982–2005

The salary from the American Embassy had come in handy when Allan returned to Sweden. He found a little red cottage just a few miles from where he had grown up which he paid for in cash. Making the purchase he had to argue with the Swedish authorities about whether he existed. In the end, they gave in and started to pay him a pension – much to Allan’s surprise.

‘Why?’ asked Allan.

‘You’re a pensioner,’ said the authorities.

‘Am I?’ said Allan.

And he was, of course, and by a good margin too. The following spring he would be seventy-eight, and Allan realised that he had got old, against all odds and without having thought about it. But he was going to get much older…

The years passed, at a leisurely rate and without Allan influencing world developments in any way at all. He didn’t even influence things in the town of Flen, into which he occasionally ventured to buy some groceries (from the grandson of wholesale dealer Gustavsson who now ran the local supermarket and to his good fortune hadn’t a clue that Allan was who he was). The public library in Flen didn’t, however, get any new visits, because Allan had realised that you could subscribe to the newspapers you wanted to read and they landed neatly in the mailbox outside his cottage. Very practical!

When the hermit in the cottage outside Yxhult turned eighty-three he thought all that biking back and forth to Flen was getting hard, so instead he bought a car. For a moment he thought about combining this with the acquisition of a driving licence, but as soon as the driving instructor had mentioned ‘sight test’ and ‘provisional licence’, Allan decided to do without. When the instructor went on to list the ‘books’, the ‘theory lessons’, the ‘driving lessons’, and the ‘final double test’, Allan had long since stopped listening.

In 1989, the Soviet Union had started to fall to bits, which didn’t surprise the old man in Yxhult with his own vodka distillery in the cellar. The new youth at the helm, Gorbachev, had started his era in power with a campaign against the massive vodka-drinking in his nation. That wasn’t something that would get the masses on your side, was it?

That same year, in fact on Allan’s birthday, a kitten suddenly appeared on the porch steps, and signalled that it was hungry. Allan invited it into his kitchen and served it milk and sausage. The cat liked that so much that it moved in.

It was a tiger-striped farmyard cat, a male, who was given the name Molotov, not after the minister but after the cocktail. Molotov didn’t say very much, but he was extremely intelligent and fantastic at listening. If Allan had something to say, he only had to call the cat and he always came skipping along, unless he was occupied with catching mice (Molotov knew what was important). The cat jumped up into Allan’s lap, made himself comfortable and made a sign with his ears to show that Allan could now say what he had to say. If Allan simultaneously scratched Molotov on the back of his head, and on his neck, there was no limit to how long the chat could last.

And when Allan got some chickens, it was enough to tell Molotov one single time that he shouldn’t go running after them, for the cat to nod and understand. The fact that he ignored what Allan said and ran after the chickens till he didn’t find it fun any more, that was another matter. What could you expect? He was a cat after all.

Allan thought that nobody was craftier than Molotov, not even the fox that was always sneaking around the chicken coop looking for gaps in the netting. The fox also had designs on the cat, but Molotov was much too quick for that.

More years were added to those that Allan had already collected. And every month the pension money arrived from the authorities without Allan doing anything in return. With that money, Allan bought cheese, sausage and potatoes and now and then a sack of sugar. In addition, he paid for the subscription to the local paper, and he paid the electricity bill whenever it appeared.

But there was still money left over every month, and what good was that? Allan once attempted to send the excess back to the authorities in an envelope, but after a while an official came to Allan’s cottage and informed him that you couldn’t do that. So Allan got his money back, and had to promise to stop arguing with the authorities.

Allan and Molotov had a good life together. Every day, weather allowing, they went for a little bike ride along the gravel roads in the area. Allan pedalled, while Molotov sat in the basket and enjoyed the wind and the speed.

The little family lived a pleasant and regular life. And this went on until one day it turned out that not only Allan but also Molotov had got older. Suddenly, the fox caught up with the cat, and that was just as surprising for the fox and the cat as it was sad for Allan.

Allan was more sad than he had ever been earlier in his life, and the sorrow soon turned to anger. The old explosives expert stood there on his veranda with tears in his eyes and called out into the winter night:

‘If it’s war you want, it’s war you’ll get, you damned fox!’

For the first and only time in his life, Allan was angry. And it wasn’t dispelled with vodka, a drive (without a driver’s licence) in his car or an extra long bike ride. Revenge was a poor thing to live for, Allan knew that. Nevertheless, just now that was precisely what he had on the agenda.

Allan set an explosive charge beside the chicken coop, to go off when the fox got hungry next time and stretched its nose a little too far into the chickens’ domain. But in his anger, Allan forgot that right next to the chicken coop was where he stored all his dynamite.

Thus it was that at dusk on the third day after Molotov’s ascent to heaven, an explosion was heard in that part of Södermanland, the like of which hadn’t been heard since the late 1920s.

The fox was blown into little bits, just like Allan’s chickens, his chicken coop and wood-shed. But the explosion took the barn and cottage too. Allan was sitting in his armchair when it happened, and he flew up in the air in the armchair and landed in a snowdrift outside his potato cellar. He sat there looking around him with an astonished expression on his face, before finally saying:

‘That was the end of the fox.’

