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

way. Besides, Allan’s father felt an affinity with the Tsar because of all the bad luck he suffered.
    Sooner or later such bad luck must change, for Russian Tsars as well as for ordinary honest folk from the vicinity of Flen.
    His father never sent any money from Russia, but once after a couple of years a package came with an enamel Easter egg that his father said he had won in a game of cards from a Russian comrade, who besides drinking, arguing and playing cards with Allan’s father had no other occupation than making these kinds of eggs.
    His father sent the Easter egg to his ‘dear wife’, who just got angry and said that the damned layabout could at least have sent a real egg so that the family could eat. She was about to throw the present out the window, when she reconsidered. Perhaps Mr Wholesale Merchant Gustavsson might be interested in it. He always tried to be special and special was exactly what Allan’s mother supposed the egg to be.
    Imagine Allan’s mother’s surprise when Mr Wholesale Merchant Gustavsson after two days’ consideration offered hereighteen crowns for Uncle’s egg. Not real money of course, just cancelling a debt, but even so.
    After that, his mother hoped to receive more eggs, but instead she found out from the next letter that the Tsar’s generals had abandoned their autocrat who then had to leave his throne. In his letter, Allan’s father cursed his egg-producing friend, who had now fled to Switzerland. Allan’s father himself planned to stay on and do battle with the upstart clown who had taken over, a man they called Lenin.
    For Allan’s father, the whole thing had acquired a personal dimension since Lenin had forbidden all private ownership of land the very day after Allan’s father had purchased twelve square metres on which to grow Swedish strawberries. ‘The land didn’t cost more than four roubles, but they won’t get away with nationalizing my strawberry patch,’ wrote Allan’s father in his very last letter home, concluding: ‘Now it’s war!’
    And war it certainly was – all the time. In just about every part of the world, and it had been going on for several years. It had broken out about a year before little Allan had got his errand-boy job at Nitroglycerine Ltd. While Allan loaded his boxes with dynamite, he listened to the workers’ comments on events. He wondered how they could know so much, but above all he marvelled at how much misery grown men could cause. Austria declared war on Serbia. Germany declared war on Russia. Then, Germany conquered Luxembourg a day before declaring war on France and invading Belgium. Great Britain then declared war on Germany, Austria declared war on Russia, and Serbia declared war on Germany.
    And on it went. The Japanese joined in, as did the Americans. In the months after the Tsar abdicated, the British took Baghdad for some reason, and then Jerusalem. The Greeks and Bulgarians started to fight each other while the Arabs continued their revolt against the Ottomans…
    So ‘Now it’s war!’ was right. Soon afterwards, one of Lenin’s henchmen had the Tsar executed together with all his family. Allan noted that the Tsar’s bad luck had persisted.
    A few months later, the Swedish consulate in Petrograd sent a telegram to Yxhult to inform them that Allan’s father was dead.
    Apparently Allan’s father had nailed some planking around a little bit of earth, and proclaimed the area to be an independent republic. He called his little state The Real Russia but then two government soldiers came to pull down the fence. Allan’s father had put up his fists in his eagerness to defend his country’s borders, and it had been impossible for the two soldiers to reason with him. In the end, they could think of no better solution than to put a bullet between his eyes, so they could go about their task in peace.
    ‘Couldn’t you have chosen to die in a less idiotic manner?’ said Allan’s mother to the telegram from the consulate.
    She hadn’t really expected her husband to come home again, but recently she had nevertheless started to hope he might, because she had troublesome lungs, and it wasn’t easy to keep up her old pace when splitting logs. Allan’s mother made a croaky sigh and that was the extent of her mourning. She told Allan philosophically that it was what it was, and that in the future whatever would be would be. Then she ruffled her son’s hair kindly before going out to split more logs.
    Allan