‘Damn and blast the German bureaucracy,’ said The Beauty and instead phoned Indonesia.
It took a while, because in Indonesia there are fifty-one different airlines and not all of them have English-speaking staff. But The Beauty didn’t give up, and finally she succeeded. In Palembang, on Sumatra, there was a transport company that for a reasonable fee would be happy to make a round trip to Sweden. They had a Boeing 747 suitable for that purpose, a machine that had recently been purchased from the Azerbaijani army. (Luckily this was before all Indonesian airlines were blacklisted by the European Union and forbidden from landing in Europe.) The company promised to arrange all the papers for the landing in Sweden, while it was the customer’s responsibility to arrange landing permission for Bali. A vet? Why?
All that remained was the matter of payment. The price went up by twenty per cent before The Beauty with a maximum use of her rich vocabulary got the company to agree to be paid in cash in Swedish crowns on arrival in Sweden.
As the Indonesian Boeing took off on its flight to Sweden, the friends held a council. Benny and Julius were entrusted with the falsification of some papers that they could wave in front of what they assumed would be fussy officials at Landvetter Airport, and Allan promised to arrange the Balinese landing permission.
They had a few problems at the airport outside Gothenburg, but Benny not only had his false veterinary certificate, but also the ability to reel off some professional-sounding veterinary phrases. This, together with the certificate of ownership and the certificate of health for the elephant, and a whole bundle of credible documentation written by Allan in Indonesian, meant that they could all board as planned. Since the friends amidst the general falsification had also said that the next stop was Copenhagen, nobody asked for their passports.
The travelling party included the hundred-year-old Allan Karlsson, petty thief Julius Jonsson (now declared innocent), eternal student Benny Ljungberg, his fiancée, the beautiful Gunilla Björklund, both of her pets, elephant Sonya and Alsatian dog Buster, Benny Ljungberg’s brother, the newly religious food-wholesaler Bosse, the previously so lonely Chief Inspector Aronsson from Eskilstuna, the former gangster boss Per-Gunnar Gerdin and his mother, eighty-year-old Rose-Marie, she who at one time had written an unfortunate letter to her son while he was incarcerated at the Hall Prison.
The flight took eleven hours, without lots of unnecessary stops en route, and the group was in good condition when the Indonesian captain informed his passengers that they were now approaching Bali’s international airport and that it was time for Allan Karlsson to pull out that landing permission. Allan asked the captain to let him know when the air traffic controller at Bali got in touch. Allan would take care of the rest.
‘Here they are,’ said the worried captain. ‘What do I tell them? They could shoot us down any minute!’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Allan and took over. ‘Hello? Is that Bali Airport?’ he said in English, and received the answer that they should immediately identify themselves unless they wanted to face the Indonesian Air Force.
‘My name is Dollars,’ said Allan. ‘One Hundred Thousand Dollars.’
The air traffic controller was completely silent. The Indonesian captain and his co-pilot looked at Allan in admiration.
‘At this very moment the controller and his closest colleagues are counting how many are getting a share,’ Allan explained.
‘I know,’ said the captain.
Another few seconds passed, before the flightleader contacted them again.
‘Hello? Are you there, Mr Dollars?’
‘Yes, I am,’ said Allan.
‘Excuse me, what is your first name, Mr Dollars?’
‘One Hundred Thousand,’ said Allan. ‘I am Mr One Hundred Thousand Dollars, and I want permission to land at your airport.’
‘Excuse me, Mr Dollars. The sound is very poor. Could you please be so kind as to say your first name once more?’
Allan explained to the captain that the controller had now started to negotiate.
‘I know,’ said the captain.
‘My first name is Two Hundred Thousand,’ said Allan. ‘Do we have your permission to land?’
‘One moment, Mr Dollars,’ said the flightleader, and checked with his colleagues. He then said:
‘You are most welcome to Bali, Mr Dollars. It will be a pleasure to have you here.’
Allan thanked the flightleader.
‘This must not be your first visit,’ said the captain, and smiled.
‘Indonesia is the country where everything is possible,’ said Allan.
When the high-ranking officials at Bali International Airport realised that several of Mr Dollars’ fellow travellers didn’t have passports, and that one of them weighed in at nearly five tons and had four legs instead of two, it cost a further 50,000 dollars to arrange the customs documents and suitable transport for Sonya. But an hour after landing, the entire group was in place at family Einstein’s hotel, including Sonya who had been transported there with Benny and The Beauty in one of the airport’s catering trucks (that afternoon’s flight to Singapore, incidentally, unfortunately lacked lunch trays).
Amanda, Allan and Mao Einstein received their guests, and after a bout of hugging and kissing, they were shown to their rooms. Sonya and Buster could meanwhile stretch their legs in the hotel’s enormous fenced-in garden. Amanda had already expressed her regret at the lack of elephant friends for Sonya on Bali, but she would immediately arrange that a potential boyfriend be delivered from Sumatra. When it came to girlfriends for Buster, he would probably find them himself; there were lots of pretty girl-dogs roaming around the island.
And Amanda promised that towards the evening there would be one hell of a Balinese party for them all, and she urged them to have a nap first.
