The Shoes of the Fisherman

by Morris West

  ‘I tried it, remember.’

  ‘With a baby who was still playing with dolls.’

  ‘And this time?’

  ‘First,’ said the old woman briskly, ‘we must get you out of the mess you’re in now, and this is where you make your first payment.’

  ‘How much?’ asked Corrado Calitri.

  ‘In money, nothing. In pride…a great deal, perhaps. You will have to approach the Rota and reverse all your previous testimony.’

  ‘How do I make them believe me?’

  The Princess Maria-Rina laughed again. ‘You repent. There will be joy in Heaven and in the Vatican when you come to repair the grave injustice that you have done to an innocent girl. You will be mending your ways, too, and they will be happy to have you back in the fold.’

  ‘I can’t do it,’ said Corrado Calitri heavily. ‘It’s a monstrous hypocrisy.’

  ‘It needn’t be,’ said the princess. ‘And even if it is, the Quirinale is worth a Mass, isn’t it?’

  In spite of himself Calitri smiled and laid an affectionate hand on the old woman’s cheek. ‘Sometimes, Aunt, I think you’re descended directly from the Borgias.’

  ‘I am,’ said the old princess,‘–but on the wrong side of the blanket!…Now…Will you do what I ask?’

  ‘I’ll have to think about it.’

  ‘You have thirty minutes, boy. At lunch they will want your answer and mine.’

  In a third-floor tenement, a stone’s throw from the Pantheon, Ruth Lewin was caught up in another of the daily dramas of Old Rome. From the evening angelus until nearly midnight, she had been working with a twenty-year-old wife to help her give birth to her first child. For the last two hours the doctor had been with her, a haggard young man who seemed far too embroiled in the drama for his own good, or for that of his patient.

  When finally they had dragged the child into the light with forceps, it was a monster – a tiny, whimpering deformity with a human head and a penguin body, whose feet and hands were attached directly to the trunk.

  Ruth Lewin stared at it in horror, and the young doctor swore savagely.

  ‘Sweet Jesus! Sweet suffering Jesus, look at it!’

  Ruth Lewin found herself stammering helplessly, ‘But why? What caused it? What…’

  ‘Shut up!’ said the doctor harshly. ‘Shut up and give me water and a towel.’

  Mechanically she did as he asked and watched in fascinated horror while he swaddled the deformed body, and then poured a few drops of water on the head and muttered the ritual words : ‘I baptize thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.’

  Ruth Lewin found voice again. ‘What’s going to happen now?’

  ‘That’s my business. You get the mother cleaned up.’

  Angry and near to tears she set about the menial task, bathing the torn young body, comforting the girl as she struggled back, moaning, into consciousness. When finally it was done and the young mother lay composed and decent on the pillows, Ruth Lewin looked up. ‘What now, Doctor?’

  He was standing by the table, his back towards her, fumbling with the wrapping that covered the child. He turned a stony face to her and said:

  ‘It’s dead. Get the father in.’

  She opened her mouth to ask a question, but no sound issued. She searched his face for an answer but his young eyes were blank as pebbles. He repeated the order. ‘Please call the father.’ Ruth Lewin went to the door and beckoned to a tall, muscular boy who was drinking a glass of wine and talking with a group of neighbours on the landing. ‘Will you come in, please?’

  Puzzled, the youth approached her with the neighbours at his heels. She drew him inside and closed the door against the other curious faces.

  The doctor confronted him, holding the swaddled body in his arms. ‘I have bad news for you, my friend. The baby was born dead.’

  The boy stared at him stupidly. ‘Dead?’

  ‘It happens sometimes. We don’t really know why. Your wife is well. She will be able to have other children.’

  Dumbly the boy moved towards the bed and bent crooning over the pale, half-conscious girl.

  ‘Let’s go,’ said the doctor abruptly. ‘I want to deliver this to the general hospital.’

  To the boy he said, ‘I have to take the body away. It’s the law. I’ll be back in the morning to see your wife, and give you a death certificate.’

