Charley lowered himself onto the wooden kneeler. He cupped his hands over the metal hood of the goose-necked lamp that reared up from his desk like a cobra. The heat from the lamp got more intense and his hunger pangs diminished. He could last through Mass without food, he told himself. But, then, he really didn’t have any choice.
Charley yawned deeply, expelling the air without making any noise. He stretched his shoulder and back muscles without moving his arms. He switched off his desk lamp as the sunrise brightened the dormitory room. He knelt waiting impatiently for the electric bell that would ring at twenty-five minutes after six precisely to signal the end of meditation and the beginning of the day’s activities: first Mass and then, at long last, breakfast.
Breakfast would give him his first opportunity of the day to see if Father Samozvanyetz was okay. Not that he thought anything had gone wrong during the night.
The flow of the novitiate routine was so orderly that anything out of the ordinary course of events was immediately apparent to all the novices. Despite strict silence, despite modesty of the eyes, which everyone practiced to a greater or lesser degree, nothing much could happen without being observed or, at least, sensed by the novices.
Charley had become acutely aware of small noises and small details. Maybe, he thought, with so much silence, you get a sixth sense. And now this morning, Charley was becoming aware that something he couldn’t identify was out of kilter.
He looked to the right into the room and saw that the curtains were still drawn around Carissime Magda’s cubicle. That was a change. Magda always managed to have his bed made, his cubicle squared away and his partition curtains pulled back along the metal bars before the start of meditation. But not this morning. And there was a barely audible tap-tap-tapping in time with the tock-tock-tocking of the clock on the wall.
He had it fixed now. Carissime Magda, kneeling at the front desk beneath the clock, was doing the tapping. With his finger? With his pencil’s eraser, maybe?
Charley didn’t have much in common with slender, bookish Stefan Magda. They had been in many of the same classrooms during their four years of high school, but they’d never been more than nodding acquaintances. Magda had always seemed like a nice enough guy. But here at Milford he seemed sort of distant and remote. He probably wanted to be one of the bunch, but just didn’t know how to fit in.
The rhythmic tap-tap-tapping persisted and Charley was pretty sure that something was bothering Magda this morning. Maybe he was feeling down in the dumps. Maybe homesick. Or going stir-crazy. But whatever it was, Charley thought, maybe he should do something about it.
Today was Thursday, a long recreation day and the self-conscious, uncoordinated Magda was probably dreading it. Maybe nobody had ever shown the guy how to throw and catch a baseball. What the heck, Charley could do that much for him. He could spend some time with Stefan Magda before the games started this afternoon, play some catch and give him some pointers.
That was what Charley was thinking about when the bell rang ending morning meditation.
He felt a little guilty that his mind had wandered so far from good old Simeon in the Temple. He glanced again at his notes. “Dear God,” he read, “please give me love of regularity and generosity in responding to the Holy Ghost. Amen.” Those were the words he’d written down in his notebook last night under the heading “Colloquy.”
He made the Sign of the Cross and stood up. “Now dost Thou dismiss Thy servant,” he said to himself. “And it’s about time.”
Eyes cast modestly to the floor, he moved smartly out of his dormitory room to follow the others down the staircase to the first floor. It was six-thirty. Breakfast was forty-five minutes away.
∗ ∗ ∗
“Alone in a crowd,” thought Charley as he walked along the right-hand side of the first-floor corridor, his Missale Romanum clasped in his left hand. Up ahead, he could hear the rumbling of the juniors descending their main staircase in the other wing of the building. They flowed into the corridor and swept toward the main chapel along the left-hand wall until the parallel columns turned right and the novices and juniors strode, side by side, into the main chapel.
Charley couldn’t help smiling at how the juniors doffed their birettas as they approached the doorway, each one removing his black hat with his own distinctive flourish. The juniors, who were going through their freshman and sophomore years of college studies, had some funny ways of acting grown up.
