Hitman Anders and the Meaning of It All

It was one routine job among many but, according to the agreement made nineteen months earlier, the price was to include two broken arms for the guy who had played blackjack too poorly for his own good and half got away with it, thanks to a baby.

Hitman Anders carried out this job, too, with precision (both arms were always easier than just one, since he didn’t have to pick the correct one). And that would probably have been the end of it, had it not occurred to him to consider the kind thing the priest had said the first time they met. It was something about how nice it had been for Hitman Anders to respect a small child.

The priest had referred to the Bible, of all things. What if there was more of the same inside that book? After all, it was fatter than the devil. Stories that could make him … feel good? Become someone different? Because there was something that came and went inside his head, something he had thus far done his best to drink away.

He would talk to the priest the very next day, and she could tell him. The next day. First the pub. It was already four thirty in the afternoon.

Unless …

What if he were to drop in at the hotel after all and ask the priest to explain this and that about this and that first, then drink away the eternal knot in his stomach? He wouldn’t have to say much while she talked: he could just listen. And a person could always drink at the same time.

* * *

‘Listen, priest, I need to talk to you.’

‘Do you need 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.’

CHAPTER 11

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 me? You will never contradict me again,’ said Gustav Kjellander to his wife, handing back the baby.

His wife heard and obeyed. During the next sixteen years, she never once contradicted her husband. Instead, when she could no longer stand herself, she walked straight into the sea.

Gustav was enraged when his vanished wife’s body washed up on the shore two days later. As previously mentioned, he was never violent, but Johanna saw in his face that he could have killed her mother there and then if she hadn’t already been dead.

‘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.’

CHAPTER 12

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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