The battle for Yibin had nevertheless been a success for the Kuomintang, because among the fifty captured communists there was one jewel. Forty-nine of the prisoners could simply be shot and pushed into a hole in the ground, but the fiftieth! Mmmm! The fiftieth was none other than the beautiful Jiang Qing, the actress who became a Marxist-Leninist and – far more important – Mao Tse-tung’s third wife.
A palaver immediately started up between, on the one side, the Kuomintang’s company command in Yibin and, on the other, Soong May-ling’s bodyguards. The argument was about who would have the responsibility for the star prisoner, Jiang Qing. So far, the company commander had just kept her locked up, waiting for the boat with Soong May-ling’s men to arrive. He hadn’t dared to do otherwise because Soong May-ling could be on board. And you didn’t argue with her.
But it turned out that Soong May-ling was in Taipei, which simplified things considerably as far as the Kuomintang company commander was concerned. Jiang Qing would first be raped in the most brutal manner and then, if she was still alive, she would be shot.
Soong May-ling’s bodyguards did not object to the rape bit. They could even see themselves joining in, but Jiang Qing must definitely not be allowed to die. Instead she should be taken to Soong May-ling or Chiang Kai-shek for them to decide her fate. This was big time politics, the internationally experienced soldiers explained in a superior tone to the provincially schooled company commander in Yibin.
The company commander grudgingly promised that he would hand over his jewel the same afternoon. The meeting broke up and the soldiers decided to celebrate their victory with a drinking spree. They were going to have a lot of fun with the jewel later on the trip home!
The final negotiations had been carried out on the deck of the riverboat that had brought Allan and the soldiers all the way from the sea. Allan was astounded by the fact that he understood most of what was said. While the soldiers had been amusing themselves in various cities, Allan had been sitting on the stern deck together with the good-natured mess boy Ah Ming, who turned out to have considerable pedagogical talent. In two months, Ah Ming had helped Allan make himself understood pretty well in Chinese (with a special proficiency in expletives and profanity).
As a child, Allan had been taught to be suspicious of people who didn’t have a drink when the opportunity arose. He was no more than six years old when his father laid a hand on his little shoulder and said:
‘You should beware of priests, my son. And people who don’t drink vodka. Worst of all are priests who don’t drink vodka.’
Acting on his own counsel, Allan’s father had certainly not been completely sober when one day he punched an innocent traveller in the face, upon which he was immediately fired from the National Railways. This in turn had caused Allan’s mother to give some words of wisdom of her own to her son:
‘Beware of drunks, Allan. That’s what I should have done.’
The little boy grew up and added his own opinions to those he had acquired from his parents. Priests and politicians were equally bad, Allan thought, and it didn’t make the slightest difference if they were communists, fascists, capitalists or any other political persuasion. But he did agree with his father that reliable people didn’t drink fruit juice. And he agreed with his mother that you had to make sure you behaved, even if you had drunk a bit more than was wise.
In practical terms, that meant that during the course of the river journey Allan had lost interest in helping Soong May-ling and her twenty drunken soldiers (in fact there were only nineteen left since one had fallen overboard and drowned). Nor did he want to be around when the soldiers raped the prisoner who was now locked up below deck, regardless of whether she was a communist or not, and of who her husband was.
So Allan decided to abandon ship and take the prisoner with him. He told his friend, the mess boy, of his decision and humbly asked that Ah Ming provide the future escapees with some food for their journey. Ah Ming promised to do that, but on one condition – that he could come along.
Eighteen of the nineteen soldiers from Soong May-ling’s bodyguard, together with the boat’s cook and the captain, were out enjoying themselves in the pleasure district in Yibin. The nineteenth soldier, the one who had drawn the shortest straw, sat grumpily outside the door to the stairs that led down to Jiang Qing’s prison cell below deck.
Allan sat down with the guard and suggested that they should have a drink together. The guard said that he had been entrusted with responsibility for possibly the most important prisoner in the nation so it would not be right to indulge in rice vodka.
