Jonas Jonasson - The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden

‘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.