it’s going on right now in a thousand places, right now as you read this and you might say oh how awful if it was brought to your attention in some compelling and artistic way and then you’d maybe write a check if you are a particularly conscientious person before going back to the usual bourgeois oblivion of the rich world. I’m sorry, being tortured gives you a bad attitude sometimes. Whoever was tortured stays tortured, Jean Amery, French resistant, died in prison, my eternal quotations. Colonel al-Muwalid did the actual torture himself, not the physical part but the interrogations. It was mainly bastinado, shredding the soles of the feet with split cables and also the very common and convenient form that I don’t know the name of where they bind your hands behind your back and hoist you off the floor and then drop you a distance, catching you just before your toes hit. It dislocates the shoulders and then they leave you there naked with your feet just touching the floor in my case since they’d flayed them to the bone thus unbearable pain either way. I say unbearable but clearly I bore it, praying continuously although to nothing I could feel. God had forsaken me as He so often does in our hours of need, playing His deep game. When I passed out from the pain I had visions, usually little replays of my stupid life but sometimes Nora was there which was nice but she wouldn’t tell me what heaven was like or how soon I would join her I figured maybe 150,000 years in Purgatory would do it. Pretty thin stuff considering. Pathetic. I didn’t even cry why have You forsaken me, not having expected even as much as I got of grace. Well,of course He forsook me.
After some days of this they got bored I suppose or they were afraid I was going into shock and they took me to what I guessed was a military hospital, and I awakened in a clean bed with my veins full of painkillers, my shoulders reset and my wounds dressed. Dr. Izadi announced himself as my doc, a small, neat guy with a pepper- and-salt mustache and glinting aviator glasses, so obviously a mukhabarati that he might as well have been wearing a T-shirt with SECRET POLICE on it. He was very concerned about my health and informed me with much clucking concern that if they got hold of me again my body wouldn’t bear it. You will die, my dear, and that will be the end of you, you really should tell them what they want to know, or you could tell me…
And so on. It would have worked too, that’s the beauty of the technique, having been tortured once and then made comfortable and filled with dozy drugs, the thought of being violated again appears insufferably awful, the anticipation being even worse than the pain itself. But what they wanted to know I did not have to give. The colonel was convinced that Richardson had discovered a bonanza of petroleum in the Upper Sobat basin, he read me what he said were transcripts of radio messages that the oil team had sent out, predicting billions upon billions of gallons, fifty, sixty billions, dwarfing the Bahr al-Ghazal fields, and so he kept asking what did you do with the data, who are you working for, you’re not some nun, do you expect us to believe that a nun could organize and lead an army made out of slaves, who is helping you, the Americans, the Russians, the Chinese, the Israelis? Where is the oil data? Who did you give it to?
But there was no oil, Richardson was perfectly clear about that and I can’t figure out why he would lie to me. I’m no expert, but I did claw through Seely’s Principles of Petroleum Geology while I was hosting the oil prospectors, enough to follow Richardson’s argument and read his seismic data and he was telling the truth, at least to me. If he was playing another game with his employers I don’t know, maybe lying tothem, but al-Muwalid wouldn’t buy it. I knew he was going to kill me, by torture if I didn’t support his fantasy, and with a head shot in any case, and I made up my mind to make a break, on my hands and knees if necessary, in order to provoke a fatal encounter, foolish really, the idea of me escaping in the shape I was in, but in the event it proved unnecessary.
I awoke one night with a hand over my mouth whose owner pressed a finger to his lips drew back the covers and lifted me out of bed like a baby. He carried me from the room, down a hallway and out into the night. There were other men standing around, watching, holding short automatic weapons. I saw one body in a wide pool of blood before they had me strapped down on a litter in the back of a military ambulance. I heard a brief rattle of fire and a dull explosion and then we were off down a road. A man with a short beard was examining me with a tiny flashlight, checking my heart and pulse taking my temperature as we roared bumping along. I heard voices speaking German over the roar of the engine. Who are you? Friends, he replied. It’s better that you sleep now. He had a slight accent, but before I could ask him anything else I felt a coolness on my thigh and a pinprick and I went out.
