Free Lumen by Ben Pastor

Captain Bora, Your Eminence. With God’s help I’ll only do what is good for the Church and the memory of the abbess.”
     
    Bora laughed, because he was embarrassed. He had no doubt that Retz meant what he’d said, but still a part of him wanted to disbelieve it. “I’m a married man, Major,” he heard himself answer.
    “So, what does that have to do with anything?”
    “It has to do with the fact that I’m not interested in Frau Kowalska. Not as the major seems to imply.”
    “I don’t need to imply anything. I saw you.”
    “It isn’t at all what the major thinks. Frau Kowalska told you I had no idea—”
    “Leave her out of this! I want to hear from you, what you were doing half-naked in front of her.”
    Bora didn’t want to repeat the story of the bath one more time. “I do quarter here, Major Retz. I was told to stay out until three hundred hours, and I assumed that by seven thirty…”

    Retz stared him up and down, with a spiteful, critical cast on his flushed face. Irritation was just beneath the surface, unconcealed and lacking in arguments, which might be angering him more.
    “There’s nothing more to be said. Next time you get the itch, Captain, go find a place to jack off instead of exhibiting yourself here.”

14 November
    The farms were all beginning to resemble one another. Whitewashed log houses among rye fields, deeply rutted paths leading from one to the next, red cows, cabbages. Occasionally shooting still echoed in the distance. SD staff cars would honk and pass his VW jeep, signalling him to pull over and let half-tracks and personnel carriers go through. In the distance buildings burned slowly, nearly without flames, raising tall pencil lines of smoke. Through his binoculars Bora made out the huddled villages, a house smouldering here and there. And still SD and SS vehicles speeded ahead of him.
    This place was no different. The woman wept, and it seemed to Bora he’d seen nothing but weeping farm women since he’d come to Poland. She led him to a trampled cabbage patch and showed him an area where the plants had been crushed.
    “Look at the blood,” she whimpered. “Look at the blood.”
    Bora looked at the blood. “Did they take your husband from the house?”
    “No, he was hiding out here in the patch, because he knew they were coming to look for us ethnic Germans.”
    “And he left you alone in the house with Polish Army stragglers coming through? Didn’t he think they might kill you instead?”

    But they hadn’t killed her , she wept. They had searched the house, gone out, found and killed him.
    “Did they do anything to you?”
    “No, but they took Frau Scholz down the way. I heard her screaming.”
    Bora made a note of the name. He’d go to the Scholz farm next. “They ‘took’ her: what do you mean, they ‘took’ her? Did they force themselves on her, did they carry her off?”
    The woman started sobbing again. All Bora could make out from her broken sentences was that the stragglers had killed the Scholz men and carried the wife off for themselves.
    “…But I prayed to God and to Mother Kazimierza of Cracow. So they killed my man and the Scholzes and they carried off Frau Scholz, but they didn’t do anything to me.”

16 November
    Nowotny sneered when he heard the question. He rubbed his finger over the healing scar on Bora’s head, rather more brutally than was required, so that Bora would admit it hurt.
    “Of course I’m an atheist, Captain, therefore don’t expect any pious statements from me. I believe none of this foolishness. Miracles! There are explanations for most so-called spiritual phenomena, including the preservation of cadavers and this mystic bleeding. For instance, have you ever heard of micrococcus prodigiosus ?”
    “No. It’s a bacterium, I suppose.”
    “It’s the bacterium that forms little red spots in bread crumbs, if you’ve ever noticed. It’s also believed by some to play a part in the hysterical condition called