Read The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden for Free Online

short.
    ‘What a beautiful lad,’ he said, and he took two steps up to the boy and tousled his hair. ‘Just a second – here you go,’ he went on, and from his inner pocket he took a sheet of commemorative stamps that had just been released for the king’s special day.
    He handed the stamps to young Ingmar, smiled, and said, ‘I could eat you right up.’ Then he tousled the boy’s hair once more before he climbed up to the furiously glaring queen.
    ‘Did you say “thank you”, Ingmar?’ asked his mother once she’d recovered from the fact that the king had touched her son – and given him a present.
    ‘No-o,’ Ingmar stammered as he stood there with stamps in hand. ‘No, I didn’t say anything. It was like he was . . . too grand to talk to.’
    The stamps became Ingmar’s most cherished possession, of course. And two years later he started working at the post office in Södertälje. He started out as a clerk of the lowest rank possible in the accounting department; sixteen years later he had climbed absolutely nowhere.
    Ingmar was infinitely proud of the tall, stately monarch. Every day, Gustaf V stared majestically past him from all the stamps the subject had reason to handle at work. Ingmar gazed humbly and lovingly back as he sat there in the Royal Mail Service’s royal uniform, even though it was not at all necessary to wear it in the accounting department.
    But there was just this one issue: the king was looking past Ingmar. It was as if he didn’t see his subject and therefore couldn’t receive the subject’s love. Ingmar so terribly wanted to be able to look the king in the eye. To apologize for not saying ‘thank you’ that time when he was fourteen. To proclaim his eternal loyalty.
    ‘So terribly’ was right. It became more and more important . . . the desire to look him in the eye, speak with him, shake his hand.
    More and more important.
    And even more important.
    His Majesty, of course, was only getting older. Soon it would be too late. Ingmar Qvist could no longer just wait for the king to march into the Södertälje Post Office one day. That had been his dream all these years, but now he was about to wake up from it.
    The king wasn’t going to seek out Ingmar.
    Ingmar had no choice but to seek out the king.
    Then he and Henrietta would make a baby, he promised.
    * * *
    The Qvist family’s already poor existence kept getting poorer and poorer. The money kept disappearing, thanks to Ingmar’s attempts to meet the king. He wrote veritable love letters (with an unnecessarily large number of stamps on them); he called (without getting further than some poor royal secretary, of course); he sent presents in the form of Swedish silversmith products, which were the king’s favourite things (and in this way he supported the not entirely honest father of five who had the task of registering all incoming royal gifts). Beyond this, he went to tennis matches and nearly all of the functions one could imagine the king might attend. This meant many expensive trips and admission tickets, yet Ingmar never came very close to meeting his king.
    Nor were the family finances fortified when Henrietta, as a result of all her worrying, started doing what almost everyone else did at the time – that is, smoking one or more packets of John Silvers per day.
    Ingmar’s boss at the accounting department of the post office was very tired of all the talk about the damn monarch and his merits. So whenever junior clerk Qvist asked for time off, he granted it even before Ingmar had managed to finish formulating his request.
    ‘Um, boss, do you think it might be possible for me to have two weeks off work, right away? I’m going to—’
    ‘Granted.’
    People had started calling Ingmar by his initials instead of his name. He was ‘IQ’ among his superiors and colleagues.
    ‘I wish you good luck in whatever kind of idiocy you’re planning to get up to this time, IQ,’ said the head clerk.
    Ingmar didn’t