Matt Pankratz
Fiction Writing Workshop

"Mother, who is Jesus?"
     "My little Kaszynka!  What questions you have!  Jesus is the Son.  He was sent to die for our sins.  If you want to know, read the Word.  Or ask the sisters, they are daughters of the Lord!"

     She often waited for her mother in the park after school.  On the afternoons of certain days she would often see Jewish men carrying bolts of cloth to the tailor's shop.  Usually on Thursdays she saw the Jew who owned the furniture store and his son climb in the front of the wagon hitched to the donkey, piled to heaping with deliveries to flats throughout the city.  The wheels of the wagon creaked under the load.  The wagon moved slowly.

     Kasia locked herself in her room.  She pulled the large, leather-bound volume from her school bag, opened the book, and read.


     Now, in the light of memory Kasia returned to her childhood questions.  She was waiting for the shamelessness of death.  Death, where her penance should be recognized and where her sins might be overlooked.  She had waited for much of her life.  Inside the waiting lived the questions that had tortured her, helped her find the ecstasy of salvation, left themselves imprinted on her, and brought her to the point of thankfully bidding them fair well as she escaped into death.  God in heaven!  Salvation!

     How could she know Jesus, beyond the text, beyond the words, stories, speeches?  Would the Lord live in her?  She could not love the Lord without knowing him.
     If she imagined, she knew Jesus could be anyone.  Maybe her father, or a weaver in a small village outside of the city, anyone.  Jesus could be the kind baker-woman who sometimes gave her fresh rolls on her walk to school.
     Were not the deeds of these people kind and just?  Did they not care for and love the world that everyday surrounded them?  If Jesus was not found in one man, then could he be in the lives of many, in parts, made whole through the connection of many?  Or was Jesus just questions and more questions, not definite, not one man or identifiable characteristics of kindness?

She turned a page and read:


Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them, "Go to the village ahead of you, and at once you will find a donkey tied there, with her colt by her.  Untie them and bring them to me.  If anyone says anything to you, tell him that the Lord needs them, and he will send them right away."


     Shouldn't the Lord ride on a horse?  The Lord is regal, magnificent.  Why should Jesus ask for an ass?  The Sisters had told her about the glorious Saviour, the Prince, the Son.  She knew the stories of richness, of beauty, or love infinite.
     If anyone asks?  Why shouldn't they?  Taking a donkey and her offspring, even if it was for the Lord, should pose questions.  What more Lord?  Let us bring ourselves to you!  Heal us Saviour!

     She remembered her vows.  Silence had been the easiest to keep.  The solace of her silence helped her to supplant the horrors and questions with belief in greater power.  Because of her chosen submission, the questions of her younger days seemed less significant.  She had come to the Sisters because all of her life had died in the camp.  The end of her life on earth would now be another passage of belief.

     Kasia desired to learn, to find an understanding for her questions.  Before the world turned upside-down she had been content to wait, to hold out for a deeper understanding, to live with questions and uncertainties.
     She went to University on a scholarship.  She read great books, argued with friends about Jesus and what it meant to believe in something she could not understand.

     "What will become of these troubles?  I do not know.  The Lord works strangely in people's lives.  There have been wars before.  There were wars in the time of Jesus.  But we still must love our brothers and sisters."

     Her arrest was inconceivable.  She was not a Jew, or a Communist.  She had a sound body and mind.  Her political affiliations were minimal, she seldom voted.  Kasia found herself falling amongst those chosen as unacceptable, as not human.  She was interned with the damned. Her life became a prison, her common inmates were people she had never known, and did not fully understand.  She could not wait to know them because they disappeared quickly in hate and death.  They faded as easily as stars at sunrise.

     From her memory came an inexorable longing.  A loneliness with such a specific place and feeling it ceased her march towards Death.  The memory had such clarity.  The vision was simple, basic, an entire part of her, sectioned off carefully.  Remembrance, recollection of words printed as much in her as in the page filled the moment.  This memory led to her ultimate destruction, to her moment of salvation.

     What kept her alive was the stars.  The stars were question-less.  Their beauty, their eternity against the horrors of her existence left no questions.  The stars lived.  They were without words, above questions.  The stars remained.  Everything around her decayed with increasing pace.  She waited for some finished passing.  She waited for death.

     Towards the end of her waiting for death in the camps, the world fell apart with reckless speed.  More died, more lives were taken, the ovens were full.  The dead were piled onto carts, the carts were pulled by men.  They were taken to open fields and set aflame.   The carts were heaped high with lives from around the world.  The wheels of the carts creaked under the load. The cries of the dead, the waiting circled.  The carts moved slowly.
     She saw fathers and sons, daughters of friends and parents, mothers, all end up as ashes. Stripped of anything, robbed of life, stuck to the certainties of death.

     It had been years since she had read the book.  The War had easily and quickly silenced her questions.  The quick terror of being torn from home and family had succeeded into an agony of length.  The Camps had been pure evil.  She had initially been outraged that her faith had not saved her, that her belief and allegiance to eternal powers could not stop the will of a
few men.  Her experience in the Camps greatly eclipsed her indignations.

     In the last moment she remembered her return to the words.  She recalled how they had re-emerged from her thoughts, and how amazed she had been that they had lasted through the many tortures she had witnessed and endured.  She remembered re-calling the words from deep inside.  She remembered how empty they were at that time, after so much.

     A soldier had given her the book.  One of the soldiers, some of those around her had called them saviours, handed her the small blue worn book.  Without opening it she knew. Despite its foreign language she knew the words.  The flood of recollection surged with emptiness through her weak body.

"Then Jesus said to his disciples, 'I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.  Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.'"  "When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished and asked, 'Who then can be saved?'"  "Jesus looked at them and said, 'With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.'"


     She had lived the possibility.  She has seen and felt the invasions of men who believed they were sanctioned by a higher power.  The murder of millions, the destruction of whole peoples, the cremation of lives.  She had been subject to man and man's possibilities.  Yet, she chose to believe the unknown.  She chose to believe in the power of God over the power of a man.  She had been told  Lord was the Son of God.  She knew Jesus was the Son of Man.
     
     Through the window she could see the stars.  The stars, created by God, preceding the Lord.  The stars had waited an eternity.  Her wait had ended.

"I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty.  I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want.  I can do everything through him who gives me strength."

     Beneath the habit, the last breath escaped.  The questions dissolved.  She knew God, and God recognized her, embraced her.  Her death, her grace, her salvation became one.


"Sister?  Sister?  Go With The Grace Of The Lord Sister."