The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared (21 page)

‘Thank you, Mr Marshal,’ said Allan.

Marshal Beria wasn’t the type to sit and chat about nothing. Life was too short for that (and besides he was socially
incompetent
). So he said to Allan:

‘Have I understood the reports correctly, Mr Karlsson, in that you are willing to assist the socialist Soviet republic
in nuclear matters in exchange for a hundred thousand dollars?’

Allan replied that he hadn’t given the money much thought, but that he would like to give Yury Borisovich a hand if there was something he needed help with and there did seem to be. But it would be nice if Mr Marshal could wait until the next day, because he had travelled an awful lot lately.

Marshal Beria answered that he understood that the journey had been somewhat exhausting for Mr Karlsson, and told him that they would soon be having dinner with Comrade Stalin, after which Mr Karlsson would be able to rest in the very finest guest suite the Kremlin had to offer.

Comrade Stalin was not stingy when it came to food. There was salmon roe and herring and salted cucumbers and meat salad and grilled vegetables and borsht and pelmeni and blini and lamb cutlets and pierogi with ice cream. There was wine of various colours and of course vodka. And even more vodka.

Around the table sat Comrade Stalin himself, Allan Karlsson from Yxhult, nuclear physicist Yury Borisovich Popov, the boss of the Soviet state’s security Marshal Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria and a little, almost invisible young man without a name and without anything to either eat or drink. He was the interpreter, and they pretended he wasn’t there.

Stalin was in brilliant spirits right from the beginning. Lavrenty Pavlovich always delivered! OK, he had put his foot in it with Einstein, that had reached Stalin’s ear, but it was history now. And besides, Einstein (the real one) only had his brain; Karlsson had exact and detailed knowledge!

And it didn’t hurt that Karlsson seemed to be such a nice guy. He had told Stalin about his background, albeit extremely briefly. His father had fought for socialism in Sweden and then journeyed to Russia for the same purpose. Admirable indeed!
His son had for his part fought in the Spanish Civil War and Stalin was not going to be so insensitive as to ask on which side. After that he had travelled to America (he had to flee, Stalin assumed) and by chance had found himself in the service of the Allies… and that could be forgiven, Stalin himself had in a manner of speaking done the same thing in the latter part of the war.

Only a few minutes into the main course, Stalin had learned how to sing the Swedish toast ‘
Helan går, sjung hopp faderallan lallan lej
’ whenever it was time to raise their glasses. Allan in turn praised Stalin’s singing voice, leading Stalin to tell of how in his youth he had not only sung in a choir but even performed as a soloist at weddings, and then he got up and gave proof of this by jumping around on the floor and waving his arms and legs in every direction to a song that Allan thought sounded almost… Indian… but nice!

Allan couldn’t sing. He couldn’t do anything of any cultural value, he realised, but the mood seemed to demand that he attempt something more than ‘
Helan går
…’, and the only thing he could remember straight off was the poem by Verner von Heidenstam that Allan’s village school teacher had forced the children to memorize.

Thus Stalin resumed his seat, while Allan got up and
proclaimed
the poem in his native Swedish.

As an eight-year-old, Allan hadn’t understood what he recited, and now that he declaimed the poem again, with impressive engagement, he realised that thirty-five years later he still hadn’t a clue what it was about. The Russian-English (insignificant) interpreter sat in silence on his chair and was even less significant than before.

Allan then announced (after the applause had died down) that what he had just recited was by Verner von Heidenstam. Had he known how Comrade Stalin would react to that news,
Allan might have refrained from announcing it, or at least adjusted the truth a little.

Comrade Stalin had once upon a time been a poet, indeed a very competent one. The spirit of the times, however, had made him a revolutionary soldier instead. Such a background was poetical enough in itself. But Stalin had also retained his interest in poetry and his knowledge of the leading
contemporary
poets.

Unfortunately for Allan, Stalin knew all too well who Verner von Heidenstam was. And unlike Allan he knew all about Verner von Heidenstam’s love of – Germany. And about the love being mutual. Hitler’s righthand man, Rudolf Hess, had visited Heidenstam’s home in the 1930s, and shortly afterwards Heidenstam had been awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Heidelberg.

