by Ben Pastor
“A passionate posture, indeed.”
“She could also kneel for two straight days with her hands clasped in prayer, sometimes indoors, sometimes in the garden. Once apparently she knelt through the night by the cloister well, with snow falling on her and in a freezing temperature. According to Father Malecki’s notes she suffered no consequences, not even frostbite.”
Nowotny finally lit the cigarette. “What are you really thinking of?”
“That it’s a shame we haven’t a better record of her ecstatic phenomena. She didn’t always bleed, but one wonders what else went on physically and otherwise.”
With a good-natured tilt of the head, Nowotny emitted smoke out of his mouth. “Pay attention the next time you have an orgasm. It isn’t that different.”
17 November
“Who kept a log of the abbess’s prophecies, and do we have her last one?”
The time had come for this inquiry. All the neat arguments Father Malecki had planned to use in order to refuse Bora access to the document seemed immaterial.
“Sister Irenka took them down in shorthand. Would you like to come to the library and ask her yourself? She speaks some German.”
Sister Irenka stood less than five feet tall, a slight woman with thick glasses and a pointed, mousy little face. Her hands peeked out from the sleeves fingering a rosary, small and nervous, white and waxy, like the hands of nuns Bora had seen before.
“I speak very little German,” she said emphatically. “Very little German. Please speak slowly.”
Eventually she pulled down from a shelf a voluminous log, whose pages were covered with the flowery sweeps of shorthand notes. At the top right corner of each new note, the date was duly marked. The latest in order of time had been taken the day before the abbess’s death. Sister Irenka reread it to herself, and then exchanged a nervous look with Father Malecki, who sat by the library table. “Nothing important that day,” she began by saying.
Bora ignored her and questioned the priest. “Why doesn’t she want to tell me? What does it say?”
“I don’t read shorthand.”
“Ask her, then. I’ll have someone else translate it if you don’t.”
An animated discussion ensued between Malecki and the nun. She sounded defensive and unwilling, even spiteful in her reticence, but she was possibly only scared.
“Tell her I don’t care if it’s political,” Bora said in the end. “What’s the gist of it?”
Malecki chose his words. “According to Sister Irenka, it prophesies that five years minus three weeks from that day, the ‘Great City on the Vistula’ will be laid waste.”
Bora had to make an effort not to smile. “Warsaw? I thought we’d done that already, and besides - five years from now? The war will have long been over by 1944! Is that all it says? Nothing about her own death?”
Again Malecki consulted with the nun, who reluctantly began flipping pages backwards. Having found what she sought, she told Bora, “On God’s birth - how you say, at Christmas, last Christmas - the Mother Superior says, ‘God will call me through my name.’ I ask her what it means, panie kapitanie, and she says, ‘When I die, it will be through my name.’”
Bora glanced at the priest. “Why, what does ‘Kazimierza’ mean? Something to do with peace, right? And what was her name before she became a nun?”
Malecki shook his head. “I wouldn’t put undue import on such a vague message.”
“I haven’t much else to go by, Father.”
“The abbess’s lay name was Maria Zapolyaia. She was related to the royal line of the Batorys, and took her religious name from the patron saint of Poland, the son of King Casimir IV. And you’re not far from the truth, ‘Kazimierz’ in Polish means he who preaches peace.”
“Well, she wasn’t killed through peace and she wasn’t killed through preaching.”
That night Bora went to bed early. Until about ten o’clock he overheard the chatter from the portable radio in Retz’s room, and either he fell asleep afterwards or the radio was turned off. The apartment was wrapped in stillness when he awoke.
His watch marked midnight. Bora adjusted the pillows beneath his head and stared into the darkness. Why had he awakened, anyway? He was tired enough. Unwittingly, he began reviewing the events of the day, from a bloody confrontation in the village of Liszki, where partisans had been found and disposed of - Colonel Schenck’s term - to Schenck himself, who wanted a list of alleged rapes against ethnic German women, by age, location and number of existing children.
