so Two decided to move forward aggressively. He suggested that Holger & Holger AB take over the entrepreneur’s entire business, including the warehouse, the condemned building and the pottery. In return, the entrepreneur would receive 35,000 kronor per month from the brothers for as long as he lived.
‘As an extra pension,’ Holger Two said. ‘We don’t exactly have any cash to buy you out with right now, Mr Entrepreneur.’
The newly minted pensioner thought this through. And he thought some more. And then he said, ‘Done! But let’s say thirty thousand rather than thirty-five thousand. And on one condition!’
‘Condition?’ said Holger Two.
‘Well, the thing is . . .’ the entrepreneur began.
The lowered price took into account the fact that Holger and Holger promised to take over responsibility for the American engineer whom the entrepreneur had found hiding in the pottery fourteen years earlier. The American had built military tunnels during the Vietnam War; he had been under constant attack by the Viet Cong and ended up seriously injured. He had received care at a hospital in Japan, become healthy again, dug his way out of his hospital room through the floor, fled to Hokkaido, hitched a ride to the Soviet border on a fishing trawler, switched to a Soviet coast-guard vessel, ended up in Moscow and then in Helsinki, and had made his way to Sweden and Stockholm. There he was granted political asylum.
But the Vietnam deserter thought he saw the CIA everywhere in Stockholm; he was a nervous wreck, and he was sure that they would find him and take him back to the war. So he went wandering around the countryside, ended up in Gnesta, happened to see an abandoned pottery, sneaked in and lay down to sleep under a tarp. It was a little more than just coincidence that he ended up where he did, because a potter was what the American was deep down in his heart. He had become an engineer and a military man on his father’s orders.
The pillow entrepreneur didn’t have much in the way of pots in his pottery; instead that was where he kept the parts of the pillow firm’s bookkeeping that didn’t do well in the light of day. For that reason he had to go there several times a week. One day, a terrified face popped up among the binders – it was the American – and the entrepreneur took pity on him. He was allowed to stay, but only if he moved into one of the apartments in the condemned house at Fredsgatan 5. If the American wanted to revive the pottery factory, that was fine, but the door to the windowless room over there must be kept closed.
With a certain amount of alarm, the American had accepted the offer, at which point he immediately, and without permission, started building a tunnel from his apartment on the ground floor of Fredsgatan 5 all the way to the pottery on the other side of the road. When the entrepreneur caught him at it, he said that he had to have an escape route when the CIA came knocking at his door. It took him several years to finish digging the tunnel. By the time it was ready, the Vietnam War had been over for a long time.
‘He’s not quite right, he certainly isn’t, but he’s part of the deal,’ said the overworked entrepreneur. ‘But he doesn’t bother anyone, and as far as I know he lives on the pottery he can throw and sell at the markets in the area. Crazy, but he won’t harm anyone except himself.’
Holger Two was hesitant. He felt that he didn’t need to surround himself with any more craziness. His brother and what he’d inherited from his father were enough. On the other hand, this arrangement would allow the brothers to move into the condemned building just as the American had done. A real house, instead of a mattress in the back of the truck.
He decided to agree to take responsibility for the nervous wreck of an American potter, so everything the former entrepreneur owned and had was signed over to One’s newly incorporated business.
Finally, the overworked man could relax! He travelled to Stockholm the next day in order to enjoy himself and bathe at the classic Sturebadet spa and bathhouse; after that he would have pickled herring and schnapps at Sturehof!
But he forgot that the country had switched to driving on the right since the last time he visited the bustling capital. He had never even noticed that the same went for Gnesta. And so he was looking in the wrong direction as he stepped out into Birger Jarlsgatan.
‘Life, here I come!’ he said.
And was immediately and fatally run over by a bus.
‘That’s really sad,’ said Holger One when the brothers learned what had happened.
‘Yes. And cheap,’ said Holger Two.
Holger and Holger went to visit the American potter to tell him about the very tragic fate of the pillow entrepreneur and to say that he was allowed to continue living there, because it was part of the agreement with the now-dead man, and agreements were meant to be kept.
Holger Two knocked on the door.
It was quiet in there.