Passing through the chapel doors, Charley dipped the fingers of his right hand in the holy water font and made the Sign of the Cross. He walked toward the altar, following the other novices who were filling the pews on the right-hand side of the chapel. The juniors went into the pews on the left, next to the stained-glass windows. But, in contrast to the studiously nonchalant juniors, the novices did not genuflect in the center aisle before entering their pews, as is the custom in Catholic churches, but stood waiting until it was full: seven novices to a pew. Then all seven genuflected together, knelt down again and began to prepare their missals for Mass.
The main chapel was simple, plain and bright. Its high ceiling and uncomplicated stained-glass windows were decorated in white, yellow and muted red. There was nothing ostentatious in the chapel, nothing to distract Charley from the beauty of the vestments and the sacred vessels. He felt comfortable in its oaken pews.
He enjoyed following the Mass in Latin. It was challenging and even fun. Although his Missale Romanum was smaller than the large book on the altar, it was exactly the same in content. His Missale was not a Latin textbook to be studied. It was the real thing.
As the Mass progressed, Charley followed the priest, sight-reading the Latin that was becoming clearer each succeeding day. He didn’t have the vocabulary to translate the Mass word for word, but he could grasp the general tone and meaning of the familiar Gospels and even the less familiar Epistles, lessons and prayers. He had no trouble at all with the parts of the Mass that did not change every day: Confiteor, Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, et alia.
There were always one or two novices who dozed off during Mass. Every now and then, one of them would be Charley. Despite his best efforts to stay awake, his eyes would grow heavy and finally close. Lost in nowhereness, his eyes would snap open as his missal leaped forward and he would have to grab to retrieve it. It was darn embarrassing, but Charley thoroughly enjoyed watching somebody else chase his flying missal. Some mornings a particularly spectacular missal chase would send the novices into a fit of collective giggles. The juniors, who never missed an opportunity to demonstrate their sophistication, would cast glances of disdain across the aisle.
At the end of Mass, when the celebrant said “Ite, Missa est”—“Go, the Mass is finished”—the only ones who did go were the novices in the first two pews who had been assigned to work in the refectory that week. As they went off to prepare to serve the morning meal, the other members of the community remained in the chapel, saying their private prayers of thanksgiving.
Charley was certainly grateful for the graces he had received through the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist and tried to be prayerfully thankful, but mostly he fretted about how hungry he was. Breakfast always began promptly at seven-fifteen.
Charley had surrendered his wristwatch upon arrival at Milford and the clock was on the back wall of the chapel. He could not look around to check the time, so he had no idea of how long he would have to wait.
He tried to distract himself by planning ahead. Novices were permitted to stay at the breakfast table as long as they wanted. But Tempus Liberum, the free-time period, began at seven-thirty. That meant that every extra moment Charley spent in the refectory ate into Tempus Liberum, which ended promptly at five minutes before eight o’clock.
During TL, there wasn’t a moment to spare. He’d have to make his bed, straighten and clean his cubicle, brush his teeth in the basement, check the bulletin board on the second-floor landing for any notices that might change his life, pass by Father Samozvanyetz’s ro
om to make sure all was well and do some work on the written report he was sending to his Dad.
The bell for breakfast rang, finally. Charley responded, following the other novices as they walked in single-file out of the chapel, across the corridor and through the refectory door. The juniors filled the rows of the tables on the right hand side of the refectory, the novices those on the left where they stood silently behind their chairs, eyes downcast, ten at each table, five on each side.
Charley stared down at his place setting on the white tablecloth: sturdy white china plate, cereal bowl, coffee mug, unadorned silverware. The thick drinking glass reflected the sunlight streaming in from the high windows behind him. The tall wooden pulpit between the two kitchen swinging doors stood empty. There was no reading at breakfast, only at the noon and evening meals.
Charley waited for the priests to enter the dining room: the Rector, the juniorate faculty, the priests who supervised the novitiate. They took their places at the two long tables on either side of the refectory doors and faced the rows of juniors and novices.
