The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden

Nombeko sensed that the engineer’s share value was on its way to a new low, and that it would soon be time to drive his price up again. But then something lucky happened – an external factor that gave the engineer, and by extension his cleaning woman, another six months of respite.

It turned out that Prime Minister B. J. Vorster was tired of being met with complaints and ingratitude in nearly every context in his own country. So with a little help, he magically made seventy-five million rand disappear from the country’s coffers, and he started the newspaper The Citizen. Unlike most citizens, this one had a uniquely, completely positive attitude towards the South African government and its ability to keep a tight rein on the natives and the rest of the world.

Unfortunately enough, an extra-treacherous citizen happened to let this come to the attention of the general public. Around the same time, the goddamn world conscience referred to a successful military operation in Angola as the slaughter of six hundred civilians – and thus it was time for Vorster to go.

Oh, fuck it, he thought one last time, and left the world of politics in 1979. All that was left to do was to go home to Cape Town and sit on the terrace of his luxury home with a whisky in his hand and a view of Robben Island where that terrorist Mandela was sitting.

Mandela was supposed to be the one who rotted away, not me, Vorster thought as he rotted away.

His successor as prime minister, P. W. Botha, was called Die Groot Krokodil – the big crocodile – and he had scared the engineer out of his wits in their very first phone call. Nombeko realized that the weapons test couldn’t wait any longer. So she brought it up one late afternoon when the engineer was still able to speak.

‘Um, Engineer…’ she said as she reached for the ashtray on his desk.

‘What is it now?’ said the engineer.

‘Well, I was just thinking…’ Nombeko began, without being interrupted. ‘I was just thinking that if all of South Africa is too crowded, except for the Kalahari Desert, why couldn’t the bomb be detonated at sea?’

South Africa was surrounded by practically endless amounts of sea in three directions. Nombeko had long been of the opinion that the best choice for a test site should have been obvious to a child, now that the desert was no longer an option. Sure enough, the childlike Westhuizen lit up. For one second. Then he realized that the intelligence service had warned him not to collaborate with the navy under any circumstances. There had been a detailed investigation after President Carter in the United States had obviously been informed of the planned test in the Kalahari, and it had singled out Vice Admiral Johan Charl Walters as the prime suspect. Admiral Walters had visited Pelindaba just three weeks before Carter’s phone call, and he had gained a clear picture of the project. He had also been alone in Engineer Westhuizen’s office for at least seven minutes while the engineer was stuck in heavy traffic one morning (the engineer had edited this last bit during the interrogation, because he had spent a little too much time at the bar where he always drank breakfast). The leading theory was that Walters had become pouty and tattled to the United States once it became clear to him that he would not be allowed to arm his submarines with nuclear warheads.

‘I don’t trust the navy,’ the engineer mumbled to his cleaning woman.

‘So get the Israelis to help,’ said Nombeko.

At that moment, the phone rang.

‘Yes, Mr Prime Minister… Of course I’m aware of the importance of… Yes, Mr Prime Minister… No, Mr Prime Minister… I don’t quite agree with that, if you’ll excuse me, Mr Prime Minister. Here on my desk is a detailed plan to carry out a test in the Indian Ocean, along with the Israelis. Within three months, Mr Prime Minister. Thank you, Mr Prime Minister, you are far too kind. Thanks again. Well, goodbye then.’

Engineer Westhuizen hung up and tossed back the whole glass of brandy he had just poured. And then he said to Nombeko:

‘Don’t just stand there. Get me the two Israelis.’

Sure enough, the test was carried out with the help of Israel. Engineer Westhuizen aimed a kind thought in the direction of former Prime Minister-slash-former-Nazi Vorster for his genius in establishing cooperation with Jerusalem. Israel’s on-site representatives were two pompous Mossad agents. Unfortunately, the engineer would come to meet with them more often than was necessary, and he never learned to tolerate that superior smile, the one that said, ‘How could you be so fucking stupid as to buy a clay goose that was hardly dry and believe it to be two thousand years old?’

When suspected traitor Vice Admiral Walters was kept out of the loop, America couldn’t keep up. Ha! Sure, the detonation was registered by an American Vela satellite, but it was a bit too late by then.

New Prime Minister P. W. Botha was so delighted by the results of the weapons test that he came to visit the research facility and brought three bottles of sparkling wine from Constantia. Then he threw a cheers-and-thanks party in Engineer Westhuizen’s office, along with the engineer, two Israeli Mossad agents, and a local darky to do the actual serving. Prime Minister Botha would never allow himself to call the darky a darky; his position demanded otherwise. But there was no rule against thinking what one thought.

In any case, she served what she was supposed to and otherwise made sure to blend into the white wallpaper as best she could.

‘Here’s to you, Engineer,’ Prime Minister Botha said, raising his glass. ‘Here’s to you!’

Engineer Westhuizen looked fittingly embarrassed about being a hero, and he discreetly asked for a refill from whatshername while the prime minister had a friendly conversation with the Mossad agents.

But then, in an instant, the relatively pleasant situation became rather the opposite. The prime minister turned to Westhuizen again and said, ‘By the way, what is your opinion on the tritium problem?’

* * *

Prime Minister P. W. Botha’s background was not entirely different from that of his predecessor. It was possible that the country’s new leader was a bit cleverer, because he had given up Nazism once he saw the direction it was heading, and started referring to his convictions as ‘Christian Nationalism’ instead. So he had avoided internment when the Allies got a foothold in the war, and he was able to start a political career without a waiting period.