By now, Allan was ninety-nine years old and he felt so knocked about that he stayed where he was. But it wasn’t hard for the ambulance, police and fire brigade to find their way to him, because the flames reached high into the sky. And when they had made sure that the geriatric in the armchair in the snowdrift beside his own potato cellar was uninjured, it was time for social services to be called in.

In less than an hour, social worker Henrik Söder was by his side. Allan was still sitting in his armchair, but the ambulance men had wrapped a couple of hospital blankets round him, which wasn’t really necessary because the fire from the house that had almost burnt to the ground still gave off quite a lot of heat.

‘Mr Karlsson, I understand that you have blown up your house?’ said social worker Söder.

‘Yes,’ said Allan. ‘It’s a bad habit of mine.’

‘Let me guess that you, Mr Karlsson, are no longer in possession of an abode?’ the social worker continued.

‘There is some truth in that,’ said Allan. ‘Do you have any suggestions, Mr Social Worker?’

The social worker couldn’t think of anything on the spot, so Allan – at the expense of social services – was carted off to the hotel in the centre of Flen, where the following evening Allan, in a festive atmosphere, celebrated New Year with, among others, social worker Söder and his wife.

Allan hadn’t been in such fancy surroundings since the time just after the war when he had stayed at the luxurious Grand Hotel in Stockholm. In fact, it was high time he paid the bill there, because in the rush to leave it never got paid.

At the beginning of January 2005, social worker Söder had located a possible place of residence for the nice old man who had happened to become suddenly homeless a week earlier.

So Allan found himself at Malmköping’s Old People’s Home, where room 1 had just become available. He was welcomed by Director Alice, who smiled a friendly smile, but who also sucked the joy out of Allan’s life in laying out for him all the rules of the Home. Director Alice said that smoking was forbidden, drinking was forbidden, and TV was forbidden after eleven in the evening. Breakfast was served at 6.45 on weekdays and an hour later at weekends. Lunch was at 11.15, coffee at 15.15 and supper at 18.15. If you were out and didn’t keep track of the time and came home too late, you risked having to go without.

After which, Director Alice went through the rules concerning showers and brushing your teeth, visits from outside and visits to other resident senior citizens, what time various medicines were handed out and between which times you couldn’t disturb Director Alice or one of her colleagues unless it was urgent, which it rarely was according to Director Alice who added that in general there was too much grumbling among the residents.

‘Can you take a shit when you want to?’ Allan asked.

Which is how Allan and Director Alice came to be at odds less than fifteen minutes after they had met.

Allan wasn’t pleased with himself over the matter of the war against the fox back home (even though he won). Losing his temper was not in his nature. Besides, now he had used language that the director at the home might well have deserved, but which nevertheless was not Allan’s style. Add to that the mile-long list of rules and regulations that Allan now had to abide by…

Allan missed his cat. And he was ninety-nine years and eight months old. It was as if he had lost control of his own spirits, and Director Alice had had a lot to do with that.

Enough was enough.

Allan was done with life, because life seemed to be done with him, and he was and always had been a man who didn’t like to push himself forward.

So he decided that he would check into room 1, have his 18.15 supper and then – newly showered, in clean sheets and new pyjamas – he would go to bed, die in his sleep, be carried out, buried in the ground and forgotten.

Allan felt an almost electric sense of pleasure spreading through his body when, at eight o’clock in the evening, for the first and last time he slipped into the sheets of his bed at the Old People’s Home. In less than four months, his age would reach three figures. Allan Emmanuel Karlsson closed his eyes and felt perfectly convinced that he would now pass away for ever. It had been exciting, the entire journey, but nothing lasts for ever, except possibly general stupidity.

Then Allan didn’t think anything more. Tiredness overcame him. Everything went dark.

Until it got light again — a white glow. Imagine that, death was just like being asleep. Would he have time to think before it was all over? And would he have time to think that he had thought it? But wait, how much do you have to think before you have finished thinking?

‘It is a quarter to seven, Allan, time for breakfast. If you don’t eat it up, we shall take your porridge away and then you won’t have anything until lunch,’ said Director Alice.

Besides everything else, Allan noted that he had grown naive in his old age. You can’t simply go and die to order. And there was now a considerable risk that the following day, too, he would be woken by that dreadful woman and be served the almost equally dreadful porridge.

Oh well. There were still a few months to go to one hundred, so surely he would manage to kick the bucket before that. ‘Alcohol kills!’ was how Director Alice had justified the ‘no alcohol’ rule in residents’ rooms. That sounded promising, thought Allan. He’d have to sneak out to the state alcohol shop.

Days passed and turned into weeks. Winter became spring and Allan longed for death almost as much as his friend Herbert had done fifty years earlier. Herbert didn’t have his wish fulfilled until he had changed his mind. That wasn’t a good omen.

And what was even worse: the staff at the Old People’s Home had started to prepare for Allan’s coming birthday. Like a caged animal he would have to put up with being looked at, sung to and fed with a birthday cake. That was most definitely not something he had asked for.

And now he had just a single night in which to die.