City of Shadows

by Ariana Franklin

  Schmidt was being told something, but he didn’t know what. “Go on,” he said.

  The priest looked relieved. “It was thought the killer or killers had been found, action had been taken, the matter was over.”

  “Yes?”

  Father Teofil looked down at the floor, as if searching for something he’d dropped. Schmidt poured more whisky into the glass, but for a while Father Teofil’s eyes desperately scanned the dirty reed mat at his feet.

  “Go on,” Schmidt said again. There was no place for pity at this point in an interrogation; time for that when you’d got the truth.

  “Then the child’s father came forward.. . .”

  “I wondered if it was the father,” Schmidt said. “Most murder victims are killed by their nearest, if not their dearest.”

  “Oh, no, Herr Schmidt, no, no. It wasn’t him. I doubt if poor Tadeusz ever killed anything bigger than a fish. A most gentle person, almost effete for a villager, a mother’s boy. Indeed . . .” The priest’s eyes swiveled toward Schmidt and away again. “I had been greatly relieved when he married, if you understand me. You come from a metropolis; perhaps you are conversant with these matters.”

  Schmidt nodded gently.

  “He came forward in church,” Father Teofil said, “I have never witnessed such a scene and hope never to do so again. Ravaged, raving— we had thought it to be grief, you see. It was guilt. He pointed . . .”

  His own arm swung out in accusation toward a worm-eaten grandmother clock in the corner. “He pointed at a young man who had been his friend. There . . .” The priest’s hand stabbed again toward the clock. “Sitting in the congregation, a young man we all knew; indeed, I had baptized him, taken his confirmation. Mary, Mother of God, have mercy on us sinners, Almighty God, who seest we have no help in ourselves.”

  “And this friend had killed his wife and child.”

  Father Teofil looked up and nodded. “They had been lovers, it seemed,” he said simply. “Ryszard had wanted them to go away together, for Tadeusz to leave his family.... Ryszard, oh, a strange, afflicted boy. In the confessional he would burden me with recitals of such sins, as if he took pleasure in it.” Father Teofil’s voice, which had begun to slur, suddenly sharpened. “And I only tell you that now because he must be dead.”

  “What happened then?” Schmidt poured more whisky into the old man’s glass, a hunter dripping the blood of a goat to attract the tiger. The killer’s near, he thought. He’s coming toward me.

  “In my own church,” Father Teofil said. “A scene from the Oresteia, accusation of slain innocence, the audience my own horror-struck congregation.” He lapsed into Greek, where Schmidt couldn’t follow him, holding out his glass. Schmidt filled it.

  “Tadeusz, my poor boy, my poor, poor boy, he made his accusation, then ran from the aisle to the door, pursued by the Furies.” Tears gathered in the hollow of the priest’s eyes and tipped over to slide down the planes of his cheeks. “He drowned himself. They found him in the dike afterward. He’d put his mother’s flatiron in one pocket and his wife’s in the other to weight him down.”

  “And Ryszard?”

  The old man’s hands lifted and fell in helplessness. “We could not believe it. What would you? These people do not belong in the world of Aeschylus. This is a simple village. They are born, they worship, they marry, they give birth, they die. Such things are as far away from them as the stars. A young mother slaughtered? Her child butchered? Because one man wished ownership of another? They did not move. They could not believe it of one of their own.”

  “No,” Schmidt said. “I can see that. He got away.”

  “He went that night. Even then we could not believe. ...But there came the testimony of his cousin, a girl. Their two families shared a smallholding. She had always suspected Ryszard, she said, had been in terror of his violent nature all her life. She took us to his room. There was the young mother’s wedding ring, other things ...an ax.”

  “Was the cousin’s name Franziska Schanskowska?”

  “Franziska, yes.”

  Schmidt had become merely a chorus, the prompt that moved on the protagonists of the tragedy being reenacted in the room by the old man’s memory. “And Ryszard? Do you know what happened to him?”

  The priest shook his head. “He escaped human justice.” He looked up. “But it may be that he was subject to God’s, because soon after that the floods came, the Lord’s punishment on wickedness, a deluge visited on the innocent and guilty alike. Poor little Franziska was swept away with so many others. Her Gypsy friend, too. How the ripples of evil spread out and out, on and on, to this very day.”

