905–1929

Allan Emmanuel Karlsson was born on 2nd May 1905. The day before, his mother had marched in the May Day procession in Flen and demonstrated on behalf of women’s suffrage, an eight-hour working day and other utopian demands. The demonstrating had at least one positive result: her contractions started and just after midnight her first and only son was born. She gave birth at home with the help of the neighbour’s wife who was not especially talented at midwifery but who had some status in the community because as a nine-year-old she had had the honour of curtsying before King Karl XIV Johan, who in turn was a friend (sort of) of Napoleon Bonaparte. And to be fair to the neighbour’s wife, the child she delivered did indeed reach adulthood, and by a very good margin.

Allan Karlsson’s father was both considerate and angry. He was considerate with his family; he was angry with society in general and with everybody who could be thought of as representing that society. Finer folk disapproved of him, dating back to the time he had stood on the square in Flen and advocated the use of contraceptives. For this offence he was fined ten crowns, and relieved of the need to worry about the topic any further since Allan’s mother out of pure shame decided to ban any further entry to her person. Allan was then six and old enough to ask his mother for a more detailed explanation of why his father’s bed had suddenly been moved into the wood-shed. He was told that he shouldn’t ask so many questions unless he wanted his ears boxed. Since Allan, like all children at all times, did not want his ears boxed, he dropped the subject.

From that day on, Allan’s father appeared less and less frequently in his own home. In the daytime he more or less coped with his job on the railways, in the evening he discussed socialism at meetings far and wide, and where he spent his nights was never really clear to Allan.

His father did however take his financial responsibilities seriously. He handed over the greater part of his salary to his wife each week, until one day he was fired after he had turned violent with a passenger who happened to announce that he was on his way to Stockholm with thousands of others to visit the King in the royal palace and assure him of their will to defend their fatherland.

‘You can start by defending yourself against this,’ Allan’s father had said and punched the man with a hard right so that he fell to the ground.

The immediate dismissal meant that Allan’s father could no longer support his family. The reputation he had acquired as a man of violence and advocate of contraception meant that it was a waste of time for him to look for another job. All that was left was to wait for the revolution, or best of all to speed up its arrival, because every little thing nowadays went so damned slowly. Allan’s father was a man who wanted to see results. Swedish socialism needed an international model. That would light a fire under everything and make things hellishly hot for Mr Wholesale Merchant Gustavsson and his capitalist ilk.

So Allan’s father packed his bag and went off to Russia to depose the Tsar. Allan’s mother of course missed his salary, but she was otherwise satisfied that her husband had left not only the district but also the country. After the family breadwinner had emigrated, it was up to Allan’s mother and the just-ten-year-old Allan himself to keep the family afloat financially. His mother had the fourteen fully grown birch trees they owned chopped down and then she cut them up and split them herself to sell as firewood, while Allan managed to get a miserably paid job as an errand boy at Nitroglycerine Ltd.’s production branch.

In the regular letters she received from St Petersburg (which soon after was renamed Petrograd), Allan’s mother noted to her increasing surprise that Allan’s father had started to waver in his belief in the blessings of socialism.

In his letters Allan’s father often referred to friends and acquaintances from Petrograd’s political establishment. The person who was most often quoted was a man called Carl. Not an especially Russian name, Allan thought, and it didn’t get any more Russian when Allan’s father began to call him Uncle Carl or just Uncle.

According to Allan’s father, Uncle’s thesis was that people in general didn’t know what was best for them, and that they needed somebody whose hand they could hold. That was why autocracy was superior to democracy, as long as the educated and responsible segment of society made sure the autocrat concerned did a good job. Seven out of ten Bolsheviks can’t read, Uncle had snorted. We can’t hand over power to a load of illiterates, can we?

In his letters, Allan’s father had nevertheless defended the Bolsheviks on that particular point, because he said ‘you can’t imagine what the Russian alphabet looks like. It’s no wonder people are illiterate.’

What was worse was how the Bolsheviks behaved. They were filthy, and they drank vodka like the riff-raff back home, the ones who laid the rails criss-crossing central Sweden. Allan’s father had always wondered how the rails could be so straight considering the extent of the workers’ consumption of spirits, and he had felt a twinge of guilt every time Swedish rails swung to the right or left.

Be that as it may, the Bolsheviks were at least as bad as the Swedes. Uncle maintained that socialism would end with everybody trying to kill everybody else until there was only one person left to make all the decisions. So it would be better to rely from the start on the Tsar, a good and educated man with a vision for the world.

