“Good God. So she was right to be afraid.”
“The truth is, we are all a little afraid of what happened here,” Sandru replied, “Because we are none of us certain of the truth. All we can do, young and old, is say our prayers, and put our souls into God’s care when we’re in this place.”
Zeffer was intrigued now.
“Tell me then,” he said to Sandru. “I want to know what went on in this place.”
“Believe me please when I tell you I would not know where to begin,” the good man replied. “I do not have the words.”
“Truly?”
“Truly.”
Zeffer studied him with new eyes; with a kind of envy. Surely it was a blessed state, to be unable to find words for the terribleness of certain deeds. To be mute when it came to atrocity, instead of gabbily familiar with it. He found his curiosity similarly muted. It seemed distasteful — not to mention pointless — to press the man to say more than he expressed himself capable of saying.
“Let’s change the subject. Show me something utterly out of the ordinary,” Zeffer said. “Then I’ll be satisfied.”
Sandru put on a smile, but it wasn’t convincing. “It isn’t much,” he said.
“Oh sometimes you find beauty in the strangest places,” Zeffer said, and as he spoke the little face of Katya Lupescu came into his mind’s eye; pale in a blue twilight.
TWO
Sandru led the way down the passageway to another door, this one rather smaller than the oak door they’d come through to get to this level. Out came his keys. He unlocked the door, and to Zeffer’s surprise he and the priest were presented with another flight of steps, taking them yet deeper into the Fortress.
“Are you ready?” the Father asked.
“Absolutely,” Zeffer said.
Down they went. The stairs were steep, the air becoming noticeably more frigid as they descended. Father Sandru said nothing as they went; he glanced back over his shoulder two or three times, to be sure that he still had Zeffer on his heels, but the expression on his face was far from happy, as though he rather regretted making the decision to bring Zeffer here, and would have turned on his heel and headed back up to the relative comfort of the floor above at the least invitation.
At the bottom of the stairs he stopped, and rubbed his hands together vigorously.
“I think before we proceed any further we should take a glass of something to warm us,” he said. “What do you say?”
“I wouldn’t say no,” Zeffer said.
The Father went to a small cubby-hole in the wall a few yards from the bottom of the stairs, from which he brought a bottle of spirits and two glasses. Zeffer didn’t remark on the liquor’s proximity; nor could he blame the brothers for needing a glass of brandy to fortify them when they came down here. Though the lower level was supplied with electricity (there were 19 lengths of electric lamps looped along the walls of the corridor) the light did nothing to warm the air nor comfort the spirit.
Father Sandru handed Zeffer a glass, and took the cork out of the bottle. The pop echoed off the naked stone of walls and floor. He poured Zeffer a healthy measure of the liquor, and then an even healthier measure for himself, which he had downed before Zeffer had got his own glass to his lips.
“When I first came here,” the Father said, refilling his glass, “we used to brew our own brandy, from plums we grew on our own trees.”
“But not now?”
“No,” the Father said, plainly saddened at the fact that they were no longer producers of liquor. “The earth is not good any longer, so the plums never ripen properly. They remain small and sour. The brandy made from such fruit is bitter, and nobody wants to drink it. Even I will not drink it, so you can judge for yourself how bad it must be!” He laughed at his self-deprecation, and used the laughter as a cue to fill his glass up again. “Drink,” he said to Zeffer, tapping his glass against Zeffer’s glass as though this was the first he’d had.