  Neither the boy nor the wife seemed to hear him, and he went out carrying the small pathetic bundle, with Ruth Lewin following like a professional mourner. The crowd on the landing stared silently at their passing and then crowded into the door of the room, whispering excitedly among themselves.

  When they reached the street, the doctor laid the body of the child on the back seat of his car and slammed the door. Then he faced Ruth Lewin and said abruptly, ‘Don’t ask any questions. I’ll deliver the cadaver to the general hospital and make a report.’

  ‘Won’t there be an autopsy?’

  ‘No. Even if there were it would show nothing. The child died of asphyxiation…’

  In a single moment all his control seemed to drain away. His body was shaken with rigors, and his young face twisted as if with an intolerable pain. Suddenly in a fury of desperation he was pleading with her. ‘Don’t leave me now. For God’s sake don’t leave me. Come to the hospital and then…then let’s go somewhere. Somewhere sane. If I’m alone tonight I think I’ll go mad.’

  ‘Of course I’ll come with you. But you can’t blame yourself for this. You’re a doctor, you know these things happen every day.’

  ‘I know! Oh yes, I know.’ He tried to smile but it was more like a rictus of agony. ‘I’ll tell you something you don’t know. I’ve got twenty more babies to be born in the next eight weeks, and at least half of them are going to be like that.’

  ‘Oh God,’ said Ruth Lewin softly. ‘Oh God Almighty, why?…’

  In her quiet house under the haunted shadow of the Palatine he told her the why. He told her savagely and brusquely as if the whole paradox of the healing art – its half promise of perpetuity, its ultimate surrender to mortality – had proved too much for him.

  ‘…It’s a crazy thought…But medical pharmacy always seems to come with the elixir of life in one hand, and a phial of poison in the other…There are antibiotics that cure some people and kill others. There was the French drug that boiled men’s brains. There was Thalidomide that gave sleep, and then grew monsters in the womb. Now there’s another one. It came on the market about twelve months ago – a combination formula to prevent nausea in pregnancy, and reduce the danger of toxaemia…Three months ago we started to get first warnings from Germany about deformities induced by the drug…It looks like Thalidomide all over again, only this time everyone’s trying to hush it up…’

  He lay back in his chair, an image of dejection, fatigue, and pure misery. ‘I used to think I was a kind of medical apostle. I paid for drugs for poorer patients out of my own pocket. I bought the bloody stuff for that girl tonight, and for all the others in the quarter.’

  ‘There’s no hope that the other births will be different?’

  ‘Some of them will be normal. But the rest…’ He flung out his hands in passionate appeal. ‘What do I do? I can’t murder them all.’

  ‘First, you must never use that word again. I saw nothing tonight. I heard nothing.’

  ‘But you know, don’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know anything – except this. You mustn’t blame yourself, and you mustn’t ever again play God. There’s a kind of madness in that.’

  ‘Madness is right.’ He ran a shaking hand through his hair. ‘It was a madness tonight, and yet…What equipment do those people have to cope with such a situation? You know what they would have said if they’d seen that birth tonight? “Mal’ occhio!” The evil eye. Someone looked on the mother and laid a curse on her while the child was still in her womb. You have no idea of the power of superstition over the minds of these poor folk. What wou
ld they do with the child? Some few might care for it. Others might stifle it or try to throw it in the river. Some few might sell it to professional beggars who would make profit from its deformity…What about all the others still to come? What do I do about them? Sweet Jesus, what do I do?’

  Without warning he was racked by deep weary sobs, so that Ruth Lewin ran to him and threw her arms about him for comfort and soothed him with soft and helpless words. When he was calm at last, she made him lie down on her bed, and covered him with a blanket, and then sat beside him holding his hand until he lapsed into the mercy of sleep. Then she was alone – alone in the mournful hours, confronted by the ultimate mystery of life and death and pain, and the bloody stinking mess of the world.

