Lumen

by Ben Pastor

  Bora had no idea what the Polish word for cavity might be. He dialled the operator, and managed to ask for the dentist’s office. The phone rang long and empty. Bora was about to hang up when finally a woman’s voice answered.

  “Margolin? Jego niema w domu. Kiedy on wraca? Nie, nie moge odpowiedzéc na to pytanie. Nie wiem kiedy.”

  “Nie rozumiem,” Bora said in return, because he hadn’t understood a thing except that Margolin wasn’t in. It took ten minutes of mutual explanation for him to realize that Margolin was not expected back at his house or office ever.

  “Just my fucking luck.” Retz disappointedly slapped his knee. “Now I’ll have to go to one of our military hacks. Do you realize how inconvenient it is to walk around with two cavities?”

  Bora, who had no cavities, didn’t think it was the time to say so.

  23 October

  In his rented room on Karmelicka Street, Father Malecki awoke from his afternoon nap with the anxious impression that he shouldn’t have fallen asleep. Heart pounding, his eyes opened on the green striped rectangle of the shuttered window and he could tell by the amount of light filtering through the slats that it was past four o’clock.

  Holding his breath, he tried to control the palpitation in his chest. It wasn’t like him to wake up in a cold sweat, especially when he hadn’t even had a nightmare. He sat up, reaching for his wristwatch on the bedstand.

  Four thirty-five. He yawned, slipped the metal band around his wrist and stretched. Why did he feel that he was late for something? There wasn’t much for him to do until this evening, when he’d join the sisters at the convent for vespers.

  The sting of anxiety made no sense. Malecki drank a sip of water to wet his dry mouth. He hadn’t felt such discomfort since the arrival of the Germans in Poland. Sure, news every day managed to make him sad and appalled in turn, impotent before the excess of violence, but this was no vicarious anguish.

  The room was quiet. The ticking of a clock just outside his door was all that broke the silence until Malecki left the bed and the springs moaned under the mattress. His heart no longer pounded, and maybe it was just a matter of giving up coffee, or going back to a decent brand of American cigarettes if he could find them on the market.

  He went to open the window, and looked down the narrow old street. There was no traffic. A German army truck slowly rode in from the centre of town. Malecki turned his back to the sill, frowning. It was no use blaming coffee or cigarettes. The anxiety was still here, noxiously lodged at the pit of his stomach.

  In the armchair, as in a fat lady’s lap, his clergyman’s vestments lay limp. Malecki put them on and began buttoning them. The idea of calling the convent bobbed up in him and he discounted it at once. How could he even think of it? There was no telephone there, and at any rate he had nothing to tell the sisters.

  Disturbed by the movement of cloth, dust motes danced around him in the light that sliced across his room.

  He sat at the narrow desk by the bed and tried to read his breviary. Words skipped about under his eyes, confusing the lines until he closed the book. He then began writing a letter to his sister in Carbondale, but didn’t even get halfway through that. Finally he opened the door of his room and called out to the landlady.

  “Pana Klara, is there anything in the news?”

  Just then, in the east end of the Old City, Bora knew he’d have trouble parking in front of the convent. He’d barely stopped by the kerb to let Hofer out, when a growing din of steel chains and engines filled the opposite end of the street. With the car still running in idle, he craned his neck out of the window to see.

  Tanks. Could anyone be as dim-witted as to do this? There was no room in this narrow street for tanks to operate. Still, jangling and rumbling on cobblestones, panzers blundered towards him from the curve ahead, where the front steps of a Jesuit church further reduced the sidewalk. Dinosaur-like, they emerged in a stench of fuel, rattling lamp posts and windows and the rear-view mirror in Bora’s car. Whatever asinine thinking had made them choose this route, on they came, blind and dumb as all machines appear when their drivers are invisible, seemingly unaware that the sharp corner facing them would pose an obstacle.

