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inside.
    She’d expounded on the tragedy at length. “The colonel’s in a terrible state,” she’d added. “He passed out in the waiting room and the young captain had to all but lift him off the floor. We’re terrified at the thought that we’ll be blamed for his getting sick, as if losing the abbess weren’t enough!”
    Five days later, Malecki knew no more about it, and they hadn’t been able to assist him at the Curia or at the consulate either. The news had been kept from the local press, but was starting to circulate by word of mouth. He worried about the notebooks on Mother Kazimierza he’d left in the library of the convent; they were written in English, of course, but Bora spoke it like a native.
    And Mother Kazimierza, Mother Kazimierza - killed by gunfire in the enclosure of her own cloister! There was something more terrible than just death in this. Hardfaced, Malecki rested the cigarette on the edge of the window sill. Murder. It was murder, naturally. He shook his head in anger. What’s natural about murder? And would
the Germans - biased, heartless killers in their own right - be the ones to investigate this murder?
     
    Without eating his food, Bora sat at the table in the smoke-filled restaurant as long as he could, and then walked out, up the stairs to the street level.
    The fresh air of the night was actually edging towards the cold of winter. It’d be raining and sleeting soon, he could smell it in the air. The temperature and grey skies of Cracow were much like Leipzig. It’d soon sleet in Leipzig, too. There were no stars out, or else they were cancelled by the glare of street lights.
    Laughter and voices loudly speaking German came from the restaurant behind him like from some happy nether region. Bora stood on the sidewalk breathing the night air as one drinks water.
    He doubted he could drive himself home. His head pounded with blinding intensity, but it was mostly the medication Nowotny had given him that lowered his alertness. The phosphorescent hands of his wristwatch indicated only eleven o’clock. Christ, he thought, that was all - eleven o’clock. He had no idea what he’d do for the next four hours.
    Against his better sense, he got in the car and drove out of the Old City, straight past the river. It was his intention to go to Wieliczka, but he missed the left turn and found himself well on his way to the mountain resort of Zakopane before an army patrol halted him at a roadblock. Bora didn’t argue with the soldiers’ reasons for stopping him. He backed up the car to the shoulder of the road, and turned the motor off.
    The soldiers were a little surprised that an officer would choose this place to sleep off a hangover, but wouldn’t do more than wonder.

29 October
    Jewish forced labour were washing the side of the Jesuit church when Malecki passed by the next morning, bound for mass at the convent. This church and the larger complex of the convent stood at the two ends of the same narrow street, as if to bless its length.
    With brushes and buckets steaming in the cold air, old men with armbands scrubbed the bloodstains of yesterday’s execution from the tender pastel colour of the stucco wall. Soapy, reddish trickles of water already ran off the basalt kerb of the sidewalk into the drain. SD soldiers stood guard. Malecki thought they’d ask him for papers, and went as far as getting them out of his wallet. They didn’t ask, but with a tight heart he walked past the silent work detail.
    Novices were singing in the small chapel when he arrived at the convent. Their high-pitched, thin voices travelled the vaulted spaces of hallways and rooms like ghosts of sound.
    The nuns flocked to him. They told him they’d heard the shots of the improvised firing squad and had feared for him.
    “No, no, I was in church,” Malecki reassured them. He followed Sister Irenka to the room where the coffin was still laid, and asked to be left alone to pray.
     
    At the same time, across