The Phoenix

Forgive me my transgressions, the elderly nun murmured, her arthritic fingers worrying at the rosary beads around her neck. Help me to find the right path, Lord. Guide me through the darkness.

Most of the nuns were at supper in the refectory, a simple repast of tomatoes, olives and vine leaves stuffed with wild rice. But Sister Magdalena always fasted on this day: the anniversary of Sister Elena’s arrival.

Sister Elena and the visiting priest, Father Georgiou, were the only other souls in the chapel tonight. Across the stone-flagged nave, inside an exquisite, medieval carved wooden confessional, Sister Elena was receiving the sacrament.

‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.’

The Mother Superior could hear only mumbling: first Elena’s soft, singsong tones and then Father Georgiou’s deep baritone. Although of course she knew the words by heart.

‘Name your sins, my child.’

What sins could Elena possibly have? This kind, gentle, endlessly patient soul? This stoic, even cheerful, sufferer of torments that would have broken any ordinary human being? Poor Sister Elena. She had lost so much. Her youth, her beauty, her loved ones. Even now, all these years later, the doctors said she was in constant physical pain. And yet her faith remained as strong as ever, a shining beacon of hope through the dark night of despair.

She should be leading us, Sister Magdalena thought, for the thousandth time. Not me. I’m like John the Baptist, unfit even to wash her feet. And yet Sister Magdalena accepted that this was God’s plan. Elena had come to them on the boat from Ios like baby Moses in his basket of reeds, a helpless refugee. Although she had never spoken of what or whom exactly she was fleeing, no one doubted the sincerity of her plight. Back then she’d been too weak to lead the community. Now she was too humble, too devoted to her own spiritual life of purity and sacrifice.

Sister Elena emerged from the confessional. Seeing the Reverend Mother kneeling there, she bowed her head once respectfully, then hurried back to her cell to begin her penance. Could words and prayers and fasting really right the wrongs of the past? Or the present, for that matter? It was a nice idea. Evil and goodness existing like numbers on some sort of balance sheet that could be moved around at will. If only that were true.

In the privacy of her bare room she began removing her garments one by one and laying them neatly on her bed. The heavy wool tunic, belt, scapular and veil, all black, followed by a black veil, extra-thick in Sister Elena’s case, then a white one, and finally the white ‘coif’ or headdress worn by all the fully professed sisters at Sikinos. Finally she stood naked, relieved to be free of her torturous habit on this stiflingly hot night.

There was no mirror in the cell, nor any other accouterment of vanity, but at night the fifty-year-old nun could clearly see her reflection in the glass windowpane. Her figure was still beautiful, slender yet rounded, with full high breasts and a narrow waist tapering into softly curved hips and thighs almost as firm as they had been in her youth. From the neck down, she was still a beautiful woman. But her face was marked with sin.

My face is my penance, she reflected.

Then again, there was more to life than physical perfection.

Power, for instance.

Reaching into the pocket of the tunic lying neatly on her bed, she pulled out the piece of paper Father Georgiou had given her, unfolding it carefully with slow, practiced hands. Newspapers were forbidden at the convent, along with all other contact with the outside world. Just seeing the words H Av? (Athens top-selling daily newspaper translated as ‘The Dawn’) at the top of the page after all these years gave Sister Elena a little thrill.

But not as much of a thrill as the photograph.

The dead child. The sign. Right there, for the whole world to see!

There were many of them out there, children and adults alike, branded like this young boy. Brothers and sisters in fire. In pain. Reaching down, Sister Elena ran her fingers over the grooves of the brand seared into her own flesh, at the top of her inner thigh. A simple letter ‘L’, the same mark as on the migrant boy. How ironic that it should be this child, this nameless refugee – this nobody – whose death had brought their signs out into the open. Put them on the front page of the newspaper, no less, and all over the television news.

God bless you, child.

Putting her hands up to her face, Sister Elena let the paper flutter to the ground, aware of an unfamiliar sensation she couldn’t quite place.

Then, all at once, it dawned on her what that was.

Sister Elena had just done something that she hadn’t done in well over ten years.

She’d smiled.

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

Jim Newsome felt the sweat trickle down between his shoulder blades and the dust sting his eyes as the preacher droned on.

‘Mimi Praeger … good Christian … good neighbor … back home with the Lord …’

The punishing sun made it hard to concentrate. A wiry outdoorsman in his late sixties, with thin lips and the erect, stiff bearing of a soldier, Jim Newsome stood beside his soft, round wife Mary, betraying no outward sign of his discomfort. But inside Jim was seething. Who in their right mind held a funeral service outdoors, at noon, in the height of summer? All around, the air shimmered with a dry, painful heat, all wind and dust and cracked earth. The kind of heat that made your throat hurt and your skin prickle with the whispered threat of fire. This was desert heat. Only they weren’t in the desert. They were in Paradise Valley, California, at the Praeger ranch, an oasis of lush green pastureland. Or at least it had been, before the drought arrived, drying out the river beds and turning the meadows brown and brittle, like an old man’s skin.

‘As we gather to scatter Mimi’s ashes over the land she loved …’ The pastor took a sip of water, mopping his brow with a handkerchief, his face tomato-red. ‘Let us call to mind our own failings …’

Jim Newsome tuned out. The rancher’s failings were his own business, not some milksop of a preacher’s, barely out of short pants. Jim would call them to mind when he was good and ready.