  She had seen a monster come to birth as the result of an act of healing and kindness. She had seen murder done in the name of mercy and found her heart more than half approving the act. Here in little was the whole mighty tragedy of man, the whole bleak mystery of his existence and his destiny.

  Confronted by that pitiful embryo, how could one say that the cogs of creation did not slip out of kilter and grind into a monstrous confusion? How could one talk of Omnipotence and Omniscience and an ever-present Goodness? How could one find a soul or spirit in the weak, puling, fishlike creature, swimming blindly out of the fluid of the womb to affront the light of day?

  Where now were the foundations of faith, and hope, and love? Where was one vestige of sanity in this madhouse of sick, maimed, helpless victims of civilization? If there were none, then it was time to quit and be gone. The exit was easy enough and once she had almost passed through it. One could not go on blundering wildly through a hall of mirrors confused, disordered, purposeless, and afraid. If there were no resolution to the discord, then pack up the band and send it home. But if there were, then it must be soon, before the tattered nerves frayed themselves into a screaming horror.

  The weariness of the vigil crept into her bones, and she stretched out on the bed beside the sleeping man. But the contact of his body troubled her, and when he muttered and turned to her in sleep, she withdrew and went into the kitchen to make herself a cup of coffee.

  She remembered another night with another man in this same house, and how for a while she had glimpsed a beginning of light. She asked herself what he would have made of tonight’s affair, and what would have been his answer for the horrors that were still to come. Then the thought struck her, cold and reviving. This was his city. He had claimed it for his own. He had named himself as the shepherd and servant of its people…

  Ruth Lewin was still awake when the grey of the false dawn crept across the Palatine Hill. And before the city had rubbed the sleep out of its eyes, she had written her letter begging a private audience with Kiril the Pontiff.

  His own letter to the Church was already finished, and the Russian draft was in the hands of the translators. Now that it was done, he felt strangely empty, oppressed by a sense of futility and frustration.

  While he was writing he had felt seized as never before by the power of the Word, by the conviction of its inevitable fruitfulness in the hearts of good men. Yet now he was faced with the cold fact that without the grace of God – and men co-operating with the grace of God – the seed might lie fertile but fruitless for a hundred years. Among the millions of believers who professed an obedience to the Word, and to his authority as its Supreme Preacher, how many were there from whom he could exact a full performance?

  He saw all too clearly what would happen to his letter. It would be read within a few months in every Catholic pulpit in the world. He would receive acknowledgements from bishops pledging their loyalty to his counsels and promising to carry them out as best they could. But between the promise and the fulfilment stood a hundred obstacles: shortage of men, shortage of money, shortness of sight and courage sometimes, and the natural resentment of the man at the point of action, who wondered why he was being asked to make so many bricks with so little straw.

  The best one could hope was that, here and there, the Word would take fire in the soul of a man, would brighten his eyes with vision, and set him striding out to achieve a divine impossible. For himself he knew there was no other choice but to go on preaching, teaching, urging to action, and to wait, empty of all but hope, on the promise of the Paraclete.

  There was a knock on his door, and the Maestro di Camera entered to inquire whether His Holiness was ready to begin the morning’s audiences. Kiril glanced briefly at the list and saw that the first name was that of Ruth Lewin.

  Her letter had troubled him deeply because it had reached him in a moment of temptation – the temptation to immerse himself in the political aspects of the Church and to challenge, by a display of power, those men like Leone who made no secret of their disagreements with him. There were those, he knew, who found his encyclical something of a novelty. It was too personal they felt, too specific. It was too openly critical of past policy. It called for new modes of action in the training of the clergy and in the direction of missionary education. For himself, the man at the top, it was all too easy to thrust his authority down the throats of his subordinates and stifle their criticism by a summons to religious obedience.

  Ruth Lewin’s letter reminded him that the real battleground was elsewhere – in lonely rooms and solitary hearts, among folk who had no theology but only an intimate and frightening familiarity with the problems of living and dying. Ruth Lewin represented a contact with such people. If he could make the faith efficacious for her, then whatever the outcome of his pontificate, he would not have failed utterly.

