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

Denmark

Sabine sat quietly behind the wheel as they crossed the bridge and drove through the tunnel on their way to Copenhagen’s international airport. She thought through her decision to emigrate one more time.

Olekorinko in Tanzania had been in her thoughts so long that she had just about exalted it to a truth that he was the solution to everything. The country in and of itself also brought many advantages. For example, Tanzanian Nazism had not yet been invented. There probably weren’t many snakes to speak of either, up at that high altitude. Snakes, in general, were among the few things Sabine disliked more than Nazis. She disliked snakes, Nazis, wars and deadly illnesses. In that order. With Karlsson a close fifth. War and violence were not on the list of things the country had to offer. That left deadly illnesses, but it seemed likely they’d have cures for such things down there. Not least with Olekorinko’s help, if everything her mother had told her about him was to be believed, which of course it was not.

Sabine had done her homework. There were further sources of inspiration to be found nearby. The Kenyan side of the border was the domain of a businesswoman named Hannah. She called herself the Queen and spent Monday through Friday curing clients’ ailments, breaking curses and giving life advice based on what could be read in the coals left by a fire. For extra money she also took on the more serious cases of cancer and AIDS. She spent Saturdays resting and on Sundays she went to church, to be on the safe side.

Hannah was happy to show off her luxury home and her fifteen cars to anyone who wanted to see them. ‘I’m a witch and I’m good at it,’ was her standing refrain among the cars. ‘In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.’

Hannah was impressive in many ways. But, still, Sabine didn’t find her sufficiently attention-grabbing. Sabine already knew how to scrape through glowing coals.

The retired evangelical pastor Olekorinko and his concept were wildly different from what the Queen practised. The pastor had built up a tent city on the savannah in the Serengeti. He kept a laboratory in an annexe to the main tent, and there he created his miracle medicine, according to a precise and partially secret recipe.

He took only very limited payments, focusing instead on the masses. For the medicine only worked there, in the tent city, and only in the moment when it was blessed by the pastor.

Sabine wanted to know more about his process. Mass meetings would be something new in modern European clairvoyance. Her mother had understood this. And it was the way forward for Sabine, her beloved assistant and the hundred-and-one-year-old who came with them, whether they wanted him or not.