Free Hitman Anders and the Meaning of It All by Jonas Jonasson Page A

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.
    â€œI need to take a shit soon,” Hitman Anders interrupted her. “Is there much left?”
    â€œI already told you to zip it while I’m talking,” said the priest. “Do the same with your behind, if you must, but 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 of carrying 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 inthe 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.
    â€œCan’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