Bora turned on his stomach, and as he did so, he thought he heard a sound like suffocated laughter, but it was probably only Retz’s turning on the bed springs. Recalling how Malecki had told him with a straight face that he’d won several amateur boxing championships in Chicago, he smiled to himself. At the mention of it, he’d actually laughed. “Why, Father,” he’d said, “do you plan to knock sense into me?”
The muffled noise came again, and this time his neck stiffened. He knew what it was this time. Not again, he thought. But he listened, holding his breath.
Retz’s room shared a wall with his own. Through the partition, Bora more distinctly heard Retz speaking under his breath. A woman’s whispered tone came in response, trying hard not to break out in laughter.
Bora was tempted to believe that Ewa Kowalska had arrived while he slept. He couldn’t positively identify her voice because he hadn’t heard her speak long enough, and it was difficult to tell from giggles and whispers. Still, he didn’t think Ewa was one to giggle, so it must be one of the others.
Suddenly he was very warm and uncomfortable. He sat up, totally alert. Unmistakably Retz’s groans came through, accompanied by the rhythmic squeak of springs, and for all his trying to get angry, Bora grew aroused instead.
Noiselessly he left the bed. He groped in the dark for his breeches, put them on, then wore his collarless shirt and buttoned it. The repeated thumps of the bedstand against the wall of the next room were beginning to make him sweat. He cracked the door and slipped out, making his way down the hall to the library. There he turned the light on and locked himself in.
Hands driven deep in his pockets, he paced back and forth for a while, with his bare feet meeting now the coolness of the parquet floor, now the soft bristle of the carpet. Not thinking was the best policy, so he did his best not to think. Not even about the times when he, too, after all - Ines was her name, and she squealed when he tickled her. But Spain was a different matter, and civil wars allow other freedoms. All around him, shelves lined the walls and buckled under the weight of books with German and Polish titles, and the occasional Yiddish one. By and by Bora relaxed his pacing. He’d noticed several familiar titles, classics, contemporary fiction, books on art and geography. He even recognized a series of Renaissance studies published at the turn of the century by his grand-father’s firm.
Between two shelves, a framed watercolour showed a rugged, woody mountain scene, identified in pencil as “In the Pieniny Mountains”. Silhouettes of Heine and of Felix Mendelssohn faced each other in black oval frames below. Between two other shelves, a case hung alone, containing a triple row of insects under glass.
It was impossible not to think. Bora’s mind kept returning to Retz and whomever he’d brought home for the third evening in as many days, and what he’d do tomorrow, whether he should talk to him or just go to work. Restlessly he walked to the case of pin-impaled beetles on the facing wall, and then back again.
It was not at all a matter of sanctimony, either. Not at all. He wasn’t puritanical about sex, in fact it was because he wasn’t, that - no. It was an issue of propriety, let alone elementary concern for security. Perhaps some resentment, because he didn’t have his wife here. Benedikta, who had erased every other experience, who was the ideal lover. No, no. It was plain concern for security.
How had the woman been allowed upstairs after hours, anyway? He’d have to check with the doorkeeper tomorrow. Bora stared at the Renaissance studies, but i
t was no use. The image came to him of his wife slipping out of her briefs under him, eager to be made love to, wet and eager. God, let me not think of Dikta right now! Bora didn’t find enough saliva in his mouth to swallow.
On the shelf right in front of him, Garcia Lorca’s verses, dripping with female blood and gentle sweat, were off-limits; he had better seek the Greek classics lined up next to Latin poetry, or contemporary German fiction. Bora knew Thomas Mann was a forbidden author, but he grabbed one of his novels from the shelf and with it in hand he sank in the armchair. The first line began, “He was an unassuming young man…”
18 November
It would be a cloudy day, and it’d probably snow. Father Malecki exercised in front of the open window, feeling the bracing coldness of dawn. His tendons stretched and muscles bulged in the lifting of weights, not bad for a fifty-six-year-old man. For many years, every morning he’d recited the rosary while exercising, knowing exactly that he’d lifted weights and done push-ups sixty times plus the litanies. Gloria Patri - one - et Filio - two - et Spiritui Sancto - three. Gloria Patri…
When the time came, he thought, he’d try to sit in on Bora’s interrogation of the nuns. The choice of a new abbess was being delayed due to the circumstances, and they now depended on him, the American priest, for decisions.
