My universe! Who knows if this letter will reach you? Enver has died. May God be good to him, for always he treated me kindly. But now you must come to me, my heart! Oh, Selca, my morning light, my angel! Have you any idea how much I have missed you? Oh, come to me! Come now, sweetest boy! My love, my youth, my very soul! I must hold you. Come quickly. I am free but I am not.
Morna
At Theti every villager had told the same story: that Selca Decani and Morna Altamori had dangerously and recklessly loved one another since the earliest days of their youth, and that nothing—no parental threat, no punishment—could keep their laughter apart. But when the girl had reached seventeen years of age her parents married her off to another, a quiet and stolid-eyed irrigation expert in comfortable employ of the State. His soul snatched out of his body, torn open and robbed of day, the young Selca Decani abandoned the village and settled far away near the marshes of the south, and soon time lost track even of the lovers’ names. But then Death spoke. First, Morna’s husband was killed by a lightning bolt when surprised in the field by a storm. Almost a year before that stroke, however, the mournful, hollow-eyed Morna had herself begun to languish in the arms of an illness that, while nameless and un-diagnosed, was quietly and steadily eating her breath. On her husband’s passing she sent for Decani, who arrived back in Theti to find her dead, and after grief too immense for human thought to contain, Decani resumed his life in the village where soon he, too, was stricken dead by an illness for which no doctor had a name, but which anyone in Theti, when asked, could tell you was surely nothing other than a broken heart.
I am free but I am not.
Vlora stared at the words. What was their meaning? Amid the tumble of his thoughts the now-hesitant raindrops tapped at the windows like a blind man’s cane. Complex analysis had shown that the letter had been folded and unfolded again and again; in fact, innumerable times. Who would cherish and reread such a letter repeatedly other than the man to whom the letter was addressed?
The dead man. The phantom. Selca Decani.
Vlora’s eyes flicked up. An eerie whipping wind had arisen behind him, softly moaning and thumping at the window-panes. Uneasy, feeling watched, the Interrogator swiveled his chair around and looked through the windows to the flickering north where thick black clouds were scudding toward the city from the mountains like the angry belief of fanatical hordes, and in a moment they would darken the Square below and its anonymous granite government buildings, the broad streets drearily leading nowhere, and the rain-slick statue of Lenin commanding the empty storefront windows crammed with the ghosts of a million longings, dust, and the dim recollection of hope. Clanking and aimless, two dilapidated automobiles crawled wetly amid whirring streams of grim-lipped bicyclists glumly churning their way on plodding errands, damp, drab souls underneath their bright slickers, while pedestrians trudged in shabby dress beneath wall posters shrieking at “enemies” and “traitors” in huge block letters that rain and the cheapness of the ink had caused to run in moody red and black streaks. The Interrogator singled out a column of children, two by two in their collarless tunics, as they trooped to the Palace of Culture or some other of the Square’s monolithic museums. They were passing in front of the Dajti Hotel, and for a moment the Interrogator wished that it were June and he were sitting at the Dajti’s sidewalk cafe tasting beer and the plentiful assortment of snacks that went well with a tango or The Blue Danube rasping thinly through the cafe’s outdoor speakers into the tired evening air.
Vlora furrowed his brow. The children had stopped. What were they gaping at? Something below and out of view. And now other pedestrians stood and stared. Silent and motionless in the drizzle, they sprouted from the curbs like dead gray souls. The Interrogator’s knee joints cracked as he rose to scan the glistening streets below. And then he saw it: in the middle of a sopping intersection, drenched in blood and dirty rain, lay the crumpled body of a Jesuit priest with pewter skin and sightless eyes still searching for the answer to an interrupted prayer. While confined in a labor camp he had baptized a newborn infant, and, tried and found guilty of this offense, he’d been shot by a firing squad that morning. Now his corpse, wrapped in clerical robes and trussed like butcher’s meat, had been dumped into the street where it would lie for three days to teach the people God’s reach was shorter than a bullet’s.
