Under the swamp

*

On some days you would walk to the back of the gym through the doubtful mirror -- the one that stubbed your face when you thought it wasn't there but sometimes also mysteriously disappeared, letting athletes step into the murky back room whose silvered walls somehow conveyed the impression of being underneath a swamp -- so that was the gym's back room where you rarely went. Young men sweat there and picked up impossibly heavy weights. In the corner the Nazi Kommindant's Wife lay on her back neglected underneath a bar of weight. She rarely succeeded in lifting it and that was part of her torment.

She had learned many years ago that you could *not* live a holy life in the midst of evil while knowing the evil was there -- even vaguely and subcutaneously, even if you didn't know much -- and yet doing nothing about it. It was not that works could justify you but that the faith that did justify you blossomed with works as if involuntarily, naturally -- always -- or else it was somehow hollow. The works had to be there and they had to come second, be derived, and this she had learned -- and shehad even profited from the learning. She was as far from being a Nazi as anyone could be. The weight was something else.

*

What do I know about heaven? I know that it is not an entitlement. Heaven is not an entitlement and let me say it again: it is by nature not something of which one will ever be able to say: this I am entitled to.

Even the righteous never speak of entitlement because no true happiness will ever have anything to do with being entitled. Every happiness contains the work of being happy. the work is a form of happiness, it is being *involved* in happiness. If I manage to hold it up for even a second I am strangely elated, like a room lit from below.

*

God is good. He will not provide a coma on a platter. You will have no servants in heaven.

This is unimaginable happiness. It is not an entitlement, the ones who love God will never be a new upper class, nor could even want to be.

*

Will I be admitted to heaven? the kommandant's wife wondered. That I still do not know.

She felt she had a chance if only because the demons still tormented her, an act that seemed to suggest she was, even after all these years of suffering, still in play. The roulette ball dashing for its cover. I have not served you well at all, Lord. But today I can begin.

*

Duessa would go by and press the bar down into the wife's emaciated chest. Curse God and die, you bad woman. The kommandant's wife would feel strangely cheered by the abuse because it meant that she was still worth taunting and thus still worth saving -- still savable. Heaven is not an entitlement.

And the people exercising on the other side of the mirror -- on top of the swamp, so to speak -- would see a witch abusing a helpless old lady but they wouldn't understand what they saw. Their eyes were bewitched, half-closed. they reacted as though they were simply watching a television as they worked out.

*