Free Lumen by Ben Pastor Page B

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