Hitman Anders and the Meaning of It All - Jonas Jonasson

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to borrow some money?’

      ‘Nope.’

      ‘Is the beer in the refrigerator gone?’

      ‘Nope. I’ve just checked.’

      ‘Then what do you want?’

      ‘To talk, I just said.’

      ‘About what?’

      ‘About how God and Jesus and the Bible and all that stuff work.’

      ‘Huh?’ said the priest. Who perhaps, even then, should have suspected that a terrible mess was in the offing.

      The priest and the hitman’s first theological discussion began with Hitman Anders saying he understood that she knew pretty much everything about religion. Maybe it would be best if she started from the beginning …

      ‘From the beginning? Oh, well, they say that in the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth, and that it happened about six thousand years ago, but there are some people who think that—’

      ‘No, dammit, not that beginning. How did it begin for you?’

      The priest was surprised and delighted instead of being on her guard. She and the receptionist had been in agreement for some time that they would dislike everyone and everything together, rather than each on their own. But they had never truly shared their life stories with one another, not beyond the superficial facts. When the occasion arose, they preferred to devote their time to the delightful things two people can do rather than to bitterness and its causes.

      At the same time – she was learning now – Hitman Anders had been ruminating on his own. This was, of course, a potential catastrophe, because if he were to start reading books about turning the other cheek when his job was rather the opposite, breaking jaws and noses on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, well, where would that leave their business plan?

      Perhaps a casual onlooker might be of the opinion that the priest ought to have grasped this from the start. And that she ought to have warned the receptionist. But, as it happened, there was no casual onlooker present, and the priest was only human (as well as a pretty dubious intermediary between man and God). If someone wanted to hear about her life, even if that someone was a half-deranged assailant and murderer, she was happy to oblige. And that was that.

      So she invited Hitman Anders to hear the story of her life, the story no one but her pillow had ever heard before. She was aware that he would offer the same intellectual response as the pillow from IKEA, but this was overshadowed by the fact that someone wanted to listen to her.

      ‘Well, in the beginning my father created Hell on Earth,’ the priest began.

      She had been forced into the trade by her father, who, naturally, opposed female priests. Not because female priests went against God’s will, that was up for debate, but because women belonged in the kitchen and also, from time to time, at the request of their husbands, in the bedroom.

      What was Gustav Kjellander to do? The priesthood had been passed down from father to son in the Kjellander family since the late 1600s. It had nothing to do with belief or a calling. It was about upholding tradition, a position. That was why his daughter’s argument about not believing in God didn’t hold much sway. She would become a priest, according to her father, or he would personally see to it that she was damned.

      For several years now, Johanna Kjellander had wondered how it could be that she had done as he’d said. She still didn’t know, but her dad had had her under his thumb as long as she could remember. Her earliest memory was of her father saying he was going to kill her rabbit. If she didn’t go to bed on time, if she didn’t clear up after herself, if she didn’t get the right grades at school, her rabbit would be put to death out of mercy because a rabbit needed a responsible owner, one who led by good example, not someone like her.

      And mealtimes: the way Dad would reach slowly across the table, grab her plate, stand up, walk to the bin and throw her dinner into it, plate and all. Because she had said something wrong at the dinner table. Heard the wrong words. Given the wrong answer. Done the wrong thing. Or just was wrong.

      Now Johanna Kjellander wondered how many plates it had been over the years. Fifty?

      Hitman Anders listened to her with great concentration, because you never knew when there might be something worth taking in. The story about her dad didn’t count: it had been clear to the hitman from the start that the old man needed a good thrashing, and that would probably take care of that. Or he could have a second thrashing, if necessary.

      In the end, Hitman Anders was forced to say so, in order to put a stop to the priest’s complaints. After an eternity she had got no further than her seventeenth birthday, when her dad had spat at her and said, ‘O God, how much must you hate me to give me a daughter, to give me this daughter. You have truly punished me, Lord.’ Her dad didn’t believe in God any more than she did, but he did believe in tormenting others with God’s help.

      ‘Please, priest, can I have the old man’s address so I can go over there with the baseball bat and preach some manners to him? Or a lot of manners, it sounds like. Should we say both right and left? Arms or legs, that’s up to you.’

      ‘Thank you for the offer,’ said the priest, ‘but it comes too late. Dad died almost two years ago, on the fourth Sunday after Trinity. When I got the news, I was up in the pulpit giving a sermon on forgiveness and not judging. But it turned out a bit different. I stood there and thanked the devil for taking my father home. It was not well received, you might say. I don’t remember everything but I’m pretty sure I called my dad a word that relates to the female genitals …’

      ‘Cunt?’

      ‘We don’t need to get into the details, but they interrupted me, pulled me down from the pulpit, and showed me the exit. Although I already knew where it was, of course.’

      Hitman Anders really wanted to know which dirty word it had been, but he had to content himself with learning that the priest’s choice had unleashed a sensational moment in which two of the congregation’s most devoted lambs had thrown their hymnals at her.

      ‘Then it must have been …’

      ‘Now, now!’ said the priest, and continued her story. ‘I took my leave and wandered around until the next Sunday, and that was when I found our mutual friend Per Persson on a park bench. And then I met you. And one thing led to the next and now we’re sitting here, you and I.’

      ‘Yes, we are,’ said Hitman Anders. ‘Now can we get back to what the Bible says about stuff so that this conversation goes somewhere?’

      ‘But you were the one who wanted … you wanted me to tell you about my—’

      ‘Yeah, yeah, but not a whole novel.’

      Johanna Kjellander’s need to share with someone – anyone at all! – the essential facts about her upbringing caused her to remind Hitman Anders that he had come to her and must behave accordingly. In short, he was to zip his lips until she had finished.

      Hitman Anders was not a person one could boss around, but since she put a beer out for him while she said this, he let her have her way. ‘Thanks,’ he said.

      ‘I told you to be quiet.’

      Johanna had been abused since the very first day of her life in every way except physically. She weighed seven pounds and five ounces when her father had touched his daughter for the first and last time. He had lifted her up, held her slightly more firmly than was necessary, brought her face to his, and hissed into her ear: ‘What are you doing here? I don’t want you. Do you hear me? I don’t want you.’

      ‘How could you, Gustav?’ said Johanna’s exhausted mother.

      ‘I am the one who decides what I can and cannot do, do you hear

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