  When she was ushered into his presence, he greeted her warmly and then, without preamble, addressed himself to the subject:

  ‘I had you called as quickly as I could because I know that you must be suffering a good deal.’

  ‘I’m grateful to Your Holiness,’ she told him in her blunt fashion. ‘I have no right to bother you, but this is a terrible affair.’

  ‘For you?’ asked Kiril quizzically.

  ‘For me it calls everything into question. But I want to talk about the others first.’

  ‘What others?’

  ‘The women who are going to give birth to these children. Most of them, I believe, are quite unprepared for what is going to happen.’

  Kiril’s lean face clouded, and a nerve began throbbing under the scar on his cheek. ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘We…that is, the mothers need help. They need a place where they can leave these children if they’re not capable of looking after them themselves. The children have to be cared for. I’m told the expectation of life is short, but they will need a special kind of care – a special kind of loving.’

  ‘You think the Church can provide it?’

  ‘It has to,’ said Ruth Lewin flatly. ‘If it means what it teaches.’ She flushed, understanding that she had committed an indiscretion; then she hurried into an explanation. ‘I’m a woman, Your Holiness. I asked myself the other night what I would do, how I would feel, if I were the mother of such a child. I don’t know. I don’t think I should behave very well.’

  Kiril the Pope gave a small wintry smile of approval. ‘I think you underrate yourself. You have more courage than you realize…Tell me. How many of these births are there likely to be in Rome?’

  ‘We expect about twenty in the next two months. There may be many more.’

  He sat for a moment, silent and thoughtful. Then he gave a crooked, boyish grin and said:

  ‘Well! Let’s see what sort of authority I have in the Church.’ He picked up the telephone and dialled the number of the Secrecy of the Sacred Congregation of Religious.

  Crisply he explained the situation and then asked, ‘Which of our nursing nuns in Rome are best equipped to look after these children?’

  There was an indistinguishable clatter of talk from the other end of the line, and Ruth Lewin saw the Pontiff’s mouth tighten in anger. He said sharply, ‘I know it is difficult. Everything is difficult. But thi
s is an urgent work of charity, and it must be done. If money is needed we will provide it. It will be your business to find the accommodation and the nursing aid. I want it arranged within the next twenty-four hours.’

  He put down the phone with a bang and said testily, ‘These people live in a little world of their own. One has to bounce them out of it into reality…Anyway you take it for granted that we shall provide care and hospital accommodation for those who need it. You will be informed by letter and telephone of the details. Then I shall have an announcement published in the Osservatore and circulated to the Roman press.’

  ‘I’m very grateful to Your Holiness.’

  ‘I’m grateful to you, young woman. Now, what can I do for you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Ruth Lewin unhappily. ‘I’ve been asking myself the same question all the way to the Vatican. Why do these things happen? Why does a good God let them happen?’

  ‘If I could tell you that,’ said Kiril the Pontiff soberly, ‘I’d be God myself. I don’t know, though I sometimes wish I did. You mustn’t imagine that the mystery of Faith is any simpler for me than it is for you. The Act of Faith is an act of acceptance – not an explanation. I’ll tell you a story about myself…When I was first taken to prison it was in the bad time in Russia. There was much torture, much cruelty. One night a man was brought back to my hut who had been handled more brutally than any other I had ever seen. He was in agony, and he kept crying over and over again for someone to kill him and put him out of his misery. I tell you truly I was tempted. It’s a terrible thing to see so much suffering. It degrades and terrifies those who see it but cannot alleviate it. That’s why I can understand, though I cannot condone, what your doctor friend did. It seems almost as though one would be bestowing a divine mercy with the gift of death. But one is not divine, one cannot dispense either life or death.’

  He broke off and seemed for a moment to sink back into a private contemplation.

  Ruth Lewin prompted him gently. ‘What was the end of the story, Holiness?’