Читать книгу Kaleidoscope. English edition - Irina Bjørnø - Страница 6

Carl was born and lived in cold, rainy Scandinavia. He was blond, blue-eyed, and tall with a trained athletic, muscular body. He was a pilot in international Scandinavian airline. He earned good money and loved his work. He travelled all around the Globe and visited almost every corner of our small, but comfortable for life, planet.

He was part of the international brotherhood of pilots, who met each other in the bars of five-star hotels, where pilots stop at night, resting between their flights. In the bars they drank – beer, whiskey, soda and exchanged flight news. English was the language used to communicate in with a special pilot accent.

Many pilots knew each other by face, some even by name, from years of stopping in the same hotels, where the windows were tightly shut and could not be opened – sealed like the windows in airplanes, locking out almost all the noise around the never sleeping airports. But pilots were accustomed to these strange, artificial conditions of life and felt great in these elite five-star night shelters offering first class breakfast.

Carl was married and had three children – blond, blue-eyed Scandinavian pretty babies – nice and slender. His wife worked as a priest (or perhaps more correctly – priestess) in the Protestant Church after her theological education at the university and specialisation as a Protestant priest.

She read sermons on Sundays and holidays for parishioners who believed in the Protestant God. She dressed in a black long dress with a white starched collar that made her head, with her short slightly curly hair, look like a cauliflower on a plate. She handed out to the parishioners small, round, crispy wafers in their mouth as a sign of the renunciation of all the sins they accumulated over the week, or for a longer period, and gave them sweet port wine to drink in silver glasses, wishing that they forget their sinful deeds forever.

But they came again and again, maybe because they forgot about their promises to God, or maybe because they liked port wine. They sang Protestant hymns together with great enthusiasm, calling to the Protestant God in their churches and hoping that he would like their songs.

The church had a separate house where the family lived, the pilot along with his wife-priestess – for free, as a supplement to her professional activities. Priest in Scandinavia receive a fixed salary, not from God or the parishioners who visited God’s house very irregularly, but from the state, which through the tax system ensured the existence of a state religion with the church buildings, priests (both sexes) and their families, limited official support only by only one, Protestant God, as reflecting of the Scandinavian system of believes.

Protestant churches – are simple, painted white with primitive altars without the magnificent gold ornaments and statues that are present in the Catholic or Orthodox churches – have been more affordable for the small Scandinavian country with socialist orientation and the most developed democracies of majorities.

Priests annually have had a three-week vacation from God, which the pilot family spent in their cabin in the woods, not far from the sandy beach. The pilot ran in the mornings along the beach, preparing his lean body for new overloads during the flight, and his wife spent her days lying in the sun trying to forget about God and the parish. She devoted all of her free time to life in the woods, picking berries and cooking sweet jam from forest raspberries.

They inherited the forest cabin from her father, also a priest, who had accumulated enough money in the service of the Protestant God to afford the small house in the woods, not far from the sandy beach.

So they lived. The pilot flying around the globe, carrying passengers and their baggage, his wife served in the church, following the traditions of the reformer Martin Luther – who loved to drink beer and did not want to follow the Catholic celibacy. Their children were well brought up, polite, and attend a private school. Everything was fine, worked out in detail. And then one day…