Superintendent Krook replied by turning off the ceiling light and slamming the door. The next morning, the first thing he did was phone ‘that loony bin’ in Uppsala to tell them to come and get Allan Karlsson.
But Bernhard Lundborg’s colleagues turned a deaf ear. Karlsson’s treatment was complete, and now they had others to castrate and analyse. If only the police superintendent knew how many people the nation must be saved from: Jews and gypsies and Negroes and imbeciles and others. The fact that Mr Karlsson had blown his own house to bits did not qualify him for a new journey to Uppsala. Aren’t you allowed to do what you want with your own house? We live in a free country, don’t we?
Police Superintendent Krook hung up. He could make no headway with these big city types. He regretted that he had not let Karlsson bike away the previous evening.
And that is why Allan Karlsson, after a morning of negotiations, was back on his bicycle with the trailer in tow. This time he had food for three days in neat packets, and double blankets to keep him warm if the weather turned cool. He waved goodbye to Superintendent Krook, who didn’t wave back, and then turned north, because that direction seemed to Allan to be as good as any.
By afternoon, the road had taken him to Hälleforsnäs, and that was far enough for one day. Allan stopped beside a grassy slope, spread out a blanket and opened one of his food packets. While he chewed away at a slice of syrupy bread with salami, he studied the industrial premises that he’d happened to choose for his picnic site. Outside the factory was a heap of cannon pipes from the foundry. Perhaps the people who made cannons could use someone to make sure that they went off when they were meant to go off. There was no point in biking as far away from Yxhult as possible. Hälleforsnäs would do as well as anywhere else. If there was work to be had, that is.
Allan’s assumption that the presence of cannon pipes might mean work for him was perhaps a little naive. Nevertheless it turned out to be exactly right. After a short talk with the director, during which Allan omitted details of certain recent life events, he secured employment as an ignition specialist.
‘I am going to like it here,’ thought Allan.
The manufacture of cannons was at a low point at the foundry in Hälleforsnäs, and the orders continued to decline. The minister of defence, in the aftermath of the First World War, had reduced the funds available to the military, while King Gustaf V sat in the palace gnashing his teeth. The defence minister, a man with an analytic bent, realised with hindsight that Sweden should have been better armed when the war broke out, but that didn’t mean that there was any point in arming now, ten years later.
The consequences for the Hälleforsnäs foundry were that production was switched to more peaceful products, and the workers lost their jobs.
But not Allan – ignition specialists being hard to come by. The factory owner had hardly believed his ears and eyes when Allan appeared one day and turned out to be an expert on explosives of every type. Up until then, he had been forced to rely entirely upon the ignition specialist he had, and that was not a good thing, because the man was a foreigner, could hardly speak Swedish, and had black hair all over his body. He also doubted whether the man was reliable. But the owner had not had much choice.
Allan, on the other hand, did not think of people in terms of their colour. He had always found Professor Lundborg’s ideas strange. But this man sounded as if he was black and Allan was curious to meet his first black man. It was with longing that he read the advertisements in the paper announcing that Josephine Baker was to appear in Stockholm, but he had to settle for Estebán, his white but dark skinned, Spanish ignition specialist colleague.
Allan and Estebán got along well, and shared a room in the workers’ barracks next to the foundry. Estebán told Allan his dramatic story. He had met a girl at a party in Madrid and secretly embarked upon a fairly innocent relationship with her, without realising that she was the daughter of the prime minister, Miguel Primo de Rivera. De Rivera was not a man you argued with. He governed the country as he wished, with the King trailing helplessly along behind him. ‘Prime minister’ was a polite word for ‘dictator’, in Estebán’s opinion. But his daughter was a knockout.
Estebán’s proletarian background had not in any way appealed to his potential father-in-law. So in his first, and only, meeting with Primo de Rivera, Estebán was informed that he had two alternatives. One was to disappear as far away from Spanish territory as possible, the other was to receive a bullet through his neck on the spot.
While Primo de Rivero cocked his rifle, Estebán said that he had at that moment decided in favour of the first alternative, and backed rapidly out of the room without so much as a glance in the direction of the sobbing girl.
As far away as possible, thought Estebán, and went north, and then even further north and finally so far north that the lakes froze to ice in the winter. He had been in Sweden ever since. He had got the job at the foundry three years earlier with some interpreting help from a Catholic priest and, may God forgive him, a made-up story about having worked with explosives back at home in Spain, when in actual fact he had mainly picked tomatoes.
Gradually, Estebán had managed to learn workable Swedish and had become a fairly competent ignition specialist. And now, with Allan at his side, he became a real professional.
Allan felt at home in the workers’ barracks. After a year, he could make himself understood in the Spanish that Estebán taught him. After two years, his Spanish was virtually fluent. But it took three years before Estebán gave up his attempts to impose his Spanish variety of international socialism on Allan. He tried everything, but Allan was not susceptible. Estebán could not understand that particular facet of his best friend’s personality. It wasn’t that Allan took an opposite view of the ways of the world and argued accordingly. No, he simply had no opinion whatsoever.