‘I entirely agree,’ said Allan. ‘But one glass can’t hurt can it?’
‘No,’ said the guard, upon reflection. ‘One glass certainly can’t hurt.’
Two hours later, Allan and the guard had each emptied a bottle, while the mess boy Ah Ming had scuttled back and forth and served goodies from the pantry. Allan had become a bit tipsy while on the job, but the guard had fallen asleep right on the open deck.
Allan looked down at the unconscious Chinese soldier at his feet.
‘Never try to out-drink a Swede, unless you happen to be a Finn or at least a Russian.’
The bomb expert, Allan Karlsson, the mess boy, Ah Ming, and the eternally grateful communist leader’s wife, Jiang Qing, slipped away from the riverboat under cover of darkness and were soon in the mountains where Jiang Qing had already spent much time together with her husband’s troops. The Tibetan nomads in the area knew her and the fugitives had no problem in eating their fill even after the supplies carried by Ah Ming had run out. The Tibetans had good reason, or so they thought, for being on friendly terms with the People’s Liberation Army. It was generally assumed that if the communists won the struggle for China, Tibet would immediately gain its independence.
Jiang Qing suggested that she, Allan and Ah Ming should hurry northwards, in a wide circle round Kuomintang-controlled territory. After months of walking in the mountains, they would eventually reach Xi’an in the province of Shaanxi – and Jiang Qing knew that her husband would be there, provided they didn’t take too long.
The mess boy, Ah Ming, was delighted by Jiang Qing’s promise that he would be able to serve Mao himself. The boy had secretly become a communist when he saw how the soldiers behaved, so he was fine with changing sides and advancing his career at the same time.
Allan, however, said that he was certain the communist struggle would manage just fine without him. So he assumed it would be okay if he went home. Did Jiang Qing agree?
Yes, she did. But ‘home’ was surely Sweden and that was terribly far away. How was Mr Karlsson going to manage?
Allan replied that boat or aeroplane would have been the most practical method but poor placement of the world’s oceans had ruled out catching a boat from the middle of China, and he hadn’t seen any airports up there in the mountains. And anyway he didn’t have any money to speak of.
‘So I’ll have to walk,’ said Allan.
The head of the village that had so generously received the three fugitives had a brother who had travelled more than anybody else. The brother had been as far afield as Ulan Bator in the north and Kabul in the west. Besides which, he had dipped his toes into the Bay of Bengal on a journey to the East Indies, but now he was home in the village again and the headman sent for him and asked him to draw a map of the world for Mr Karlsson so that he could find his way back to Sweden. The brother promised to do that and he had completed the task by the next day.
Even if you’re well bundled up, it is bold to cross the Himalayas with only the help of a homemade map of the world and a compass. In fact, Allan could have walked north of the mountain chain and the Aral and Caspian Seas, but reality and the homemade map didn’t exactly match up. So Allan said goodbye to Jiang Qing and Ah Ming and started upon his perambulation, which was to go through Tibet, over the Himalayas, through British India, Afghanistan, into Iran, on to Turkey and then up through Europe.
After two month
s on foot, Allan discovered that he must have chosen the wrong side of a mountain range and the best way to deal with that was to turn back and start over. Another four months later (on the right side of the mountain range) Allan realised he was making rather slow progress. At a market in a mountain village he haggled as best he could about the price of a camel, with the help of sign language and the Chinese he knew. Allan and the camel seller finally came to an agreement, but not until the seller had been forced to accept that Allan was not going to take in his daughter as part of the purchase.
Allan did consider the part about the daughter. Not for purely physical reasons, because he no longer had any such urges. They had been left behind in a bucket in Professor Lundborg’s operating theatre. It was rather her companionship that attracted him. Life on the Tibetan highland plateau could sometimes be lonely.