  “Oh, yes,” Schmidt said. “What was he like, Ryszard?”

  “Oh, a big boy, tall, the Galczynskis were all tall. Very big, very clever. I think often that the village was too small for him and that had he been allowed ...But his father was a harsh man, a brutal man. I baptized him, taught him his catechism. That he should have ...So terrible. I look at his picture sometimes, pray for his soul ...pray for his victims.”

  “A picture? You’ve got a picture?”

  It was a matter of bullying now. Schmidt scrabbled through a dresser drawer, holding up photograph after photograph of Sunday-school picnics, church processions, a cart bearing a statue of the Virgin Mary with white-clad, palm-carrying little girls walking beside it, a confirmation class. “Is that him? Is that him?”

  He went on searching. “Is that him?”

  “Ah.”

  It was of a boys’ church choir. He took it over to the old man. “Which one?”

  “Lord have mercy on his soul, and...and there’s Tadeusz.. . .” The priest’s finger glissaded across the photograph from a tall figure to a slighter one. “My boys, my boys.”

  “I’m sorry,” Schmidt said. He took the glass out of the priest’s hand, where it had begun to tip, lifted the thin, cassocked body more comfortably into its chair, and stood looking down at it until its breathing became regular. “I’m very sorry.” He put the photograph into his pocket and went to find a neighbor who would sit with the old man and make sure he didn’t vomit in his sleep.

  Walking back up the street toward the hunting lodge, he attracted bright Polish greetings that he neither heard nor returned.

  R.G. ofMunich. Ryszard Galczynski of Bagna Duze.

  That was it, then. Now he knew the face Hannelore had seen. The heavy features of the boy in the photograph in his pocket were those of the man third from the left in the picture of the Sturmabteilung’s sports conference, at the moment in his pack up at the hunting lodge. He had the motive, the name, and a photograph. Two photographs.

  R.G.

  ofMunich. The man had changed his name and probably his nationality. He’d taken German citizenship; no Pole could have possessed the influence that had protected the identity of this one—but he’d kept his initials. And his nature.

  What was needed now was proof. There’d be no trouble connecting

  R.G.

  with the murders he’d committed here in the marshes; the crimes would be on file somewhere and the Polish police probably delighted to extradite him so that he could be charged.

  But I want you to pay in Germany, for Natalya, for Hannelore, and for the others you’ve dispensed with on your way. I want you in my dock in front of my judges, so the nation can see what sort of animal the fucking SA nurtures in its bosom.

  And that would be more difficult. An examining magistrate was unlikely to make the imaginative leaps that Schmidt had in order to connect a storm trooper with the shadow in Charlottenburg. There’d been no proof at all that the man had killed Hannelore and, it seemed, very little for the murder of Potrovskov or of Olga. The witnesses who’d seen him in the streets near Charlottenburg would be unreliable nine years later—even supposing they hadn’t died in the meantime.

  The only link was Anna or Franziska or the Gypsy girl or whoever the hell she was, the only one who could point the finger.

  “Hello,” s
aid a voice.

  She was sitting on a bench in the Zorawskis’ garden—he hadn’t realized he’d reached it.

  “I’ve got him,” he said. “He was here. He killed a mother and her

  baby because he was having an affair with her husband.” “I know.” “How do you know?”

  “The count told me.” She seemed strangely unexcited. “I want you to come for a walk with me.”

  “All right.” He fell into step beside her and began to reconstruct the sequence. “He got away. It was wartime . . . chaos ...and he escaped. But we know where he went, don’t we? He went to Germany, changed his name. Christ, I don’t know how he walks on two legs; he kills like a stoat. Something stands in his way and it’s dead. He chopped down that woman and child to get them out of the way, didn’t think twice.”