In a way, Uncle knew what he was talking about. He had actually met the Tsar, and indeed more than once. Uncle claimed that Nicholas II had a genuinely good heart. The Tsar had had a lot of bad luck, but surely that couldn’t last. Failed harvests and revolting Bolsheviks had made a mess of things. And then the Germans started to growl just because the Tsar was mobilizing his forces. But he did that in order to keep the peace. After all it wasn’t the Tsar who had killed the Archduke and his wife in Sarajevo, was it?

That was evidently how Uncle (whoever he was) saw it all, and somehow he got Allan’s father to see it the same way. Besides, Allan’s father felt an affinity with the Tsar because of all the bad luck he suffered.

Sooner or later such bad luck must change, for Russian Tsars as well as for ordinary honest folk from the vicinity of Flen.

His father never sent any money from Russia, but once after a couple of years a package came with an enamel Easter egg that his father said he had won in a game of cards from a Russian comrade, who besides drinking, arguing and playing cards with Allan’s father had no other occupation than making these kinds of eggs.

His father sent the Easter egg to his ‘dear wife’, who just got angry and said that the damned layabout could at least have sent a real egg so that the family could eat. She was about to throw the present out the window, when she reconsidered. Perhaps Mr Wholesale Merchant Gustavsson might be interested in it. He always tried to be special and special was exactly what Allan’s mother supposed the egg to be.

Imagine Allan’s mother’s surprise when Mr Wholesale Merchant Gustavsson after two days’ consideration offered her eighteen crowns for Uncle’s egg. Not real money of course, just cancelling a debt, but even so.

After that, his mother hoped to receive more eggs, but instead she found out from the next letter that the Tsar’s generals had abandoned their autocrat who then had to leave his throne. In his letter, Allan’s father cursed his egg-producing friend, who had now fled to Switzerland. Allan’s father himself planned to stay on and do battle with the upstart clown who had taken over, a man they called Lenin.

For Allan’s father, the whole thing had acquired a personal dimension since Lenin had forbidden all private ownership of land the very day after Allan’s father had purchased twelve square metres on which to grow Swedish strawberries. ‘The land didn’t cost more than four roubles, but they won’t get away with nationalizing my strawberry patch,’ wrote Allan’s father in his very last letter home, concluding: ‘Now it’s war!’

And war it certainly was – all the time. In just about every part of the world, and it had been going on for several years. It had broken out about a year before little Allan had got his errand-boy job at Nitroglycerine Ltd. While Allan loaded his boxes with dynamite, he listened to the workers’ comments on events. He wondered how they could know so much, but above all he marvelled at how much misery grown men could cause. Austria declared war on Serbia. Germany declared war on Russia. Then, Germany conquered Luxembourg a day before declaring war on France and invading Belgium. Great Britain then declared war on Germany, Austria declared war on Russia, and Serbia declared war on Germany.

And on it went. The Japanese joined in, as did the Americans. In the months after the Tsar abdicated, the British took Baghdad for some reason, and then Jerusalem. The Greeks and Bulgarians started to fight each other while the Arabs 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 wanted to tempt Allan into some political movement or other. But Allan’s great interest in world events did not include any interest in trying to change them.

In a political sense, Allan’s childhood had been bewildering. On the one hand, he was from the working class. You could hardly use any other description of a boy who ends his schooling when he is ten to get a job in industry. On the other hand, he respected the memory of his father, and his father during far too short a life had managed to hold views right across the spectrum. He started on the Left, went on to praise Tsar Nicholas II and rounded off his existence with a land dispute with Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

His mother, in between her coughing fits, had cursed everyone from the King to the Bolsheviks and, in passing, even the leader of the Social Democrats, Mr Wholesale Merchant Gustavsson, and – not least – Allan’s father.

Allan himself was certainly no fool. True, he only spent three years in school, but that was plenty for him to have learned to read, write and count. His politically conscious fellow workers at Nitroglycerine Ltd. had also made him curious about the world.

But what finally formed young Allan’s philosophy of life were his mother’s words when they received the news of his father’s death. It took a while before the message seeped into his soul, but once there, it was there for ever:

Things are what they are, and whatever will be will be.

That meant among other things that you didn’t make a fuss, especially when there was good reason to do so, as for example, when they heard the news about his father’s death. In accordance with family tradition, Allan reacted by chopping wood, although for an unusually long time and particularly quietly. Or when his mother followed his father’s example, and as a result was carried out to the waiting hearse. Allan stayed in the kitchen and followed the spectacle through the window. And then he said so quietly that only he could hear:

‘Well, goodbye, mum.’

And that was the end of that chapter of his life.

