The Prayer

By Oskar Klausenstock

An old Irish priest, dying in a hospital in Boston, meets a young Jewish man, a doctor in training. Although they dont know it yet, they have little in commonexcept for their painful pasts. Still, Dr. K (his Polish last name is unpronounceable to the nurses) agrees to sit vigil on what could be Father OMalleys final night of mortality.

The priest soon speaks, reliving his bloody past in Ireland, where he fought in a failed revolution of 1916 as one of the rebels. Dr. K, a former inmate of multiple Nazi concentration camps, can relate to the old mans sense of failure. He was unable to save his family from the camps and is now the last remaining member of that family.

In their conversation, Father OMalley makes it clear that despite differences in faith, all men bleed red blood and all men deserve redemption. OMalley prays he will see the sun of one more daya final sign of Gods eternal forgiveness for past mistakes. Dr. K faces the guilt he has tried hard to forget. By morning, they are changed men; by morning, if theyre lucky, the Lord will hear them both.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Sep 10, 2013
• ISBN: 9781491703953

Oskar Klausenstock

Oskar Klausenstock was born and raised in Poland, where he spent time in several concentration camps during World War II. He arrived in the United States in 1949 and attended Boston University. He has published poetry and research papers and is now a retired physician. He lives with his family in California.

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Copyright © 2013 Oskar Klausenstock.

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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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ISBN: 978-1-4917-0393-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-0394-6 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-0395-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013914671

iUniverse rev. date: 9/9/2013

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

References

About The Author

CHAPTER ONE

THE DAY WAS NEARLY OVER; another day in school, scribbling notes, biochemistry, the last lecture of the day delivered by Dr. Monroe in his customary monotone. Gathering my hastily written notes, I headed for the entrance hall not realizing how much my life was about to change. I passed the bulletin board dotted with numerous notices, some typed, some handwritten little pages, offering tutorial aid, books for sale, requesting books to buy, some in search of sharing lodgings. Today there was a new one, the page larger than most. It offered a part-time job to a medical student acquainted with taking histories and medical charts. Room and board, it said, both words underlined. Seven evenings a week. A somewhat harsh employment term, but for me, a penniless twenty-four-year-old medical student, a recent arrival from war-torn Europe, still anguished by the specter of what transpired there during World War II, the offer was the closest thing to the garden of Eden. Heady stuff, this offer, with its possibility of wearing a clean white uniform and a stethoscope around my neck, and being called doctor at a time when that title was still a mirage on the distant horizon. How tempting the position of being an extern in a hospital was!

I read the offer, a promise of a nourishing meal at day’s end, of living in a place other than the single room where I lived, in a South Boston side street near the school. A flea and bedbug infested room it was, with the permeating odor of decay and the deafening noise of the elevated rattling the window every few minutes.

I rushed to get to the hospital with the alluring offer of employment. There it stood, not far from the school. Entering I was soon directed to the desk of a nun, a tall woman with a fleshy face, sparse eyebrows, and a redundant chin, draped over by the edge of her wimple like a stiff apron, her skin silky white and without a blemish. Mother Superior. She introduced herself and bid me to sit across her desk. For a long while she silently studied my face with her gray eyes, which were attentive and probing, eyes that allowed for no frivolity and spoke clearly of being in charge of all things on these hospital premises, an undisputed rule maker, even though she wore the same nun’s garb as all the others. All about her spoke of simplicity bordering on austerity—the simple, uncluttered desk with an old-fashioned inkstand and blotter, a bell, a telephone, all in white, as if she was trying to blend with her surroundings.

At first I felt ill at ease facing her across her desk. My eyes riveted on her large cross dangling from a beaded necklace. Eventually, as my nerves settled, my gaze shifted to the wall behind her and the prominently displayed portrait of the Black Madonna. I knew that portrait. Our Lady of Częstochowa she was called, the patron Madonna of Poland, my home country. How well I knew it from my school days, from the many holiday processions when she was carried aloft through the streets of my native town. Black and enigmatic, she reigned over the faces of the crowds of worshipers looking up at her in adoration. As I sat there, my eyes captured by the large, gold-framed and illuminated portrait of the saint and her inordinately large, iconic eyes, a barrage of recollections flooded my mind—of Poland and home—some gratifying, most of them painful. Mother Superior followed my gaze.

Do you know her? she asked.

I nodded.

Jasna Góra, yes. I nodded. Back home in Poland, I learned about her in school, and of the famous monastery. She was looked upon as the saintly Queen of Poland.

Mother Superior nodded, apparently impressed by my knowledge of the Black Madonna. It seemed that here in the United States, few know about her.

Catholic, I suppose? she asked, with a slight nod at the portrait.

Jewish, born and raised in Poland, I replied.

And you know so much about the Church, she said with a note that seemed to imply approval if not outright praise.

I was hired right there and then and asked to start the next day. But would you mind very much—she hesitated for a moment—if we would address you as Dr. K, especially when being paged on the hospital loudspeaker? Your full name is a bit … well, let’s say a little long and unwieldy.

To be offered the position, a dream fulfilled, I accepted the shortcut to my name with joy and gratitude.

It took a little time to get adjusted to the somber atmosphere of the hospital with its abundance of crosses on the walls, the many statues of the Madonna with Child, and the concealed artificial lamps that seemed more to insinuate light than to truly illuminate. After a while, the lights and the nuns, silent most of the time, seemed to go hand in hand.

The nuns, sisters they were called, seemed to have been informed that I was a Jew within the day of my arrival. Asking quick, darting questions on meeting me, many seemed to have heard of the small Polish town where I was born. Impressed by my fluency in the Polish language, my being of a faith other than theirs seemed to outweigh any possible devotional and religious conflicts.

My curriculum vitae, and as much of my past as I cared to divulge to the Mother Superior, soon became an open book to the entire order. When it came to asking about the war years spent in Poland, most of it having been in one form of incarceration or another, Mother Superior and the sisters were quite circumspect, as if sensing that there were things better left unspoken. By the time I crossed the hospital threshold and was introduced, each nun took it upon herself to greet me in Polish and exchange some small pleasantries. My past was a closed chapter, never alluded to. It was as warm a welcome as I ever received in a place of employment, especially one where all were nuns.

And so it all began. School, a short respite, a tram ride to the hospital, the donning of a white coat, a stethoscope around my neck, and standing before a mirror to admire my self-deluded metamorphosis from being a medical student to being introduced to patients as a doctor.

Never before have I felt this important.

Charts, aluminum bound, look alike. Some contain only a few pages and hastily written notes, clearly recent admissions; others are more voluminous, with many pages dog-eared. By ten