The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared

meetings far and wide, and where he spent his nights was never really clear to Allan.
    His father did however take his financial responsibilities seriously. He handed over the greater part of his salary to his wife each week, until one day he was fired after he had turned violent with a passenger who happened to announce that he was on his way to Stockholm with thousands of others to visit the King in the royal palace and assure him of their will to defend their fatherland.
    ‘You can start by defending yourself against this,’ Allan’s father had said and punched the man with a hard right so that he fell to the ground.
    The immediate dismissal meant that Allan’s father could no longer support his family. The reputation he had acquired as a man of violence and advocate of contraception meant that it was a waste of time for him to look for another job. All that was left was to wait for the revolution, or best of all to speed up its arrival, because every little thing nowadays went so damned slowly. Allan’s father was a man who wanted to see results. Swedish socialism needed an international model. That would light a fire under everything and make things hellishly hot for Mr Wholesale Merchant Gustavsson and his capitalist ilk.
    So Allan’s father packed his bag and went off to Russia to depose the Tsar. Allan’s mother of course missed his salary, but she was otherwise satisfied that her husband had left not only the district but also the country. After the family breadwinner had emigrated, it was up to Allan’s mother and the just-ten-year-old Allan himself to keep the family afloat financially. His mother had the fourteen fully grown birch trees they owned chopped down and then she cut them up and split them herself to sell as firewood, while Allan managed to geta miserably paid job as an errand boy at Nitroglycerine Ltd.’s production branch.
    In the regular letters she received from St Petersburg (which soon after was renamed Petrograd), Allan’s mother noted to her increasing surprise that Allan’s father had started to waver in his belief in the blessings of socialism.
    In his letters Allan’s father often referred to friends and acquaintances from Petrograd’s political establishment. The person who was most often quoted was a man called Carl. Not an especially Russian name, Allan thought, and it didn’t get any more Russian when Allan’s father began to call him Uncle Carl or just Uncle.
    According to Allan’s father, Uncle’s thesis was that people in general didn’t know what was best for them, and that they needed somebody whose hand they could hold. That was why autocracy was superior to democracy, as long as the educated and responsible segment of society made sure the autocrat concerned did a good job. Seven out of ten Bolsheviks can’t read, Uncle had snorted. We can’t hand over power to a load of illiterates, can we?
    In his letters, Allan’s father had nevertheless defended the Bolsheviks on that particular point, because he said ‘you can’t imagine what the Russian alphabet looks like. It’s no wonder people are illiterate.’
    What was worse was how the Bolsheviks behaved. They were filthy, and they drank vodka like the riff-raff back home, the ones who laid the rails criss-crossing central Sweden. Allan’s father had always wondered how the rails could be so straight considering the extent of the workers’ consumption of spirits, and he had felt a twinge of guilt every time Swedish rails swung to the right or left.
    Be that as it may, the Bolsheviks were at least as bad as the Swedes. Uncle maintained that socialism would end with everybody trying to kill everybody else until there was only one personleft to make all the decisions. So it would be better to rely from the start on the Tsar, a good and educated man with a vision for the world.
    In a way, Uncle knew what he was talking about. He had actually met the Tsar, and indeed more than once. Uncle claimed that Nicholas II had a genuinely good heart. The Tsar had had a lot of bad luck, but surely that couldn’t last. Failed harvests and revolting Bolsheviks had made a mess of things. And then the Germans started to growl just because the Tsar was mobilizing his forces. But he did that in order to keep the peace. After all it wasn’t the Tsar who had killed the Archduke and his wife in Sarajevo, was it?
    That was evidently how Uncle (whoever he was) saw it all, and somehow he got Allan’s father to see it the same