The Accidental Further Adventures of the Hundred-Year-Old Man

by Jonas Jonasson

  Sweden, Germany

  The rainbow coffin joined a Harley Davidson coffin, a Ferrari coffin, a golf-is-the-best-thing-ever coffin, a John Lennon/Imagine coffin, a white-doves-in-flight-on-a-pale-blue-background coffin, a dancing-fairies-in-a-meadow coffin, and a sunset-at-sea coffin.

  Sabine was quick on the draw and found a used hearse for sale. Very quick. At the conclusion of the sale she realized that the eight coffins they were planning to bring to Stuttgart wouldn’t fit into it. It would take at most two, preferably just one. Julius offered comfort by pointing out that it would be useful for years to come, when it was time to deliver completed orders. Then he sent her to rent a small truck at the nearest service station. Before it was time to take off on their trip, she managed, on Julius’s advice, to paint a VfB Stuttgart coffin in red, white and a little yellow, with the words ‘Love since 1983’ in German, thanks to Google Translate.

  ‘VfB Stuttgart? What’s that?’ Allan asked.

  ‘The local football team,’ said Julius. ‘Might work.’

  Sabine locked up and put a sign on the door: ‘Closed. You all shop somewhere else anyway.’ Then they aimed southwards, all three of them, with nine coffins in tow.

  * * *

  It took two days, with overnights in Copenhagen and Hanover. Pleasant dinners for three in both cities. As pleasant as they could be, at least, with Allan stubbornly reporting the latest news all the time, as if Sabine and Julius weren’t already aware of the state of the world. Allan’s latest charming story was about a former winner of the Nobel Peace Prize who might currently be pursuing genocide instead of peace.

  After dinner in Hanover, Allan went to bed. Julius promised to join him soon, but this was a promise he wouldn’t keep. Instead he slept in Sabine’s room; it turned out this was something they had both been considering for some time.

  ‘Well, then,’ said Allan, when the trio gathered for breakfast the next day. ‘The Minister for Foreign Affairs is no longer good enough.’

  ‘Idiot,’ said Julius.

  He and Sabine had spent time together every day and night since they’d first met a few months ago. Of course, Allan was always there in one corner, but he seldom left his sofa and in no way did he pose a threat to the love between the much-younger Julius and the even-younger-than-that Sabine.

  It would be an exaggeration to say they just clicked. After all, their love affair had begun when Julius tried to rob his future intended of a box of bandages. But from that point on, their relationship grew steadily. And the evening in Hanover turned into a night neither regretted the next morning.

  Julius felt that Sabine made him a better person. She didn’t just take, she gave too. He felt … proud of her.

  ‘Better late than never,’ said Sabine, apropos of the fact that she’d fallen in love shortly before her sixtieth birthday.

  ‘Much better late than never,’ said Julius, raising a glass of breakfast milk in a toast.

  ‘Okay, okay,’ said Allan. ‘Do you know what Trump did overnight?’

  Germany

  The trade fair was a success. Few of the two thousand exhibitors were met with as much interest as Booth D128, the one with nine coffins and banners that said things like ‘Heaven Can’t Wait’, ‘Ticket to Paradise’ and ‘The Last Journey’. Sabine wasn’t quite sure what message she was trying to get across, but she was in charge of designing the booth and wanted everything to be as lively as possible around the death they were marketing.

  The first to go was the VfB Stuttgart coffin. A diehard Karlsruhe fan offered three thousand euros; his goal was to humiliate Stuttgart somehow, with the help of the coffin, when the occasion arose. If no such occasion presented itself in a reasonable amount of time, he planned to charge ten euros per Karlsruhe fan who wanted to relieve themselves on the coffin in a public place. Then he could set it on fire and put the video online as a potential viral success.

  ‘Does you-know-what really burn?’ Sabine asked the customer, who had shared more of his plans than the salespeople truly needed to know.

