Read Lumen for Free Online

you do
- but then I wouldn’t turn out to be much of a pianist, would I?”
    Bora dried his hands before buckling his belt. After a knock on the door, a nurse peered in with the mottled images of the X-rays in hand. Nowotny held them against the light for some moments, attentively looking at them. He shook his head afterwards.
    “Well! I guess you got close to getting a wound badge after all. Your skull is fractured.” He pointed at a serpentine line on the hindmost quarter of the temporal bone. “There isn’t much we can do about it, save giving you painkillers for the time it starts hurting in earnest.” He handed Bora a small bottle. “Call me if you need more than this to sleep at night. Otherwise come back a week on Friday and we’ll have the stitches out.”
     
    At Bora’s entrance that evening, Retz stared.
    “What the hell?…” He averted his face from Bora’s bloody uniform, and wouldn’t let him finish explaining. “Take it off, take it off! It looks awful, take the damn thing off!”
    He heard Bora walk to the bathroom and turn on the water in the sink.
    “Wash the sink after you’re done!” he cried out after him. “I hate the fucking sight of blood, and don’t want it there while I shave!”
    Bora changed before joining the major in the living room. He now noticed that there were flowers in a vase, and a bottle of wine on ice.
    “That’s better,” Retz said. “Do you remember what day of the week this is?”
    “Yes, I know. I’ll stay out until late, Major.” Bora was beginning to have an atrocious headache, but added nothing to what he had said. He sat in the armchair and rested his shoulders against the padded back of it. When he closed his
eyes, fragmentary images of the incident down the street from the convent flashed before him. A meat-chewing animal seemed to eat in spasms at the right of his head.
    Retz wouldn’t look at him. “Well, you obviously expect to be asked. What’s happened to you?”
    Bora told him.
    “You don’t say! What did we do about it?”
    “The SD shot five men against the wall of the Jesuit church.”
    “Well, thank God for the SD.”
    Bora opened his eyes. Major Retz was turning the bottle inside the ice bucket. “ Schloss Vollrads , 1935 vintage. She’s worth it.”
    Making leverage on the back of the armchair, Bora turned to leave the room. He was groggy with blood loss and beginning to feel nauseous. Retz’s impatient glance at his watch didn’t help. “I’ll be out of here in a moment, Major,” he said. “Just the time to wash my face in cold water one more time and figure out where I’m going to spend seven hours.”
    “You should have thought about it earlier!”
    “Yes, Major.”
    Five minutes later, Retz hammered with his fist on the bathroom door. “What the hell are you doing, Bora? Are you throwing up in my damn bathroom?”
    Bora was too sick to talk back. He held on to the rim of the toilet bowl with both hands, and his icy, clammy forehead on them.
    “Hurry up, and wipe it clean afterwards!”
    Bora had to give in to another heave of sputum before shakily lifting his head to answer the insistent hammering.
    “Goddamn it, Major - will you let me vomit in peace?”

    The wire from the Vatican, signed by the Secretary of State, instructed Malecki to remain in Cracow until further notice, and collaborate with any official investigation into the abbess’s death.
    Father Malecki lit himself a cigarette. It was a German brand he’d obtained through the landlady’s son, a pale yellow five-count pack marked Sondermischung , with an Army seal. Collaborate with the investigation. It was more easily said than done. In the confusion following the incident he’d been unable to determine if Polish authorities would be involved in the case. German cars were cordoning off the convent when he’d arrived for vespers on Monday, and although he’d seen neither Hofer nor Bora he’d been told by Sister Irenka that they were