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

born in the north of Sweden, the only child of Anders and Elvina Jonsson. Julius worked as a labourer on thefamily farm and was beaten every day by his father who was of the opinion that Julius was good for nothing. when Julius was twenty-five, his mother died of cancer – which Julius grieved over – and shortly afterwards his father was swallowed by the bog when he tried to rescue a heifer. Julius grieved over that too – because he was fond of the heifer.
    Young Julius had no talent for the farming life (in this his father had essentially been right) nor did he have any desire for it. So he sold everything except a few acres of forest that he thought might come in handy in his old age. He went off to Stockholm and within two years had squandered all his money. He then returned to the forest.
    With great enthusiasm, Julius put in a bid to supply 5,000 electricity poles to the Hudiksvall District Electrical Company. And since Julius didn’t concern himself with such details as employment tax and VAT, he won the bid, and with the help of a dozen Hungarian refugees he managed to deliver the poles on time, and was paid more money than he knew existed.
    So far, all was well. The problem was that Julius had been obliged to cheat a little. The trees were not yet fully grown, so the poles were a yard shorter that what had been ordered. This would probably have gone unnoticed if it hadn’t been for the fact that virtually every farmer in the area had just acquired a combine harvester.
    The Hudiksvall District Electrical Company stuck up the poles, with cables criss-crossing fields and meadows in the area, and when it was harvest time, on one single morning the cables were pulled down in twenty-six locations by twenty-two different newly bought combine harvesters. The entire region had no electricity for weeks, as harvests were lost, and milking machines stopped working. It was not long before the farmers’ fury – at first directed against the Hudiksvall District Electrical Company – was turned against young Julius.
    ‘The town slogan “Happy Hudiksvall” was not on many people’s lips at that time, I can tell you,’ Julius said. ‘I had to hide at the Town Hotel in Sundsvall for seven months and then I ran out of money. Shall we have another swig of the hard stuff?’
    Allan thought that they should. The elk had been washed down with beer too, and now Allan felt so comprehensively satisfied that he began to be almost afraid of dying.
    Julius continued his story. After being nearly run down by a tractor in the centre of Sundsvall (driven by a farmer with a murderous look in his eyes), he realised that the locals weren’t going to forget his little mistake for the next hundred years. So he moved a long way south and ended up in Mariefred where he did a bit of small-time thieving for a while until he tired of town life and managed to acquire the former station building in Byringe for 25,000 crowns he happened to find one night in a safe at the Gripsholm Inn.
    Here at the station, he now lived essentially via handouts from the state, poaching in his neighbour’s forest, small-scale production and sale of alcoholic spirits from his home-distilling apparatus, and resale of what goods he could get hold of from his neighbours. He wasn’t particularly popular in the neighbourhood, Julius went on, and between mouthfuls Allan answered that he could imagine as much.
    When Julius suggested having one final snifter ‘for dessert’, Allan answered that he had always had a weakness for desserts of that kind, but that first of all he must seek out a toilet if there possibly happened to be one in the building. Julius got up, turned on the ceiling lamp since it was starting to get dark, and then pointed to the stairs saying that there was a functional lavatory on the right. He promised to have two newly poured drams ready and waiting when Allan returned.
    Allan found the toilet where Julius had said it would be. He stood in position to pee, and as usual the last drops didn’t quitemake it to the bowl. Some of them landed softly on his pee slippers instead.
    Halfway through the process, Allan heard a noise on the stairs. His first thought was that it was Julius, going off with his newly stolen suitcase. The noise got louder. Somebody was climbing the stairs.
    Allan realised that there was a chance that the steps he heard outside the door belonged to a slightly built young man with long, greasy blond hair, scraggly beard