  Julius stepped in and said that the purpose of the coffin had been to honour the organization that was VfB Stuttgart, not to deride it. Furthermore, Julius went on, he understood now, if he hadn’t before, why the concept of peace on earth seemed so remote. Last but not least, he sincerely pitied the buyer of the coffin for putting hate above love.

  ‘All that said: three thousand euros, it’s a deal.’

  The second coffin to sell was a pre-order for a Karlsruhe coffin. It so happened that a Stuttgart fan, in all the fuss, had happened to overhear the preceding conversation and acted accordingly.

  ‘He who pisses last pisses best,’ he said to the Karlsruhe fan, once the coffin was ordered and the agreement signed.

  At which the two fans began first to bicker and then to scuffle, until they were carried off and ejected by security.

  Before the day was over, they had sold twelve more coffins, including pre-orders. The only coffin they’d brought that didn’t move was sunset-at-sea. Sabine believed this was because it was six hundred kilometres from Stuttgart to the nearest sunset at sea, but Julius thought it might be because the sunset had turned out an awful lot like a sunrise.

  Fourteen coffins at three thousand euros each made forty-two thousand. The company Die with Pride wasn’t even formally established yet, but it seemed to be headed for a fruitful future.

  If only it hadn’t been for that damned bad luck.

  Denmark, Sweden

  Povl Riis-Knudsen was the chairman of the National Socialist Movement of Denmark, until he happened to get it on with an Arab and was forced to leave the party. Caught red-handed, he tried to argue that the Arab had awfully white skin. That wouldn’t do. An Arab was an Arab.

  Yet, as the leader of the movement, he’d managed to leave his mark. He appeared on Danish TV to argue that all foreigners should be forced to leave the country, and advocated the death penalty for anyone who spread AIDS. He wanted to place political opponents in labour camps and sterilize everyone with the wrong skin colour. In accordance with some extra-complicated logic, he also had a passion for fundamentalist Islam, even though he wouldn’t touch Muslims with a ten-foot pole (unless they were white Arabs). More recently he had published books in which he attempted to prove that the concentration camps of the Second World War had never existed.

  This Danish man was a main source of inspiration for the Swedish neo-Nazis in the Nordic Resistance Party. It wasn’t Denmark or Sweden under threat: it was the Aryan race and, in the long term, all of humanity – that was, biology and ecology over geography.

  Within the movement were those who masqueraded as quiet Sweden Democrats and those who wanted to take quick and drastic action. Kenneth Engvall was of the latter category, to such an extent that one day he took his brother and created the Aryan Alliance instead. The last straw, for Kenneth, was when the Nordic Resistance Movement applied for a demonstration permit. What kind of resistance was that? And whom did they have to apply to? The same corrupt Jewish power elite they claimed to be resisting!

  For Kenneth, it was simple. Real democracy meant, among other things, the right to hound out everyone who didn’t belong in the Nordic countries. If they didn’t leave voluntarily, there were other options. Popular government, in the true sense of the phrase, meant that the people the National Socialists put in government actually governed. The right people.

  And yet Kenneth’s lack of respect for the Nordic Resistance Movement didn’t give him any immediate reason to wage war on two fronts. The Resistance could remain. Anyway, they weren’t all bad. During the most recent demonstration in Gothenburg, several had raised their right arms in the air, towards the spectators, palms flat. That was the way to do it! It was just annoying that they later called the whole thing a ‘friendly greeting to allies’ and said that only the power elite would read anything else into it.

  Many people saw the humour in denying the obvious. Kenneth saw nothing but cowardice. The only thing
worth denying was the Holocaust. After all, that was how the Jewish Mafia got their fuel. It wasn’t the neo-Nazis’ problem to account for where six million Jews had gone during those years. Why would it be? Weren’t people allowed to do whatever they wanted with their lives?

  To argue with power was to legitimize it. And Kenneth refused. The people’s courts that would soon replace the faux-justice system the power elite had wrapped around their little finger had no task more urgent than purging all the race traitors of Scandinavia. And the Arabs, Jews and Gypsies, of course. And owning it! At long last, those who remained would be pure and white, the people the current elite worked around the clock to destroy. That was genocide. It could not stand. And yet it did.