Allan worked hard with his dynamite company and during the first years of the 1920s built up a considerable circle of customers in the county. On Saturday evenings, when his contemporaries were attending barn dances, Allan sat at home and developed new formulae to improve the quality of his dynamite. And when Sunday came, he went to the gravel pit and tested the new explosives. But not between eleven and one, he had finally had to promise the local pastor, in exchange for him not complaining too much about Allan’s absence from church.

Allan liked his own company and that was good, because he lived a solitary life. Since he didn’t join the ranks of the labour movement he was despised by socialists, while he was far too working class (not to mention being his father’s son) to be allowed a place at any bourgeois gathering. Gustavsson, for one, would rather die than end up in the company of that Karlsson brat. Just think, what would happen if the boy discovered what Gustavsson had been paid for the enamel egg which he had once bought from Allan’s mother for next to nothing and now sold to a diplomat in Stockholm. Thanks to that bit of business, Gustavsson had become the district’s third proud owner of an automobile.

That time he had been lucky. But one Sunday in August 1925, after the church service, Gustavsson’s luck ran out. He went out for a drive, mainly to show off his expensive car. Unluckily for him, he happened to choose the road that passed Allan Karlsson’s house. At the bend, Gustavsson had got nervous (or perhaps God or fate had a hand in the events), and the gears got stuck and one thing led to another and Gustavsson and his automobile went straight into the gravel pit behind the house, instead of following the gentle curve of the road to the right. It would have been bad enough for Gustavsson to set foot on Allan’s land and have to explain himself, but things turned out much worse than that, because just as Gustavsson managed to bring his runaway automobile to a halt, Allan set off the first of that Sunday’s trial explosions.

Allan, himself, was curled up for protection behind the outhouse and could neither see nor hear anything. Not until he returned to the gravel, did he realise that something had gone wrong. Bits of Gustavsson’s automobile were spread out over half the pit, and here and there lay bits of Gustavsson himself.

Gustavsson’s head had landed softly on a patch of grass. It stared vacantly out over the destruction.

‘What business did you have in my gravel pit?’ Allan asked.

Gustavsson did not reply.

Over the next four years, Allan had plenty of time to read and improve his knowledge of how society was developing. After the explosion in the quarry, he found himself incarcerated in an asylum, though it was hard to say exactly what for. Eventually, the topic of his father came up when a young and enthusiastic disciple of Professor Bernhard Lundborg, an expert on Racial Biology at the University of Uppsala, decided to build his career on Allan’s case. When Allan fell into the clutches of Professor Lundborg, he was immediately sterilised for ‘eugenic and social reasons’ on the basis that Allan was probably a bit slow and there was probably too much of his father in him for the state to allow further reproduction of the Karlsson genes.

The sterilization did not bother Allan. On the contrary, he felt he was well-treated at Professor Lundborg’s clinic. Now and then, he had to answer all sorts of questions such as why he needed to blow people and things into bits and whether he had any Negro blood. Allan answered that he saw a certain difference between things and people when it came to the pleasure of lighting the fuse of a load of dynamite. Splitting a rock down the middle, that could make you feel good. But if instead of a rock, it was a person, well, Allan couldn’t see why a person wouldn’t move out of the way under the circumstances. Didn’t Professor Lundborg feel the same way?

But Bernhard Lundborg was not the sort of man to involve himself in philosophical discussion with his patients; he repeated the question about Negro blood. Allan answered that you never really know, but both his parents had had skin that was as pale as his, perhaps the professor would take that as an answer? And then Allan added that he was dying to see a black man for real if the professor had one on hand.

Professor Lundborg and his assistants did not answer Allan’s questions, but they made notes and hummed and then left him in peace, sometimes for days at a stretch. Allan devoted those days to all kinds of reading: the daily newspapers of course, but also books from the hospital’s extensive library. Add to that three square meals a day, an indoor toilet, and a room of his own, and you can see why Allan found it very comfortable to be locked up in an asylum. The atmosphere had been a little unpleasant only once, and that was when Allan asked Professor Lundborg what was so dangerous about being a Negro or a Jew. For once, the professor didn’t respond with silence, but bellowed that Karlsson should mind his own business and not interfere in other people’s affairs. Allan was reminded of that time many years ago when his mother had threatened to box his ears.

The years passed and the interviews with Allan became few and far between. Then parliament appointed a committee to investigate the sterilization of ‘biologically inferior individuals’ and when the report was issued, Professor Lundborg suddenly had so much to do that Allan’s bed was needed for somebody else. In the spring of 1929, Allan was pronounced rehabilitated and fit once again to enter society, and was sent out onto the streets with just enough cash to get him a train ticket to Flen. He had to walk the last few miles to Yxhult, but Allan didn’t mind. After four years behind bars, he needed to stretch his legs.