Father Elijah

by Michael D. O'Brien

  She led him behind the curtain and down a hall to a staircase. Mops and brooms were lying across the steps. He cleared them out of the way and began to climb.

  “If there’s treasure up there,” she quipped, “I get my share.”

  “It is unlikely there will be anything other than the treasure of memories. Thank you for your help, Pani.”

  “Don’t mention it. Treasure of memories! Ha! Can you eat memories? Memories are garbage. You live your life and then you take out the garbage. That’s all.”

  She went off shrieking at her youngsters who had burst into the hallway, fighting.

  At the top of the stairway he unlocked the door. It squealed as he opened it and a wave of cool, musty air rushed out to meet him. He closed the door behind and shot the bolt.

  He stood for a few moments looking about him. The apartment was recognizable only by its shape and by the light coming through a dust-covered window in the kitchen / sitting room. The toilet closet was in the same place, but the plumbing had been removed. The ceiling did not seem quite so high as he remembered, but then he had been a youth at the time, an underfed, undersized boy. Nor was it any longer embellished with plaster ornaments—a casualty of the bombing. There were no furnishings. The hardwood floor was strewn everywhere with bits of crumbling plaster and mouse droppings.

  The small bedroom came closest to the template of his memory. The windowpane he and Pawel had replaced with a tin sheet for the smokestack of the wood burner was no longer there. It had been restored by glass. But the dimensions of the room were the same. He stood in the echoing silence and listened once more to the stories Pawel had told him. The tale of the artist who saw Christ hidden in the ruined face of an old sinner. He recalled especially the tale of a prince without a kingdom, who found his heart. Here too, the orthodox Jewish boy, David Schäfer, had told his Polish benefactor the tales of the Hassidim. How often had Pawel looked at him with puzzlement? How often, in return, had he failed to understand the older man? Yet between them there had grown a mutual respect that had set aside for a time the barrier between their cultures. They had learned much from each other. Pawel had become like a father to him, because his father and his mother had perished in the Shoah. He had become like a son to Pawel because Pawel had no wife or child, and because Pawel was a prince without a kingdom, who searched within himself for a father’s heart.

  Years later, after the war, when he was rising in Israel, a lawyer with a reputation for outrage and justice, a public figure destined for a political future, he had received a message from this man. A crumpled note wrapped around a tarnished religious medal. An angel delivered it to him while he was on a speaking tour in New York. The medal said, Mądrość—Wisdom! This small coinage had dislodged him from that certain future, had raised the fundamental doubt which set his life upon an entirely different course. A few words on a scrap of yellow paper.

  David, my son, my friend,

  Never have I wanted to live so much as I do now. I go down into darkness in your place. I give you my life. I carry your image within me like an icon. This is my joy. I go down at last to sleep, but my heart is awake.

  Pawel.

  The messenger said it had been hurled from a train during the war. The messenger had kept it for many years until an angel had spoken to her and told her that the famous Israeli was the man to whom the note was addressed. But David Schäfer had ceased to exist. By then he had a new name given to him by the Haganah. During the War of Independence, this name had solidified and become his public identity, and the past became merely a form of garbage that must one day be taken away. Eventually, he grew famous with this name, and it bore no relationship to the name on the note. There was not a soul in the world who would remember his true name, aside from those who kept a certain file in the basement of Haganah headquarters. How could a simple Polish woman from Florida know him? How? Impossible, he thought at the time. But she knew him with a kind of knowing in the soul, and she credited the angels with that knowing.

  Had Pawel Tarnowski gone down into darkness? Was the train really bound for Oświęcim? Perhaps the woman’s husband, the trackman, had been mistaken. Even if he were right, and Pawel had been taken to that place of death, he may have survived. A few had survived. If Pawel lived, Elijah knew that he must find him.

  The curtain that had once covered the staircase to the attic was gone, its secret exposed. The door was unlocked and swung open without difficulty. He went up.