Holger One knocked, too.
‘Are you from the CIA?’ they heard a voice say.
‘No, from S?dert?lje,’ said Holger Two.
After that it was quiet for a few more seconds. Then the door was cautiously opened.
The meeting between the men went well. It started off a bit hesitantly, but things went better after Holger and Holger insinuated that at least one of them had a somewhat complicated relationship with society as well. It was true that the American had been granted asylum, but since then he had not been in contact with the Swedish authorities, so he didn’t dare guess how much his asylum was worth today.
The potter could tolerate the new ownership of the condemned building; he decided to stay put, telling himself that there really weren’t enough indications to suggest that Holger and Holger were doing errands for the American intelligence agency. Actually, there were almost no indications because, no matter how crafty the CIA was, they would never think of sending two identical agents with the same name.
The American even considered Holger Two’s offer of jumping in now and then to take care of pillow deliveries. But in that case he demanded that the truck be given fake licence plates so that the CIA couldn’t locate him in the event that he should be captured in a picture taken by one of the organization’s thousands of hidden cameras, which were all over the country.
Holger Two shook his head, but he sent One out on a nighttime assignment to steal a set of licence plates. But when the potter further demanded that the truck be painted black so that he could more easily shake off the American intelligence agency along some dark forested road on the day they managed to catch up with him, Two had had enough.
‘We’ll deliver our pillows ourselves, come to think of it. But thanks anyway.’
The potter gazed after him for a long time. Why had he changed his mind so quickly?
* * *
Holger Two felt that, on the whole, life had turned out to be relatively miserable, despite the arrangement with the pillow company and the condemned house. Furthermore, he was forced to note jealously that One had acquired a girlfriend. She was crazy, too, in Two’s opinion, but then birds of a feather tend to flock together. She was a young girl of perhaps seventeen, and she seemed to be angry with everything, with the possible exception of Holger One. The two of them had met in central Gnesta, where the angry young woman had arranged a one-person demonstration against the corrupt banking system. As a self-designated representative of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, she had applied for a loan of half a million kronor, but the manager of the bank – who happened, incidentally, to be the angry young woman’s father – had said that loans couldn’t be granted via a delegate, and that President Ortega would have to come to Gnesta himself, show identification, and argue for his own creditworthiness.
Creditworthiness? How worthy was the bank manager himself, turning his back on his own daughter like this?
Thus the demonstration. Which had limited impact, because the audience consisted only of the girl’s father, who was standing at the door of the bank, two scruffy men on a bench, who were waiting for the clock to strike ten so the Systembolaget off-licence would open – and Holger One, who was in town on an errand to buy bandages and antiseptic because he had hammered his thumb early that morning when he set about fixing a hole in the floor in his and his brother’s apartment.
It was easy to see what the girl’s father was thinking. The two scruffy men were mostly imagining what one could buy in Systembolaget for half a million kronor (the bolder one guessed one hundred bottles of Explorer vodka), while Holger One was completely blinded by the girl. She was fighting for a president who was, in turn, fighting an uphill battle, to say the least, in that he was an enemy of the United States and most of the rest of the world.
When the girl had finished demonstrating, he introduced himself and told her about his dream of deposing the Swedish king. Within five minutes they had realized they were made for each other. The girl went up to her unhappy father, who was still standing at the door of his bank, and informed him that he could go to hell because she was going to move in with . . . uh, what was his name? Holger!
Two was driven out of his and One’s shared home; he had to make his own in the even more run-down apartment across the hall. All while life continued on its ill-fated path.
Then one day there was a delivery to Upplands V?sby, north of Stockholm – to the refugee camp run by the Immigration Board. Holger Two drove into the compound, parked outside the camp’s storeroom, saw a solitary black woman, surely a new arrival, sitting on a bench at a distance, didn’t think twice about it, and carried in the pillows he had brought. When he came out again, the woman suddenly spoke to him. He answered her politely and in return he heard her spontaneously marvel that men like him could exist.
He felt this comment so deeply in his heart that he couldn’t help the reply that came out of him, namely, ‘The problem is, I don’t.’
He might have run far away instead, if he had known what was going to happen.