But since the daughter spoke nothing but a monotonous-sounding Tibeto-Burmese dialect that Allan didn’t understand, he thought that where intellectual stimulation was concerned he could just as well talk to the camel. Besides, one couldn’t rule out that the daughter might have certain sexual expectations as to the arrangement. Something in the way she looked at him led Allan to believe that to be the case.
So another two months of loneliness ensued, with Allan wobbling across the roof of the world on the back of a camel, before he came across three strangers, also on camels. Allan greeted them in the languages he knew: Chinese, Spanish, English and Swedish. Luckily, English worked.
Allan told his new acquaintances that he was on his way home to Sweden. The men looked at him wide-eyed. Was he going to ride a camel all the way to northern Europe?
‘With a little break for the ship across Öresund,’ said Allan.
The three men didn’t know what Öresund was so Allan told them that it was where the Baltic Sea met the Atlantic Ocean. After they had ascertained that Allan was not a supporter of the British-American lackey, the Shah of Iran, they invited him to accompany them.
The men told him that they had met at university in Tehran where they had studied English. After their studies, they had spent two years in China, breathing the same air as their communist hero, Mao Tse-tung, and they were now on their way back home to Iran.
‘We are Marxists,’ one of the men said. ‘We are pursuing our struggle in the name of the international worker; in his name we will carry out a revolution in Iran and the whole world; we will build a society based upon the economic and social equality of all people: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.’
‘I see, comrade,’ said Allan. ‘Do you happen to have any spare vodka?’
The men did. The bottle went from camel-back to camel-back and Allan began to feel that the journey was working out nicely.
Eleven months later, the four men had managed to save each other’s lives at least three times. They had survived avalanches, pirates, extreme cold and repeated periods of hunger. Two of the camels had died, a third had had to be slaughtered and eaten, and the fourth had been given to an Afghan customs officer so that they would be allowed to enter the country instead of being arrested.
Allan had never imagined it would be easy to cross the Himalayas. But later he had realised just how lucky he had been to bump into those kind Iranian communists. It would not have been pleasant to wrestle alone with the valley sandstorms and the flooding rivers, and the -40°C in the mountains – even if he could have managed the bitter cold on his own, with his long experience of the Swedish winters. The group had set up camp at an altitude of 2,000 metres to wait for the 1946–47 winter to end.
The three communists tried to get Allan to join their struggle, especially after they discovered his talent for working with dynamite. Allan wished them the best of luck, but said that he had to go home to Sweden to look after his house in Yxhult. (Allan momentarily forgot that he had blown the house to bits eighteen years earlier.)
In the end, the men gave up their attempts to persuade Allan of the rightness of their cause, and settled for his being a good comrade, and someone who didn’t complain about a bit of snow. Allan’s standing improved further when, while the group was waiting for better weather, he figured out how to make alcohol from goats’ milk. The communists couldn’t fathom how he managed, but the end result was definitely potent and made everything a bit warmer and less boring.
In the spring of 1947 they finally made it over to the southern side of the world’s highest mountain chain. The closer they came to the Iranian border, the more eager the communists were to talk about the future of Iran. Now was the time to chase the foreigners out of the country once and for all. The Brits had supported the corrupt shah for years and years, and that was bad enough. But when the shah finally tired of being their lapdog and started to protest, then the Brits simply lifted him off his throne and put his son there instead. Allan was reminded of Soong May-ling’s relationship to Chiang Kai-shek; he reflected that family relations could be weird out in the big wide world.
The shah’s son was evidently easier to bribe than the father, and now the British and Americans controlled the Iranian oil. Inspired by Mao Tse-tung, these Iranian communists were determined to put a stop to that. The problem was that some other Iranian communists leaned more towards the brand of communism practised in Stalin’s Soviet Union, and there were other irritating revolutionary elements who mixed religion into it all.
‘Interesting,’ said Allan, and meant the opposite.
They replied with a long Marxist declaration on the theme that the situation was more than interesting. The trio would, in short, be victorious or die!