Allan had the same problem. Estebán was a good friend. It wasn’t his fault that he had been poisoned by those damned politics. He certainly wasn’t the only one.
The seasons came and went for some time before Allan’s life took a new turn. It started when Estebán received the news that Primo de Rivera had resigned and fled the country. Now, proper democracy was just round the corner, perhaps even socialism, and Estebán didn’t want to miss that.
So he planned to go home as soon as possible. The foundry was getting fewer and fewer orders because Señor Defence Minister had decided that there wouldn’t be any more wars. Estebán was sure that both ignition specialists would be fired any day. What did his friend Allan have in mind for the future? Did he want to come along to Spain?
Allan thought about it. On the one hand, he wasn’t interested in any revolution, Spanish or otherwise. It would probably only lead to a new revolution, in the opposite direction. On the other hand, Spain was actually abroad, just like every other country except Sweden, and after having read about countries abroad all his life perhaps it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to experience them for real. On the way, they might even meet up with a black man or two.
When Estebán promised that they would meet at least one black man on the way to Spain, Allan had to say yes. The two friends then discussed more practical matters. In doing so they came to the conclusion that the owner of the foundry was a ‘stupid bastard’ (that was exactly how they put it) and did not deserve their consideration. They decided to wait for that week’s wages and then discreetly disappear.
So it was that Allan and Estebán got up at five in the morning the following Sunday to depart by bicycle with trailer attached in a southerly direction, leading – eventually – to Spain. On the way, Estebán planned to stop outside the foundry owner’s residence to deliver a complete sample – liquid and solid – of the results of his morning visit to the lavatory in a jug with milk that was placed early every morning at the factory owner’s gate. Estebán had been forced to put up for a long time with being called ‘the ape’ by the factory owner and his two teenage sons.
‘Revenge is not a go
od thing,’ Allan warned him. ‘Revenge is like politics, one thing always leads to another until bad has become worse, and worse has become worst.’
But Estebán insisted. Just because you had slightly hairy arms and didn’t speak the foundry owner’s language that didn’t make you an ape, did it?
Allan had to agree, so the two friends arrived at a reasonable compromise. Estebán would limit himself to pissing into the milk.
That same morning witnesses had sneaked to the foundry-owner that Allan and Estebán had been seen on bikes with trailers on the way towards Katrineholm, or perhaps even further south, so the foundry owner was prepared for the coming week’s immediate decrease in staff. He sat brooding on the veranda of his lavish foundry owner’s villa while he sipped the glass of milk that Sigrid had kindly served him, together with an almond biscuit. The foundry owner’s mood darkened because there seemed to be something wrong with the biscuits. They had a distinct taste of ammonia.
The foundry owner decided to wait until after church to tell Sigrid off. For the time being, he would drink another glass of milk, hoping to remove the unpleasant taste in his mouth.
So it was that Allan found himself in Spain. It took them three months to make their way down through Europe, and on the way he got to meet more black men than he ever dreamed of. But after the first one, he lost interest. It turned out that there was no difference other than the colour of their skin, except of course that they spoke weird languages, but the whites did that too, from southern Sweden onwards. Professor Lundborg must have been frightened by a black man when he was a child, thought Allan.
Allan and his friend Estebán came to a land in chaos. The King had fled to Rome and been replaced by a republic. The Left called for revolución, while the Right was terrified by what had gone on in Stalin’s Russia. Would the same thing happen here?
For a moment Estebán forgot that his friend was incorrigibly apolitical and tried to drag Allan in the direction of revolution. But Allan stuck to his habit of not getting involved. It seemed all too familiar, and Allan was still unable to understand why everything always had to become the exact opposite of what it was.
An unsuccessful military coup from the Right was followed by a general strike from the Left. Then there was a general election. The Left won, and the Right got grumpy, or was it the other way around? Allan wasn’t really sure. In the end, there was war.
Allan was in a foreign country and had no better idea than to follow half a step behind his friend Estebán, who joined the army and was immediately promoted to sergeant when his platoon leader realised that Estebán knew how to blow things up.
Allan’s friend wore his uniform with pride and looked forward to his first contribution to the war. The platoon was ordered to blow up a couple of bridges in a valley in Aragon, and Estebán’s group was told to deal with the first bridge. Estebán was so exalted by the trust placed in him that he got up onto a rock, grabbed his rifle in his left hand, raised it in the air and shouted:
‘Death to fascism, death to all…’
He didn’t manage to finish the sentence before half of his head and one shoulder were shot away by what might possibly have been one of the first enemy mortars fired in the war. Allan was about twenty metres away when it happened, and thus avoided being dirtied by the parts of his comrade that were spread around the rock that Estebán had been stupid enough to stand on. One of the soldiers in Estebán’s group started to cry. For his part, Allan looked around at what was left of his friend and decided that it wasn’t worth picking up the bits.
‘You should have stayed in Hälleforsnäs,’ said Allan and suddenly felt a sincere longing to be chopping wood outside his little house in Yxhult.
The mortar that killed Estebán may well have been the first in the war, but it certainly wasn’t the last. Allan considered going home, but suddenly the war was all around him. Besides, it was one hell of a long walk back to Sweden, and nobody was waiting for him.
