The Convent: A Novel by Panos Karnezis Page B

nuns was perhaps not as severe as it could have been, considering Sister María Inés’s fury. Nevertheless, it was unjust and hurtful enough to change the mood in the convent. Everybody still carried out their tasks with diligence, stopped their work every three hours to pray in the chapel, ate together in the refectory, but a shadow had fallen over whatever they did, and they had lost their cheerfulness. The Mother Superior noticed it and wondered whether perhaps she had treated the two nuns a bit too harshly, but did nothing to show her doubt. She neither called off their punishment nor moderated it, but hoped that the incident would soon be forgotten. A few days later, things were indeed beginning to return to normal, but then something happened that shattered any hope for peace between her and the sisters.
    She had left Sister Beatriz in charge of the child and gone to midday prayer. When she returned to her room, she was pleased to find the young nun also kneeling in prayer, with the child on her lap and her head bowed. She had insisted that her assistant should not neglect her religious duties even when she had to care for the child, and had instructed her to recite the canonical hours wherever she happened to be with as much devotion as if she were in the chapel. The Mother Superior paused at the door and waited for the nun to finish. When Sister Beatriz crossed herself and stood up with the child in her arms, the Mother Superior shut the door. The young woman gave a start.
    ‘I am very pleased with you, Beatriz,’ the Mother Superior said. ‘Your assistance with the child is important to me and your absence from the chapel has not turned you into a heathen.’
    ‘I’m glad that I can be of help, Reverend Mother.’
    ‘One day I hope to repay you for all your kindness and good sense.’
    She stretched her arms towards the baby and the nun obediently handed him to her. Sister María Inés told her when to have his food ready. The young woman bowed and left the room. In recent days Sister María Inés had been feeling a drop in temperature. Autumn was coming and soon the weather would turn and something would have to be done about keeping the room warm. Winters in the convent were bitterly cold. In the past, she used to welcome them with penitent spirit, but now she had to think less about her soul and more about the child. She opened a drawer in her desk and took out the box where she kept her savings. She counted the money and decided to ask Sister Beatriz to buy her a small stove the next time she went to the city.
    She wrapped the child well with a blanket and went out for a stroll before it was time to feed him. There was no one outside: it was the time when the nuns gathered round the refectory table to parcel the altar breads. Sister María Inés walked across the courtyard, observing everything as if she had never seen it before. The bell tower, the chimneys, the gargoyles on the roofs, the stork nests, the faces on the statues of the saints in the cloister, even the moss on the flagstones and the peeling paint on the old doors fascinated her. For her the signs of decay were not simply reminders of the passage of time but the telltale signs of an undying remorse that trailed back to the Fall of Man.
    A stork rising from its nest caught her eye and she watched it fly away with a few easy flaps of its wings. The birds would soon be leaving for Africa. In a medieval bestiary that she had found in the convent library, she had read that if a stork’s nest caught fire the bird would stay and burn in it rather than abandon it. She had no doubt that it was true and often wondered whether she herself would have the courage to do the same if it ever came to it. She wanted to be able to say that she would, but the choice she had made when she was young did not allow her to believe with certainty that she was capable of self-sacrifice.
    At the refectory, she pushed open the heavy door just a crack and watched the