Kaleidoscope. English edition. Irina Bjørnø

was no air around her but some gas, made her close her eyes and calling her to sleep. Miss Pigli fell down on her side and at the same moment fell asleep – without pain, without violence. The floor under her went away, but she was fast asleep. When her body left this dark room on the transporter, the trusting heart of Danish Miss Pigli was still beating – as calmly as it did when she was alive.

      She was driven up to the man clothed in iron gloves and an apron – like a medieval knight in the last tournament. He picked up the pig carcass by a hook and suddenly thrust a tube, sharpened on one side like a knife into Miss Pigli’s chest. The tube was very sharp and went straight into the heart of Miss Pigli. From there, a stream of lively, warm blood of definitely dead piglet gushed out. The blood flowed into the special container and later black bloody pudding and medical drugs would be made from it.

      The Miss Piglet’s carcass went on for a further butchery. The transporter was long and there were about twenty people, each doing their job, transforming Miss Pigli’s body into meat, viscera, skin and bones. There was a packing machine at the end of the transporter and boxes, already packed with pieces of fresh pork.

      Most fresh meat and heads with eyes and noses were sent by air to Japan, where the price depended on the freshness of the meat and was reduced with each hour passed. The remaining parts were sent for processing with slower traffic to different parts of the world.

      Miss Pigli’s parts found themselves in Paris, London, Hong Kong, Berlin, Parma, and many other places of our planet. Even in the small shops of Damascus, with their leather goods, even in hospitals of Tel Aviv and Tehran, where the insulin was used to treat local Muslim people eating too many sweets, and therefore suffering from diabetes.

      Miss Pigli was omnipresent and indestructible, continuing to live her ‘lives’ in the bodies and on the skin of others. She kissed the lips of Parisian women and covered with hijab Syrian ones. She was keeping the lives of children in hospitals in Iraq. She warmed old legs of the Jews in Jerusalem with her skin. She was indestructible and eternal. Like the God who created her. Like the Allah himself, who cursed her.

      The Pilot

      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…