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

The new guy’s loyalties lay with Moscow above all, and the uranium used was Russian. The man from Chabarovsk regularly reported to Gennady Aksakov. Thus Volodya and Gena knew everything worth knowing about the hundred-and-one-year-old Swede who’d had a cameo in the laboratory and made a mess of things. Kim Jong-un had nagged President Putin nearly to death on the topic of how the Russians, with their global network of agents, ought to track down Karlsson and slit his throat, but Putin was secretly amused by the old man. Imagine being more than a hundred years old, coming to Pyongyang and getting the little big man all worked up like that. Even if the old man hadn’t vanished, the president would have let him be. The problem seemed likely to solve itself within the not-too-distant future.

In any case, the news of the day was that the man from Chabarovsk had joined Kim Jong-un in whining for a plutonium centrifuge. Volodya could see Gena’s opinion written on his face.

‘Hmm,’ said the president. ‘Send the damn thing over, then. But we won’t go too far, will we, Gena?’

The rainbow coffin joined a Harley Davidson coffin, a Ferrari coffin, a golf-is-the-best-thing-ever coffin, a John Lennon/ Imagine coffin, a white-doves-in-flight-on-a-pale-blue-background coffin, a dancing-fairies-in-a-meadow coffin, and a sunset-at-sea coffin.

Sabine was quick on the draw and found a used hearse for sale. Very quick. At the conclusion of the sale she realized that the eight coffins they were planning to bring to Stuttgart wouldn’t fit into it. It would take at most two, preferably just one. Julius offered comfort by pointing out that it would be useful for years to come, when it was time to deliver completed orders. Then he sent her to rent a small truck at the nearest service station. Before it was time to take off on their trip, she managed, on Julius’s advice, to paint a VfB Stuttgart coffin in red, white and a little yellow, with the words ‘Love since 1983’ in German, thanks to Google Translate.

‘VfB Stuttgart? What’s that?’ Allan asked.

‘The local football team,’ said Julius. ‘Might work.’

Sabine locked up and put a sign on the door: ‘Closed. You all shop somewhere else anyway.’ Then they aimed southwards, all three of them, with nine coffins in tow.

It took two days, with overnights in Copenhagen and Hanover. Pleasant dinners for three in both cities. As pleasant as they could be, at least, with Allan stubbornly reporting the latest news all the time, as if Sabine and Julius weren’t already aware of the state of the world. Allan’s latest charming story was about a former winner of the Nobel Peace Prize who might currently be pursuing genocide instead of peace.

After dinner in Hanover, Allan went to bed. Julius promised to join him soon, but this was a promise he wouldn’t keep. Instead he slept in Sabine’s room; it turned out this was something they had both been considering for some time.

‘Well, then,’ said Allan, when the trio gathered for breakfast the next day. ‘The Minister for Foreign Affairs is no longer good enough.’

‘Idiot,’ said Julius.

He and Sabine had spent time together every day and night since they’d first met a few months ago. Of course, Allan was always there in one corner, but he seldom left his sofa and in no way did he pose a threat to the love between the much-younger Julius and the even-younger-than-that Sabine.

It would be an exaggeration to say they just clicked. After all, their love affair had begun when Julius tried to rob his future intended of a box of bandages. But from that point on, their relationship grew steadily. And the evening in Hanover turned into a night neither regretted the next morning.

Julius felt that Sabine made him a better person. She didn’t just take, she gave too. He felt… proud of her.

‘Better late than never,’ said Sabine, apropos of the fact that she’d fallen in love shortly before her sixtieth birthday.

‘Much better late than never,’ said Julius, raising a glass of breakfast milk in a toast.

‘Okay, okay,’ said Allan. ‘Do you know what Trump did overnight?’

The trade fair was a success. Few of the two thousand exhibitors were met with as much interest as Booth D128, the one with nine coffins and banners that said things like ‘Heaven Can’t Wait’, ‘Ticket to Paradise’ and ‘The Last Journey’. Sabine wasn’t quite sure what message she was trying to get across, but she was in charge of designing the booth and wanted everything to be as lively as possible around the death they were marketing.

The first to go was the VfB Stuttgart coffin. A diehard Karlsruhe fan offered three thousand euros; his goal was to humiliate Stuttgart somehow, with the help of the coffin, when the occasion arose. If no such occasion presented itself in a reasonable amount of time, he planned to charge ten euros per Karlsruhe fan who wanted to relieve themselves on the coffin in a public place. Then he could set it on fire and put the video online as a potential viral success.

‘Does you-know-what really burn?’ Sabine asked the customer, who had shared more of his plans than the salespeople truly needed to know.

Julius stepped in and said that the purpose of the coffin had been to honour the organization that was VfB Stuttgart, not to deride it. Furthermore, Julius went on, he understood now, if he hadn’t before, why the concept of peace on earth seemed so remote. Last but not least, he sincerely pitied the buyer of the coffin for putting hate above love.

‘All that said: three thousand euros, it’s a deal.’

The second coffin to sell was a pre-order for a Karlsruhe coffin. It so happened that a Stuttgart fan, in all the fuss, had happened to overhear the preceding conversation and acted accordingly.

‘He who pisses last pisses best,’ he said to the Karlsruhe fan, once the coffin was ordered and the agreement signed.

At which the two fans began first to bicker and then to scuffle, until they were carried off and ejected by security.

Before the day was over, they had sold twelve more coffins, including pre-orders. The only coffin they’d brought that didn’t move was sunset-at-sea. Sabine believed this was because it was six hundred kilometres from Stuttgart to the nearest sunset at sea, but Julius thought it might be because the sunset had turned out an awful lot like a sunrise.

Fourteen coffins at three thousand euros each made forty-two thousand. The company Die with Pride wasn’t even formally established yet, but it seemed to be headed for a fruitful future.

If only it hadn’t been for that damned bad luck.

Povl Riis-Knudsen was the chairman of the National Socialist Movement of Denmark, until he happened to get it on with an Arab and was forced to leave the party. Caught red-handed, he tried to argue that the Arab had awfully white skin. That wouldn’t do. An Arab was an Arab.

Yet, as the leader of the movement, he’d managed to leave his mark. He appeared on Danish TV to argue that all foreigners should be forced to leave the country, and advocated the death penalty for anyone who spread AIDS. He wanted to place political opponents in labour camps and sterilize everyone with the wrong skin colour. In accordance with some extra-complicated logic, he also had a passion for fundamentalist Islam, even though he wouldn’t touch Muslims with a ten-foot pole (unless they were white Arabs). More recently he had published books in which he attempted to prove that the concentration camps of the Second World War had never existed.

This Danish man was a main source of inspiration for the Swedish neo-Nazis in the Nordic Resistance Party. It wasn’t Denmark or Sweden under threat: it was the Aryan race and, in the long term, all of humanity – that was, biology and ecology over geography.