All except three abided by that recommendation. Pike and Pike’s mamma couldn’t wait any longer for that parasol drink and the same applied to Allan, minus the parasol.
All three made their way to the deckchairs beside the water, made themselves comfortable, and waited for the delivery of what they had just ordered from the bar.
The waitress was eighty-four years old and had taken over from the barman.
‘Here’s a red parasol drink for you, Mr Gerdin. And a green parasol drink for you, Mrs Mamma Gerdin. And… but wait a moment… You didn’t order milk, did you, Allan?’
‘I thought you had promised not to get involved with serving the drinks, dear Amanda,’ said Allan.
‘I lied, dear Allan. I lied.’
Darkness descended upon the paradise and the friends gathered for a three-course meal, invited by their hosts Amanda, Allan and Mao Einstein. For starters they were served sate lilit, for the main course bebek betutu and for dessert a jaja batun bedil. They drank tual wayah, palm-tree beer, except for Benny who drank water.
The very first evening on Indonesian soil was almost as long as it was pleasant. The food came to an end and it was rounded off with pisang ambon for everyone except Allan who had a vodka and Benny who had a cup of tea.
Bosse felt that this day and evening of excess needed a bit of spiritual balance so he stood up and quoted Jesus from the Gospel according to Matthew (‘Happy are they… their spiritual needs’). Bosse believed they would all benefit from listening to God and learning from God. And then he put his palms together and thanked the Lord for an extremely unusual and unusually good day.
‘Everything will work out just fine,’ said Allan in the silence created by Bosse’s words.
Bosse had thanked the Lord and perhaps the Lord thanked them in return, because their good fortune lasted and grew. Benny asked The Beauty if she would marry him, to which she replied: ‘Yes, damn it! Now, straight away!’ The ceremony took place the following evening and lasted three days. Rose-Marie Gerdin, eighty years old, taught the members of the local pensioners’ club how to play the Treasure Island Game (but no better than her so that she herself could win every time); Pike lay on the be
ach under a parasol day in and day out, drinking parasol drinks in all the colours of the rainbow; Bosse and Julius bought a fishing boat which they rarely left, and Chief Inspector Aronsson became a popular member of the Balinese upper classes: he was a white man after all, and a detective chief inspector too, and if that wasn’t enough, he had come from the least corrupt country in the world. You couldn’t get more exotic than that.
Every day, Allan and Amanda went on suitably long walks along the glowing white beach outside the hotel. They always had lots to talk about, and they felt better and better in each other’s company. They didn’t go very fast, because she was eighty-four years old and he was now in his hundred and first year.
After a while they started to hold each other’s hand, for balance. Then they decided to dine, just the two of them, on Amanda’s terrace in the evenings, as it got too much with all the others. And in the end, Allan moved in with Amanda for good. In that way, Allan’s room could be rented to a tourist instead, and that was good for the hotel’s balance sheet.
During one of the following day’s walks, Amanda raised the question of whether they should just do the same as Benny and The Beauty, that is, get married, when they were living together anyway. Allan said that Amanda was a young girl in comparison with him, but that he could bring himself to ignore that circumstance. And nowadays he mixed his own drinks so there was no problem there either. So, in short, Allan couldn’t see any decisive objection to what Amanda had just proposed.
‘Then it’s a plan?’ said Amanda.
‘Yes, it’s a plan,’ said Allan.
And they held each other’s hand extra hard. For balance.
The investigation into Henrik ‘Bucket’ Hultén’s death was short and without result. The police looked into his past and interrogated Bucket’s former companions in Småland (not far from Gunilla Björklund’s Lake Farm, in fact), but they hadn’t heard or seen anything.
The colleagues in Riga sought out the drunkard who had taken the Mustang to the scrapyard, but they couldn’t get a sensible word out of him until one of the police colleagues thought of priming him with a bottle of wine. Then the drunkard suddenly started to tell them – that he had no idea who it was who had asked him to take the car to the scrapyard. Somebody just turned up at the park bench one day with a whole bag full of wine bottles.
‘I wasn’t sober, admittedly,’ said the drunkard. ‘But I never get so drunk that I’d say no to four bottles of wine.’
Only one journalist got in touch a few days later to find out how the investigation about Bucket Hultén’s death was going, but Prosecutor Ranelid wasn’t there to take the call. He had gone on holiday, booking a cheap last-minute charter flight to Las Palmas. What he really wanted to do was to get away from everything, and he had heard that Bali was nice, but that flight was fully booked.
The Canary Islands would have to do. And there he sat now in a deck chair under a parasol, with a parasol drink in his hand, wondering where Aronsson had gone off to. He had apparently given his notice, taken all the holiday due to him and just disappeared.
Chapter 28
1982–2005
The salary from the American Embassy had come in handy when Allan returned to Sweden. He found a little red cottage just a few miles from where he had grown up which he paid for in cash. Making the purchase he had to argue with the Swedish authorities about whether he existed. In the end, they gave in and started to pay him a pension – much to Allan’s surprise.
‘Why?’ asked Allan.
‘You’re a pensioner,’ said the authorities.
