Heinrich Beyer’s Sacred Heart scapular

Heinrich Beyer’s Sacred Heart scapular is a small devotional garment whose significance emerges through its material resemblance to one Adrián Gallardo once wore and through the final gesture Beyer makes toward it. In the Klooga massacre, the scapular accompanies a seventeen-year-old German conscript as he refuses an order to shoot Jewish prisoners. It cannot save him from execution, but its crimson cord becomes the last visible sign of the faith and conscience that distinguish his refusal from the obedience around him.

Appearance and personal history

Beyer’s scapular is a piece of white silk, yellowed by sweat and dust from the front. A Sacred Heart of Jesus is printed on it, with red and gold thread embroidered over the image. Its worn surface records its use in the conditions of war, while its devotional design connects it to the Catholic upbringing Beyer describes: he comes from a prosperous Catholic family of landowners in the countryside near Bad Tölz.

The scapular is not merely a symbol introduced from outside Beyer’s life. He wears it beneath his shirt and brings it out during a lull in the artillery fire, kissing it before showing it to Adrián. That familiar, repeated gesture makes the object part of his daily practice of faith. Its closeness to his body is also emphasized by the crimson cord around his neck, which Adrián notices even before learning the young soldier’s story.

Adrián’s recognition and lost faith

When Adrián asks about the scapular, Beyer takes it from his shirt and kisses it. The sight recalls Adrián’s own similar scapular, which his mother placed around his neck when she said goodbye to him at the La Puebla de Arganzón railway stop in July 1936. He had kissed it many times in Spain. He did not take it with him to Russia and no longer knows where it went; he imagines that someone found it among the belongings left in his apartment on Calle Almirante and threw it away before a new tenant arrived.

Adrián’s response is not simply nostalgia for a lost possession. He remembers having felt naked and unarmed when the scapular was not against his chest. Now, faced with Beyer’s intact one, he feels the depth of his own separation from the religious practice it once supported. When Beyer asks whether he wants to pray, Adrián cannot explain in German that he has stopped praying: he lost the habit during the Spanish Civil War and his faith at Krasny Bor. He would like to accompany Beyer, murmuring in Spanish to a prayer he could recognize without understanding, but fears that doing so would be a lie amid the deceptions he already carries. He answers with a slow shake of the head.

At Klooga: faith and refusal

At Klooga, the scapular acquires its sharpest meaning when Beyer is selected for the firing squad assembled to kill Jewish prisoners. Adrián recognizes him among the soldiers facing exhausted, emaciated women. The sight calls up the mothers of both young men: Adrián imagines Beyer’s mother as much like his own, and sees the conscript as a near double of himself, a country-bred boy apparently innocent of the killing he is being made to take part in. The comparison offers Adrián a way to imagine that the atrocity is a predetermined fate, and even a momentary feeling that Beyer’s presence might absolve him from what he is about to witness.

That imagined likeness breaks at the moment of choice. When the officer Kleiber orders the firing squad to raise its rifles, Beyer remains standing with his rifle resting on the ground. He moves his lips in prayer while the women before him pray as well. Kleiber approaches, draws his pistol, and challenges him over the punishment for his offense. Beyer says that he knows the punishment. Kleiber shoots him in the forehead, and he falls. As his body is carried away, Adrián sees his right hand still closed around the scapular’s cord at his neck. He had time to grasp it, but not time to kiss it.

Meaning in the novel

The scapular does not function as a talisman that makes its wearer invulnerable. Beyer is killed, and the object he clutches cannot interrupt the execution or the massacre that follows. Its force lies instead in the contrast between the devotion it embodies and the violence demanded of him. His refusal makes his faith legible as an ethical choice rather than a private badge: he will not turn his rifle on the prisoners, even though he understands what disobedience will cost.

For Adrián, the scapular is also a material link between his former self and the young man he watches die. He once wore and kissed a similar object, but has lost both the scapular and the belief associated with it. Beyer’s hand closing on the cord makes that lost faith present again without restoring it. The moment exposes the difference between recognizing a moral choice and accepting that it is possible: Adrián initially treats Beyer as a double bound to the same inevitable role, then has to confront the fact that Beyer refuses. The scapular remains at the center of that revelation—not as protection from violence, but as the object held by a person who chooses not to commit it.