When I next opened my eyes I started crying because I wasn’t in heaven with Nora, and the first face I saw was Peter Mulvaney’s and for a second I thought it was her. Where am I the usual question and he said Malta, we’re on Malta, in Valletta. He told me that he’d arranged the snatch, a bunch of special ops pals he’d organized on short notice, mostly Germans, came in and took over the military hospital where I was being held. For me? I said, calculating the cost. The Society footed the bill, he said. Why? He looked a little embarrassed. We occasionally work together, he said. Mucha do about nothing, I said, and he nodded. Nora would have raised holy hell, he said, but we had a mutual interest. I brought your bag, he said, your things from Wibok, there’s not much but I thought you’d want them. Am I going back to Wibok? Do you want to?
I thought about that for a while, looking around the room, a typical hospital room with a window through which came the smell of gasoline and cooking-scented air and the rumble of a city, which I had not heard since we left Rome. No, I said, I’m finished there. Where then? Florida, I said. I want to go home.
So when I was strong enough they flew me to London on a passport made out to Emmylou Dideroff and then to Miami, where I bumped into David Packer at the airport and it turned out that he knew the Jamesons and on that basis got me my houseboat and the job at Wilson’s and I lived like a mouse, a church mouse, until the day I saw Jabir al-Muwalid on SW First Street and the river and you know the rest. I didn’t kill him.
Here it ends and don’t ask me to explain it because I can’t. It’s what I remember but who knows the sources of memory? Or fate? Only God. Or as the saint says at the end ofhis confessions, What man can enable the human mind to understand this? Which angel can interpret it to an angel? What angel can help a human being to grasp it? Only You can be asked, only You can be begged, only on Your door can we knock. Yes, indeed, that is how it is received, how it is found, how the door is opened.
Emmylou Dideroff
Emily Garigeau
(late of the Society of Nursing Sisters of the Blood of Christ)
It is not possible in a small book such as this to recount in detail the sufferings and martyrdoms of the sisters of the Blood of Christ during the Second World War, and even now the fate of many remains obscure. Of the Polish Province, only three sisters survived, out of seventy-three in 1939. (The prioress general, Sr. Dr. Ludmilla Poniowski, died during the bombing of Warsaw. She had been making a visit of inspection when war broke out and she immediately made her way to the Society’s hospital, where she treated casualties until her operating room was destroyed by a direct hit.) Many records were lost when the Mother House at Nemours was confiscated by the German occupation authorities for use as a convalescent home for the army, and most of the European leadership was murdered by various regimes. Mother General Sapenfeld was arrested in June of 1941, soon after the Gestapo obtained a secret memorandum directing her sisters to use their best efforts to rescue Jews and other innocent victims of the Nazis, since, she wrote, “The German Reich has declared war on a whole people and, since they are not combatants, they must be considered to be innocent victims and the subjects of our sacred vow of service.” She died in the Ravensbruck concentration camp in the winter of 1943. In February 1944, the Society was outlawed in all German-occupied territories, its priories and assets were seized, and many sisters were arrested. A total of eighty-seven sisters perished in the camps.
— FROM FAITHFUL UNTO DEATH: THE STORY OF THE NURSING SISTERS OF THE BLOOD OF CHRIST, BY SR. BENEDICTA COOLEY, SBC, ROSARIAN PRESS, BOSTON, 1947.
Twenty-two
It was nearly midnight when they arrived at the scruffy banks of the Miami River. Everything at the hospital had taken longer than expected, and Paz had not the heart to rush things. He had wanted to take Lorna home first, but she refused, and Barlow backed her up on it. He pointed out that they had no idea what they would encounter at Packer’s houseboat, and they could not arrange for police backup without implicating themselves in the escape of a dangerous felon, besides which the point of that had only been to keep Emmylou out of the hands of the feds until
