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

hindsight that Sweden should have been better armed when the war broke out, but that didn’t mean that there was any point in arming now, ten years later.
    The consequences for the Hälleforsnäs foundry were that production was switched to more peaceful products, and the workers lost their jobs.
    But not Allan – ignition specialists being hard to come by. The factory owner had hardly believed his ears and eyes when Allan appeared one day and turned out to be an expert on explosives of every type. Up until then, he had been forced to rely entirely upon the ignition specialist he had, and that was not a good thing, because the man was a foreigner, could hardly speak Swedish, and had black hair all over his body. He also doubted whether the man was reliable. But the owner had not had much choice.
    Allan, on the other hand, did not think of people in terms of their colour. He had always found Professor Lundborg’s ideas strange. But this man sounded as if he was black and Allan was curious to meet his first black man. It was with longing that he read the advertisements in the paper announcing that Josephine Baker was to appear in Stockholm, but he had to settle for Estebán, his white but dark skinned, Spanish ignition specialist colleague.
    Allan and Estebán got along well, and shared a room in the workers’ barracks next to the foundry. Estebán told Allan his dramatic story. He had met a girl at a party in Madrid and secretly embarked upon a fairly innocent relationship with her, without realising that she was the daughter of the prime minister, Miguel Primo de Rivera. De Rivera was not a man you argued with. He governed the country as he wished, with the King trailing helplessly along behind him. ‘Prime minister’ was a polite word for ‘dictator’, in Estebán’s opinion. But his daughter was a knockout.
    Estebán’s proletarian background had not in any way appealed to his potential father-in-law. So in his first, and only, meeting with Primo de Rivera, Estebán was informed that he had two alternatives. One was to disappear as far away from Spanish territory as possible, the other was to receive a bullet through his neck on the spot.
    While Primo de Rivero cocked his rifle, Estebán said that he had at that moment decided in favour of the first alternative, and backed rapidly out of the room without so much as a glance in the direction of the sobbing girl.
    As far away as possible, thought Estebán, and went north, and then even further north and finally so far north that the lakes froze to ice in the winter. He had been in Sweden ever since. He had got the job at the foundry three years earlier with some interpreting help from a Catholic priest and, may Godforgive him, a made-up story about having worked with explosives back at home in Spain, when in actual fact he had mainly picked tomatoes.
    Gradually, Estebán had managed to learn workable Swedish and had become a fairly competent ignition specialist. And now, with Allan at his side, he became a real professional.
    Allan felt at home in the workers’ barracks. After a year, he could make himself understood in the Spanish that Estebán taught him. After two years, his Spanish was virtually fluent. But it took three years before Estebán gave up his attempts to impose his Spanish variety of international socialism on Allan. He tried everything, but Allan was not susceptible. Estebán could not understand that particular facet of his best friend’s personality. It wasn’t that Allan took an opposite view of the ways of the world and argued accordingly. No, he simply had no opinion whatsoever.
    Allan had the same problem. Estebán was a good friend. It wasn’t his fault that he had been poisoned by those damned politics. He certainly wasn’t the only one.
    The seasons came and went for some time before Allan’s life took a new turn. It started when Estebán received the news that Primo de Rivera had resigned and fled the country. Now, proper democracy was just round the corner, perhaps even socialism, and Estebán didn’t want to miss that.
    So he planned to go home as soon as possible. The foundry was getting fewer and fewer orders because Señor Defence Minister had decided that there wouldn’t be any more wars. Estebán was sure that both ignition specialists would be fired any day. What did his friend Allan have in mind for the future? Did he want to come along to Spain?
    Allan thought about it. On the one hand, he wasn’t interested in