The man closed his eye and his chest began to heave. Trembling, he rolled away from the blessed sister and moaned. Soon his breathing was halting and his shoulders began to jerk. Anoush gently laid both hands on him. He began to shake and lurch as the frightened Anoush prayed loudly. Suddenly she stopped and simply held him close, for the man was not wrestling in the throes of death, but rather sobbing like a child.
Heinrich lay in the care of his aged nurse for weeks. His fever had passed but his body was frail. By late April he was baking bread once again and helping the novice with the bells. In exchange for lodging and food, broken Heinrich humbly asked to serve in whatever ways his improving health might allow until he was strong enough to begin his journey home. His request was reluctantly granted with the stipulation that he not remain past the first day of July.
In the warm weeks of springtime, Heinrich spent hours listening to the words of Sister Anoush as he helped tend her gardens. She was wise and encouraging. She worked in apparent vain to teach him the proper order of things, that nothing on earth—no king, no pope, no village priest or reeve, nor high-minded notion—ruled with authority unless it ruled according to God’s Law of Love.
Despite her kindness and her instruction, the man remained numb, empty, and woefully shamed. His penance had miscarried, and he believed his many years away from home had been in vain. It was a new weight of sorrow he could scarcely bear. More than that, he had no more solution, no goal in view that might lighten the millstone hanging heavy on his shoulders. Everything had failed him, including himself. His spirit was wounded and scarred, barred from wisdom, closed to hope. He suffered the horrors of Anfechtung—the aching, unrequited contest for the soul.
In early June, Sister Anoush begged the priests to allow Heinrich the tasks of the carter. She hoped a change in the man’s monotony might kindle some spark of life. So, with some hesitation, the man was given charge of the two-wheeled cart and sent about Rome delivering eggs, carrying children to adoptive homes, fetching foundlings, bearing dispatches, and other sundry chores.
Bouncing atop Rome’s cobbles helped awaken something within the joyless man. He was particularly taken by the beauty of the Pantheon. Once the grand temple of the Roman gods, it had become a Christian church six hundred years before. The pilgrim stared up at its huge, domed ceiling, opened in the very center to the blue sky. Heinrich quickly looked down. “Cursed vow!” he grumbled. He wasn’t sure it had meaning any longer, but he was not ready to abandon all.
The man began to enjoy his days riding in the Italian sunshine. He marveled at the ruins of Rome’s glorious past, now mere mounds of stubble rising up from the dirt and debris of the centuries. He passed the forum and imagined the voices of the senators echoing amongst the goats now chewing grass atop what once had been the world’s seat of power. He trotted his little horse through Constantine’s arch and pretended to be a charioteer in a Roman legion following the emperor to the far-flung reaches of the world.
By Midsummer’s Day, Heinrich thought the decaying city to be redeemed, in part, by its scattered gardens and wildflowers, songbirds and the few fountains that yet sprayed water in the sun-bathed air. He watched a few squealing children splash in one and Heinrich paused to think of his own good lads. He could see them frolicking in the Laubusbach. The man reached into his satchel and retrieved his stone. He swished it in the fountain’s waters and chuckled. “There, little charm, you’d be baptized in the waters of Rome!” He rubbed the smooth stone between his fingers and thumb, then dropped it back into his bag. “Home,” he resolved. “’Tis time.”
Indeed it was. And in the early hours of the first day of July in the Year of Grace 1212, Sister Anoush walked her dear friend before the marvelous mosaic of Santa Maria in Domnica. There, the ragged, broad-shouldered German and his frail, stooped, Armenian friend stood silently together one last time as the rising sun illuminated the flowers of the fields and the robes of the angels. The golden halo of the Holy Child sparkled like a ring of jewels against the deep blue robes of the Virgin, and the saints glowed all around.
Heinrich’s eye lingered along the gold-eyed, red blooms and his mind flew to Emma and her corn poppies. His heart filled with the colors of the rainbow; the fruit of the sun. He lifted Sister Anoush’s knotty hand to his lips and kissed it tenderly.
Don Vincenzo broke the silence. “Sister, tell him I’ve come to release him.”
Heinrich’s mood changed as he was led to the confessional. There, he dutifully offered a short list of committed sins, but he had already reasoned it was probably useless. Whatever absolution God might have granted by His grace would certainly be rejected out-of-hand, for the man had held his own soul in the scales—and he found it wanting. God’s love was surely conditioned on his sincerity, and his sincerity was disproven by his failings. Not only did he expect his eternal state to be in the gravest peril, but his temporal indulgence would not now be granted either. His incomplete penance would leave a reckoning still due on earth, one that both he and his family must pay as penalty.