Fragments of Me. Eric G. Swedin
parade ground.
The instructor summoned each Catholic boy forward in turn and ordered him to march out to the chapel to give his confession. There were only six of them, since we were deep in Protestant territory north of Berlin. Each boy submitted to the ritual and dutifully recited in detail each sin of the last week. Among the petty fights and lustful thoughts toward girls, three of them had been involved in liaisons with other boys at the school. This activity was growing in popularity among German military youth across the nation. I forgave each of them their trespasses, though only God can forgive, assigned each of them some penances, and bid them to go and sin no more.
I returned to my own parsonage and ministered to the needy there, but a preoccupation with the growing lump under my belt interfered with my concentration. Finding a new host in a manner that did not violate my own moral code was always so difficult. One of the confessing boys had talked about a liaison with another boy, a Lutheran, named Gustav. Apparently Gustav liked to hurt his playmates and few sought him out any more.
After a few inquiries, I identified the boy in question. His father was Baron von Hof, a high administrator in the Prussian government. Responsible for some aspect of agriculture. He lived on an estate outside of town and every weekend his only child visited. Standing on the street corner across from the grey stone wall that surrounded the gymnasium, I watched as the youth came out. A strapping lad, with blond hair and the high cheekbones of the Nordic people. He wore his uniform with careless ease, its lines crisp and straight. I crossed the street, dodging a horse-drawn wagon and approached him. He glanced my way and turned away. The collar and frock of a priest did not interest him.
As we passed, I contrived to discreetly touch his arm.
The next day I waited for him, reading a book as I loitered. It was by a Frenchman named Jules Verne, who told such wonderfully outlandish stories. A carriage drew up and the young man alighted. He walked directly toward me, which startled me. He touched me and I knew the story.
A petty bureaucrat by day, Baron von Hof was a twisted man at home. And he twisted his son. Even though only sixteen, Gustov had been totally corrupted. I could describe their crimes of corruption and brutality, but to what purpose? After centuries of experience, I can see when a person is redeemable. Gustov was not and so my fragmental destroyed him. I now had a fresh, young body.
Gustov and I returned to my quarters at the church. Three canons and two priests lived there. My own small room contained a bed, writing desk and straight-backed chair, and a bookcase full of leather-bound volumes. Gustov sat on my bed and patiently waited. Sitting at the desk, I wrote my will. It was simple enough, granting what little money I had to the parish poor and giving away my books and other treasures to particular friends. I turned to look out my window and contemplate my impending demise.
Frau Stettin was kneeling at her daughter’s headstone in the small graveyard. During my first year here, some thirty-three years ago, the girl of only seven had died. Every day the good frau came to place fresh flowers from her greenhouse on the grave and spend an hour with her only child. Herr Stettin handled his grief differently and never came to the church. He was a prosperous tanner now, unlike the poverty of the past that had prevented them from taking the girl to a hospital in Berlin. I often comforted the Frau during her weekly confessions. Some might see her prolonged grief as an illness, but I knew better. She had twisted and turned until she found a mode of life that she could live. The daily visit gave her reason to continue. A lesser woman would have just lain down and waited for the reaper to harvest her.
Beyond the stone wall of the graveyard was a playground. A contribution of Herr Ruderman, owner of three dairies. After a sermon on why it is easier to pass a camel through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to go to heaven, he had come to me in contrition. He asked how he could make amends and I suggested the playground for the local children. He gave in the proper spirit of caring and loving, not begrudgingly. If there is a judgment day, I am sure that this will be a mark in his favor.
There, side by side, death and life. Frau Stettin was alone while the playground was full of laughing children. Death is always lonely. While I was not about to die in an absolute sense, in another way I was dying. It was hard to give up the life that I had created for myself here and the people that I loved so dearly. My books and my other knickknacks, while only made of paper or leather or wood, were invested with emotional meaning. I would leave them also.
My physiology reacted to my emotions and tears streamed down my face. After a while, I wiped them away and smiled at the antics of the children. Children know such raw joy, unrefined by the weight of years. Taking my will, I went to find Father Braun. He was in his room. A younger man, he deferred to me as the senior priest. Normally I waited for a visit from the bishop to say confession.
He opened the door to my knock and I entered. After a few pleasantries, I got to the core of the issue. “Father, I am dying. I have only a short time left, perhaps only hours.”
“Are you sure?” The young priest was alarmed. “Shouldn’t we summon a doctor?”
“No, no, of course not. I am at peace with my fate. I am here to ask you to hear my confession and administer last rites.”
“Isn’t that premature?”
“No, absolutely not.”
He heard my confession, which was not much, mostly regrets that I could not do more for those that came to me. I am a healer and being a priest or minister was the best mode to deliver my comfort. Then he performed the final sacrament. While I am not Roman Catholic in the usual sense, I honor the beliefs of the community. Last rites provide closure.
Pressing my will into his trembling hands, I asked him to run to the store and buy me some sweets. He gladly complied. This was his first experience with the final sacrament and I could see that it had unnerved him.
He was a good boy, one who had the potential and drive to care for my parish when I was gone. Returning to my room, I lay down on the bed and passed my core self to Gustov.
As Gustov, I slipped out of the church and returned to my home. There would be no gymnasium for me today, and besides, a military gymnasium was not for me. Society and culture was changing ever more rapidly around me. There was a new profession called psychiatry. The medical men were encroaching on the territory that only priests had heretofore occupied. Medical school was the place for me.
That night I pushed the self of the Baron from his body, slaying that which made him a person. With my fragmental in complete control of his son, the new Baron, I tried to heal some of the decades of horrible damage that the petty Junker had caused.
With my new body, I decided to head to the front. There were surely many there who were crippled in mind and needed my help.
CHAPTER EIGHT
A French schoolhouse on the outskirts of Lille served as a hospital. Most of the children of the city had fled with their parents in 1914, so their classrooms now housed about four hundred patients. Most of the men were recovering from gas attacks or the damage caused by bullets and shrapnel. Shell-shock casualties occupied a single room on the second floor.
The windows faced south and bathed the room in a warm glow during the morning that by afternoon made the room a humid sauna. The sweet-sick smell of gangrene drifted in from the first floor. Of the nine patients in the upper room, a man named Hans Kruppen lay in the third bed on the left. A large Frenchwoman, Mrs. Joulet, quickly and efficiently changed his clothes and bedding, cleaning away the feces and urine-soaked sheets. As she rolled him back and forth in the process, he lay limp, neither resisting nor assisting her efforts. The good woman worked in the hospital and earned just enough money to support her six children. Her husband had left with the reserves only days before war erupted. Fate decreed that her children be stricken with fever when the Germans swept through, preventing her from fleeing. Letters funneled through Switzerland kept her in contact with him, but the letters stopped coming after the opening battles around Verdun. It took her six months to find out that he had died during an artillery barrage.
Some might think that she should not be here tending the wounds of the countrymen of those who had slain her husband, but she was better than that. She