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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
‘I need to take a shit soon,’ Hitman Anders interrupted her. ‘Is there much left?’
‘I already told you to zip it while I’m talking,’ said the priest. ‘Do the same with your behind, if you must, because you’re not going anywhere until I’ve finished.’
Hitman Anders had never seen her so decisive. And his visit to the bathroom wasn’t that urgent – he was just bored. He sighed and let her continue.
Three years after her mother’s death, it was time for Johanna to leave home for higher studies. Her father made sure to keep a firm grip on her, just as he’d always done, with letters and phone calls.
Priesthood is not the sort of status you can attain in a day. Johanna had to collect a substantial number of academic points in theology, exegesis, hermeneutics, religious pedagogy and other subjects just to be accepted into the final semester at the Church of Sweden’s pastoral institute in Uppsala.
The closer the daughter got to complying with her father’s demands, the more frustrated her father became about the state of things. Johanna was and remained a woman: in essence she was unworthy to carry on the family tradition. Gustav Kjellander felt trapped between the importance of upholding a centuries-old tradition on the one hand and betraying his forefathers – because Johanna was a daughter rather than a son – on the other. He pitied himself, hating God and his daughter in equal measure, just as he knew that God (if he existed) hated him, and his daughter would, too, if she dared.
The only rebellion Johanna was capable of was hardly worth the name. She devoted all her intellectual power to despising God, to not believing in Jesus, and to seeing right through all the stories in the Bible. By demeaning the pure, evangelical Protestant faith, she demeaned her father. And yet, by not telling anyone else that she was an active non-believer, she succeeded in being ordained one rainy June day. It wasn’t just rainy. It was also very windy, on the verge of a storm. It was only thirty-nine degrees Fahrenheit – in June! Hadn’t there even been a little hail?
Johanna scoffed inwardly. If the weather on her ordination day was God’s way of protesting at her career choice, was that the best he could do?
Once the rain and hail had passed, she packed her bags and returned home to Sörmland. First to a congregation at arm’s length from her father and overseen by the same. Four years later, as planned, she took over the Kjellander family congregation as parish priest. Her dad retired, probably with the intention of running the show anyway, but he got stomach cancer and – just think! – it turned out he could be defeated after all! What God had spent a whole life failing to do (if he’d even tried), the cancer had taken care of in three months. Thereupon, spontaneously and straight from the pulpit, his daughter bade him welcome to Hell. When she used that word for the female sex organ, applying it to the man who had personified the congregation for thirty-three years, it was the nail in the coffin.
‘Can’t you just say once and for all whether or not it was “cunt”?’ said Hitman Anders.
The priest looked at him with a face that said, ‘Did you not receive express orders to keep your mouth shut?’
The congregation’s experiment with a woman as a parish priest was over. Her dad was dead; the daughter was free. And unemployed. And, after a week on the streets, dirty and hungry.
But four ham sandwiches and a bottle of raspberry cordial later, she had both a new home and a new job. It paid well from the start, and even after two years the money just kept improving. And, of course, she had also found love! If only the hitman sitting across from her didn’t insist that they talk about the Bible …
‘Right, the Bible,’ said Hitman Anders. ‘If you’re done blathering, maybe we could get to the point.’
The priest took offence at the hitman’s lack of interest in her story and her fate in life. And at the fact that he’d spoken at all, in violation of the rule currently in effect.
‘Would you like another beer?’ she asked.
‘Yes, please! Finally!’
‘Well, you can’t have one.’
One of the central tenets of newly minted theology graduate Johanna Kjellander’s active non-belief had been that the four gospels were unquestionably written long after Jesus’s death. If there was a man who could walk on water, make food out of nothing, help the lame to walk, drive demons from man into pig, and even get up and walk around after having been dead for three days – if there was a man like that (or a woman, for that matter), why would it take one, two or more generations before someone bothered to write down all the things that that man had done?
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