The Teachings of St. Scaphander

"Thirty silver pieces. They're sellin' the poor Jesus all over again in this place." When they had finally managed to nail down the crucifix, although not too precisely, they each took out a bottle of beer and said Our Beer in Heaven, which had replaced the old-fashion prayer a long time ago. After that, the carpenters crept away to the cellar to have a little doze before lunchtime. There they have disturbed the monastery Ghost who had been taking a rest after a house-party night.

This Ghost inhabited the monastery for several centuries already, but the recent six years became his toughestexperience since the times when he had been walled up alive in the very cellar where now three fat carpenters were anoring.

After six sisters of St. Scaphander had been given back the massive building which used to belong to their congregation, they rented part of it to a night club called Paradise and a pension named Eternal Refuge. It was then that the Ghost discovered a new way of spending his lonely nights. This was his only leisure activity, not counting another one, which was preaching to the deluded religious by means of pretending to be St. Scaphander himself.

In the old, beaten by many a tempest, chapel of St. Scaphander, Mother Superior was lying, penitent, on the floor. The Ghost slipped behind a huge painting which showed St. Scaphander's agonies.

"St. Scaphander, ask graces for us sinners from Our Divine Master", Mother Superior wept. "We need money for restoring the temple so badly."

There the Ghost launched his usual wrathful period . "Why allowst thou the pagans to intercourse, full of vice, in the corridors of this holy institution? Knowst thou not, o sinner, that the Pope of Rome hath condemned th'use of condoms?" he uttered in a strict voice of St. Scaphander.

Mother Superior started crying aloud. Satisfied, the Ghost went to inspect the monastery kitchen.

The entrance to the kitchen was almost obstructed by a mountain of Easter presents from all over the Christian world. In the kitchen, three thin nuns were cooking pork with bread dumplings and cabbage. Next to them, three old beggar women were cutting onions. The onions made them shed abundant tears.

"Sister Miranda, do you think the today's high guest will try our famous onion soup?" asked one of the nuns.

"I don't think so, sister Quintilliania. He would rather have his dinner in the government residence. Everything's been planned and cooked beforehand. He's a prince!"

"A heretic prince!"

The Ghost became anxious. The word heretic gave rise to unpleasant rememberings. It was heresy he had been tortured and executed for. So the Ghost left the monastery kitchen melancholically, and moved towards another kitchen, that of Paradise night club.

In Paradise, only vegetarian dishes were on the list. Three thug-like cooks, with black hair and military-type manners, sniffed greedily the tempting smell of pork, which came from the monastery kitchen.

"A bloody steak, that's all I want right now," said one of them, while taking out a can of cuffent jam.

"Hush, the boss could have heard it!" the second one whispered. "You might get us into trouble!"

However, the first one did not give up. "I'm sick and tired of all these never-ending toasts. And this red jam... do you know what it reminds me of?"

"Shut up!"

"Won't. It reminds me of General Vukovic 's unseamed belly. Do you remember him squealing like a pig? Ha, ha, that was so ungenerallike. And when I see your hands covered with this red jam to the elbow, like this -"

"Hush,the boss could have heard!"

All three carried on with their cooking.

The Ghost felt completely down. He remembered the horrible tortures he had been exposed to, before being walled up in the cellar. Again, he saw his own bowels hanging out of his belly. So he hurried to leave the vegetarian kitchen at once.

During the day, the only quiet place in the entire monastery was the night club. To there the Ghost set off, hoping to finally sleep off the troubles of yet another unruly party night.

It was indeed quiet down there, save the scratching of three black cleaner men's brooms against the floor, and the snoring from behind a loudspeaker, where a tired DJ was taking a rest. Lulled by these peaceful sounds, the Ghost soon fell asleep behind another loudspeaker.

Both sleepers were woken by a loud brass fanfare , which indicated the arrival of the royal guest. Astonished, the Ghost and the DJ rushed upstairs to see what was happening. At the entrance, a considerable crowd had gathered, who were waving flags in the air, and shouting, "Long live the Prince of Devonshire!"

The Ghost jumped with joy. He clearly remembered the Prince of Devonshire , whom he had once confronted in a battle in 1432, and who had dealt him a painful wound. Looking round for a rider dressed in golden armour, and surrounded by numerous attendants, the Ghost at first did not even notice two modest-looking guests who entered the building. One of them, a tall, dark-haired, athletic man with a friendly charming smile, greeted the crowd by waving his hand. The Ghost was petrified and did not understand anything. Was that the Prince!? "O tempora, o mores"- he sighed. The second guest was familiar to the Ghost. It was an ex-prisoner of the monastery cellar, which had not so long ago been used as apolitical jail. He was of medium height, with reddish hair, a rather shy type of person. The Ghost remarked to himself, that the visitor's neat suit fitted him much more than the prisoner's gown he used to wear several years ago. "Long live our Vice Prime Minister!" cheered the crowd.