The Interrogator’s eye caught a blur of motion, a tight, quick, furtive signing with the hand. Someone in the crowd had blessed himself. Blood pounded at the scar slashing Vlora’s lips and, furious, he wheeled and rushed from his office down to the sodden streets below without hat, without coat, and without companion except for his rage and the scar’s bright ache, but once outside the Security Building he found only lifeless streets and the rain and, beneath the reckless, teeming sky, the body of the man who had purchased death on the cheap with a few sprinkled droplets of water. Two Chinese men in Mao-style uniforms emerged from the Dajti Hotel beneath the shelter of glistening black umbrellas that were hemmed with tiny yellow dragons. They ambled to the curb and gawked at the dead man, at first, and then they turned and stared at Vlora as his booted feet sloshed forward until he was standing by the body of the priest. But for the two unblinking Chinese, the streets were deserted, nothing stirred; but Vlora knew that they were there. The watchers. They were hiding. He could feel their wounded stares like burning sins upon his back. “Do you think this pig was a hero?” he bellowed. The words echoed damply in the concrete emptiness. “Do you think that he loved you at all? Don’t you know that his lies are what have kept you so poor and your children so ignorant and sick? Do you believe in the Devil still? Well, there is your Devil! He is there!” He had flung up his arm in accusation at the corpse and he wheeled around pointing and shouting “He is there!” until at last a great weariness weighted his legs and he faltered, his arm limply sagging to his side. The two Chinese turned their gaze to him in-curiously, then grinned as he met their stares. Aware of nothing but the largeness of their top front teeth, Vlora slowly turned away and bowed his head, and, with his clothes soaked through, his throat raw, he stood and listened to the rain’s soft stitching of despair into the hardness of the stubborn, unwon streets.
On the following morning, the 20th of March, Vlora ordered the Prisoner moved to a cell that was crowded and cramped and yet dimensionless, a haunted, lightless sea infested by moans and ceaseless whispers eerily drifting above the sounds of restless shifting on straw-filled pallets, of sobbing and litanies of better times lost. Here a light bulb dangled by a wire from the ceiling, painting the blackness with an amber haze, while food was scraped and pushed through slots—cold poppy-seed noodles and moldy bread—while at random a tap would gasp and bleed water. With the Prisoner’s arrival the cell contained thirteen men and six women, but guards would come often to drag someone away and by March 22nd only five were left, among them the Prisoner and a seemingly half-mad one-eyed priest who apparently remembered that it was Sunday. “Before the Big Bang,” he started preaching to the cell, “the entire universe was a point of zero size and infinite weight. Then the point exploded, creating space and, with it, time and its twin, disorder. And yet for the cosmos to come into existence the force of that primal outward explosion needed to match the force of gravity with the accuracy you would need for a bullet to hit a one-inch target at the opposite side of the observable universe seventeen billion miles away.”
Here a fist lashed out from the darkness, striking the priest on his cheekbone with the crunching sound of gristle and flesh. “I told you I wanted to sleep!” snarled an angry, deep male voice. The priest listened to the ringing and the rushing in his ears and the pad-pad-pad of hands slapping at stone as the priest’s assailant crawled away, a brawny and extremely irritable Muslim who had announced to the cell upon his arrival that although he had “murdered many others” he was “totally innocent” of the “outrage” that had brought him to this horrible place, the brutal and ultimately fatal beating of a bicycle repairman in Shkoder
Square.
“Then along came the living cell,” dared the priest with stubborn defiance, although prudently lowering his voice. “But how? Ah, yes, there was a chemical soup, we are told, wherein by the usual and much-loved ‘chance’ a virus finally happened to form. And then another and another. Need I go on? But never mind that this soup, we’ve since learned, did not exist, or that the odds against even one such virus appearing in as much as a billion years is more than the odds against flipping a coin and having eagles turn up six million times in a row. The beloved reply is, ‘A unique event.’ Is it rude to suggest that at such magnitudes the distinction between the unique and the supernatural would appear to have lost its utility, if not its insouciant je ne sais quoi?”
From somewhere came the gasps of a couple making love.
The priest glanced toward the sound.
