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turned to her as the soldiers went poking into the deep sluice behind the barn, behind and into a pile of manure, chasing horseflies.
     
    At headquarters in Cracow, Colonel Hofer had a headache. He hid the letter from home under an orderly pile of maps, only so that he wouldn’t be tempted to read
it again, when it did no good. Again and again his eyes went to the wall clock. He tasted a surge of resentment at the thought that Army General Blaskowitz would visit at four this afternoon, when the abbess had granted him an appointment at four thirty.
    He’d uselessly tried to negotiate the hour with Blaskowitz’s aide, who had informed him the commander-in-chief might spend the whole afternoon in Cracow.
    “You must pray much,” Mother Kazimierza had warned the day before, speaking in her precise, book-learned German. “Your wife must pray much more than she does. How can Christ listen to you if you don’t pray? Only uninterrupted prayer opens God’s doors.”
    Hofer reached into the top drawer of his desk, where a booklet on spiritual exercises written by the abbess - useless to him in Polish - contained as a bookmark a small square of surgical gauze sealed in hard transparent plastic. At the centre of the gauze stood a perfectly round bloodstain.
    Hofer could weep in frustration. “You may only come see me during next week, and then no more,” Mother Kazimierza had told him on his way out the day before.
    His heart had cringed at the words. “Why only one more week?” he’d cried out to her. “I need your prayers - why only one more week?”
    The nun wanted to say no more about it. “ Laudetur Jesus Christus. ” She’d signalled to Sister Irenka to escort the visitor out, and he’d had to leave. Hofer sighed deeply at the recollection, and tears welled in his eyes. It was becoming more and more difficult to hide his emotions. Luckily, Captain Bora was naive, and hadn’t noticed.
    Like most men of his political generation, Bora was hard to figure out, but at least there was some traditional solidity in him, a trustworthiness that had little to do with party allegiance. He knew how to keep things to himself.
The only trouble with Bora, Hofer glumly considered, was that fortune treated him well.
     
    Out in the country, the smell of charring flesh came from the haystack, where the flames continued to smoulder and the fermenting core of the stack burned around the body in black compact clumps like peat.
    Bora looked up from his map and called to the soldiers squatting near the threshold of the farmhouse.
    “For Christ’s sake, pull him away from there! Can’t you see the poor bastard’s starting to cook?”

16 October
    Bora didn’t return to Cracow until Monday. He met Retz at Army Headquarters - Retz was in the Supply Service, and was now cursing over the phone about some late shipment of bedsheets - and at the end of day they drove to their apartment together.
    It was a fine three-storey house on the Podzamcze, directly below the formidable bastion of the Wawel Castle. Against the pale yellow stucco, freshly painted shutters and wrought-iron balconies stood out, and from what Bora could tell, a narrow garden of evergreens lined the back of the building.
    He followed Retz up two flights of stairs, to a door which the major opened on an elegant interior.
    “Just our luck that we’d billet here.” Retz disparagingly said, pulling back the key from the lock with an ill-humoured jerk. They’d been talking of Colonel Hofer on the way to the house, but now the very act of walking into the apartment seemed to renew his contempt for the assigned quarters. Entering ahead of Bora, he added, “Did you see what’s on the door frame outside?” He referred
to a small, half-torn metallic container which Bora had already noticed. It seemed to have been pried open with the point of a knife, and right now it resembled nothing but torn metal. “Do you know what that’s supposed to be?”
    Bora said he thought he