All of this caused Stalin’s mood to undergo an abrupt metamorphosis.

‘Is Mr Karlsson sitting here and insulting the generous host who received him with open arms?’ asked Stalin.

Allan assured him that such was not the case. If it was Heidenstam who had upset Mr Stalin, then Allan apologized profusely. Perhaps it might be some consolation that Heidenstam had been dead for some years?

‘And “
sjung hopp faderallan lallan lej
”, what did that
actually
mean? Did you have Stalin repeat a homage to the enemies of the revolution?’ asked Stalin, who always spoke of himself in the third person when he got angry.

Allan answered that he would need some time to think to be able to translate ‘
sjung hopp faderallan lallan lej
’ into English, but that Mr Stalin could rest assured that it was nothing more than a cheerful ditty.

‘A cheerful ditty?’ said Comrade Stalin in a loud voice. ‘Does Mr Karlsson think that Stalin looks like a cheerful person?’

Allan was beginning to tire of Stalin’s touchiness. The old geezer was quite red in the face with anger, but about not very much. Stalin went on:

‘And what actually did you do in the Spanish Civil War? It would perhaps be best to ask Mr Heidenstam-lover which side he fought for!’

Has he got a sixth sense too, the devil? Allan thought. Oh well, he was already as angry as he could reasonably become, so it was probably just as well to come clean.

‘I wasn’t really fighting, Mr Stalin, but at first I helped the republicans, before – for rather random reasons – changing sides and becoming good friends with General Franco.’

‘General Franco?’ Stalin shouted, and then stood up so that the chair behind him fell over.

It was evidently possible to get even angrier. On a few
occasions
in Allan’s eventful life, somebody had shouted at him, but he had never, ever, shouted back, and he had no plans to do so to Stalin. That didn’t mean that he was unmoved by the
situation
. On the contrary, he had rapidly come to dislike the little loudmouth on the other side of the table, in his own quiet way.

‘And not only that, Mr Stalin. I have been in China for the purpose of making war against Mao Tse-tung, before I went to Iran and prevented an attempt to assassinate Churchill.’

‘Churchill? That fat pig!’ Stalin shouted.

Stalin recovered for a moment before downing a whole glass of vodka. Allan watched enviously. He too would like to have his glass filled, but didn’t think it was the right moment for such a request.

Marshal Beria and Yury Borisovich didn’t say anything. But their faces bore very different expressions. While Beria stared angrily at Allan, Yury just looked unhappy.

Stalin absorbed the vodka he had just downed and then he lowered his voice to a normal level. He was still angry.

‘Has Stalin understood correctly?’ asked Stalin. ‘You were on Franco’s side, you have fought against Comrade Mao, you have… saved the life of the pig in London and you have put the deadliest weapon in the world in the hands of the
arch-capitalists
in the USA.

‘I might have known,’ Stalin mumbled and in his anger forgot to talk in the third person. ‘And now you are here to sell
yourself
to Soviet socialism? One hundred thousand dollars, is that the price for your soul? Or has the price gone up during the course of the evening?’

Allan no longer wanted to help. Of course, Yury was still a good man and he was the one who actually needed the help. But you couldn’t get away from the fact that the results of Yury’s work would end up in the hands of Comrade Stalin, and he was not exactly Allan’s idea of a real comrade. On the contrary, he seemed unstable, and it would probably be best for all concerned if he didn’t get the bomb to play with.

‘Not exactly,’ said Allan. ‘This was never about money…’

He didn’t get any further before Stalin exploded again.

‘Who do you think you are, you damned rat? Do you think that you, a representative of fascism, of horrid American
capitalism
, of everything on this Earth that Stalin despises, that you, you, can come to the Kremlin, to the Kremlin, and bargain with Stalin, and bargain with Stalin?’

‘Why do you say everything twice?’ Allan wondered, while Stalin went on:

‘The Soviet Union is prepared to go to war again, I’ll tell you that! There will be war, there will inevitably be war until American imperialism is wiped out.’

‘Is that what you think?’ asked Allan.

‘To do battle and to win, we don’t need your damned atom bomb! What we need is socialist souls and hearts! He who knows he can never be defeated, can never be defeated!’