At the same time, a strange procession approached the opposite entrance. It consisted of a short, nervous man followed by four boys marching in a line in the order of height, starting with the tallest one. The boys were each carrying a pot.

The Ghost was fond of this pious family. The father had decided to name his sons in the honour of the four Evangelists, that is, Matthew, whose pot was for the onion soup; Lucas, whose pot was for the pork; John, dumplings; and, finally, James, who was about to fill his pot with sauerkraut.

The procession walked upstairs to the monastery kitchen. At the same time, the Prince of Devonshire and the Vice Prime Minister were going to have a look at the famous prison cell in which the latter used to be imprisoned. Now, a gilded memorial plaque hung there.

The Ghost became sarcastic as he remembered the incredible lots of reports on the famous prisoner, written by volunteer informers who shared the cell with him; the present politician himself, on the other hand, wrote only poetry.

The guests were going downstairs to the cellar when the pious family marched out of the kitchen with their pots full, and walked in the same direction. The father decided that they had better hurried up in order not to clash into the attendance, which was a considerable power of people. But as they rushed towards the exit Matthew accidentally stumbled, and spilt the onion soup on the floor. furious, the father dragged him by the ear into a corner.

Then the visitors entered. The first one to slip was the Prince of Devonshire; however, he managed to restore equilibrium. Unforunately, the Vice Prime Minister did not have that much skill in skating. He slided on the floor as far as the inside of his former prison cell.

"So this is the cell I was imprisoned in," he laughed. The spontaneous joke was appreciated with a general applause. When it calmed down, a loud shot-like bang came from around the corner.

"Assassination! Everyone down!" the bodyguards shouted and, with their guns drawn out, threw themselves on the terrorists.

Everybody lay down on the floor, except the Prince who was used to this kind of situations. Some seconds later the bodyguards dragged two people out of the corner. Matthew's left cheek was bright red with a heavy slap; the next moment his father managed to land another one on the boy's right cheek.

"Please don't beat the child," the Prince exclaimed. "Nothing serious has happened."

The wives of local politicians, however, had a different opinion, when they rose to their feet and discovered onion soup stains on their best clothes. The Ghost expected the poor boy to be beheaded on the spot, and hurried off to the nearest cell so as not to see it. The cell was now a hotel room. Therein he saw a picture peculiar to the place he inhabited: two foreign student couples were making love in a two-storey bed. The Ghost hovered in the corner, gradually overcoming the embarrassment.

After six years of liberty, he still could not bring himself to look at teenagers having sex, without pious rage arising in him. Same applied to the improvised strip show schoolboys and schoolgirls carried out every night. Even cross-examinations and tortures had been a more acceptable sight for a martyr that he was.

When the Ghost had been alive, he had been a faithful follower of Master John Hus. He had fought heroically for the right to receive the Holy Communion in both bread and wine. Captured and tortured, the Hussite had died of wounds and famine in the monastery cellar. Henceforth, in the five hundred years that had elapsed, he had never once attended a Catholic mass; but in the absence of the priest and the nuns, he had been secretly eucharistising himself in both kinds, with all possible splendour. He had ceased doing so forty years ago, when the monastery had become a jail; during that time, he had not received the Blessed Sacrament at all. His most recent hobby was to impersonate St. Scaphander. Petrified sisters whispered about miracle, or a diabolic illusion.

And now, as he saw the six religious drifting to the Holy Mass, the Ghost stole upon them swifty, and howled, "Sinners, o ye great sinners, do ye penance, ask ye mercy of Our Lord! Hath Our Divine Saviour not said, 'My House is the House of prayer'!? Your Mother House is a domicile of every vice, a blasphemic paradise to gentile juvenile ruffians, a refuge to villains in the Evil One's service! Shame on ye!"

The nuns passed along without uttering a word, but then the Ghost suddenly started whirling around them, bringing their habbits to a state of complete mess. This occupied them for a while.

The Ghost, whose funtime had hence commenced, now went to the Paradise club, where a house-party was just beginning. On his way, he blew utilized condoms, lying in abundance on arm-chair handles,telephone tables and coffee machines, down on the floor, and howled into the open doors of hotel rooms, causing their teenage inhabitants to laugh frantically.

The party had just begun. The DJ, who called himself Mister X, was one of the Ghost's favourite persons. He liked Mr. X's slightly manic appearance. The fanatic look in his big eyes, whose lids were painted black, reminded the Ghost of the passionate expression in the eyes of a Hussite preacher he used to know. And when Mr. X put headphones ontop of his bald cranium, he looked like a wounded Thaborite with bandage on his head. Another peculiar detail about Mr. X was that he normally played from six gramophones, which was a world record. Sensitive and paranoid, he possessed a special art of getting people into ecstasy.

