Lumen Read Free

Private.”
    “Yes, sir. It’s a shame, though.”
    Bora took his Walther out and shot the cow in the ear.
    “Now burn the hay.”
    As the fires were set, Bora stepped away from the threshing floor. He was resentful not for the farmers, but for himself. This job was beneath soldiers: beneath him , at any rate; beneath soldiers like him. Quickly he climbed the incline to the place where the bodies of the two stragglers lay.
    They still wore the dirt-coloured baggy clothes of the Polish army, but were barefooted. Had they flung off their ill-fitting boots in order to ease their escape? Bora thought so, by the bruised and pinched appearance of their toes.
Flies clustered on the dead men’s long, drawn faces, and their pale eyes seemed to have cloudy water in them. The blue collar patches identified them as infantrymen.
    Bora crouched to search their tunics for papers. He hadn’t handled dead bodies since his volunteer days in Spain - the past, victorious spring of Teruel. The weight, the coldness of death surprised him anew. The flies took off from the bloody clothes, landed again. Far away, artillery shots were being fired, perhaps as far as Chrzanów. It’s hot , he thought. It’s hot and these men no more feel it than they’ll ever feel anything again, until God raises them.
    Bora found no identification disks, no documents, surely all disposed of along the way. But there was a folded photograph in one of the men’s breast pockets. When Bora took it out and unfolded it, it broke in half.
    By the signature, he recognized that it was a black-and-white portrait of Mother Kazimierza, standing with hands clasped in prayer. Bandages were wrapped around her hands, and dark stains were visible through the gauze padding. In the upper right corner, a crude photomontage showed an engraved heart surmounted by a flame. Around the heart a crown of thorns squeezed it until drops of blood oozed from it. A crown surmounted the heart, and from the crown a tongue of flame rose. The letters L.C.A.N. were printed over the flame in a semi-circle. Bora looked at the back of the photograph, and read that the letters stood for Lumen Christi, Adiuva Nos.
    Light of Christ, succour us , indeed. Some good it’d done to the man carrying it.
    Rifle shots at the foot of the incline startled him, but it was only a soldier firing in the air to keep the woman away from the burning haystack. Bora stood up, slipped the photograph into his map case and walked down.
    Light of Christ. Really.

    He had no sooner reached the threshing floor, than a wild, close burst of machine-gun fire sent the soldiers scattering. Bora himself dodged at random, because smoke from the haystack obstructed the view. “Watch out!” a soldier shouted, and it was seconds, fractions of seconds: shooting, smoke, dodging, the soldier’s cry. Suddenly Bora made out a man’s ghostly figure surging through the smoke, and fired. “Shoot!” He called out. “Shoot, men!”
    Ghost-like, the armed man turned to him from the flames of collapsing hay, but Bora was quicker. Quicker than his soldiers, even. Two, three times more he shot into the smoke.
    The machine gun let out a last burst, skywards. The man dropped on his knees as if a great weight had felled him, crumpling into the scented cradle of hay fire.
    Right arm still extended, Bora released the trigger. “He almost did us in! Didn’t you see him?” He was angry at his men, but other than that, the danger had jarred him back into a state of tight control. He even felt better because of it, as if his task here were somehow redeemed by risk. “Search the other stacks,” he ordered, and for the next five minutes closely supervised the jabbing of bayonets into the smouldering hay.
    Loud weeping came from the farm wife, crouched on the doorstep. Head buried in the fold of her arms, her disconsolate heap of clothes shook with fear and grief.
    “Hannes, tell her to shut the hell up,” Bora said. He kept his back obstinately