“Coition brings the keenest of pleasures,” he noted. “And why? To ensure continuation of the species. That is purpose. But purpose is the business of a mind! And so we see that—”
The blow struck the side of his head. The priest swayed, fought to hold himself erect, then fell, and for moments he lay on his back, unmoving, his breath flowing labored and sputtering with blood. “I have made this a Mass upon the Universe,” at last he murmured dazedly, “and my preaching this Sunday—Is it Sunday? No matter. In any case, we haven’t any wine.” And then feeling the light being squeezed from his eye, he lifted a quavering hand into the air as if about to give a blessing to an infant or a barn and with blood trickling down from the side of his mouth he murmured, just before losing consciousness: “Go! The Mass is ended.”
Minutes later—or perhaps several hours or days, who can tell, for the arms of pain crush time as they will—it was the silence that awakened the priest with a start. He sat up and looked around. “So they’re gone, the other lunatics,” he exhaled into the dimness, “hauled off to asylums, no doubt. Just a joke. Without a doubt they’re all dead.” He looked over at the Prisoner, who was sitting on the ground close beside him with his head bent low and his forearms braced upon propped-up knees so that his hands hung loosely with spatulate grace. He had yet to utter a word. “You there, hello,” said the priest.”What’s your name? What’s your crime, your unspeakable offence? I mean, besides going mad, which is definitely criminal, especially if caused by recollections of Eden. Tell me, what have you done?”
The Prisoner made no reply. He did not move.
The priest appraised him dismally.
“Please don’t pay me any mind,” he said dryly. “After all, I’m just a poor old reactionary cleric, adjunct and running dog of the Vatican and all-around enemy of the people. Please don’t work yourself up over anything I say.” The priest waited for an answer, then looked away. “It’s the babies,” he murmured cryptically. “I am sorry. I am not Stephen Kurti. Stephen Kurti fought the soldiers with his hands, with his fists, when they came to destroy his church in Drin. They sent him to prison and then to a labor camp where he secretly baptized a child, and for this he was executed by firing squad. Did any saint fear God as much as these villains?” He lowered his head to his chest. “No, I am not Kurti,” he continued softly: “My body is a house of pain, I am in torment, I am hopelessly insane and a river of grief; and yet I cannot extinguish my yearning to live. I live for the cold, slimy noodles that they give us.” The priest jerked his head up and looked to the door as in the hall steely footsteps crunched, implacable, approaching the cell with deadly intent. Then they passed and their echoes lost their way into death. The priest lowered his head again.
“Father Lazar Shantoja, the famous man of letters, he was another,” he mournfully recalled. “After years at hard labor, they released him. Do you know what his mother did when she saw him, her only son, her beloved boy, when he first came walking up to her door after all those years of unbroken separation?” He turned and looked at the Prisoner again. “She danced. Yes, she found she couldn’t speak so she danced; she danced uncontrollably, on and on. Months later Shantoja was rearrested. His hands were sawn off and his forearms and his leg bones were broken, and only then was his mother allowed to come visit him. When he entered the room where she was waiting he was walking in the only way that he could, by supporting his weight on his elbows and knees, and she screamed at the jailers to be merciful and kill him. They obliged. I saw him dragged by his feet down flights of stairs, and by the time they had reached the second floor, his skull was ripped open. When they saw that I had witnessed this, I was put in isolation for a month. They let me out early so I could play in a volleyball game.” He lifted his head, looking off.
“Oh, once I was brave, I suppose. When I was first captured they started to question me: Wasn’t it true I was a Vatican spy? Would I recant? Pledge allegiance to the new Albania, the first official atheist state in all the world? I said no. And then the torture came, the electrodes. Blue-white lightning filled my skull; I thought the top of my head was about to come off. I was screaming and my teeth would slam shut on my tongue. Then I felt a warm liquid pouring down on my face. I thought it was water to spread the current, but I heard the men laughing and opened my eyes and saw that one of them was pissing on my face. Soon after, when maddened by thirst one day, I suddenly plunged my burning head into the fouled and stinking bowl of a toilet, my parched tongue lapping like a maddened dog’s, and then in vain were the shouts and the threats and the kicks, the rifle butt blows to my head and my back; no, nothing, no power, no pleading angel, could stay me from my frenzy of lapping and slurping until many strong men at last wrenched me away. And that’s where it began, I think, my revulsion at my own humanity. Until that moment I hadn’t been broken. There had even been a day when a guard brought me news that my elderly mother, grievously ill, had been put in an ambulance, and that the driver and his very young helper, on their way to a hospital, because they were running so late and it soon would be dark and they would miss their dinner, they decided that the whole thing was too much trouble and they stopped and dumped my mother down the side of a mountain. By the way, the driver’s helper was Vlora’s son. Yes, the torturer. The very same one. The guard told me he was sorry and as a consolation he gave me an apricot. An apricot in place of my mother.