So Allan sought out Estebán’s company commander, introduced himself as Europe’s leading pyrotechnical expert and said that he would be prepared to blow up bridges and other infrastructural constructions for the company commander, in exchange for three square meals a day and enough wine to get drunk on when circumstances allowed.
The company commander was about to have Allan shot because he stubbornly refused to sing the praises of socialism and the republic and, almost worse, he insisted on serving in civilian clothes. As Allan expressed it:
‘One more thing… if I am going to blow up bridges for you, then I’m going to do it wearing my own jacket, otherwise you can blow up the bridges yourself.’
No company commander has ever been born who would let himself be browbeaten by a civilian in that way. The problem for this particular company commander was that the most skilled explosives expert in his company was spread in pieces across a rock on a nearby hill.
While the company commander sat in his foldable military field chair and ruminated upon whether Allan’s immediate future was employment or execution, one of the platoon leaders whispered in his ear that the young sergeant who so unfortunately had just been shot to bits had previously affirmed this strange Swede’s abilities as a master in the field of explosives.
That decided the matter. Señor Karlsson could a) stay alive, b) be fed three square meals a day, c) have the right to wear his jacket, and d) have exactly the same right as all the others to sample the wine now and then, in reasonable quantities. In return, he would blow up exactly what the commanders around him asked. Two soldiers were asked to keep a special eye on the Swede, because there was no way of knowing for certain that he wasn’t a spy.
The months turned to years. Allan blew up what he was told to blow up, and he did so with considerable skill.
The job was not without its risks. You often had to crawl along the ground in order to sneak up on the object that was to be blown up, place an explosive charge there with a time fuse and then zig-zag your way back to safe ground. After three months, one of Allan’s two guards lost his life (by mistake he crawled right into an enemy camp). Six months later, the other one met the same fate (he got up to stretch his back and immediately that same body part was shot in two). The company commander didn’t bother to replace them, since Señor Karlsson had done such a good job with the explosives.
Allan couldn’t see the point of killing lots of people unnecessarily, so he tried to make sure the bridge in question was empty when the charge went off. That was true as well for the very last bridge he was ordered to blow just before the war ended. But this time, just as he had finished his preparations and had crawled back to some bushes beyond one of the bridge foundations, an enemy patrol came walking towards him with a medal-wearing little man in the middle. They approached from the other side and seemed to be totally unaware that the republicans were close by, and that they were just about to join Estebán and tens of thousands of other Spaniards in eternity.
But Allan had had enough. So he got up out of the bushes and started to wave his arms.
‘Go away!’ he hollered at the little man with the medals and his entourage. ‘Be off, before you get blown up!’
The little man with the medals gave a start. Then his entourage dragged him over the bridge and didn’t stop until they had reached Allan’s bush. Eight rifles were suddenly pointed at the Swede and at least one of them would have been fired if it hadn’t been for the bridge suddenly blowing up behind them all. The pressure wave knocked the little man with the medals into Allan’s bush. In the tumult, none of the little man’s entourage dared send a bullet in Allan’s direction, since it might hit the wrong person. Besides, he appeared to be a civilian. And when the smoke settled there was no longer any question of killing Allan. The little man with the medals shook his hand and explained that a real general knows how to show his appreciation and that the best thing now was for the group to withdraw to the other side again, with or without a bridge. If his saviour wanted to come along, he was more than
welcome. Once there, the general would invite him to dinner.
‘Paella Andaluz,’ said the general. ‘My cook is from the south. ¿Comprende?’
Yes, indeed, Allan understood. He understood that he had saved the life of the generalissimo himself; he understood that it was probably to his advantage to be standing there in his dirty jacket instead of in enemy uniform; he understood that his friends on the hill a few hundred metres away would be watching the whole thing through binoculars and he understood that for the sake of his health it would be best to change sides in the war the purpose of which he hadn’t in any case understood.
Besides, he was hungry.
‘Sí, por favor, mí general,’ said Allan. Paella would hit the spot. Perhaps with a glass or two of red wine?
When, ten years earlier, Allan had applied for a job as an ignition specialist at the foundry in Hälleforsnäs, he had chosen to exclude from his résumé the fact that he had been in an asylum for four years, after which he had blown up his own house. Perhaps that was why the job interview went so well.
Allan thought back to that while he chatted with General Franco. On the one hand, you shouldn’t lie. On the other, it would be best not to reveal to the general that it was Allan who had set the charge under the bridge and that he had, for the last three years, been a civilian employee of the republican army. Allan wasn’t shy, but in this particular case there was a dinner and good booze on offer. The truth could temporarily be set aside, Allan thought.
So, Allan told the generalissimo that he had found himself in the bush while fleeing from the republicans. Luckily he had personally observed how the charge had been set, so he was able to warn the general. Furthermore, the reason he had ended up in Spain and the war at all was that he had been tempted there by a friend, a man who had a close relationship with the deceased Primo di Rivera. But since that friend had been killed by an enemy mortar shell, Allan had been forced to struggle on his own to stay alive. He had been in the clutches of the republicans, but eventually managed to break out.
The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared Page 7