  So what did the Nordic Resistance Movement do? Demonstrated! And denied themselves.

  * * *

  An objective onlooker would have placed Kenneth Engvall high on the list of Sweden’s most dangerous people. He had once been schooled in the Los Angeles branch of the Aryan Brotherhood, where he had made a career out of being a Nazi and Fascist, without quite knowing the difference between the two. He climbed rapidly through the ranks by using a chainsaw to cut in two a man with the wrong attitude and the wrong race. For this he was locked up for four years, and no more, since the group’s extraordinary attorney managed to get the brutal murder defined as gross negligence.

  After just a week in prison, Kenneth killed a fellow prisoner, a Mexican who happened to have an opinion about his heavily tattooed back: across the top it said, ‘In memory of Adolf Hitler’, with a swastika underneath. This was followed by the cross of the Ku Klux Klan with the words ‘white supremacy’.

  The Mexican thought that only someone brain-dead would identify with Hitler and the KKK. For this he received a ballpoint pen shoved into his skull via one eye, at which he too became a member of the group ‘brain-dead’.

  All seven people in the room with the perpetrator and the victim had managed to look the other way when it happened. No witnesses, no one to punish. But in the three years and fifty-one weeks that remained of Kenneth Engvall’s sentence, no one complained about his tattoos or any other of his undertakings.

  For a long time now, Kenneth had been free and back in the country of his birth. With his little brother Johnny he had joined up with and made something of a career out of the Nordic Resistance Movement. But he’d never managed to get to the top, where he belonged. He was thought too outspoken. What the fuck kind of word was that? Surely if this country needed anything, it was outspokenness.

  And that was how the Aryan Alliance came to be, in cooperation with the Aryan Brotherhood in Los Angeles. The operation had only just begun; there was no structure to speak of yet. Kenneth and his little brother were putting the finishing touches to a plan of action to overtake power and devoted their free time to homicide and gross assault of the foreign element. Mostly assault. A string of murders at this stage would risk waking the current powers and their yes-men on the police force. Spending twenty or thirty years inside was hardly the quickest path to a new order.

  Money was an issue as well. The Americans contributed a certain amount each month, but they had already sent word that in time the cash-flow must start to come from the other direction. They recommended that Kenneth take over Stockholm’s cocaine trade from the Turkish-Italian coalition that currently had the market cornered. Of course he would. But there were more than eight well-guarded targets and only two people to do it. They needed a plan. ‘Take your time,’ was the Americans’ response. They trusted Kenneth.

  Russia

  It was almost as if Gennady Aksakov didn’t exist. He had no title, no employer, no official tasks. He did, however, have two passports: one Russian and one Finnish. He’d obtained the latter in 1998, with some difficulty, but with support from the then-director of the Russian Federation’s Federal Security Service, one Vladimir Vladimirovitch Putin.

  Since he was a Finn when it suited him, Gennady Aksakov could travel around the Nordic countries as he pleased. He was perhaps the best in the world at what he did. Of course he had more important things to do than destabilize Scandinavia, but it was a decently large market in which to test new ideas.

  These days, there were established nationalist parties in all four Nordic countries. All four opposed the EU. As such they were Gennady’s tools without knowing it. At the same time, it was clear that their political momentum had stagnated. Take, for one example, Swedish populists. They amplified existing problems or invented ones that didn’t exist, polarizing and making people fearful of one another. Then they pointed to what they’d created and said they were the only ones with solutions.

  This method wasn’t new. Back in 1933, Hitler, Goering and Goebbels had succeeded in inflating a simple case of arson to an international Communist conspiracy. They scared people one day and came up with the solution the next. After all, fright demands might. Instead, it wasn’t long before almost four thousand had been imprisoned without trial, emergency laws put in place, and competing political parties forbidden, along with select parts of the press.