  The attic was one long, empty room, paneled with strips of dark brown wood. The household cooking aromas from the first floor were stronger here, but the smell of aging varnish dominated everything. Elijah went to the far end and looked out the small window. The roof tiles were the same. The view of the roofs of Old Town were identical, a faithful reconstruction. The horizon was completely different, dominated by Soviet and capitalist architecture.

  On the day of their betrayal, he had escaped out through this window and run across the roofs to another block. He had walked to the river, trying not to attract attention, and when he came to the sand banks, he struck east along the shore for a kilometer until he found thick bushes. He hid in them until nightfall and swam to the opposite shore, then traveled cross-country until he came to woods. In these woods he found partisans. He told them that he had directions to a place of refuge at Mazowiecki, on the farm of Pawel’s cousin Masha. They advised him against it. He looked too Jewish, they said. Even disguised as a farm laborer, he could never remain undetected. He had no papers. He would be dead within a month. The Poles passed him on to another group of partisans who lived in a forest to the east. They were young Jews, bitter, tattered, and poorly armed, trying to find the Soviet front. He stayed with them for a week, left them, and moved east by night. He was soon starved, sick, half-crazed. He stole food when he came upon unguarded fields. Gentiles attempted to hand him over to the Germans more than a few times, but he always managed to escape.

  Once, caught sleeping in a barn, he was beaten and locked inside a tool room while the farmer went to get the SS. He tore up a floor board and squeezed out through a gap in the stone foundation and crawled across a muddy field, slithered into a creek, and waded downstream for hours until the barking of dogs grew faint behind him. Others, righteous Gentiles, recognizing a half-mad Jew boy, hid him in haylofts and fed him entire meals. Some along the way, mistaking him for a holy fool, gave him bread, an egg, a tin cup of milk, a slice of stale sausage. South of Lvov he came upon the Dnestr River. He traveled for three nights along the riverbank until he tripped over a punt half-sunken in the shallows. He dragged it up on shore, turned it upside down and slept beneath it. In the morning light, he saw that it had been punctured by bullet holes and that dried blood was spattered on the gunwales—an old event. At dusk, he filled the holes with bunched reeds, put it back into the water, got into it, and lay down. The current carried him south throughout that night. A man, fishing in the dawn, hailed him from the shore. He cooked a fish. The boy ate it ravenously. The man observed the manner in which he consumed it. He gave him cheese and a shot-glass of harsh, home-distilled vodka. He talked to him in a strange language. He made jokes. The boy did not laugh. He made sign language for guns, gestured in a mock Hitler salute, and pointed down the river, by which the boy understood that the Germans were on the river, not far below. The man made the sign of the cross on his breast and raised his eyes to the heavens, a glance that conveyed a mixture of long-suffering and irony. Then he took him to his farm, fed him for several days, and throughout one long night led him by a footpath across forests and fields to the banks of a different river.

  “Prut! Prut!” said the man emphatically, pointing downstream.

  David Schäfer thanked him in Polish, Yiddish, French, and pidgin Russian, to which the man replied with broad grins and nods. As the sun set, the boy walked away from him, south along the banks of the River Prut, which bent around the foot of the Carpathians and meandered toward the Black Sea.

  * * *
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br />   The banging on the door pulled him back across a half-century of time.

  “Come on. Aren’t you finished? What’s up there?”

  “I will be down soon”, he called.

  “Let me see. Maybe you found treasure after all, eh? Maybe you want to keep it just for you.”

  He went down and unlocked the door. “Come up and see for yourself.”

  The woman went through the top floors carefully, clicking her tongue in disapproval, commenting on the bad insulation, the cost of heat, the mice, the “snake”, the problems of trying to raise good children now that the old order had disappeared.

  “The communists were bastards,” she said, “but at least they kept things in line.”

  “The War was worse.”

  “Everybody talks about the bad old days,” she complained, “but I tell you, this time looks bad enough to me. How can an honest worker hope to own a home, I ask you!”

  “Believe me, Pani, the War was beyond imagining. It was the reign of evil.”