Botha and his Reform Church knew that the Truth could be read in the Bible, if one only read very carefully. After all, the Tower of Babel – man’s attempt to build his way to Heaven – came up in Genesis. God found this attempt presumptuous; he became indignant and scattered the people all over the world and created language confusion as punishment.

Different people, different languages. It was God’s intention to keep people separate. It was a green light from on high to divide people up according to colour.

The big crocodile also felt that it was God’s help that let him climb in his career. Soon he was the minister of defence in his predecessor Vorster’s cabinet. From this position, he commanded air raids on the terrorists who were hiding in Angola, the incident that the stupid rest of the world called a slaughter of innocents. ‘We have photographic evidence!’ said the world. ‘It’s what you can’t see that’s important,’ said the crocodile, but the only person he convinced with this was his mother.

Anyway, Engineer Westhuizen’s current problem was that P. W. Botha’s father had been the commanding officer in the Second Boer War and that Botha himself had military strategies and issues in his blood. Therefore he also had some knowledge of all that technical stuff for which Engineer Westhuizen was the nuclear weapons programme’s top representative. Botha had no reason to suspect that the engineer was the fraud he was. He had asked his question out of conversational curiosity.

* * *

Engineer Westhuizen hadn’t spoken for ten seconds, and the situation was about to become awkward for him – and downright dangerous for Nombeko, who thought that if the idiot didn’t answer the world’s simplest question soon, he would be toast. She was tired of having to save him time and again, but all the same she fished the plain brown spare bottle of Klipdrift from her pocket, stepped up to the engineer, and said she had noticed that Mr Westhuizen was having trouble with his asthma again.

‘Here, take a big gulp and you’ll soon regain the ability to talk so that you can tell Mr Prime Minister that the short half-life of tritium isn’t a problem because it is unrelated to the bomb’s explosive effect.’

The engineer drained the entire medicine bottle and immediately felt better. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Botha looked wide-eyed at the servant.

‘You know about the tritium problem?’

‘Goodness, no.’ Nombeko laughed. ‘You see, I clean this room every day and the engineer spends almost all his time rattling off formulas and other strange things to himself. And apparently some of it got stuck even in my little brain. Would you like a refill, Mr Prime Minister?’

Prime Minister Botha accepted more sparkling wine and gave Nombeko a long look as she returned to her wallpaper. Meanwhile the engineer cleared his throat and apologized for the asthma attack and for the servant’s impudence in opening her mouth.

‘The fact is, the half-life of tritium is not relevant to the bomb’s explosive effect,’ said the engineer.

‘Yes, I just heard that from the waitress,’ the prime minister said acidly.

Botha didn’t ask any difficult follow-up questions; he was soon in a good mood again thanks to Nombeko’s eager refills of bubbly. Engineer Westhuizen had made it through another crisis. And so had his cleaning woman.

When the first bomb was ready, the next phase of production went as follows: two independent, high-quality work teams each built a bomb, using the first one as a model. The teams were instructed to be extremely accurate when it came to accounting for the steps they took. In this way, the production of bombs two and three could be compared in detail – first compared to each other and then compared to number one. It was the engineer himself, and no one else (except a certain woman who didn’t count), who was in charge of the comparison.

If the bombs were identical, then they would also be correct. It was highly unlikely that two independent teams could make identical mistakes at that high level. According to whatshername, the statistical likelihood of that was.0054 per cent.

* * *

Nombeko continued to search for something that would give her hope. The three Chinese girls knew some things, like that the Egyptian pyramids were in Egypt, how to poison dogs, and what to watch out for when stealing a wallet from the inner pocket of a jacket. Things like that.

The engineer frequently mumbled about progress in South Africa and the world, but the information from that source had to be filtered and interpreted, since for the most part all the politicians on earth were idiots or Communists, and all of their decisions were either idiotic or Communistic. And when they were Communistic, they were also idiotic.

When the people chose a former Hollywood actor to be the new American president, the engineer condemned not only the president elect but also all of his people. However, Ronald Reagan avoided being labelled a Communist. Instead the engineer focused on the president’s presumed sexual orientation, based on the hypothesis that all men who stood for anything different from what the engineer stood for were homosexuals.

All due deference to the Chinese girls and the engineer, but as sources of news they couldn’t compete with the TV in the waiting room outside the engineer’s office. On the sly Nombeko would often turn it on and follow the news and debate programmes while she pretended to scrub the floor. That corridor was by far the cleanest in the research facility.

‘Are you here scrubbing again?’ the irritated engineer once said as he came strolling in to work at ten thirty in the morning, fifteen minutes earlier than Nombeko had counted on. ‘And who turned on the TV?’

This could have ended poorly from an information-gathering perspective, but Nombeko knew her engineer. Instead of answering the question, she changed the subject.

‘I saw a half-empty bottle of Klipdrift on your desk when I was in there cleaning, Engineer. I thought it might be old and I should pour it out. But I wasn’t sure; I wanted to check with you first, Engineer.’

‘Poured out? Are you nuts?’ said the engineer, rushing into his office to make sure that those life-giving drops were still there. To make sure that whatshername wouldn’t get any other dumb ideas, he immediately transferred them from the bottle to his bloodstream. And he soon forgot the TV, the floor and the servant.