The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson Page B

had always been bothered by his own limited schooling. He could hardly write, he was no good at maths, he didn’t understand a word of English and it was only with difficulty he could remember that Norway’s capital was called Oslo, if anybody happened to ask. The only thing Uncle Frasse knew was how to do business. And he ended up rolling in money.
    Exactly just how much money Uncle Frasse had at the time of his departure, was hard to say. It happened when Bosse was nineteen and Benny almost eighteen. One day, a lawyer contacted Bosse and Benny, and informed them that they were both mentioned in Uncle Frasse’s will but that the matter was somewhat complicated and that a meeting was required.
    Benny and Bosse met the lawyer at his office and discovered that a considerable amount – unspecified – of money awaited the brothers the day they both completed their university education.
    And as if that wasn’t enough, the lawyer would supply the brothers with a generous monthly allowance (to be regularly increased according to the rate of inflation) while they were studying. But the monthly allowance would stop if they abandoned their studies, just as it would when they had passed a final examination and should be able to support themselves. There was more to the will, some more or less complicated details, but on the whole what it meant was that the brothers would only be rich once they had both finished their studies.
    Bosse and Benny immediately started on a seven-week course in welding skills and the lawyer confirmed that according to the will that would suffice, ‘although I suspect that your uncle Frank might have had something more advanced in mind’.
    Two things happened halfway through the course. One, Benny finally had enough of his brother’s bossiness. That’s theway he had always been but it was time to make it clear to big brother that they were both grown and he needed to find someone else to order around. Two, Benny realised that he didn’t want to become a welder and that in any case he had no talent for it. The two brothers argued about this for a while, until Benny managed to talk his way into a course on botany at Stockholm University. According to the lawyer, the will allowed for a change of subject, as long as there was no interruption.
    Bosse finished his welder’s training, but didn’t get a penny of Uncle Frasse’s money because his brother Benny was still studying . In addition, the lawyer immediately ended Bosse’s monthly allowance, in accordance with the will.
    This, of course, meant that the brothers became enemies. And when Bosse, in a bout of drunken confusion, smashed up Benny’s newly purchased motorcycle (bought with money from his generous study allowance), that was the end of all brotherly love, the end of any relationship whatsoever.
    Bosse started to do business deals in the spirit of Uncle Frasse, yet perhaps without his uncle’s talent. After a while he moved to Västergötland, partly in search of new business opportunities, partly to avoid the risk of bumping into his damned brother. Benny, on the other hand, stayed in the academic world, year after year. The monthly allowance was, as explained earlier, generous and by changing his subject just before taking final exams and starting on something new, Benny could live well, while his bullying jerk of a brother had to wait for his money.
    And Benny continued like this for thirty years, until the extremely aged lawyer one day contacted him and announced that the money in the will was now used up, that there wouldn’t be any more monthly allowances, and of course there was no other money available for anything else. The brothers could forget the inheritance, said the lawyer who was now more than ninety years old and who appeared to have stayed alive for thesake of the will, because just a couple of weeks later he died in his television armchair.
    All this had happened just a few weeks ago. Benny had suddenly found himself