  He looked at Esther. “They were fair-haired, you know. I saw their picture. Even Röhm couldn’t countenance that; Hitler certainly wouldn’t. Jew killers are one thing, Aryan killers another—and the man’s a homosexual, another species Hitler’s got no time for. No wonder he wants to keep the past quiet. He’s risen through the Nazi ranks. Be a shame if his career’s spoiled by a dead woman and child in Poland. Power’s important to him; it satisfies his bloodlust—it is a sort of blood-lust. And he’s clever. He’s directed it. The Sturmabteilung’s a spiritual home for him. God, what a whale of a time he must’ve had—breaking limbs with impunity. He’s the Nazis’ sort of man, a monster who doesn’t care.”

  They were in forest now, autumn leaves soft under their feet, but Schmidt was back in Berlin in wintertime, near the Landwehr Canal. “That’s where they met again, him and Anna, the girl from his home village, I damn well know they did. Him up from Munich for a day out smashing Communists. Her ...I don’t know what she was doing, but she’s walking along the Landwehr and comes face-to-face with a nightmare. There, right in front of her, the man who’s always terrified her. She sees him, he sees her. It blasts them both, him as well as her. She’ll tell, take away his power ...she knows. He’s got to kill her or— Where the hell are we going?”

  “There was a village somewhere along this track. A Jewish village.”

  “Have you been listening to what I said?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I know. I’m glad.” She tucked herself under his arm and put her own around his waist. “He comes from here, he’s a killer, you’ve got him.”

  “Well, more or less,” Schmidt said. “Could you stop a minute?”

  “I love you so much,” she said. She was crying.

  He put a hand under her elbow and guided her to a fallen tree. “Sit down.” He sat down beside her and fished in the pocket of her jacket for the toilet tissue she always carried on foreign journeys. “Blow,” he said.

  She wiped her eyes. “But that wasn’t everything,” she said.

  “What else?”

  “It was Easter, you see,” she said. “Before Ryszard was declared the murderer, this was. They found the little boy’s body in the dike at Easter. Passover. They thought it was a ritual killing.”

  An old, dark phrase out of history; he’d felt a brief unease when the priest had used it, but hadn’t stopped to run it down.

  “Ritual killing,” she said. “It was always the same if an Aryan child was found dead. It happened in Russia . . . oh, how many times. Someone to blame and be killed in turn. The same excuse to murder Jews—they were killing Christian children or poisoning the wells, one or the other. Always. And then would come the pogrom.”

  It was a warm day. The mist hiding the waterways at dawn had risen, momentarily scarlet, and dispersed into an enamel-blue sky.

  She said, “They found the body, and...It was night, but immediately most of the men here set out to the village where the local Jews lived. Zorawski told me. He wasn’t here at the time—he and the countess were in Warsaw—but I don’t think he’d have stopped it anyway.”

  They were sitting so still that a quail came bustling out of the trees, then turned and went back into them. The rattle of a woodpecker came from farther in the forest.

  She took a deep breath. “He said...Zorawski said, ‘It was a ghastly business, but one good thing came out of it—we got rid of the Jews.’ ”

  “What did they do to them?”

  “I don’t know; even the count doesn’t know. He’d have told me, believe me, he’d have told me.” She turned her head to look at him. “I don’t want to go back to that house, Schmidt.”

  “No.”

  She stood up. “I’m going to the Jewish village. Blociska, it’s called. There’s something I want to do.”

  It was a long walk and very beautiful, following the ruts in the track through shafts of sunlight, into shadow and out again, birdsong. He thought how blithely nature had ignored killers who passed through it—a youth dragging the dead body of a child, men with torches.

  The trees thinned. “This is it, I think,” she said. “Zorawski said the priest stopped them from burning it down.”

  It was eerie. Blociska had been a village almost indistinguishable from Bagna Duze, but now it was dead. There were still signs above the doors of the shops in the wide, muddy main street, but the roof of one of them had fallen in. Rusted chains hung over a well. Sparrows pecked in empty hen runs. No sound apart from the singing of birds. Where the track widened out into what had been the village street, there was a huge, round, black scar made by fire.

  “No need to imagine things,” he said. “That’s recent.”

  She nodded and walked on, turned a corner—and there was the building that made Blociska different from Bagna Duze.

  “Good God,” Schmidt said.

