“I’m no historian, but I’ve read a few books.”
“In 1939 the Second World War began, and in 1940 the Winter War in Finland. A
large number of the Lindholm movement joined as Finland volunteers. Richard was
one of them and by then a captain in the Swedish army. He was killed in February
1940—just before the peace treaty with the Soviet Union—and thereby became a
martyr in the Nazi movement and had a battle group named after him. Even now a
handful of idiots gather at a cemetery in Stockholm on the anniversary of his death
to honour him.”
“I understand.”
“In 1926, when he was nineteen, he was going out with a woman called Margareta,
the daughter of a teacher in Falun. They met in some political context and had a
relationship which resulted in a son, Gottfried, who was born in 1927. The couple
married when the boy was born. During the first half of the thirties, my brother sent
his wife and child here to Hedestad while he was stationed with his regiment in
Gävle. In his free time he travelled around and did proselytising for Nazism. In 1936
he had a huge fight with my father which resulted in my father cutting him off.
After that Richard had to make his own living. He moved with his family to
Stockholm and lived in relative poverty.”
“He had no money of his own?”
“The inheritance he had in the firm was tied up. He couldn’t sell outside the family.
Worse than their straitened circumstances, Richard was a brutal domestic. He beat
his wife and abused his son. Gottfried grew up cowed and bullied. He was thirteen
when Richard was killed. I suspect it was the happiest day of his life up to that
point. My father took pity on the widow and child and brought them here to
Hedestad, where he found an apartment for Margareta and saw to it that she had a
decent life.
“If Richard personified the family’s dark, fanatical side, Gottfried embodied the
indolent one. When he reached the age of eighteen I decided to take him under my
wing—he was my dead brother’s son, after all—and you have to remember that
the age difference between Gottfried and me was not so great. I was only seven
years older, but by then I was on the firm’s board, and it was clear that I was the
one who would take over from my father, while Gottfried was more or less
regarded as an outsider.”