Rules for Prayer and Days of Indulgence

The Rules for Prayer and Days of Indulgence become, for the unnamed boy narrator, an imagined system for accounting for both suffering and hope. After hearing that particular prayers earn from one hundred to three hundred days of indulgence, he concludes that prayer governs worldly fortune: people prosper or suffer according to the amount stored up for them. He responds by learning the prayers with the highest stated value and reciting them relentlessly, treating each as an addition to a heavenly account. The rule gives his life an order he can grasp, but it does not change the conditions that made him seek protection in the first place.

The Teaching and the Boy’s Interpretation

The teaching reaches the boy while he is living with Garbos, whose repeated mistreatment leaves him afraid to complain or escape. He hears the village vicar explain the number of indulgence days associated with certain prayers to an old peasant who does not understand the idea. The vicar elaborates, and the boy takes from the exchange a practical principle: more prayers mean a better life, while fewer mean more trouble and pain. The text presents this as the boy’s understanding of the teaching, not as proof that prayer actually controls earthly events.

He immediately expands the explanation into a comprehensive account of human difference. In his reasoning, strength and weakness, freedom and enslavement, wealth and poverty, health and sickness all reflect how much prayer people have accumulated. Heaven becomes a storehouse in which each person has a separate bin for days of indulgence. Some bins are already full; others are nearly empty, and new ones await people who have not yet learned the value of prayer. The system translates an opaque and unfair world into a ledger whose rules the boy believes he can master.

The image of storage makes the doctrine tangible to him. He imagines days of indulgence piling up like sacks of wheat at harvest, and pictures his own bin growing until heaven must provide a larger one. This fantasy of measurable accumulation reverses his sense of helplessness: instead of accepting that other people control his circumstances, he believes he has discovered a means of improving them through his own effort. The rule is thus both a religious teaching and a structure the boy builds around it to explain why suffering falls unevenly.

Learning the Prayers as a Strategy

The boy approaches the village vicar with feigned casualness and asks to see the Prayer book. He selects the prayers marked with the largest numbers of indulgence days and asks the vicar to teach them. The vicar is surprised by the boy’s preference for some prayers and lack of interest in others, but reads the chosen ones several times. The boy concentrates on memorizing them until he knows them perfectly. For him, learning is not an abstract act of devotion: he believes he has acquired the means to leave punishment and humiliation behind.

Once he knows the prayers, he treats spare moments as opportunities to increase his account. He recites them rapidly, sometimes including a prayer with fewer indulgence days so that heaven will not think he has neglected the humbler ones. He fears that lost time has cost him years of protection and resolves to catch up. The imagined account gives him a future-directed task with a clear measure of progress, unlike his unpredictable life under Garbos.

His vision grows beyond private calculation. He imagines prayers rising from the earth like sparrows, carrying his name through councils of angels and saints toward the heavenly throne. In this vision, a small boy distinguished by black hair and black eyes can become noticeable in a hierarchy that otherwise seems far beyond his reach. The image lends the repeated practice a scale and audience: each prayer is not only a unit added to a bin, but also a signal that he exists and may be recognized.

Prayer Under Threat

The boy’s new practice takes place alongside continuing abuse, rather than replacing or ending it. Garbos notices the constant muttering and suspects that the boy is casting spells. The boy conceals his real purpose because he fears that Garbos might forbid him to pray or somehow interfere with the prayers. Garbos interprets the boy’s delayed answers and inattention to threats as defiance, and the boy’s life continues to alternate between prayer and beatings. The practice offers an inward refuge, but no outward safety.

When Garbos suspends him by straps, the boy uses prayer to organize his endurance. As his strength ebbs, he promises himself another ten or twenty prayers before giving up, then sets a further target. He believes that every additional thousand days of indulgence might save his life, perhaps immediately. The prayers therefore function as a private measure of time and effort inside an ordeal he cannot control: each recitation sets a limited next step when the larger situation offers no reliable end.

This use of the rule also exposes its tragic limit. The boy believes accumulated indulgence will protect him from Garbos, yet the mistreatment continues. He does not abandon the arithmetic; instead, he interprets present pain as evidence that he should have begun earlier and must now make up for lost time. His conviction turns suffering into a reason for greater effort, even though the account he imagines cannot restrain the person harming him.

Religious Authority and Competing Rules

The vicar is the source of the boy’s knowledge, but his authority does not provide dependable protection. After noticing bruises, he asks Garbos who caused them and why, and tells him to bring the boy to church the next day. Garbos responds by beating the boy again and threatening him against speaking about it. The boy expects that another complaint might bring only a mild admonition and expose him to further punishment. Religious instruction offers a language of justice, while the vicar’s limited intervention leaves the boy uncertain that the institution can enforce it.

The surrounding villages are governed by more than one kind of rule. Under German occupation, communities must deliver much of their scarce produce to the troops, and refusal risks punitive raids. Partisans also demand assistance, while factions punish villages for supporting their rivals. German soldiers search the blacksmith’s village and shoot peasants as examples; the blacksmith hides the boy in a potato cellar while promising deliveries. In this setting, survival depends on navigating coercive powers as well as local authority. The boy’s heavenly ledger is another order he can imagine, but it has no force over armed men or household abusers.

Other arrangements in the boy’s life make the contrast between material and imagined security especially clear. Olga teaches that survival without human help requires knowledge of plants and animals and possession of fire, and gives him a portable Comet stove. Cans for such stoves are scarce enough that communities near the railway fight over them. The stove can provide heat and cooked food; prayer, by contrast, provides the boy with a framework for interpreting danger and a discipline for enduring it. The evidence does not establish that he treats the two as equivalent protections, but their different functions clarify the limits of the indulgence system.

Meaning and Limits

The rule matters because it turns helplessness into a practice the boy can perform continuously. He cannot determine whether Garbos will punish him, whether the vicar will intervene, or how the people around him will treat him. He can, however, memorize prayers, count them, and imagine their accumulation. The resulting sense of order is intensely personal: it assigns an explanation to inequality and gives the boy a future in which effort might outweigh humiliation.

That imagined justice remains distinct from the formal arrangements that later determine his fate. When the war is ending, the boy must leave the regiment and be sent under regulations for lost children to a special center while officials determine whether his parents are alive. The administrative rule does not settle the theological questions he had tried to answer, just as his prayers did not end the abuse. The Rules for Prayer and Days of Indulgence therefore mark both the resourcefulness and the vulnerability of his response: a child constructs a world of accounts and accumulated hope inside circumstances governed by powers he cannot command.