“You won’t leave me alone?” she whispers.
“I won’t leave you alone.”
“Swear it,” she says, stopping.
“I swear,” I reply.
“All right, Rudolf.” She sighs as though many of her problems were now lessened. “But don’t forget. You forget so often.”
“I won’t forget”
“Kiss me.”
I draw her to me. I have a very slight feeling of horror and am uncertain what to do. I kiss her with dry, closed lips.
She raises her hand to my head and holds it. Suddenly I feel a sharp bite and push her back. My lower lip is bleeding. She has bitten into it. I stare at her. She is smiling. Her face has changed. It is mean and sly. “Blood!” she says softly and triumphantly. “You were going to betray me again. I know you! But now you can’t do it. It is sealed. You cannot go away again!”
“I cannot go away,” I say soberly. “AH right! But that’s no reason to attack me like a cat. How it bleeds! What am I to say to the Mother Superior if she sees me like this?”
Isabelle laughs. “Nothing,” she replies. “Why do you always have to say something? Don’t be such a coward!”
I taste the warm blood in my mouth. My handkerchief is no good—the wound will have to close itself. Isabelle is standing in front of me. Now she is Jennie. Her mouth is small and ugly and she wears a sly, malicious smile. Then the bells begin to ring for the May devotion. An attendant comes along the path. Her white coat shimmers dimly in the twilight.
During the devotion my wound stopped bleeding, I have received my thousand marks, and I am now sitting at table with Vicar Bodendiek. Bodendiek has taken off his silk vestments in the little sacristy. Fifteen minutes ago he was still a mythical figure—shrouded in the smoke of incense he stood there in the candlelight clothed in brocade, raising the golden monstrance with the body of Christ in the Host above the heads of the pious sisters and the skulls of those of the insane who had received permission to attend devotion—but now in his shabby black coat and slightly sweat-stained while collar, which fastens behind instead of in front, he is just a simple agent of God, good-natured, powerful, with red cheeks and a red nose whose burst veins reveal the wine lover. He does not know it but for many years before the war he was my confessor, in the days when the school made us confess and take communion every month. Those of us who were smart went to Bodendiek. He was hard of hearing, and since one whispers at confession, he could not understand what sins we were admitting to. Therefore, he gave the lightest penances. A couple of Our Fathers and you were free of all sin and could go and play football or try to get forbidden books out of the public library. It was a different story with the cathedral pastor to whom I went once because I was in a hurry and there was a line standing in front of Bodendiek’s booth. The cathedral pastor gave me a crafty penance; I was to come to him for confession in one week, and when I did so he asked me why I was there. Since you can’t lie in the confessional, I told him and he gave me a dozen rosaries as penance and the command to appear at the same time next week. That went on until I was almost in despair—I saw myself chained for life to the cathedral pastor by these weekly confessions. Fortunately in the fourth week the holy man came down with measles and had to stay in bed. When my day for confession came, I went to Bodendiek and explained the situation to him—the cathedral pastor had instructed me to confess that day but he was sick. What was I to do? I could not go to his house since measles are contagious. Bodendiek decided that I might just as well confess to him; a confession is a confession and a priest a priest. I did it and was free. From then on, however, I avoided the cathedral pastor like the plague.
We are sitting in a little room near the big assembly hall used by the inmates who are not under restraint. It is not really a dining room; there are bookcases in it, a pot with white geraniums, a few straight and easy chairs, and a round table. The Mother Superior has sent us a bottle of wine and we are waiting for the meal. Ten years ago I would never have dreamed that someday I would be drinking a bottle of wine with my father confessor—but then, neither would I have dreamed that I would someday kill men and be decorated for it instead of being hanged—nevertheless, that is what happened.
Bodendiek samples the wine. “A Schloss Reinhartshausener from the estate of Prince Heinrich von Preussen,” he remarks reverently. “The Mother Superior has sent us something very good. Do you know anything about wine?”
“Very little.”
“You ought to learn. Food and drink are gifts of God. They should be enjoyed and understood.”
“Death is surely a gift of God also,” I reply, glancing through the window into the dark garden. It has grown windy and the black treetops are tossing. “Ought one to enjoy and understand it too?”
Bodendiek looks at me with amusement over the rim of his wine glass. “For a Christian death is no problem. He doesn’t exactly have to enjoy it; but he can understand it without difficulty. Death is entrance into eternal life. There’s nothing to fear there. And for many it is a release.”
“Why?”
“A release from sickness, pain, loneliness, and misery.”
Bodendiek takes an appreciative sip and swirls it inside his red cheeks.
“I know,” I say. “Release from this earthly vale of tears. Why did God create it in the first place?”
At the moment Bodendiek does not look as though he were finding the earthly vale of tears hard to bear. He is comfortably replete and has spread the skirts of his priest’s robe over the arms of his chair so that they will not be creased by the weight of his ponderous bottom. Thus he sits, an expert on wine and the beyond, his glass firm in his hand.
“Why really did God create this earthly vale of tears?” I repeat. “Couldn’t He have admitted us at once to eternal life?”
Bodendiek shrugs his shoulders. “You can read about that in the Bible. Man, paradise, the fall—”
“The fall, the eviction from paradise, original sin, and with it the curse of one hundred thousand generations. The God of the longest wrath on record.”
“The God of forgiveness,” Bodendiek replies, holding his wine up to the light. “The God of love and of justice Who is always ready to forgive and Who has given His own son to redeem mankind.”
“Herr Vicar Bodendiek,” I say suddenly very angry, “why really did the God of love and justice make people so unequal? Why is one miserable and sick and another healthy and mean?”
“He who is humiliated here will be exalted in the next life. God is compensatory justice.”
“I’m not so sure of that,” I reply. “I knew a woman who had cancer for ten years, who survived six frightful operations, who was never without pain, and who finally doubted God when two of her children died. She gave up going to mass, to confession, and to communion, and according to the rules of the Church she died in a state of mortal sin. According to those same rules she is now burning for all eternity in the hell which the God of love created. Is that justice?”
Bodendiek looks for a while into his wine. “Was it your mother?” he asks then.
I stare at him. “What has that to do with it?”
“It was your mother, wasn’t it?”
I swallow. “Suppose it was my mother—”
He is silent. “A single second is enough to reconcile oneself with God,” he says then cautiously. “One second before death. A single thought. It doesn’t even have to be spoken.”