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

in him that he got up onto a rock, grabbed his rifle in his left hand, raised it in the air and shouted:
    ‘Death to fascism, death to all…’
    He didn’t manage to finish the sentence before half of his head and one shoulder were shot away by what might possibly have been one of the first enemy mortars fired in the war. Allan was about twenty metres away when it happened, and thus avoided being dirtied by the parts of his comrade that were spread around the rock that Estebán had been stupid enough to stand on. One of the soldiers in Estebán’s group started to cry. For his part, Allan looked around at what was left of his friend and decided that it wasn’t worth picking up the bits.
    ‘You should have stayed in Hälleforsnäs,’ said Allan and suddenly felt a sincere longing to be chopping wood outside his little house in Yxhult.
    The mortar that killed Estebán may well have been the first in the war, but it certainly wasn’t the last. Allan considered going home, but suddenly the war was all around him. Besides, it was one hell of a long walk back to Sweden, and nobody was waiting for him.
    So Allan sought out Estebán’s company commander, introduced himself as Europe’s leading pyrotechnical expert and said that he would be prepared to blow up bridges and otherinfrastructural constructions for the company commander, in exchange for three square meals a day and enough wine to get drunk on when circumstances allowed.
    The company commander was about to have Allan shot because he stubbornly refused to sing the praises of socialism and the republic and, almost worse, he insisted on serving in civilian clothes. As Allan expressed it:
    ‘One more thing… if I am going to blow up bridges for you, then I’m going to do it wearing my own jacket, otherwise you can blow up the bridges yourself.’
    No company commander has ever been born who would let himself be browbeaten by a civilian in that way. The problem for this particular company commander was that the most skilled explosives expert in his company was spread in pieces across a rock on a nearby hill.
    While the company commander sat in his foldable military field chair and ruminated upon whether Allan’s immediate future was employment or execution, one of the platoon leaders whispered in his ear that the young sergeant who so unfortunately had just been shot to bits had previously affirmed this strange Swede’s abilities as a master in the field of explosives.
    That decided the matter. Señor Karlsson could a) stay alive, b) be fed three square meals a day, c) have the right to wear his jacket, and d) have exactly the same right as all the others to sample the wine now and then, in reasonable quantities. In return, he would blow up exactly what the commanders around him asked. Two soldiers were asked to keep a special eye on the Swede, because there was no way of knowing for certain that he wasn’t a spy.
    The months turned to years. Allan blew up what he was told to blow up, and he did so with considerable skill.
    The job was not without its risks. You often had to crawl along the ground in order to sneak up on the object that wasto be blown up, place an explosive charge there with a time fuse and then zig-zag your way back to safe ground. After three months, one of Allan’s two guards lost his life (by mistake he crawled right into an enemy camp). Six months later, the other one met the same fate (he got up to stretch his back and immediately that same body part was shot in two). The company commander didn’t bother to replace them, since Señor Karlsson had done such a good job with the explosives.
    Allan couldn’t see the point of killing lots of people unnecessarily, so he tried to make sure the bridge in question was empty when the charge went off. That was true as well for the very last bridge he was ordered to blow just before the war ended. But this time, just as he had finished his preparations and had crawled back to some bushes beyond one of the bridge foundations, an enemy patrol came walking towards him with a medal-wearing little man in the middle. They approached from the other side and seemed to be totally unaware that the republicans were close by, and that they were just about to join Estebán and tens of thousands of other Spaniards in eternity.
    But Allan had had enough. So he got up out of the bushes and started to wave his arms.
    ‘Go away!’ he hollered at the little man with the medals and his entourage. ‘Be off,