  She grunted but did not argue.

  “I would like to be alone awhile longer, if you don’t mind. There is no treasure.”

  “All right. But I have to go out at noon. I need you gone so I can lock up. Not that I mistrust you. . .”

  “I understand. Give me a little time.”

  She grumbled down the stairs, closed the door, and abandoned him to silence. This silence was of inestimable worth to him, for when he sank into its arms forgotten passages of memory came out of the shadows and spoke to him.

  “I listen in the darkness for God”, Pawel said.

  “That is a beautiful thing”, said the boy.

  “Like Elijah on Mount Carmel, listening for the words of God in the gentle breeze.”

  “Is it a lonely thing?”

  “Sometimes it is. I live here in this great city like a monachus, a solitary one. I pray. I work. I put good books into the hands of people. Perhaps good thoughts are born in their minds. That is my calling.”

  “I am returned to not-understanding. Why does this prevent us from sharing the bed? Five blankets are better than two. You are like a brother. You are my friend. We would sleep well at last.”

  “The warmth of another heart beating close would be too great a consolation for me. Don’t you understand?”

  “I will never understand.”

  “I would forget the great heart beating through everything and everywhere at all times. I would cease to move toward Him. I would love the creature more than the Creator—and in the end I would cease to love the creature too. I would not love anything.”

  Father Elijah sat on the floor of the bedroom and leaned against the wall. He closed his eyes. He recalled the bitterly cold nights when Pawel would not permit him to share the bed, when the host had given him his extra blanket instead. A natural reserve perhaps. Modesty. Pawel was always a distant man, wrapped within himself. He did not reveal much of his heart except in stories.

  “Am I like a son to you, Pawel?”

  “Yes, a little like a son.”

  “And a friend?”

  “Yes, that too.”

  “But a young friend who says childish things.”

  “Może, perhaps. But also the man who is becoming. A good man who one day will walk with me beside the Vistula, when this war is over, and who will correct my poor philosophy.”

  David Schäfer smiled. Father Elijah smiled.

  “I see now that you are not angry with me, Pawel.”

  “I have never been angry with you.”

  “Yet I am a burden to you.”

  “You have never been a burden to me.”

  “But there is another thing. I see it there, in your heart. It remains.”

  “Some day, on a spring morning when the invaders have gone, we will walk in the sun beside the river, and then we will speak of this thing.”

  “Is it a thing which makes you unhappy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Of which you are ashamed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it sitra ahra?”*

  “It is a wound inflicted by the sitra ahra.”

  “It hurts you?”

  “Yes. It hurts me.”

  “Is it like a stone in your heart? Like the prince?”

  “Yes, like that.”

  “We will remove the stone and throw it in the river.”

  “You are very young, David.”

  “Sometimes the young see things that the old don’t see.”

  “More often the old see things the young don’t see.”

  “Pawel, I think it is a holy thing to be a son in the realm of the soul.”

  “Then it is a holy thing, also, to be a father of the soul.”

  “It is a thing we can make together, you and me.”

  The Germans and a Polish traitor had eliminated that possibility. The bent one, Pawel had called him.

  “Far groys tsores zolttsu zikh nit farbrenen. . .”, David Schäfer had cried into Pawel’s coat on the day the Germans battered down the door.

  “Do not burn for sorrow, do not burn for sorrow. . . ,” he had cried, though he did not understand why he should utter the words of a ghetto song at this very last moment.

  “Go!” Pawel said sternly. “Go!”

  “I cannot leave without you.”

  “They are already here. I will hold them off for a short while, enough time for you to get away.”

  “I will not go!”

  “Go! Go!”

  Those were the last words the man had spoken to him before shoving him out the attic window onto the roof, into his future.

  * * *

  “The count has been expecting you,” said the nurse, “but he is sleeping. Please wait in the drawing room while I wake him. He will need some attention to his needs, and then, if he is able, I will bring him to you here.”

