Юнас Юнассон - The Accidental Further Adventures of the Hundred-Year-Old Man

The hundred-and-one-year-old nodded. Money made life easier in many ways. How were the asparagus funds? They had reached Sweden: didn’t Julius have a whole bunch of asparagus contacts here? Allan wasn’t familiar with the details of how Indonesian Swedish asparagus was sent this way and that, all over the world, but he assumed it made a stopover in this country. Wouldn’t anything else have been verging on unethical?

Brilliant! Julius didn’t have a whole bunch of contacts, but he did have Gunnar Gräslund.

‘Who might he be?’ asked Allan.

Gunnar Gräslund was an acquaintance from the past. Most people knew him by the name ‘Gunnar Grisly’ because that was what he was. He never showered; he shaved once a week; he did snuff and swore. And he had spent his entire life swindling people (Julius didn’t blame him for that last part). He was the one who’d been handed the task of selling Gustav Svensson’s locally grown asparagus onwards and, however grisly he was otherwise, he fulfilled his commitments.

‘All we have to do is travel to Gunnar, explain our situation, and he’ll take out his wallet.’

‘Travel on what?’ asked Allan.

‘On foot,’ said Julius.

Sweden is sixteen hundred kilometres in length, but not quite so wide. A relatively enormous surface for a trifling ten million people to share.

In most of the country, you can wander for hours without meeting another person, or even a moose. You can buy yourself a valley including your own lake for an amount that wouldn’t get you more than a shabby studio apartment on the outskirts of Paris. The downside to this purchase is that you will soon discover it is 120 kilometres to the nearest store, 160 to a pharmacy, and even longer to limp if you step on a nail and require a hospital. If you want to borrow cream for your coffee from the nearest neighbour, there’s a good chance they’re a three-hour walk away. And three hours back. The coffee will have gone cold long before you return home.

Not everyone wants that sort of lifestyle. Those who want it least have made a silent pact to gather in Stockholm and its immediate surroundings. With them come the businesses. H&M, Ericsson, and IKEA prioritize the areas where two and a half million potential customers live over places like the village of Nattavaara north of the Arctic Circle, where seventy-seven people still haven’t left.

So it wasn’t particularly surprising that the regional warehouse for Julius Jonsson and Gustav Svensson’s asparagus operation was located outside Stockholm and nowhere else. For a firm that has no need of direct contact with the consumer, yet moves imports and exports by plane, the area around Arlanda Airport poses an advantage. More specifically, Märsta. Even more specifically, a two-hour walk from Arlanda Airport. Two and a half if you’re old.

The alternative was a fifteen-minute taxi ride, but that possibility had been drunk for breakfast.

Gustav Svensson had already had to manage without his partner for far too long. First Julius had disappeared, on Allan’s birthday and everything. Gustav had unfinished business with their hotel and couldn’t go there to look for him, but by asking around he discovered that Julius and Allan had gone to sea in a hot-air balloon.

After a few days, Gustav assumed Julius was dead, but almost a week later his cell phone received a call. He was alive! And asking questions about the operation, without leaving a call-back number.

Then came a few days of quiet before the next sign of life. Another message on the voicemail. Gustav promised himself he would get better at charging the phone. This time, his friend said he had travelled to New York from Pyongyang! He’d gone to America? In a hot-air balloon? Via North Korea?

Even so, the question of where Julius was and when he planned to return home was subordinate to the necessity of having someone to make important daily business decisions. Gustav didn’t know what to do other than sit down at his partner’s desk and make those decisions in said partner’s spirit. Without Julius, he listened to the Swedish importer/exporter who suggested that they call the so Swedish-sounding asparagus Swedish in Sweden as well. That would bring an even higher price.

Gustav had some vague memory from his conversations with Julius that this was something to look out for. But only a vague memory. The advantage of arak was that it freed your thoughts; the disadvantage was that they were not only freed but also, by the next morning, gone.

Julius would have put a stop to further Swedifying Gustav Svensson’s asparagus, if he’d had the chance. The last time it had happened, a stupid middleman had laid waste to the entire operation by doing that very thing.

Thus it came to pass that Allan and Julius, after two and a half hours of slow walking, arrived at the warehouse of the Swedish partner, the day after the police had raided the place and arrested the partner in question. The door of the warehouse bore a yellow sign with a red outline and black text: ‘Sealed in accordance with Code of Judicial Procedure Chapter 27, Paragraph 15. Trespassing is punishable by law.’ Signed: ‘The Police.’

‘What happened here?’ Allan asked a woman passing by with her dog.

‘A raid on an illegal vegetable importer,’ said the woman.

‘Bloody Gunnar Grisly,’ said Julius.

‘Nice dog,’ said Allan. ‘What’s its name?’

The friends were once again at a loss. And as penniless as before. Furthermore, Julius had a blister. He limped alongside Allan towards central Märsta, and had trouble keeping up with the hundred-and-one-year-old’s pace. At last he had to give up.

‘I’m not taking another step,’ he said. ‘I’m about to die of this blister.’

‘It’s not that easy to die,’ said Allan. ‘I know from my own personal experience. You’ll just have to take a few more steps.’

He pointed at a corner shop across the street; it appeared to share a wall with an undertaker. ‘Won’t that be nice? Inside the door on the left you can buy bandages, and if they don’t have any for sale you can die inside the door on the right.’

Allan stepped into the corner shop with his limping friend two metres behind. A woman of late middle age with three different kinds of amulet around her neck sat at the cash register. She looked up in surprise; she wasn’t exactly drowning in customers.

‘Good morning,’ said Allan. ‘Might there be any bandages for sale here? My friend Julius has grown weary of his blister.’

Yes, there were. The woman pointed at the shelf of personal hygiene items. Julius staggered over, found what he needed, and staggered back to the amulet lady, who scanned the item and informed him of the price.

‘Thirty-six kronor, please.’

‘Well, that’s the thing,’ Julius thought up. ‘I forgot my wallet today. Can I come back and pay tomorrow?’

‘That’s fine. I’ll put the bandages aside for now,’ said the woman, snatching the box back so fast her amulets rattled.

‘No – that is, I have a blister now, but money later. I want to take the bandages with me, come back tomorrow and pay.’

The woman was more than just a cashier. In fact, she owned the store. She aimed a grave look at one of her first customers of the day. ‘I am a hardworking business owner. I’ve been here since eight this morning for almost no reason. Are you suggesting that I should start handing out my wares for free, once someone who needs something finally appears?’

Julius sighed, not sure he had the energy for the dialogue he could see coming. But he responded that he understood the woman’s point of view, and that he wished she could come to understand his own. This was a very special situation. He was an honourable person, a diplomat, in fact, who had just returned from America on an urgent matter. He had accidentally left his wallet at the embassy.