Charley glanced up quickly and looked down just as quickly. Father Samozvanyetz was standing behind the chair reserved for the Master of Novices. All was well.
Father Rector led the recitation of Grace before Meals. Then came the scuffle of chairs as the Jesuit community sat down to consume the morning meal in silence.
Charley liked the way the meals were organized. The novice waiters, who wore long white aprons over their cassocks, deposited their serving bowls and platters in the center of each table. The food was passed from novice to novice diagonally, back and forth across the table, so that the bowls and platters wound up at the ends of the tables where the waiters could easily pick them up and take them back to the kitchen to be re-filled.
As always, breakfast was a quiet affair. Only a murmured “Bread, please,” or “Milk, please,” broke the silence. Latin was not allowed to be spoken at table, not since some novice, according to legend, uttered the word: placemus. The first time Charley heard that story at recreation, the Latin pun went completely over his head.
“Placemus,” a second-year novice had explained. “It’s the hortatory subjunctive of placere. To please. Placemus. Let us please. Get it, Cris-may?”
Charley remembered saying, “Oh, yeah.” Or something equally brilliant.
He often got lost in the word play at recreation and had to run to catch up with the rapid-fire conversations. But here in the silent refectory he was able to concentrate on his slab of cornbread covered with a brown meat stew. Sometimes there was a red stew, which was zingier and a little harder to digest. Scrambled eggs often became lukewarm and hard during the trip from stove to table, but the cornbread and stew was always dependable.
This morning, he was tempted to take seconds, but settled for an apple instead. Following the house rule, he cut his apple into quarters and sliced out the core from each section. Only then was he permitted to eat the apple with his fingers. As he munched his quartered apple and drank his coffee, he decided it was a pity that Adam hadn’t been required to quarter his apple before eating it.
Would things have turned out differently if he had more time to think about what he was doing? That might be something to contribute at recreation. Or maybe it was just too dumb.
Charley finished the fourth quarter of his apple, drank down the last of his coffee, stood up, said his Grace After Meals under his breath and left. His unmade bed awaited him.
Once behind the closed curtains of his cubicle, he stripped the bed down to its mattress and set to work. When he’d finished, the white sheets with their hospital corners were stretched taut, the pillow squared away at the head of the bed, the plain gray blanket neatly folded at the foot. He ran a dust mop over the floor, checked his coffin to make sure that everything was hung up properly and checked his chest of drawers to make sure that the washbasin covered his shaving kit. Satisfied that his cubicle was all in order, he slid the curtains back and looked about the dormitory room.
Only two cubicles were still closed. Carissime Magda’s was open but Magda himself was nowhere to be seen. He’d probably gone to check the bulletin board, thought Charley. Most first-year novices had learned to check the board frequently rather than trust what they heard in Latin from their fellows, even from the secundi anni who were trying to teach them the ropes.
The most important document on the board was the Ordo. Typed on the back of a file card and posted sometime after the dormitory lights had been extinguished, the Ordo listed the scheduled activities of the day, hour by hour. If there was any change in the daily order after it was posted, two long rings of the electric bells would alert the novices to check the bulletin board.
That hadn’t happened since Charley arrived at the novitiate and the Ordo, that Thursday morning, showed no changes in the standard schedule. Charley’s name was still on the Clean-up list. That meant that he’d be helping clear the refectory tables after supper, wash the dishes and reset the tables. The Manualia sheet, which had been posted Sunday evening, had not been changed either.
Charley’s morning work assignment remained the same. Once again, while the other novices spent the hour of manual labor sweeping the floors, mopping up the castles or helping the cooks, Charley would be working for Brother Hegstad in the infirmary.
Manualia would not start until five minutes after eight. First, at seven fifty-five, there would be five minutes of Examen, a quick review of the morning meditation. So Charley returned to his dormitory room and began the short Examen period wondering where Cris-may Magda might be. He should have been at his desk, but he was not. Charley let that slide and concentrated on his current fault: wishing that his Manualia assignment was anywhere but the infirmary.