Malecki admitted he’d never held so much sway in Chicago, where his parish of St Stanislaus, huge, damp and soot-black, sat like a widow among the workers’ houses and factories of the neighbourhood. Much study and application had brought him this far. Who knows, he might end up going to Rome next, and speak to the Pope about the Holy Abbess of Cracow.
Breathing hard, he put down the weights for the last time - “A-men!” - and began running in place.
In the library, Bora spent his first waking seconds wondering how he’d come to be in an armchair with Mann’s book on his lap. He’d read as far as the chapter entitled “Politically Suspect”, and must have drifted off then.
His first care was to get to the bathroom in advance of Retz, who took for ever. When he passed by, no noises came from the major’s room. In the hallway, a woman’s raincoat hung from the rack, and rubber galoshes looked like sleeping mice beneath it.
Bora made no special effort to be quiet at this hour. He showered and shaved at leisure. He was blotting his face with the towel when he heard the clacking of a woman’s heels in the hallway. There was a pause, and then the front door was opened and closed.
Less than a minute later, Retz’s sleepy voice reached him through the door. “How long do you have yet to go, Bora?”
4
18 November
First thing in the morning, Colonel Schenck said, “Get ready. We’re going to the university to carry out the directives of the 15 September memorandum.”
Bora felt a pang of discomfort, because he remembered the memorandum well. He pulled out a file on manuscripts and documents to be seized from the university archives, and followed the colonel out of headquarters. “We’re to add to the list whatever is written in German or refers to Germany,” Schenck was telling him. “You read Latin, so I expect you to supply me with on-the-spot advice on worthwhile additions.”
It no longer rained but it was cold outside. When Bora glanced back, the brown-and-yellow façade of Headquarters - the former Economic Academy - loomed with its statuary over the dying flowerbeds. Before stepping into the staff car, Schenck signalled for the driver of an army truck parked by the kerb to follow. The moment Bora sat by him in the car, he said, “Well, what are you finding out about the murder?”
Bora expected the question. From the briefcase resting on his knees he took out a batch of neatly typewritten pages.
“These are testimonials by all the sisters, regarding the afternoon hours of the day Mother Kazimierza died. Not all of them have checkable alibis, as was expected: one nun will vouch for the other, and we obviously have no witnesses from outside the community. Sister Jadwiga is the only one who dealt with the repairmen. According to her, they were still working at the ceiling inside the chapel when the victim died. No shot was heard, she made me understand, but on the other hand the men were making plenty of noise by drilling and hammering. And of course when Colonel Hofer and I arrived, the tanks were rumbling outside.”
Schenck gave back the papers without reading them, listening intently. He had lost an eye fighting in Madrid two years earlier, and one could not tell except that the left iris, icily grey like the other, had a vitreous splendour when the light struck it.
“So. How many workers were there?”
“Three. Some time after sixteen hundred hours - Sister Jadwiga couldn’t be more precise than that - one of the men left the chapel to get a different bit for the drill. The toolbox had been left in the sacristy, and he was gone for about fifteen minutes.”
“Fifteen minutes to get a drill bit?”
“That’s what Sister Jadwiga said. She admits she grew impatient and then nervous about his absence, because silver candlesticks and monstrances are kept in the sacristy. After a few minutes she went to see what the man was up to. She found him eating bread and cheese by the toolbox. She says she ostentatiously checked the shelf of silver to make him aware of her concern. Nothing was missing, and she thought no more of it until I asked.”
“Well, what does it prove?”
