Lumen by Ben Pastor Page B

stolidity. “With Frau Kowalska?”
    “Why, no! Not Ewa. Ewa’s all right. She’s really all right in certain respects. No, much younger. Afresh little piece. God, how wonderful women are at twenty!” Retz couldn’t detect any sign of agreement or disagreement in Bora, so he said, “Satisfy a curiosity of mine, Bora: what do you do after hours? That is, other than playing Schumann or studying Russian. How do you keep yourself, you know, well-balanced?”
    “I drive around, Major.”
    Retz failed to understand the irony in Bora’s words. “Well, you ought to do something else other than driving around Cracow. Doesn’t it get tedious dealing with nuns day in, day out?”

    “I do as I am ordered.”
    The boy with the packages stopped before they came back to the Corpus Christi church, which marked the west end of the ghetto. Retz’s BMW waited north of the church, and, seeing the officers come, the driver opened the back door for them. The major tossed a coin to the boy, who put the packages in Bora’s hands and ran off with all the speed his clogs allowed.
    Bora handed the packages to the driver. The visit had depressed him, though he was careful not to give that impression to Retz. Retz took his place in the BMW and said, “You should take life less seriously.”

27 November
    Sister Jadwiga dried her hands with the rough cloth of her apron. She was a large nun with straggly grey hairs on her chin, something like a sparse beard coming out of prominent moles.
    “ Niet. ” She spoke Russian fluently, but still wouldn’t talk to Bora about the abbess. Bora suddenly came to the point of losing his temper, visibly enough for Father Malecki to interject a few words of advice, which the nun took in sullenly.
    “She doesn’t want to talk because she has something to hide,” Bora burst out. “She’s either seen something or heard something and doesn’t want to spill it out. I can tell her in Russian or you can tell her in Polish, Father. I will hear what the matter is!”
    Malecki showed that he understood. “ Siostra Jadwiga.” He began a stern homily that lasted a full five minutes. Bora didn’t understand it and didn’t care. He paced back and forth until the curt defensive replies from the nun grew longer and more tremulous. Malecki was breaking
down her resistance with a steady flow of hard-sounding words, at the end of which Bora turned away from the gory crucifix and to the unexpected scene of Sister Jadwiga beginning to cry.
    Eventually she led the men out of the waiting room. They went through a bare hallway, up a ramp of stairs and down an elbow-shaped corridor.
    Bora remembered having been here before. He recognized the plaster statue of the Madonna with a tinsel crown of stars. Sister Jadwiga stopped in front of it to cross herself, and he was about to ungraciously urge her forwards when she lifted the statue by the elbows and without effort rested it on the floor.
    “What is she doing?” Bora asked.
    Malecki said he had no idea.
    Sister Jadwiga dabbed her eyes and blew her nose in a napkin-sized handkerchief before removing the embroidered doily from the statue’s pedestal. Carefully she folded the doily over the window sill and lifted the hollow wooden pedestal straight up.
    Bora and the priest stared at the floor. Malecki didn’t move, didn’t breathe. Bora said something in German. The tinsel stars on the Madonna’s halo tinkled when he crouched to lift by the barrel one of the hidden guns.
    Minutes later, they formed a most unlikely centrepiece on the nuns’ refectory table. Bora had been careful not to touch the stocks with his bare hands. Under Malecki’s troubled scrutiny he laid the weapons in a row, five of them.
    One after the other, he released the clip catches to check the magazines, and laid them - full as they were - alongside each gun. His movements appeared to Malecki intentionally slow or exacting. Whatever hung in balance here depended on how Bora would take the