∗ ∗ ∗
Charley had spent his first infirmary visit with Father Beck getting acquainted and learning about his Dad’s days at Saint Ignatius High School.
“He had some trouble when we began studying Virgil,” said Father Beck at one point, “but his Latin became much better after I got him straightened out.”
Charley laughed.
“He told me about that, Father. He said he still can’t figure out how you knew he was using a pony.”
“Well, Carissime, I’ll let you in on a little trade secret. But don’t ever reveal it to any of the boys you’ll be teaching later on. There’s an interlineal translation of the Aeneid that has a telltale phrase that shows up every year in some boy’s homework. ‘There was a city, Carthage by name.’ You’re familiar with it?” Father Beck chuckled. “Don’t worry. The statute of limitations ran out when you graduated.”
The priest paused to catch his breath.
“Here’s the tip-off. ‘By name’ is the translator’s conceit. It’s a little too fancy. ‘By name’ is not found in the Latin text or in the working vocabulary of the average high school boy.”
“I’ll be darned,” said Charley.
“Remember that when you’re a teacher yourself,” said Father Beck with a grin. “When a fancy phrase like ‘Carthage by name’ catches your eye, you’ll hear hoof beats. But be sure to let several days pass after detecting the pony before you say anything. Your student will have no way of knowing that you are not a mind reader. That’s the second Jesuit rule of teaching high school boys, Carissime.”
“What’s the first rule, Father?”
“Don’t smile until Christmas.”
∗ ∗ ∗
Alone in his room, the man who played Father Samozvanyetz paced up and down, thumbing through a small book with a dark green cover: The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, composed in the Sixteenth Century, “translated from the Autograph” by Father Elder Mullan, S.J., in 1908. From time to time, he would frown and shake his head, for the book refused to give up its secret. That it contained a secret, he was certain.
Too many hearts had been set afire by this little book. That he knew from history. Yet he could find nothing in its pages to explain that phenomenon
.
Somehow this little book had sent Francis Xavier to the Orient, Edmund Campion to Tyburn, Isaac Jogues and his Blackrobes to New France and Alex Samozvanyetz to Lubianka. How was that accomplished?
Unlike Mein Kampf or Das Kapital, this book of Saint Ignatius was slim and small enough to slip into a jacket pocket. It was not even one inch thick. He had read it so many times that he almost knew it by heart, but he could find no clue to its power to change men’s lives.
There were, at the beginning, about two dozen uninformative pages containing the Preface, Table of Contents, Index, and the Approbations and Permissions:—Nihil Obstat and Imprimaturs—Nothing Objectionable and Let it be Published—which were to be found in most Roman Catholic books. As for the writings of Ignatius himself, they took up a mere one hundred and ninety-four pages. It was a training manual of sorts, and not a real book at all. What it outlined, without much explanation, was some sort of process.
He would just have to follow it along, step by step, stay ahead of his class, and see what happened.
∗ ∗ ∗
“There’s not all that much that needs doing this morning, Cris-may,” said Brother Hegstad when Charley arrived in the infirmary. “After we tidy up the pharmacy, we’ll go straighten up Father’s room together and then you can spend the rest of the time visiting with him.”
“Okay,” said Charley. “But I’ve got to tell you, Brother, visiting Father Beck makes me awfully sad. Doesn’t it bother you, working with sick people all the time?”
“I’m pretty much used to it, Cris-may. But when I’m nursing older folks, I sometimes get fearful of getting weak and helpless myself someday. Maybe that’s why the Good Lord placed Father in our care: to teach us something. Not to be afraid to help old people, maybe. Something simple like that. It doesn’t hurt us to do something good and it makes the older person feel better to have a younger person around.
Red Army Spies and the Blackrobes Trilogy Page 25
