Was life a walk in the park?
Well, one thing was for sure: if it was, this was a new phenomenon for Johanna Kjellander. Up to now life had mostly just jerked her around.
It was all because of that stuff with her dad. And his dad. And his dad. And his dad. In some collective fashion, they had decreed that she should be a he, and that he should be a priest.
In the first instance, it hadn’t worked out as they’d desired, and Johanna was forced to hear throughout her childhood that it was her own fault she wasn’t man enough to be a man.
But become a priest she had. And if she were to stop and think instead of falling asleep again, perhaps this had less to do with her lack of belief and more to do with not believing as a matter of principle. After all, the Bible could be read from so many different viewpoints. The priest chose her own—and in so doing affirmed her bitterness towards her father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and so on, all the way back to somewhere beyond Gustav III (who had, incidentally, certain similarities to the churchwarden, the difference being that the King, in his day, had taken his shot in the back rather than in the eye).
“So you do believe in that book a little bit after all?” said the receptionist.
“Let’s not go overboard. There’s no goddamn way Noah lived to the age of nine hundred.”
“Nine hundred and fifty.”
“Or that. Remember, I just woke up.”
“I’m not sure I’ve ever heard you swear before.”
“Oh, it’s happened. But mostly after one in the morning.”
They smiled at each other. Not that it was visible in the darkness, but they could feel it.
The receptionist kept talking, confessing that the question he’d just posed might be silly, but the priest had thus far avoided answering it.
Johanna Kjellander yawned and confessed that this was because she had forgotten the question. “But feel free to ask it again. The night is ruined anyway.”
Right, it was about the point of everything. And whether things were going as well for them as they should. Whether life was a walk in the park.
The priest was silent for a moment, then decided to take the conversation seriously. She did enjoy eating foie gras at the Hilton with her receptionist. Much more than standing in a pulpit and lying to a flock of sheep once a week.
But Per was right, of course, that each day verged on being the same as the one before, and it was not a given that they should remain in the suite until they ran out of money. Which they probably would rather quickly at this place, wouldn’t they?
“If we’re conservative with the foie gras and champagne, the contents of the suitcase will last for about three and a half years,” the receptionist said, allowing for some miscalculation.
“And then what?” said the priest.
“That’s what I’m saying.”
The priest had registered Per Persson’s flirtation with one of the country’s most famous poems, the one that began “A day of plenty is never blessed; a day of thirst is always best.”
What spurred her into an extra round of pondering their existence was not the poem per se, but that the poet had committed suicide just a few years later. This could not reasonably be considered the meaning of life.
When Johanna thought back to the moments she had actually found pleasurable since meeting the receptionist (aside from their sexual relations and the accompanying quality time on a mattress, in a camper, behind an organ, or wherever else was available), it was the times when they had handed out money left and right. The hullabaloo in the Red Cross store in Växjö had perhaps not been a high point, but seeing a Salvationist stagger backwards outside Systembolaget in Hässleholm was the sort of thing you could smile about afterwards. And that time with the camper parked willy-nilly outside the headquarters of Save the Children. And the time Hitman Anders had told off the tin soldier who didn’t want to accept a suspicious package meant for his Queen . . .
The receptionist nodded in recollection, but he was also growing nervous. Was the priest trying to say they should give the contents of the yellow suitcase to needy people other than themselves? Was that the way . . . ?
“The hell it is!” said the priest, sitting up even straighter in bed.
“You just swore again.”
“Well, stop talking such goddamn rubbish!”
At last they came to an agreement that their life had been a walk in the park for a while because they had given with one hand while no one could see that they were taking many times more with the other. That it was more blessed to take than to give, but that giving did have its advantages.
The receptionist tried to summarize and look to the future. “What if the meaning of life is to make other people happy as long as we have the financial means to make ourselves just a little happier? Like the Church project, but without God, Jesus, or snipers in the bell tower.”
“Or Noah,” said the priest.
“What?”
“Without God, Jesus, snipers in the bell tower, or Noah. I can’t stand him.”
The receptionist promised to think up a new equation on the theme of goodness versus neediness in which no one had occasion to know that they considered themselves to be the neediest of all. And the equation—whatever it would turn out to be—would under no circumstances include Noah or his ark.
“Is it okay if I go back to sleep while you work out the details?” asked the priest, preparing herself for the “yes” she had reason to expect.
The receptionist thought she was a worthy conversational partner even when she was half asleep. And she might as well stay that way a little while longer. For he had just had a micro-idea on the theme of the meaning of life. So he said she was welcome to fall asleep again, unless she could be persuaded to respond positively to the fact that he had suddenly started coveting his neighbor. Per Persson wriggled closer.
“It’s almost one thirty,” said Johanna Kjellander. And wriggled in to meet him.