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Hitman Anders and the Meaning of It All. Jonas Jonasson
Читать онлайн.Название Hitman Anders and the Meaning of It All
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780008152086
Автор произведения Jonas Jonasson
Жанр Приключения: прочее
Издательство HarperCollins
You would have liked this one, Dad.
So it’s for you.
An unusual business strategy
Daydreaming in the reception area of one of Sweden’s most wretched hotels stood a man whose life would soon come to be filled with death and bodily harm, thieves and bandits.
The only grandchild of horse-dealer Henrik Bergman was, as always, channelling his paternal grandfather’s shortcomings. The old man had been foremost in his field in southern Sweden; he never sold fewer than seven thousand animals per year, and each was first-class.
But from 1955, the traitorous farmers began to exchange Grandfather’s cold- and warmbloods for tractors at a rate that Grandfather refused to comprehend. Seven thousand transactions became seven hundred, which became seventy, which became seven. Within five years, the family’s multi-million-krona fortune had gone up in a cloud of diesel smoke. In 1960, the as-yet-unborn grandson’s dad tried to save what he could by travelling around to all the farmers in the region and preaching on the curse of mechanization. After all, there were so many rumours flying about. Such as how diesel fuel would cause cancer if it got on your skin and, of course, get on your skin it did.
And then Dad added that studies showed diesel could cause sterility in men. But he really shouldn’t have mentioned that. For one thing, it wasn’t true, and for another, it sounded perfectly lovely to breadwinning but continuously horny farmers with three to eight children each. It was embarrassing to try to get your hands on condoms, not so for a Massey Ferguson or John Deere.
His grandfather had died not only destitute but kicked to death by his last horse. His grieving, horseless son took up the reins, completed some sort of course, and was soon employed by Facit AB, one of the world’s leading companies in the production of typewriters and mechanical calculators. Thus he succeeded in being trampled by the future not once but twice in his lifetime, because suddenly the electronic calculator popped up on the market. As if to poke fun at Facit’s brick of a product, the Japanese version fitted the inner pocket of a jacket.
The Facit group’s machines didn’t shrink (at least, not fast enough), but the firm itself did, until it shrivelled up into absolutely nothing.
The son of the horse dealer was laid off. To repress the fact that he had been twice cheated by life, he took to the bottle. Unemployed, bitter, always unbathed and never sober, he soon lost all his power of attraction in the eyes of his twenty-years-younger wife, who managed to stick it out for a little while, then another little while. But eventually it occurred to the patient young woman that the mistake of marrying the wrong man was possible to undo. ‘I want a divorce,’ she said one morning,