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 He