There he stood, encircled by his six gramophones, like a warriorwho decided to fight to the last drop of blood. At first he seemed to be losing the battle as the only person he managed to get onto the dance-floor was a short, poorly dressed man with long, shaggy red hair. With his cap pulled down onto his so that only the beard could be seen, the man swayed from side to side. He seemed to have isolated himself from the rest of the world completely.

A crucial break in the battle came about when the ultraviolet lights were turned on, so that anything that was white started glowing. Normally invisible, the Ghost emerged in the middle of the dance-floor as a mystic figure in white. Although this happened every night, still it was a sensation. It was nothing but the Ghost that caused the enormous success of the Paradise club. Everybody thought the glowing Ghost to be a revolutionary new special effect brought from abroad, When he was nibbling in the clouds of nitrogen smoke, he had a sort of spellbound which made people get down on the dance-floor without hesitation and shake their bodies mindlessly.

A spark of happiness appeared in the DJ's face, naturally pale so that it shone in the UV lights as well as the Ghost. The floor was now crowded; so the battle was won.

The Ghost, too, was happy. For him, being a special effect was a way to realise himself to the full, and popularity and common admiration flattered him no less than an ordinary human. The sight of the crowd partying all around, together with the music which sounded as a message from a different world, made the Ghost feel like in Heaven.

The only person to know the truth about the nature of the famous special effect was the owner of the Paradise club. When the Ghost had visited the club for the first time, the owner was petrified and called at the guard to get the strange apparition lost, whichof course did not work. However, later on, as he saw the Ghost's popularity among the ravers, he thought that, whatever it really was, it might bring him extra income. His idea was to get the Ghost contracted, so that he does not simply disappear one day, the thing the lucky emigree, rich by a sheer coincidence, was panically afraid of.

When one day he approached the Ghost during the party with an exceptionally lucrative contract, he received the angry reply,"Aroint thee!" "What?" "Get lost! What canst thou offer me? I am but a wandering spirit, sans body which yearn for wealth. hink of thy soul, pray for Divine Grace, thou who servest Mammona!" The uneducated rich man did not understand the Ghost's obsolete expressions, and decided to leave him alone.

At three o'clock in the morning the Ghost quitted Paradise, The crowd, which had already got slightly tired, now felt abandonned and so was in low spirits; the party was about to be over anyway.

As the Ghost was passing along the corridors, bestrewn with drugged bodies of foreign students, he remembered the times of plague, when dead corpses were lying all over the place and anyone who happened to survive was trying to get away as quickly as possible. And so he did.

Meanwhile the peculiar game with the crucified Christ began. The wooden crucifix in the nonastery yard represented the target. Making use of the occasion of the Great Silence at the monastery, the inhabitants of Eternal Refuge pensoin were trying to hit the target with an empty bottle. The one to bring the crucifix down into the grass was ther winner. All players then joyfully urinated on the overthrown Saviour from the windows.

The Ghost was totally disgusted. He could not brinr himself not to interfere and went for it again and again.

"Listen up, ye miserable gentiles!" he exclaimed. "Ignorant as ye are, know ye who is He that ye do profane? He loveth you! He died for you, crucified by ignorants such as you! For your ingratitude, ye shall be thrown into th'everlasting bonfire of shame and despair!"

The Ghost's passionate howl had, as usual, drowned in the flow of swear words in different languages. The desperate Ghost tried the last. He expired a misty clowd which reeked of decomposition.

Delighted by what they thought was a nice joke, the young jumped down from the window-sills and galloped back to their rooms,laughing. Many of them came down with fatigue in the midway, falling asleep in the corridors, bathroms and even staircases. "At least they have left Him alone," thought the Ghost, and went to sleep in the cellar.

After the noise had calmed down, three men appeared in the yard. They lined up in a row, and started performing a strange oriental dance. With their backs bent down, they were jumping in a round, casting bizarre shadows in the moonlight. One of them, agrey- haired Europian dressed in a black shirt with a white bow tie, and with a green band around his head, was waving a green banner with a stripe below. Two others, Oriental type men in lamb wool hats, were singing a sad oriental song.

The chief of the Night Wolves, as the three bearded men called themselves, was a famous local TV show presenter who spent his free time fighting a querilla war in the distant oriental mountains.

The highlanders were ex-field commanders who lived in the monastery secretly. All three were permanently bored with inaction; dancing in the moonlight reminded them of home.

Once, outraged at having been served pork for lunch, the commanders hijacked the three nuns from the monastery kitchen and held them as hostages, demanding mutton. Fortunately, the hostages were freed by the vegetarian cooks from the Paradise kitchen, who in their turn demanded some bloody steak as a reward.

With the break of dawn, the Night Wolves vanished as swiftly as they had appeared. Then the carpenters came; sighing, they rinsed the wooden crucifix from a hose. After that they started mounting it back to its place. The cross kept toppling as though it did not want to return to its Golgotha...