The Accidental Further Adventures of the Hundred-Year-Old Man. Jonas Jonasson

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СКАЧАТЬ with all the bells and whistles. This included, among other things, linking the SIM cards to the hotel, which found its total telephone costs doubled, although no one understood why.

      Once the hundred-year-old man learned how the remarkable contraption worked, he no sooner woke for the day than he turned it on to see what had happened overnight. It was the minor delightful news items from all the corners of the world that amused him most. Like the one about how a hundred doctors and nurses in Naples took turns signing each other in and out so no one had to work but everyone still got paid. Or the one about Romania, how so many government officials had had to be locked up for corruption that the country’s prisons were full. And how those officials who had yet to be arrested had a solution to the problem: legalize corruption so they would avoid the need to build more prisons.

      Allan and Julius developed a new morning routine. The old one had involved Allan launching into every breakfast with complaints about his friend’s loud snoring, which he could hear through the wall. The new one involved the same, but with the addition of Allan’s reports about what he’d found out on his tablet since last time. At first Julius enjoyed the brief news updates, not least because they took the focus off his snoring. He was immediately delighted by the Romanian notion of making the illegal legal. Just think how much easier it would be as a petty thief in such a society.

      But Allan quickly disabused him of that thought, because if petty thievery were to become legal then the concept would cease to exist. Julius, who had been on the verge of suggesting that he and Allan leave Bali and move to Bucharest, immediately deflated. The joy in being a small-time thief was, of course, mainly derived from tricking someone out of something, preferably someone who deserved it or at least wouldn’t suffer too much from it. If swindling could no longer be considered a swindle, what was the point?

      Allan consoled him with the information that the Romanians had turned out to a man to protest against the politicians’ and officials’ plans. The average Romanian was not as philosophically inclined as those in power. He or she reasoned that those who stole should be locked up, no matter their title or position, and whether or not there was anywhere to lock them up.

      Breakfast times at the hotel in Bali ended up revolving ever more often around where in the world Julius and Allan should go now that life had become so humdrum in their current location. When the leading news story on the morning in question told him that it was twenty degrees warmer than usual at the North Pole, Allan wondered if that might be an option.

      Julius stuffed fried noodles into his mouth, finished chewing, then said he didn’t think the North Pole was the right place for him and Allan. Especially not if the ice was about to melt. Julius caught a cold whenever his feet got wet. And there were polar bears, and all Julius knew about polar bears was that they seemed to get out of the wrong side of bed every morning from birth onwards. At least the snakes on Bali were shy.

      Allan said that perhaps it was no wonder a polar bear might lose its temper given that the ground was melting beneath its feet. If things were about to go down the tubes, that bear probably ought to stroll to solid ground while it still had time. Canada, in that case, because the United States had a new president again – had Allan already mentioned this to Julius? And, by golly, this new guy wouldn’t allow just anyone over the border.

      Yes, Julius had heard of Trump. That was his name. The polar bear may have been white, but it was a foreigner first and foremost. So it shouldn’t get its hopes up.

      The news on Allan’s black tablet had the curious habit of being both big and small. Mostly big, unpleasantly enough. Allan sought out the small and charming but got the rest of it into the bargain. It was impossible to see the molehills for the mountains.

      During his first hundred years of life, Allan had never reflected upon the bigger picture. Now his new toy was telling him that the world was in a dreadful state. And reminding him of why he had, once upon a time, rightly chosen to turn his back on it and think only of himself.

      He recalled his early years as an errand boy at the gunpowder factory in Flen. There, half the workers had devoted their free time to longing for a red revolution, while the other half was horrified at the threat from China and Japan. Their understanding of the Yellow Peril was nurtured by novels and booklets that depicted a scenario in which the white world was devoured by the yellow one.

      Allan did not care about such nuances, and he continued along the same path after the Second World War when brown shirts made brown the ugliest colour of them all. He noticed this as little then as he did the next time people converged around an ideological expression. This time it was more a longing for something than away from it. Peace on earth was in, and so were floral VW buses and, frequently, hash. Everyone loved everyone else, except Allan, who didn’t love anyone or anything. Except his cat. Not that he was bitter: he just was.

      The flowery era of life lasted until Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan took over in their respective realms. They thought it was more practical to love oneself and one’s own successes. But if you insisted on disliking someone it should be the Russians. Essentially there were no other threats, and when Reagan killed Soviet Communism simply by talking about sending missiles from space, it was peace and joy for all, except the half of humanity who had no daily food and the several thousand British miners who no longer had a mine to go to. The new view was that there was no reason to care about your neighbour; it was enough to tolerate him or her. And people did, until the winds of change blew once more.

      A bit unexpectedly, perhaps, the brown-shirt ideology made a comeback. Not by way of Germany this time, at least not first and foremost. Or even second and middlemost. But in a number of other countries it was in. The United States wasn’t first among them, but it soon became the most noticeable, thanks to its recently elected president. It was impossible to say how much he really believed in it: that seemed to change from day to day. But the old adage about doing something yourself if you want it done right wouldn’t suffice: it was time to point out external threats to the white Western lives we all deserved to live.

      Allan, of course, wanted to consider his black tablet a tool of pure entertainment, but he had a hard time shielding himself against the broader contexts he was beginning to perceive. He thought about putting the tablet down. Leaving it be for a whole day. And another. Only to admit reluctantly that it was too late. The man who had, more than anyone else, not bothered to care about the state of things had started to care about the state of things.

      ‘I’ll be damned,’ he mumbled to himself.

      ‘What’s that?’ Julius wondered.

      ‘It was nothing. Except what I just said.’

      ‘Damned?’

      ‘Yes.’

       Indonesia

      Once Allan had come to terms with his new-found relative interest in the rest of humanity, his black tablet helped him regain lost ground. It greeted him with the news of a Norwegian who had his own lake, where he fed the roach and bream pellets full of carotene. When the pike in the lake ate the recently fed fish their flesh turned pink, whereupon the Norwegian caught them, filleted them and sold them as salmon. He minimized his risks by exporting the frauds solely to Namibia where, naturally, there lived a retired health inspector from Oslo. The inspector sounded the alarm, the Norwegian was locked up, and the price of salmon in south-western Africa went back to normal.

      And so on. The black tablet helped Allan enjoy life again, even as Julius continued to live in frustration. It had been months since he’d managed a single dishonourable undertaking. In his last СКАЧАТЬ