Bora placed on the briefcase a hand-drawn sketch of the chapel area. “The chapel is behind the main convent church, which faces the street and can be entered from it. No access is possible to the chapel from without the convent. Here, see - there is a doorway that leads from the sacristy to a corridor. One of the windows in the corridor looks over a low wall that connects the chapel-sacristy complex to the main body of the convent, where the cloister is. It took me less than two minutes to reach the low wall from the chapel, then the roof of the cloister, and from there I easily gained access to the upper balcony of the cloister itself, and slipped down to the inner garden.”
“You presuppose the man knew the abbess would be in the cloister.”
“Everyone knew. The abbess prayed alone in the cloister between the canonical hours of sext and nones - one to four in the afternoon - and seldom did she break this seclusion. That’s why the workers were told to proceed with repairs indoors during that time.”
The staff car and truck stopped to idle at a crossroads, where military police were directing a column of half-tracks down Copernicus Street. The rumble on the sidewalk forced the officers inside to raise their voices to continue to talk.
“What hope is there of tracing any of the men?”
Bora shook his head. “They’d all sneaked out by the time the ambulance came, at seventeen hundred hours. I didn’t know of their presence then, nor did I get a useable description of them, unless ‘taller than the other’ or ‘dark-haired’ is sufficient to identify them. I began enquiring with construction companies in the city, but from what I understand the nuns relied on independent journeymen and even makeshift hirelings. In this case, the nuns asked the priest of the Jesuit church down the street to find them a crew.”
“Well, what about the priest?”
“His name is Father Rozek. He’s been detained by the SS since the rock-throwing incident. So far, I’ve been unable to find out even where he’s kept.”
The last half-track rolled by, trailing a smudgy smell. No sooner had the car started again, than Schenck gave the driver a sharp order to stop.
“By the kerb, you idiot. There.”
Under Bora’s surprised glance, he strode out and made for a plain young woman waiting on the sidewalk holding one child to her chest and another by the hand. Gallantly Schenck saluted, took her under his arm and escorted her across the street to the Planty Park. Having distributed a couple of starchy pats on the children’s muffled heads, he walked back to the car.
He neither smiled nor seemed more kindly disposed because of the interruption.
“Do you have children?” he asked Bora.
“Not
yet, sir.”
“I’ve been married six years. I have four children and my wife is pregnant.” Schenck waved his glove for the driver to take Sienna Street into the Old City. Looking over his shoulder to make sure the truck followed, he said, “You ought to start a family as soon as possible, Bora,” and then fixed his bright, real and artificial eyes on his colleague. “What about the alibis of the other nuns?”
“Well, we know about Sister Jadwiga, with the workers in the chapel. If we assume the abbess was murdered - say - between fourteen and sixteen hundred hours, during that time ten of the sisters were gathered in the refectory for choir practice. Two were apparently cooking the evening meal in the kitchen. The eldest, Sister Teresa, lay sick in bed, and is deaf besides. Two postulants were whitewashing the walls in the cellar, and Sister Irenka had left early to accompany an ailing novice to the dentist—”
“True?”
“True. I checked.”
Schenck grinned. “Go on.”
“We’re down to the porter nun, who hardly ever leaves her post. The walls are thick, and I doubt she’d hear much that went on anywhere else in the convent. As I see it, the sisters’ alibis are reasonable, but that’s as far as it goes.”
“Hofer said it was half-past sixteen hundred hours when you arrived at the nuns’.”
“It was thirty-five past the hour. The body was lukewarm. I can’t say more than this regarding the hour of death. Doctor Nowotny reminds me that within five minutes of being exposed to the air, blood begins to coagulate, and a cadaver’s temperature only decreases one degree Celsius in two hours’ time. I touched her wrist, but frankly couldn’t tell how long she’d been dead. The doctor also explained that hysteria” - Bora could kick himself for blushing as he said it - “sometimes affects body temperature, so - being untrained-I shouldn’t count on that detail.”