She took it all in as if I was telling her about my summer vacation, nodding, and then she said, yes, this is what I imagined. Let me say two things. First, you have observed that the church is corrupt, and I don’t mean just the Catholic Church I mean the church entire, for it is all the same in every splinter, and I agree, because you know it’s partly a human institution and as such subject to the ruin of this world, and the more so as it has from time to time exercised power and power tends always to corrupt. So for nearly all its history the church has been run by gangsters, sometimes by literal gangsters, but almost always by egotistical power-hungry men without the slightest interest in following Christ. They may admire Christ and think he is very great, but that was not what Christ was after, you know, not at all. One of my countrymen once wrote that the church is the cross on which Christ is crucified every day, but then he said also that Christ cannot be separated from His cross, which means that in addition to being a seedy club of somewhat dull men wearing funny clothing the church is also the eternal, perfect, and mystical Body of Christ, which is why we women bother with it at all, and why we give our lives to it and count ourselves fortunate. You don’t understand this now, but perhaps later you will.
I said something or started to and she said be quiet for a moment please. And I did, and she said, next, as to you and this story you have told me: you have been cruelly treated and betrayed, your childhood has been stolen. The world is oftentimes une patisse’ emerdee, a shit pie, but this is known, this is boring. The only interesting thing is how we use the suffering that is inevitable in life. Believe me, I understand what you have been through.
I said you have no fucking idea.
Do I not? she said. Then listen. In the winter of 1945 I was fifteen. My father had been arrested and executed in the July plot against Hitler, as perhaps you know, since you seem to be familiar with history. My two brothers had by this time been killed on the eastern front, and we were in a farm cart trying to get out of East Prussia before the Russians got us, my mother, my sister Liesel who was three years younger than I, and me. We failed in this and ended up among hundreds of refugees trapped in a ruined factory and when the Russians found us they raped every woman. Us three they tied to pipes naked and we were raped an uncountable number of times for two days and two nights. My sister was raped to death. I saw a couple of drunken Russians throw her out the window like a sack of garbage. In her whole life no one had ever said a harsh word to her, and so she died. My mother hanged herself the next day. I wandered for some weeks trading my body for food and cigarettes to whomever would buy. Then the Bloods found me, a group of German sisters, and naturally they had all been raped too. The interesting thing was that we never complained about what had happened to us because by then we knew very well that our people had done far far worse in Poland and Russia. So we suffered silently like dogs.
I remember that line very well although I’m not as sure of the rest. I am making it up the way we do in our minds, when we play back our memories. We’ve been taught by the voice-overs in movies. But I recall that about suffering silently like a dog, I recall it in my heart.
She went on and told me how she had walked with these sisters to the west, then they were joined by others who had been released from concentration camps where the Nazis had put them. After the war was over a small group of them from all over Europe gathered in what had been a Blood priory in Rottweil in Germany. She said I saw all these women who in many cases had suffered worse than I had, lost everything, been tortured, ruined in their health, and all they could think of to do was to help others, and I was insane with rage I wanted to scream at them why why how can you believe in a God who allows such things, death, torture, rape, the slaughter of little children? And this woman, Sr. Magdalena, one day came up to me. She had been in the retreat too, they had nailed her naked to a farm cart so that any soldier who came by on the road could have her, like a public latrine. And one day she said to me you have to forgive them, they didn’t know what they were doing. And I lost my mind when I heard these words, I attacked her right there, I spat on her and scratched her face. But she threw her arms around me and soon we were wrestling on the floor, and she pinned me down and put her crucifix in front of my face, this crucifix in fact?and here the prioress held up the one she wore, held it in front of my own face?this very one. Then, she said, Sister Magdalena showed me the scars on her hands left by the Russian nails. Look look you stupid child she shouted at me what do you think this is, a joke, a fairy tale? I was crucified and I died and now I live in Christ, blessed be His name. And you! Don’t you see you are a corpse too after what was done to you and the true life is waiting for you to pick it up. But you will not, no you clutch the death to you like a child with her rag doll. Only forgive them now and you will be able to forgive yourself for not having died with your family and live again in God.
So that was the prioress’s tale, or the important part of it anyway. Eventually God touched her heart and she stayed with the Bloods as they pulled themselves together after the war, and later she became a sister herself. She explained that the women who were there then, the survivors of the catastrophe in Europe, were called Rottweilers and I said I thought it was because you were mean as a bad dog and she laughed and said there is yet another thing on which you were misinformed. When I left I heard the shiny man say well you really told her off. I am still using my childish name for him. I should say Lucifer now, but that sounds like something in a movie, with the special effects and the funny eyes.
You know that despite my tough front I really have a very weak mind, my brain is a vessel in which anything can be poured and I will tend to buy it. My poor parents left me so hollow. Unfortunately, there is no drain valve. So the prioress’s words stayed with me against my will and I pondered them in my heart, like Mary in the Gospel.
I agreed to go to church and I did. I stood I sat I knelt I crossed myself with the others I made the responses and I sang. They wanted an outward show, I said to myself, I would give them the outward show, but inside there would be no change. The priest was Father Munch, a small elderly man with shiny fake teeth. He arrived in procession, he proclaimed the Gospel, produced an anodyne homily, said his magic words over the bread and wine, and drifted away. I sensed he wasn’t all that comfortable at St. C.’s. I’ve heard that at regular convents priests are petted and doted over, but the Bloods I knew always treated them like union plumbers?they had the package and the ticket so they got to do the job, but that didn’t mean you had to like it. Poor man, and I can’t help believing he felt unappreciated, getting up before dawn and driving over slick winter roads up the mountain from Bradleyville to say mass for a bunch of hard-faced women who’d spent their lives dodging bombs and death squads and had no doubt they could carry off the whole thing a lot better themselves. And probably had too, as I found out later.
After some weeks I found it was hard to keep my mind off of God during mass. I had heard the Bible words before and they fell like they say on deaf ears but my body was moving in the ritual ways and even though I mocked I was doing it and slowly it got to touch my pondering heart. Now in this ecumenical age we’re not supposed to speak against the charisms of all the different shards into which the church has shattered yet I can’t help feeling that no other church would have seized me as this one did. I am a fleshly creature and the Catholics work through the body in all things more than the others I think. The Bloods spend much of their lives amid really horrible ugliness and so when they have a chance as at St. C.’s they pour it on?processions, incense, banners, choirs, organ. I had never heard music like that, being a cracker barbarian, only the clunky hymns they sang in Wayland, so Palestrina and Mozart and Schubert hit me like a brick on the head, the opposite really, it knocked meawake in a way I hadn’t imagined before. Several times I cried despite myself.