  Judiciously Bora drove the car onto the sidewalk, and for the next five minutes he was as much part of the deafening manoeuvring, backing up and squeezing past as the tanks themselves.

  The last cumbersome vehicle was still churning the corner with its mammoth flank when Hofer unexpectedly stumbled out of the convent door. Seeing him stagger on the sidewalk caused Bora to rush from the car, sure of a partisan attack. By the time the grey-faced Hofer made some frantic gesture for help, Bora was already by him. Pistol in hand, he straddled in a protective stance, turned to the street as if the unseen danger should come from there.

  “Inside - inside!” Hofer’s choked voice found a way out of the cavern of his mouth. He rudely pushed the younger man ahead of himself into the dark vestibule.

  For a moment it seemed to Bora that flimsy ghosts were milling around him, gowned and wailing. Then he recognized it was the nuns, whispering and sobbing in their incomprehensible language.

  Hofer kept pushing him, and they hastily crossed plain rooms, past black crosses, long tables, starched linen, chairs, a hallway, steps, and then a green burst of light and the odour of watered dirt.

  They were standing at the edge of the cloister. A perfectly square overcast sky opened above, and the different greens of small trees and potted plants crowded the view on all sides.

  “Look, Bora!”

  Mother Kazimierza lay face down by the well at the paved centre of the garden, arms spread to the sides, face turned away from the viewer. Part of her wimple showed white. That, and the black robe gathered around her legs, made her look like a strange, overgrown swallow, felled from a great height.

  From under her tall body a thread-like red line had come snaking in the grout between the bricks, to the edge of the paved area. The long, sinuous ribbon seemed to reach out for the men and women standing at a distance. Past the edge of bricks, it had been absorbed by the moist dirt, like a river that disappears into porous soil.

  Bora lowered his gun.

  To his left, pressing both hands on her mouth, one of the young novices began to shake convulsively, but would not weep. When a breath of unseasonably cold wind swept over the cloister, round yellow leaves, no larger than coins, rained in from the trees outside. No coherent sounds came from the staring group until Hofer stammered to himself, glassy-eyed.

  “She’s dead, she’s dead - the saint is dead.”

  With his eyes, Bora followed the trail of blood to the lacy edge it formed at his feet. It had already happened to him in Aragon, two summers ago. The dirt had drunk it all, but small black ants were racing towards it, and back and forth surveyed the bank of what must be a nourishing, drying river bed to their infinitesimal size.

  2

  25 October

  “What is your professional opinion of Colonel Hofer’s state of health?”

  SS Captain Salle-Weber stood planted behind the colonel’s desk like a roughly hewn, insignia-strewn tree. Bora looked ahead of himself rather than directly at him.

  “I have only served with the colonel two weeks, Hauptsturmführer . As a subordinate, my opinion is by necessity limited, perhaps even irrelevant.”

  Salle-Weber had Bora’s folder in front of him. He glanced through it. “How long have you been a captain, Captain?”

  “Three weeks.”

  “Well, you’re a big boy now. Leave aside the matter of hierarchy and give me a dispassionate assessment of your commander. We wouldn’t ask if we didn’t feel it were relevant.”

  “I believe the colonel is under great stress.”

  “Aren’t we all?”

  “He has personal reasons, I’m sure you know.”

  “All I know is that he’s got no nerve.”

  Bora glanced at Salle-Weber, and then once more ahead of himself. “He must have some nerve
, given that he volunteered for Spain two years ago.”

  “What of it? So did you and a shipload of airmen. So did Schenck, and even your jug-headed interpreter.”

  “Well, then. With all that we’re in hostile territory, Colonel Hofer doesn’t bother to carry a gun, unlike you and I. How’s that for nerve?”

  “That’s not nerve. It’s idiocy.” With pretended indifference Salle-Weber opened the top drawer of Hofer’s desk, started rummaging with his hand in it. He pulled the prayer book out. There was a packet of letters, and he took those out as well.

  Bora followed his movements with a needling sense of being personally intruded upon. “Is this an investigation?”