  And that was only the start. But, above all, that was then. A new century demanded new solutions. Certainly the Sweden Democrats, Finns Party, Golden Dawn, PVV, BNP, AfD, FPÖ, and other flavours of alphabet soup could try what had worked in 1933, if they wished. But they would never take it all the way.

  After all, only one in five Swedes could imagine voting for a party leader who clearly stated that simply being born and raised in Sweden, and having the ability to play football, did not make you Swedish. In the re-born north, you weren’t named anything that started with Z. The Sweden Democrats’ current leader had originally been attracted to the party by a woman who first shared with him her political vision, then took off for a pro-Nazi demonstration, wearing a uniform with shiny boots, leather pants, a shirt and a scarf. The future party leader joined the movement, made a career of it, and polished their political arguments almost beyond recognition. He had his teeth fixed, and was now reaping the fruits of many years of hard work. He had done everything right. Yet four out of five Swedes turned against him. To Gennady Aksakov, this was the ultimate proof that the established right-wing populists would never split the EU wide open.

  Not without help.

  Money wasn’t the issue. Gennady and his friends had billions, if you counted in kronor. Several hundred million in euros or dollars. How much it amounted to in roubles was less relevant. But to pump up the Sweden Democrats, Finn Party and others financially would be risky and, most importantly, not a viable way forwards. Human logic functioned such that very few people considered themselves extremists. As long as the Sweden Democrats were the most extreme party Sweden had to offer, there would always be plenty of people who refrained from voting for them, even if those voters agreed with their platform. Nothing about that would change just because Gennady managed to fortify the party coffers, so they could tell the same truths even louder.

  If, however, he contributed to an alternative voice, to the right of those who were furthest right, two things would happen: first, the Sweden Democrats would point fingers at the neo-Nazis and say, ‘Look how terrible they are! We are certainly not like them!’ Second, people would agree. In one fell swoop, voting Sweden Democrat would become more socially acceptable. Fifteen per cent voter support might become thirty; the third-largest party could become the second-largest, or perhaps even the largest. A Sweden Democrat prime minister wouldn’t necessarily mean Sweden would leave the EU, because that would take a majority vote in Parliament. But the political map would be redrawn. The conservatives, Liberals and Social Democrats would all have reason to overhaul their foreign policy. Few wish to die, after all. That went for political parties as much as it did people.

  And, above all, if the experiment worked in little Sweden, then in the future a person would only have to do the same thing where it would truly matter.

  Like in Germany.

  Gennady Aksakov had to choose between the establishe
d Nordic Resistance Movement and the newly formed Aryan Alliance. The problem with the former was that it was generally known in Gennady’s circles that the Swedish Security Service had infiltrated the organization to the extent that it was no longer possible to know who was what. The problem with the Aryan Alliance, on the other hand, was that thus far they were absolutely nothing.

  But Gennady wasn’t in much of a hurry. Better done right than done fast.

  He met with Kenneth Engvall and his brother on a Monday. Under a fake name, of course. By Tuesday he had put four million euros at the disposal of the Aryan Alliance’s honourable mission. The Engvall brothers believed what they wanted to when it came to Gennady’s origins and devotion to the good cause. And with that everything would probably have gone just fine, if only those idiots had managed to stay alive.

  Sweden

  Investee Kenneth Engvall perished suddenly in connection with a spontaneous political manifestation.

  It began when the brothers arrived at a shopping centre in Bromma, not far from Stockholm’s domestic airport. Little brother was behind the wheel, looking for parking. Big brother beside him caught sight of a beggar at one of the entrances to the shopping centre. He was monumentally displeased and made a snap decision.

  ‘Wait here with the engine running. We’ll go shopping somewhere else. I’ve just got to … make a point.’

  Johnny understood more or less what Kenneth was getting at and agreed with his analysis: that, as a result, it would be best to find a different place to shop.

  Big brother left the car and approached the Romanian who was sitting by the entrance in the hope that passers-by would give him a krona or two, since the Roma minority’s life back home in Romania was far beyond hopeless (even as those in Sweden preferred to discuss the legality of being a beggar rather than that EU member-state Romania ought to shape up).