The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared

by Jonas Jonasson

Allan hoped for the young man’s sake that he was having a pleasant time in there, bearing in mind the disappointment that was awaiting him.

The corpse fell forward and hit its forehead on an iron handle. ‘That would have been really painful if the circumstances had been a little different,’ said Allan. ‘There are undoubtedly advantages to being dead,’ said Julius.

Allan thought it sounded unnecessary for the people in the seventeenth century to kill each other. If they had only been a little patient they would all have died in the end anyway.

‘You crossed the Himalayas? At a hundred?’ ‘No, don’t be silly,’ said Allan. ‘You see, Mr Prosecutor, I haven’t always been a hundred years old. No, that’s recent.’

During my hundred years, my tongue has slipped only twice. First when I told the West how you build an atom bomb, and then when I did the same for the East.’