And the Rat Laughed - By Nava Semel Page 0,47

Dolorosa, You provided for Him. A mother to console him, an embracing father. The arms of Mary Magdalene were etched in his memory. Not a five-year-old child, but a man of thirty-three, His years as numerous as the buttons on my habit. Even then, on His final journey, He was not alone. Veronica emerged from her house and wiped His brow with a handkerchief, and Simon of Cyrene bore the cross for Him when He stumbled. His own mother fell at His feet, and mothers that He did not know lamented. “Do not weep for me, Daughter of Jerusalem,” He told them, “but for your own children.”

So many times I have tried to envisage the scene, always seeing myself as a Daughter of Jerusalem. Fortunate was Your son with so great a crowd to comfort Him in his last hour. But the little girl whom You sent to the pit is a hostage of her own loneliness. If it was not You who created this suffering, perhaps the Antichrist has prevailed, and it is his kingdom rather than Your own.

I am afraid to find out.

18 September 1943

The village is asleep. My window overlooks the hill nestling below. Wooden houses, with thatch-and-shingle roofs. Their walls are painted white, and the cornices red, like the colors of our Polish flag. All around are fields of rye and sugar beet, oats and potatoes.

My church stands in the centre of the village. Storks nest in the belfry every spring. In the shade of the pear tree I compose my sermons. For hours I observe the foliage changing hues, and I am filled with awe at the cycle of the seasons. I see the bed of nasturtiums that I planted in the garden on the day I came to serve here, many years ago. The community house and the school are on either side of the church, and on the outskirts of the village is the roadside chapel. Passersby stop, say a prayer and hang some green branches and flowers on the statue of “The Troubled Christ”.

A small place. There are many like it. Who will know its name? Who will remember? And it moves along as if there were no War raging on at all. The pigs have been fed, the cows milked, the eggs gathered from the henhouses. The people eat their little meals. But what do they hide in those basements and pits, behind their Ave Marias? Their daily routine deceived me, and I too was immersed in my duties and did nothing to stop the scourge.

When the German tanks arrived, I went out to greet them by the roadside shrine. I rode in the first one to the village square. There they stayed. I shook hands with the German Commandant, welcoming him. The entire village cheered. Conquerors come, conquerors go. How are these conquerors different from the ones who came before? I have put my trust in the Church, and I believed that if I preached mercy and compassion, I was fulfilling Your most important tenets. I pretended that there was no horror being committed – anything to spare myself the sin of despair.

And now, despair swallows me. If these are the people who sat through my sermons, and seemed to follow in my footsteps, then I am the one who deserve to be condemned: they have absorbed nothing of my preachings. Every Sunday, that farmer and his wife have been coming here, and I have given them the bread and the wine so that they may enter into Holy Communion with Your Son, but all this time they were devouring the flesh of that child, sucking her blood. And I knew nothing of it.

I chose not to know.

19 September 1943

St Thomas Aquinas was right: despair leads to hatred, unbridled fury and bloodthirstiness. I kneel at her side, and imagine my hands around the neck of the farmer’s son. I take pleasure in envisaging his death, watching as he flails his arms and gasps his last. And You too, why didn’t you just kill her, and be done with it? You would have spared her a life filled with the memory of the Stefan inside her.

I refuse to grant pardon. I will not turn the other cheek.

I close the pages, and cover the child with another blanket. The support of the body I can attend to, but not the needs of what lies inside it.

Whom should I pray to?

20 September 1943

Another day has gone by, and her condition is unchanged. I