‘Am I?’ said Allan.
And he was, of course, and by a good margin too. The following spring he would be seventy-eight, and Allan realised that he had got old, against all odds and without having thought about it. But he was going to get much older…
The years passed, at a leisurely rate and without Allan influencing world developments in any way at all. He didn’t even influence things in the town of Flen, into which he occasionally ventured to buy some groceries (from the grandson of wholesale dealer Gustavsson who now ran the local supermarket and to his good fortune hadn’t a clue that Allan was who he was). The public library in Flen didn’t, however, get any new visits, because Allan had realised that you could subscribe to the newspapers you wanted to read and they landed neatly in the mailbox outside his cottage. Very practical!
When the hermit in the cottage outside Yxhult turned eighty-three he thought all that biking back and forth to Flen was getting hard, so instead he bought a car. For a moment he thought about combining this with the acquisition of a driving licence, but as soon as the driving instructor had mentioned ‘sight test’ and ‘provisional licence’, Allan decided to do without. When the instructor went on to list the ‘books’, the ‘theory lessons’, the ‘driving lessons’, and the ‘final double test’, Allan had long since stopped listening.
In 1989, the Soviet Union had started to fall to bits, which didn’t surprise the old man in Yxhult with his own vodka distillery in the cellar. The new youth at the helm, Gorbachev, had started his era in power with a campaign against the massive vodka-drinking in his nation. That wasn’t something that would get the masses on your side, was it?
That same year, in fact on Allan’s birthday, a kitten suddenly appeared on the porch steps, and signalled that it was hungry. Allan invited it into his kitchen and served it milk and sausage. The cat liked that so much that it moved in.
It was a tiger-striped farmyard cat, a male, who was given the name Molotov, not after the minister but after the cocktail. Molotov didn’t say very much, but he was extremely intelligent and fantastic at listening. If Allan had something to say, he only had to call the cat and he always came skipping along, unless he was occupied with catching mice (Molotov knew what was important). The cat jumped up into Allan’s lap, made himself comfortable and made a sign with his ears to show that Allan could now say what he had to say. If Allan simultaneously scratched Molotov on the back of his head, and on his neck, there was no limit to how long the chat could last.
And when Allan got some chickens, it was enough to tell Molotov one single time that he shouldn’t go running after them, for the cat to nod and understand. The fact that he ignored what Allan said and ran after the chickens till he didn’t find it fun any more, that was another matter. What could you expect? He was a cat after all.
Allan thought that nobody was craftier than Molotov, not even the fox that was always sneaking around the chicken coop looking for gaps in the netting. The fox also had designs on the cat, but Molotov was much too quick for that.
More years were added to those that Allan had already collected. And every month the pension money arrived from the authorities without Allan doing anything in return. With that money, Allan bought cheese, sausage and potatoes and now and then a sack of sugar. In addition, he paid for the subscription to the local paper, and he paid the electricity bill whenever it appeared.
But there was still money left over every month, and what good was that? Allan once attempted to send the excess back to the authorities in an envelope, but after a while an official came to Allan’s cottage and informed him that you couldn’t do that. So Allan got his money back, and had to promise to stop arguing with the authorities.
Allan and Molotov had a good life together. Every day, weather allowing, they went for a little bike ride along the gravel roads in the area. Allan pedalled, while Molotov sat in the basket and enjoyed the wind and the speed.
The little family lived a pleasant and regular life. And this went on until one day it turned out that not only Allan but also Molotov had got older. Suddenly, the fox caught up with the cat, and that was just as surprising for the fox and the cat as it was sad for Allan.
Allan was more sad than he had ever been earlier in his life, and the sorrow soon turned to anger. The old explosives expert stood there on his veranda with tears in his eyes and called out into the winter night:
‘If it’s war you
want, it’s war you’ll get, you damned fox!’
For the first and only time in his life, Allan was angry. And it wasn’t dispelled with vodka, a drive (without a driver’s licence) in his car or an extra long bike ride. Revenge was a poor thing to live for, Allan knew that. Nevertheless, just now that was precisely what he had on the agenda.
Allan set an explosive charge beside the chicken coop, to go off when the fox got hungry next time and stretched its nose a little too far into the chickens’ domain. But in his anger, Allan forgot that right next to the chicken coop was where he stored all his dynamite.
Thus it was that at dusk on the third day after Molotov’s ascent to heaven, an explosion was heard in that part of Södermanland, the like of which hadn’t been heard since the late 1920s.
The fox was blown into little bits, just like Allan’s chickens, his chicken coop and wood-shed. But the explosion took the barn and cottage too. Allan was sitting in his armchair when it happened, and he flew up in the air in the armchair and landed in a snowdrift outside his potato cellar. He sat there looking around him with an astonished expression on his face, before finally saying:
‘That was the end of the fox.’
By now, Allan was ninety-nine years old and he felt so knocked about that he stayed where he was. But it wasn’t hard for the ambulance, police and fire brigade to find their way to him, because the flames reached high into the sky. And when they had made sure that the geriatric in the armchair in the snowdrift beside his own potato cellar was uninjured, it was time for social services to be called in.
The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared Page 35