‘Unless of course somebody drops an atom bomb on him,’ said Allan.

‘I shall destroy capitalism! Do you hear! I shall destroy every single capitalist! And I shall start with you, you dog, if you don’t help us with the bomb!’

Allan noted that he had managed to be both a rat and a dog in the course of a minute or so. And that Stalin was being rather inconsistent, because now he wanted to use Allan’s services after all.

But Allan wasn’t going to sit there and listen to this abuse any longer. He had come to Moscow to help them out, not to be shouted at. Stalin would have to manage on his own.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ said Allan.

‘What,’ said Stalin angrily.

‘Why don’t you shave off that moustache?’

With that the dinner was over, because the interpreter fainted.

Plans were changed with all haste. Allan was not, after all, housed in the finest guest suite at the Kremlin, but instead in a windowless room in the cellar of the nation’s secret police. Comrade Stalin had finally decided that the Soviet Union would get an atom bomb either through its own experts working out how to make it, or by good old-fashioned honest espionage. They would not kidnap any more westerners and they would definitely not bargain with capitalists or fascists or both combined.

Yury was deeply unhappy. Not only because he had persuaded the nice Allan to come to the Soviet Union where death now certainly awaited him, but also because Comrade Stalin had exhibited such human failings! The Great Leader was intelligent, well-educated, a good dancer and he had a good singing voice. And on top of that he was completely bonkers! Allan had
happened
to quote the wrong poet and in a few seconds a pleasant dinner had been transformed into a… catastrophe.

At the risk of his own life, Yury tried cautiously, so cautiously, to talk to Beria about Allan’s impending execution and whether despite everything there was an alternative.

But Yury had misjudged the marshal. He did use violence against women and children, he did torture and execute guilty as well as innocent people, he did that and a lot more besides… but however revolting his methods, Marshal Beria did work single-mindedly in the best interests of the Soviet Union.

‘Don’t worry, my dear Yury Borisovich, Mr Karlsson won’t die. At least not yet.’

Marshal Beria explained that he intended to keep Allan Karlsson out of the way as a backup, in case Yury Borisovich and his fellow scientists continued to fail to make a bomb. This explanation had an inbuilt threat, and Marshal Beria was very pleased with that.

While waiting for his trial, Allan sat in one of the many cells at the headquarters of the secret police. The only thing that happened was that every day Allan was served a loaf of bread, thirty grams of sugar and three warm meals (vegetable soup, vegetable soup and vegetable soup).

The food had been decidedly better in the Kremlin than it was here in the cell. But Allan thought that although the soup tasted as it did, he could at least enjoy it in peace, without anyone shouting at him for reasons that he couldn’t quite follow.

This new diet lasted six days, before the special tribunal of the secret police summoned Allan. The courtroom, just like Allan’s cell, was in the enormous secret police headquarters beside Lubyanka Square, but a few floors higher up. Allan was placed on a chair in front of a judge behind a pulpit. To the left of the judge sat the prosecutor, a man with a grim expression, and to the right Allan’s defence lawyer, a man with an equally grim expression.

For starters, the prosecutor said something in Russian that Allan didn’t understand. Then the defence lawyer said
something
else in Russian that Allan didn’t understand either. After which the judge nodded as if he was thinking, before opening and reading a little crib (to make sure he got it right) and then proclaiming the verdict of the court:

‘The special tribunal hereby condemns Allan Emmanuel Karlsson, citizen of the kingdom of Sweden, as an element dangerous to the Soviet socialist society, to a sentence of thirty years in the correction camp in Vladivostok.’

The judge informed the convicted man that the sentence could be appealed, and that the appeal could take place within three months of the present day. But Allan Karlsson’s defence lawyer informed the court on behalf of Allan Karlsson that they would not be appealing. Allan Karlsson was, on the contrary, grateful for the mild sentence.

Allan was of course never asked whether or not he was grateful, but the verdict did undoubtedly have some good aspects. First, the accused would live, which was rare when you had been classified as a dangerous element. And second, he would be going to the Gulag camps in Vladivostok, which had the most bearable climate in Siberia. The weather there wasn’t much more unpleasant than back home in Södermanland, while further north and inland in Russia it could get as cold as -50, -60 and even -70 °C.