Lumen by Ben Pastor

don’t think I’m telling you anything you didn’t know, Father, by saying there were Polish ‘patriots’ hiding in one of the houses nearby. The SD flushed them out thoroughly on the day after the abbess died. Just before I came here today, I climbed to the top floor of that house over there.” Bora pointed at a tall building across the
street. “You were in the cloister, Father Malecki, and very visible to the naked eye. Even with my ordinance pistol I could have easily shot you through the head or put a sizeable dent in your frame.”
    Malecki didn’t appreciate the humour. “Good of you not to have done it.”
    “I had no reason, God forbid. As I suspected, any shot fired from the neighbourhood would have penetrated the abbess’s body at a very different angle. In other matters, I have come to admit there was a remarkable lack of bias in her prophecies. She stated facts that would or might happen, without taking an open nationalistic stance. That attitude might have irritated the Poles as well as others.”
    “‘Others’? You Germans, you mean.”
    “We’d find less blatant ways to dispose of politically troublesome church people. But let’s say yes, for the sake of impartiality.” Bora smiled. “Without sharing it, I understand the neutrality of a true saint in matters of political ideology. There’s no objective good or bad in the Godhead, if the Godhead transcends the mere game of relative opposites.”
    Malecki pricked up his ears. “That’s a dangerous speculation, Captain. Are you trying to equate the principle of evil with the principle of good?”
    “I’m saying they’re necessary value judgements, but value judgements none the less, time-bound and contingent.”
    “You confuse value judgements with values of obligation!”
    “Why, Father Malecki, it’s the Jesuits who say that the end justifies the means, and that all that leads Godwards is good. That kind of theology isn’t my cup of tea, but it might have been the Holy Abbess’s.”

23 November
    On Thursday, one month after the incident, Bora was riding with Hannes to the countryside west of Cracow with the nun’s murder in mind.
    With an eye to the rainy countryside, he pulled out of his map case a plan of Our Lady of Seven Sorrows convent. It was over fifty years old, he’d wrangled with the archbishop’s secretary to get it, and the newer buildings in the neighbourhood didn’t appear on it.
    Even though the interpreter did his best over the bumpy country lanes, it was impossible to read the map in the car without incurring the risk of tearing the flimsy paper. Bora put it away in despair.
    “Hannes, how far is it?” he asked.
    The jug-headed, dwarfish Silesian turned back just at the time necessary to drive into a hole that sent them both tumbling on the seats. “Another half-hour, Captain.”
    His first thorough interrogation of a Polish superior officer lay half an hour away, Bora thought, and he couldn’t get Mother Kazimierza out of his head.

26 November
    She was still on his mind on Sunday morning, when he and Retz were riding in the major’s requisitioned BMW back from breakfast at the officers’ club.
    Retz had been jabbering for some time, and now said, “You have to come, Bora. You’ve never been there, have you? It’s educational, and before they seal it off you have to see it.”
    He meant the Cracow ghetto, and whether or not Bora felt otherwise, Retz was already directing the driver towards it.

    “I have to buy a gift for someone. There are good deals to be had these days, and the Supply Service has carte blanche in visiting the Jewish quarter. Besides, where else would we find shops open on Sunday? You can help me out with the language.”
    It had snowed overnight, and uselessly the sun tried to shine after the men parked by the brick bulk of the Corpus Christi church. Rims of ice ringed the puddles in the street, and slushy remnants of snow heaped in the corners.
    “Look up the Polish word for