  He’d seen synagogues in Berlin—two years ago he’d attended the funeral service for Minna Wolff in one—but not like this. “Chinese” was his first thought, but its successive diminishing roofs topped by a little pyramid were pitched straight, not with the curls of a pagoda. Yet it was Eastern, huge, alien, strange, exotic, and constructed entirely from wood.

  It was wooden magic. It was rotting. It had a blurred look. Some of the roof shingles had slid to the ground; the Star of David held in one of the cloisterlike arches adorning the ground-floor walls was falling sideways.

  “There was one like this in Rosa’s village,” she said, “not so big, though.”

  “Rosa?”

  “Rosa was the one who mended me.”

  She unwound one of the scarves from her head and then put it on again so that it draped. “There’s something I’ve got to do. I’m not sure how to do it, and Rosa would say I shouldn’t be doing it at all according to the Law. Women don’t play much part in the synagogue—there should be more of you, for instance, to make a minyan. But I’m going to do it anyway, for whoever died here, for his victims. You don’t need to come in. I won’t be long.”

  “I think I will.”

  “Well, you go in that way. I go up here. Separate entrances for men and women.” Gingerly, she began mounting the outside staircase.

  “Be careful,” he called. She’d slipped as one of the steps gave way.

  “Don’t worry.”

  He pushed open the main door and left it open so that light could get in. The few windows were allowing only dusty shafts of sun to come through. It was even more astonishing inside than out. They hadn’t been able to afford gilding; they’d had only wood, and they’d carved it, fretted it, ornamented it, turned it, polished it, so that once it had gleamed like gold and even now leaped out, like glorious bramble bushes, to catch the soul of the beholder. The walls formed bays, and in the center of the hall stood the pulpit—no, Joe Wolff had called it the bima—an octagonal plinth with a lacelike balustrade around it.

  He could smell damp and, he thought, the oil that had once burned in the hanging lamps. Some bats dangled from the cupolaed ceiling.

  He heard a door scrape open in a gallery above his head, and she began praying for the dead in Russian. In a low, clear monotone, the complex, mighty syllables echoed into an empt
y synagogue for the souls of men, women, and children, Aryan, Jewish, for a people that were gone and, perhaps, for the bereft and ignorant parents who had driven them away, for Natalya, for Hannelore, Potrovskov, Olga. On and on it went, until he wondered at the power of words, mere exhalations of breath, useless against cudgels and racial hatred but still so compelling that he found himself adding his own Our Father in a plea to a God he didn’t believe in, because in this place, at this time, it was appropriate.

  Then there was silence, and he could hear the birds again.

  When they met outside, she was brisk. “There.”

  They set off toward the forest. She was still full of words, as if the prayers had loosened them. She said, “In the pogrom I lost everybody, everybody. They killed my mother, my father, my siblings, friends, my dog. To this day I don’t know how I got out alive—or why. I was too injured to remember. There’s a space in time I still can’t cope with. I just woke up in Rosa’s village. I get flashes of it, I hear the shots, see the bayonets slicing down, my head explodes. I think I hear my little brother whimper.”

  She paused for a moment and went on, still brisk. “Rosa took me in and nursed me. She was the wife of the village rabbi, an ordinary woman, you’d think, rough. She had too many dead of her own to be sentimental about mine, and soon she had more because, while I was still recovering, Cossacks came riding into the village. They were being chased by a contingent of Bolsheviks. You wouldn’t think they’d stop to kill and burn, but they did.” She smiled. “Rosa said it was force of habit.”

  He handed her over a fallen tree, and she resumed the long, rhythmic stride that helped to keep the words pumping. “She hid me along with as many as she could. When they’d gone, when we came out, there was nothing left. Her elder son had already emigrated to England; Russia was in civil war, so why stay?” Her hands spread out in a very Jewish query, as Rosa’s must have done. “So she took us survivors out of Russia, through Poland, into Germany. I decided to remain in Berlin. I didn’t want to go to England. When I got the job with Nick, I persuaded him to get me papers for her and the others. They were forged, of course, but they got Rosa and the rest to England. We still keep in touch. She’s in New York now, doing well.”