“And yet that night, while grieving alone in my freezing cell and suddenly doubting the existence of God in the face of the suffering of the innocent, I heard God’s voice. Oh, yes, really and actually—his voice! ‘James, when did I ask you to solve the Problem of Evil?’ he chided. ‘That is my problem,’ he told me. ‘What I ask is that you be the best priest that you can be.’ He sounded rather cross, like the God of Job, perhaps because he saw me surreptitiously glancing all around the cell in search of hidden microphones and loudspeakers. Then ‘Trust me,’ he said, ‘and leave the brooding and theology to me.’ Oh, well, this was God, alright, no doubt about it, and apparently lonely for those days in the desert when he’d make his appearance in the form of a cloud, or, at night, as a burning pillar of evasions. I had a few caveats to offer but prudently said nothing as I wanted no insufferable blasts about my whereabouts when he was laying the foundations of the world. Talk about torture! Never mind, though, it all ended well. Oh, I confess I’d grown nervous when I heard him say, ‘Trust me,’ but mostly his words had a wonderful effect and from that moment I determined to become a great priest, consoling and caring for my fellow prisoners, encouraging and giving as much as I could. ‘I will go to the altar of God,’ my heart sang, ‘unto God who gives joy to my youth.’ And then I saw the warm piss pouring down on my face. It was after this incident, I think, that it finally dawned upon me that even if God existed it was simply not possible that he could love me.
“Oh, I did say Mass after that in the labor camp at Mali, where we worked in swamps, an interminable army of men in rags sinking down into mud slopping up to our chests. I even heard some confessions, such as they were. Can you imagine the paucity of sins in such a place? But don’t think I was brave. They just didn’t care about t
hese things. Only baptism. That’s what they hated and feared. But I baptized no one; no, no infant that was born in the camp.” The priest lowered his head and his voice. “I am here because I failed to fulfill my work quota.” For a time he fell silent. Then abruptly he burst into tears, sobbing wrenchingly and beating his chest with a fist. “Mea culpa, mea culpa!” he kept repeating. When he’d recovered, he leaned back against the wall of the cell and turned his head to look over at the Prisoner.
“Are you a priest?” he asked softly in the darkness.
He waited, and then went on. “Yes, I think so. I can smell the holy oils on your hands. Would you hear my confession, please, Father?”
No response. The only sound was a single drip of the faucet.
“They’ll be coming to get us soon. That’s alright, all of life is preparation for death. Yet I’d hoped to face God with—well—it’s just all of those babies that I’ve kept from his sight . . .” His voice trailed off, and as tears coursed down his cheeks he crumpled to the merciless stone of the floor with a muffled groan made of all the unanswered prayers of his life. “Meme, meme,” he murmured, calling softly for his mother again and again until in time his quiet sobs and pleas had all dwindled, enfolded in the steady sure river of his breath.
The Prisoner lifted his head and stared at him.
And then slowly reached out his hand.
Moments later, heavy steps in the hall were heard approaching. The priest bolted upright and gripping the Prisoner’s shoulders, he shook him, shouting frenziedly, “They’re coming! They’re coming to get us! For the love of Christ, give me absolution! I am sorry for all of my sins! Absolve me!” Then the door to the cell was thrown open and the lightbulb flared to a shocking brilliance as the priest, still screaming “Absolve me! Absolve me!” was dragged from the cell by cursing guards.
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