Page 222 - What They Did to the Kid

210 Jack Fritscher

“You have a nervous condition?”
Not till now, I thought. I was still my own best observer. “I
was working very hard. Studying. Writing. I had begun translating
a German moral theology book, but stopped already early in the
spring. My studies come first.”
“Yes. That book by that heretic Häring.”
“I was told, Rector, that he is one of the new theologians.”
He glared at me. “Häring is a radical rogue priest.” He pulled
a sheaf of loose pages from his desk drawer. “These pages came
from your room. There’s words in here. Words that...one word...
mentioned twice. You have dared to write it.”
“I only translated it, Rector.”
“No seminarian should even know that word exists.”
“I looked in the dictionary, Rector.”
“That word does not exist.”
“When I become a priest, hearing Confessions, that word...”
“Do not listen to everything you hear in the Con fessional. Do
you understand me?”
“Yes, Rector.”
“I shall take these pages and burn them myself.”
“Yes, Rector.”
He was an assassin. I sat across from him, intent on playing his
game, intent on outmaneuvering him. This was about survival. I was
certain I had a vocation, and if God were trying to tell me I didn’t
have a vocation, God would certainly find a better messenger than
the pietistic Rector Karg.
If I was not to be a priest, which negation I sincerely doubted,
then I would leave Misery by my own will. I would not let this assas-
sin twist ten years of my pure motives of study, prayer, work, and
virtue into some weird pattern that would justify his shipping me.
If I were to be removed, I would remove myself. All my life I
lived to protect my vocation. Could I be faulted for grooming my
specific vocation as a worker-priest, writing for my supper, in the
general calling to the priesthood? I would not relinquish my lifetime
of focus now. Not to an assassin who knew me only as a name in roll
call, another mouth to feed, and a brain that was so cogito: ergo sum,
I think: therefore I am, that he feared, what? My powers of analysis?

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