Jonas Jonasson - The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden

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.