Gábor Szappanos Crime and Punishment in Heaven: Modern Hungarian Short Stories Translated from the Hungarian by Peter Ortutay

Gábor Szappanos

Crime and Punishment in Heaven

Translated from the Hungarian

by Peter Ortutay

Smashwords Edition

Copyright@Peter Ortutay

2019

Gábor Szappanos:

Crime and Punishment in Heaven

The last cheer-leader with her long thighs in silken stockings, in red miniskirt and white boots, burst like a balloon, too. There were exactly twelve of them. And they all looked so realistic… and so desirable, too. St. Peter made a deep sigh at experiencing the new failure, frowned with his white brows resentfully and accusingly and looked with his pungent and blue eyes at the designer, at the great heavenly magician Albert Einstein. Since the Second Advent of Christ time has been passing by with cheerless monotony and they had to enjoy themselves somehow in the heavenly Jerusalem. It was not particularly comforting either if the Redeemer himself appeared on the scene because in such cases He tenderly but categorically hauled Peter over the coals asking him why he was juggling there all the time, he’d better alit on the Earth that was made climatically and demographically livable, a new earthly Paradise actually, and do some useful work there. He added that Peter would have it that if he started working, for instance cultivated a beautiful little garden, cut roses, or returned to his original job, which was fishing, he would not need the sight of those cheer-leaders made of the wandering atoms of very sparse ether, of light- and quantum-particles and existing just for a couple of seconds. 

But Peter was not especially dead nuts on any work. Not even in his earthly life, and especially not in the Heaven. Back then he preferred mooning about in Galilee with Jesus to fishing in the Lake Kinneret. He preferred loafing about in the fields, stealing the ripe spikes and nibbling the corns and listening to what the Lord said although he hardly understood anything out of what He taught. He had no inkling what the parables were about. He did not understand why Jesus had chosen him, and all the other disciples, but if once He had chosen them, why could He not speak to them in a language that they understood! All his work with Jesus was a failure. Then the end topped everything. It was most humiliating: despite his resolutions he denied the Lord thrice. He did not even understand why Jesus called him the rock. He was just a grey pebble you could use for playing ducks and drakes on water – he was a simple and weak character. 

But somehow Jesus was always permissive with him. Sure, Peter thought, why not be permissive since that was the essence of Christian forgiveness. Even now, in the Heaven, when with the support of his scholarly friends whom he gathered around himself he tried to produce matter out of nothing actually. By matter he meant things which looked like attractive women. Einstein and his team of particle physicists, however, did not even promise more to Peter than that they could create visible material for a couple of seconds, but Peter would hardly have time to touch them because due to the laws of physics and Heaven they dissolve almost immediately. So Peter had no chance to grab hold of attractive cheer-leaders’ thighs, but still he had insisted that the scholars presented him this illusion.

Oh, vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas! What vanity and superfluous trials! Peter despised himself for being beset by women and he despised himself for his earlier fornication when he had taken toll in kind from the prettier pretties entering the Heaven. Back then, long before the Second Advent, the deceased arrived more or less in their bodily essence and the laws were then much milder in the Heaven. As the womenfolk easier to look at arrived, Peter instantly began to fondle his snow white beard with a glitter in his eyes and committed them on the spot. The freshly ordained nuns, the virgins, the young women, the Madonna Lilies, had only just entered the gate and found themselves on the bed woven from light, and even before waking up they were already disgraced. Suddenly they did not even quite know where they had got to, to the Hell or to the Heaven. Or perhaps to the Purgatory where this was the Baptism of Fire? That time Peter had a body, too. 

As a matter of fact the guard of the keys to Heaven was a satyr. And it was not only Peter who was a man of pleasure, before the Second Advent he also had disciples in a bad sense of course. If there was something he had to leave the gate for, two angels were the substitutes. They were supposed to control the newcomers, i.e. to ascertain posteriorly whether they had come to the appropriate place, if it was not a mistake for them to come here, and they were supposed to guide them, in short to inform them what life was like here above: they had to explain to the newcomers that here in the Heaven everything was going on in the mind only, it happened what one had in his thoughts and it was not the earthly material rules that governed the world here. 

