The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

^{CHAPTER 22} FATHER’S LAND

So I exit the Gates of Hell, carrying the slim body of my dear father, and ring the huge Golden Doorbell. God lets me wait a while. I guess my application has to be approved by the Committee of Die Hard Cases before it reaches his eyes.

Meanwhile Torture takes me over to his place, a huge white house on a hill close to his church, and puts me up in a window-free space in his basement, visited only by him and his wife. They tell me they have three kids. I can’t see them, nor can I hear them. Apparently they spend their days in silence, reading the Bible. Just like me. Every morning the preacher-man picks three chapters I’m supposed to read that day. “Or despisest thou the riches of his goodness and forbearance and longsuffering; not knowing that the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance?”

It’s Torture Therapy: Step 3.

Torture’s secret weapon is his wife, Hanna. She’s just as classic-looking as him: a burly woman with soft skin, nice leathery wrinkles, a biblical bust, and a pleasant voice. She moves silently about the house, wearing colorless T-shirts and long skirts, with long graying hair like a horse tail and not a stitch of makeup. If there were a TV show called Miss Mother Earth, she’d be visited with lights and lenses by the all-American camera crew. One has the feeling that her hair grows a foot a day and that she cuts it every night before going to bed. And that every morning she milks her breasts, putting what the household needs in the fridge, but donating the rest to the milk fund of CWCC, Career Women with Carbon Chests. She speaks English with an accent that goes a bit deeper than the Icelandic one. As if she belonged to some hot spring nation. She’s more like the mountain behind the man than “the woman behind the man.” She is the Christian country of care that her husband, the eyes-on-fire ambassador, represents in his clumsy way.

Hanna’s big drawback is her incredibly bad breath, which doesn’t really go with her incredibly good vibes. It probably stems from the biblical amount of frustration she’s had to swallow over the years. It can’t be easy being married to Torture.

Still, if she was the only woman on our platoon and we were stuck in the mountains for a month, I’d start dreaming about her on day seven.

Breakfast is a slice of homemade bread that I kiss before eating. And a glass of milk that I keep hoping is homemade as well. Lunch is exactly the same, but dinner is always meat. A lamb, a calf, or a foal. Some animal that Torture has slaughtered up in his garage, I’m sure. I’m back in the Old Testament. In the care of Sarah, wife of Abraham. My room has no windows, my bed is hard, my book is the Bible, my days are simple, and my nights are getting more and more peaceful.

Therapy seems to be working.

I’ve done away with a hundred hits. Only one remains. Every day my glasses-wearing guardian angel comes downstairs and listens for half an hour. His lust for violence is biblical. His crazy eyes have calmed a bit though. Or I have grown accustomed to them. He informs me about his outside-the-box methods.

“I have the black belt in both judo and karate. This is where I come from. I didn’t meet God until I met my wife, when I was thirty-five. I always say that I married God,” the bearded man says with a gentle laugh. I think I’m starting to understand his talk about circumcising the heart. It’s probably crucial when you’re married to God. He laughs a little more, adding: “I was lucky.” Somehow his laughter sounds a bit learned. As if he had learned it at Preaching School, to spice up his speeches with short chuckles here and there. “No. I’m only putting my knowledge and expertise to the service of the Lord. We have a saying in Icelandic that you have to fight evil with evil.”

By going through the disaster of my life, calmly and carefully, I’m slowly trying to bury it. Trying to bury my father properly. It’s like this artist once told me in some dingy little diner on the East Side: He only painted the picture he did not want to see ever again. “It’s just takin’ out the trash, man.” He was going through a tough divorce, he said, and only painted his ex-wife. Big horrible nudes.

For fifteen years I have carried this thing inside me. For fifteen years my dead father has been the unborn child I’ve been carrying in my womb. I guess that’s why I’ve always been on the fat side. By finally giving birth to it I can possibly stop living like an ostrich stuffed with shame. The delivery was painful as hell, but I had this great midwife: an Icelandic priest in a karate outfit. The newborn baby looks like this:

It was at the end of my first week in uniform. We’d volunteered for the big offensive out east, me, my father, and Dario, shortly after the fall of Vukovar. Our assignment was to cross the river Vuka.

But they didn’t want a whole family out in the front lines so they told me to stay behind. “Keep post and shoot every sucker you see!” I spent the cold night with my virgin rifle and chattering teeth, looking after three tents and a jeep. In the distance I could hear rifles arguing like angry insects. An occasional flame would light the leafless woods. My brother and father were out there doing their national duty in the cold forest mud. I was trying hard to distinguish the noise of our rifles from the Serbian ones, hoping the former would silence the latter. But of course we were all using the same fucking weapons. Somewhere not so far away some fat fucker was sleeping his ass off on a comfy mattress made from the profits of war.

Finally it started to snow. The flakes were thick and heavy, as if they were full of dirt already. I grabbed one with the tip of my tongue and it tasted like mud.

Close to daybreak, I heard a voice followed by some rustling of bushes. I reacted instantly, firing my first “manly” shot. I was surprised by my swift and sure reaction. Met with silence, it seemed to be a success. Still, I remained on the trigger for half an hour, for safety’s sake, watching the snowflakes fall on the rifle and my hand, building up a small snowdrift on the barrel, but melting away on my skin. Then I thought I heard that voice again, some low murmuring out in the bushes. I fired another shot. They did not fire back. But the faint murmuring didn’t stop. I remained still for another half an hour, firing a couple of more times, but the voice kept creeping through. So I crawled like an undercover snake to the bushes. Finally, I could make out a body lying buried in the naked branches, talking to himself. He seemed to be wearing our uniform. I cried out a warning before rushing through the shrubs, rifle first.

I found my father lying there with a leaking heart. The lower part of his body was covered in snow, as if his legs were dead already. His face was pale, and his eyes were as big as eggs that instantly broke upon seeing me. He managed to whisper the first half of my name, and then he was gone.

I shot my father and let him lie like a wounded deer out in the bushes for an hour, blabbing his life away. When I finally listened to him, he had only half a word left. “Tod…” The thing I became. It was like a fucking curse.

I accidentally blew off the second half of my name. And the better half of my life.

I stood there for some minutes, staring at the face so close to my own. Snow kept on falling, and I watched as the flakes slowly stopped turning into water on my father’s brow and cheeks and started building up small drifts around his screaming eyes. I was surprised how quickly his fatherly warmth turned cold. I couldn’t touch him. I just walked away from his body, leaving his big eyes open for interpretation.

I didn’t cry.

When they brought me the news of my father, they told me my brother Dario had also died a heroic death. As always, he was on the offensive when he met his destiny. He ran like a Jamaican sprinter towards the Serbian spear speeding towards his heart. It was pure Dario.

They said my father witnessed his death and that he instantly went nuts. He threw himself over his body and then suddenly started crying out my name, “Tomo! Tomo!” before running back to our post without his shotgun.

“Oh?” I said to my fellow soldiers, nodding a few times, as if they were telling me the results of some football games. “But, what about the battle?”

“We took the river bank. We hold the river bank now.”

I have seen that fucking river bank. It fucking sucks.