The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 didn’t really understand what his mother meant. But he understood that his father was dead, that his mother coughed and that the war was over. As for himself, by the age of thirteen he had acquired a particular skill in making explosions by mixing nitroglycerine, cellulose nitrate, ammonium nitrate, sodium nitrate, wood flour, dinitrotoluene and a few other ingredients. That ought to come in handy some day, thought Allan, and went out to help his mother with the wood.
    Two years later, Allan’s mother finished coughing, and she entered that imagined heaven where his father was possibly already established. Then, on the threshold of the little house, Allan found an angry Mr Wholesale Merchant who thought that Allan’s mother should have paid her debt of nine crowns before she – without telling anyone – went and died. But Allan had no plans to give Gustavsson anything.
    ‘That’s something you’ll have to talk to her about yourself, Mr Wholesale Merchant. Do you want to borrow a spade?’
    As wholesalers often are, the man was lightly built, compared with the fifteen-year-old Allan. The boy was on his way to becoming a man, and if he was half as crazy as his father then he was capable of anything, was how Mr Wholesale Merchant Gustavsson saw it, and since he wanted to be around quite a bit longer to count his money, the subject of the debt was never raised again.
    Young Allan couldn’t understand how his mother had managed to scrape together several hundred crowns in savings. But the money was there anyway, and it was enough to bury her and to start the Karlsson Dynamite Company. The boy was only fifteen years old when his mother died, but Allan had learned all he needed at Nitroglycerine Ltd.
    He experimented freely in the gravel pit behind the house; once so freely that two miles away the closest neighbour’s cow had a miscarriage. But Allan never heard about that, because just like Mr Wholesale Merchant Gustavsson, the neighbour was a little bit afraid of crazy Karlsson’s possibly equally crazy boy.
    Since his time as an errand boy, Allan had retained his interest in current affairs. At least once a week, he rode his bicycle to the public library in Flen to update himself on the latest news. When he was there he often met young men who were keen to debate and who all had one thing in common: they wantedto tempt Allan into some political movement or other. But Allan’s great interest in world events did not include any