The angels by nature in physical sense have no sex, but these two, however, fell in love with each other, and it often happened that they retired into the room made of rainbow and light and had a hanky-panky for quite a while in the bed while people were just flowing slowly or thronging through the gate like sheep into a pen. When Peter learned this disorderliness, he could say nothing. He could not keelhaul them since they also knew something about their Superior’s deeds. The only question was why Christ did not ever interfere as He knew about everything. He really did not understand the Lord. He at least admitted to himself and the Redeemer, too, that he was unable to control his physical desires and that he could not resist temptation, so Christ did not have to choose him. He knew very well what he was like. He was by no means a rock, but rather… rather sand in a desert that changes its form as the wind blows.

Einstein wanted to meet the Redeemer and have a good talk with him about the great things of the world, about the origin and the age of the Universe, about the possible limits of the God’s and His only Son’s power in the world, and among other things also about the question that if there was life similar to ours on some far away planet, God’s laws were valid for it, too – in short about lots of such exciting questions in which natural science and theology meet. Further on he was very curious to know that if God had been part and parcel of Genesis, why he made such impossible laws in quantum-physics which were totally incomprehensible and illogical even for the Founding Father of Relativity. 

Peter drew him and the other scholars into producing this hopeless but grand scientific achievement, cheer-leaders’ making, by promising to them that he would make them heard by the Redeemer once, but up till now this did not happen. When Einstein, getting tired of the long waiting, once called Peter to account for his promise, the guard of the gate answered that he was not late for anything since there was still the whole eternity before them.

Well, Peter, you just wait… – hissed Einstein hardly audibly and disappeared into the thick white light.

Then a humongous long time passed, but Peter did not lift a hand to put anything across. He had no squint intention in his head in this sense, he was simply too lazy to do anything at all. 

Then one day – or more precisely saying in any drop of the endless and unmeasurable eternity-ocean which was as nice and boring as all the rest – Peter, as was his wont, was just pondering on his own littleness, insignificance and unsteadiness, when all of a sudden it flashed through his mind how long ago it was that Einstein asked him, demanded him for being admitted to the presence of the Lord. This of course did not move him to do something urgently in order to promote the matter. So that he did not even deal with this buzzing thought for long till all of a sudden he became aware of a frightening thing, some curious queer noise! 

One is supposed to know that it was Doomsday when the Lord Jesus showed His most frightening face for the last time: spearheading the heavenly armies on a huge white horse and in a red, blood-soaked cloak He appeared on the sky and pulled out a sward from His throat. That enormous hurly-burly, amazing heavenly and earthly phenomena and all kind of extraordinary revelations made the Lord gorgeous and frightening, primarily for sinners of course. For the just it was rather beatific, because they knew what this all was for and elated with joy acquitted that what they had waited for so long befell. For as a matter of fact on Doomsday Peter was terrifically frightened because he did not know at all where he would get at this very final account. Without avail was he officially the Lord’s first earthly procurator, he knew himself enough not to be sure of himself, of whether he would get to the to Heaven or not…more precisely that he would remain there. His job was no longer needed: on Doomsday everybody resurrected and on the same day they either went to Hell or back to Heaven. Since everybody’s nature changed and became sexless as a matter of fact like the angels, child-birth became impossible. All the resurrected got stuck for good in the age in which they were on Doomsday. Peter was washed up for fornication because womenfolk, ugly or pretty, no longer came. Nobody came. So the question what the Lord’s decision would be emerged rightly in his mind. He was consoled by the fact only that Jesus pardoned the woman who committed adultery, too, saved her from being stoned to death, although He made her promise not to sin any more. Peter did not know if the woman continued to sin after Jesus had gone away or not, but he deemed it most likely that not because Jesus always had an extraordinary effect on women tortured by life who sort of drank His words, listened to Him, and many became His loyal disciples. Peter with his common sense, as a matter of fact, was unable to understand how Jesus could resist the woman who adored Him enraptured and would be ready to fulfill all His wishes. He should have had only to flick to them and they would have jumped at once. Maybe at night at the camp-fire He had flicked and they jumped only he, Peter, did not ever know anything about it. Zeal always overcame him very quickly as simple carefree people in general. Also in that case when the Lord asked him and two other disciples of his explicitly to keep their eyes peeled in that Garden of Gethsemane – but didn’t he fall asleep, thrice at that?! Remorse pricked him for that, too. 

As he got in his reminiscences as far as that he shivered because he heard the noise again,