The very next day, the latter turned out to be the case, because as soon as the four friends set foot on Iranian soil they were arrested by a border patrol. The three communists unfortunately each had a copy of the Communist Manifesto (in Farsi), and that got them shot on the spot. Allan survived because he had no literature with him. Besides, he looked foreign and required further investigation.
With the barrel of a rifle in his back, Allan took his cap off and thanked the three dead communists for their company across the Himalayas. He couldn’t really get used to the way people he befriended went and died right in front of his eyes.
Allan didn’t have time for a longer period of mourning. His hands were tied behind his back and he was thrown into the rear of a truck. With his nose buried in a blanket he asked in English to be taken to the Swedish Embassy in Tehran, or to the American one if Sweden didn’t have any representation in the city.
‘Khafe sho!’ was the answer, in a threatening tone.
Allan didn’t understand the words, but he understood the sentiment. It probably wouldn’t hurt to keep his mouth shut for a while.
On the other side of the globe, in Washington DC, President Harry Truman had problems of his own. Election time was coming up, and it was important for him to make his policies clear. And that meant deciding what they were. The biggest strategic question was how much he would be prepared to support the blacks in the south. You had to maintain a fine balance between seeming modern and not seeming too soft. That was how you maintained your support in the opinion polls.
And in the world arena, he had Stalin to deal with. There, however, he was not prepared to compromise. Stalin had managed to charm quite a few people, but not Harry S. Truman.
In light of everything else, China was now history. Stalin had backed Mao Tse-tung, and Truman couldn’t refrain from doing the same to that amateur Chiang Kai-shek. Soong May-ling had so far got what she wanted, but now that would have to end too. He wondered what had happened to Allan Karlsson. A very nice guy.
Chiang Kai-shek suffered more and more military defeats. And Soong May-ling’s project failed because the explosives expert assigned to it disappeared, taking the clown’s wife with him.
Soong May-ling asked time and time again for a meeting with President Truman, hoping to be able to strangle him with her bare hands for having sent her Allan Karlsson, but Truman never had time t
o receive her. Instead, the United States turned its back on the Kuomintang; in China, the corruption, hyperinflation and famine all played into the hands of Mao Tse-tung. In the end, Chiang Kai-shek, Soong May-ling and their subordinates had to flee to Taiwan. Mainland China became communist China.
Chapter 12
Monday, 9th May 2005
The friends at Lake Farm realised that it was high time to get in their bus and leave for good. But first they had some things to take care of.
The Beauty put on a raincoat with a hood and rubber gloves and rolled out the hose to rinse off the remains of the thug that Sonya had just sat to death. But first, she eased the revolver out of the dead man’s right hand and carefully laid it on the veranda (where she later forgot it), with the barrel pointing at the thick trunk of a fir tree four metres away. You never knew when those things could go off.
When Bucket was cleansed of Sonya’s excrement, he was put under the back seat of his own Ford Mustang. Normally there wouldn’t have been room for him, but now he was neatly flattened.
Then Julius got behind the wheel of the thug’s car and drove off, with Benny right behind him in The Beauty’s Passat. The idea was to seek out a deserted place a safe distance from Lake Farm and then pour petrol over the thug’s car and set fire to it, just as real gangsters would have done.
But that required a can and petrol. So Julius and Benny stopped at a service station in Braås, Benny went in to do what was necessary and Julius to buy something yummy to chew on.
A new Ford Mustang with a V8 of more than 300 horsepower outside a service station is as sensational in Braås as a Boeing 747 would be on a street in downtown Stockholm. It didn’t take more than a second for Bucket’s little brother and one of his colleagues in The Violence to seize the opportunity. The little brother jumped into the Mustang while his colleague kept an eye on the man he presumed was the owner, who was looking at the sweets in the service station shop. What a find! And what an idiot! He’d even left the keys in the ignition.
The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared Page 13