  The hard-eyed manservant placed a tray of tea and biscuits on a side-table. Elijah did not take them. Despite the large windows the front room was saturated in perpetual gloom, unrelieved by black and burgundy portraits of ancient noblemen, scowling from their chiaroscuro, badly painted, in monstrous gold frames Two life-size sculptures stood guard at each end of the room. They were male nudes carved from marble, a dying satyr (probably Roman), and a runner (classical Greek). Both were stained and chipped. They might be genuine antiquities or clever frauds.

  “So, you are admiring my collection”, said a high-pitched voice behind him. The nurse was wheeling the count across the room toward a chaise longue. She and the manservant shifted the old man’s body onto it and left them.

  “Please, sit. Tea? No? It isn’t poisoned. No doubt you think you have fallen into the boudoir of a Medici?” He cackled and then had a fit of coughing.

  “Ah, sic transit gloria mundi” said the count pompously. “All flesh is grass, is it not? You people are the experts on that subject. But I could tell you a thing or two.”

  He coughed again, and when he had settled himself and rearranged a purple velvet rug over his legs, the count cocked his head becomingly and draped an arm along the back of the lounge.

  “Now, I don’t wish to miss a single detail. You must tell me all!”

  “I didn’t come to intrude upon your time, Count Smokrev. I wished to thank you personally for permission to visit your premises in Old Town.”

  “A mere nothing. You have my key? Please give it here.”

  “Of course. Here it is.”

  “So. Was it as you remembered it?”

  “It is essentially unchanged. It was really quite kind of you to allow a stranger a moment’s nostalgia. I thank you.”

  He rose to leave, but Smokrev fluttered his hands, commanding him back down: “Sit, sit, sit! I haven’t quite finished with you.”

  “Indeed? There is not much more to tell.”

  “Tell me how you came under the protection of this man. Tarkowyski, you called him?”

  “Tarnowski.”

  “Yes, yes. Well, tell me. Te
ll me all.”

  Father Elijah noted the hungry glint in the old man’s eye and decided to humor the whim of a lonely soul.

  “I was raised in Muranow, up on Zamenhofa. When the Germans came, as you remember, we were cordoned off. In the summer of 1942, my entire family was taken and put in a train at the Umschlagplatz for resettlement.”

  “Aha! You know what that meant, of course.”

  “Yes.”

  “Treblinka.”

  “Yes. Treblinka.”

  “But not you? They didn’t take you?”

  “I hid in the sewers. I lived like a rat. In September I broke out by the northeast gate. I ran. I didn’t know where I was going. I just ran. The soldiers chased me, but I lost them in the maze of Old Town. I fell through the door of the very shop which is now owned by you. The proprietor hid me. I lived in the apartment and attic above the shop throughout the winter of ’42-’43. Then I made my way south.”

  “When was the last time you saw your protector?”

  “Late winter, early spring of ’43. I was forced to flee, you see. I was discovered by a Pole. He reported me to the Germans.”

  “The traitor!”

  Smokrev lit a thick cigarette with trembling fingers and blew a cloud of noxious smoke across the room.

  “I never found out the fate of my friend.”

  “A pity.”

  “I was put in a camp on Cyprus after the war and got into Palestine on an illegal ship in ’47, just before the War of Independence. Those days were frantic, very exciting for a young man After the birth of Israel, I had more time. I wrote to the Polish government seeking information about Pawel Tarnowski, but, of course, there were no replies.”

  “But of course. By the way, did my nurse tell you I’m dying of lung cancer? No?! Did she mention my age? I’m in my nineties, you know, although I look in my early seventies. Don’t deny it! Don’t violate an old tart’s vanity. I survived the collapse of the nobility, the Nazis, the Russians. It’s the new crowd who will bury me”, he sighed and exhaled a stream of smoke.

  “I developed a taste for these foul Russian cigarettes in bed. I liked the Russians. Especially their boys. You would be simply amazed at how often a coquette is to be found beneath a hulking farmer in a uniform. Ah, those sweet, vicious, mongol eyes! Paradise!”