Read Online Hitman Anders and the Meaning of It All by Jonas Jonasson - Free Book Online Page B

refrigerator gone?”
    â€œNope. I’ve just checked.”
    â€œThen what do you want?”
    â€œTo talk, I just said.”
    â€œAbout what?”
    â€œAbout how God and Jesus and the Bible and all that stuff work.”
    â€œHuh?” said the priest. Who perhaps, even then, should have suspected that a terrible mess was drawing near.
    The priest and the hitman’s first theological discussion beganwith Hitman Anders saying he understood that she knew pretty much everything about religion. Maybe it would be best if she started from the beginning . . .
    â€œFrom 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—”
    â€œNo, 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.
    â€œWell, 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 sway 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 pick 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 garbage can and throw her dinner into it, plate and all. Because she had said