  “Just answer the questions, Captain. Hofer had a total breakdown two days ago, and this is hardly anything we can afford in the middle of a campaign. You were with him when he took sick, so be good and report accurately on it.”

  Bora did.

  Salle-Weber listened in silence, without taking notes, keeping his eyes nailed on the younger man. “You’re an observant fellow,” he said in the end, not in the way of admiration but acknowledging the fact. “It’s a virtue, you know.” He finally removed his eyes - like Bora, he was green-eyed, but the measure of eagerness was different in his glance - and put Hofer’s things back into the drawer. “What’s the nun to him? What did he expect to gain from visiting her every day?”

  “She had the reputation of being a saint.”

  Salle-Weber laughed. “A stone-dead one! There’s no such thing as saints in Germany today.”

  “We’re not in Germany.”

  “There’s no such thing as saints in the General Government either.”

  “I said she ‘had the reputation’, Hauptsturmführer.”

  “Well, good enough. Don’t go anywhere after work tonight: I want you back here to give me a detailed account of what you saw when the body was discovered.”

  Bora resigned himself to the thought. “What will happen to Colonel Hofer?” he asked before leaving the office.

  “Oh, he’ll return to work when he gets his nerve back. We’ll have you keep an eye on him from now on, how’s that?” Salle-Weber locked the top drawer of Hofer’s desk with a key, which he pocketed. “Your interim commander is Lieutenant Colonel Emil Schenck, and I believe he has orders for you already.”

  Halfway across town, Father Malecki walked back from the American consulate in a despondent frame of mind. He’d just wired the Vatican the news of the abbess’s death and would be back this afternoon to hear the official reply. The shock of her death was still with him, nearly forty-eight hours after the fact. With the removal of the reason for his presence in Poland, everything was tilted off centre. Thinking ahead fatigued him, and he refrained from it.

  He glumly walked down Franciszkańska and then took a narrow, winding street to reach the convent church, whose façade opened on the sidewalk with a flight of baroque marble steps. He’d been saying mass here every day since the titular priest had volunteered for the army, and had gone the way of thousands of prisoners of war.

  He didn’t expect to find a German army car parked in front of the entrance. There was a driver waiting in the front seat, so he realized an officer must be inside. Atop the flight of stairs, in a recess of the pilaster-flanked portal, a soldier stood with submachine gun slung on his stomach.

  Even before crossing, Malecki decided not to attempt to go directly past him. He had in his pocket the key to one of the side doors, and without so much as pausing on the sidewalk he continued down the street, took the next perpendicular alley and approached the church from behind.

  “Ewa?” The red-haired girl stuck her head inside the dressing room they shared in the city theatre. “Can I come in?”

  “Come.”

  “Someone left a card for you. Here it is.”

  With both hands carefully pulling the silk stocking up her leg, Ewa Kowalska wouldn’t risk a rash movement. “Open it and read it to me. Who’s it from?”

  The girl held it out for her to see that the address had been typed. “I don’t know,” she said with a little smile. “But the private who delivered it isn’t wearing a Polish uniform.”

  “Don’t be a prude, Kasia. Read it to me.”

  Kasia ripped the envelope and looked inside. Her heart-shaped mouth pouted. “Oh, crap. It’s written in German.”

  The church by the convent was empty of worshipers. Bora was blushing, but did not stop doing what he’d begun, namely taking the open missals one by one and ripping out the page with the hymn God Who Saved Poland.

  Father Malecki watched in impotent anger, while the sexton twisted his hands. “Jaka szkoda, jaka szkoda,” he moaned. “What a pity!”

  Bora threw the missals into a pile, resentfully. “I was told that you had a whole week to get rid of this page, and you didn’t. Now I have to do this.”

  Malecki kept his temper under control. “Did you expect me to tear pages out of a missal?”

  “You had specific instructions to do so! It’s not going to do you any good to refuse us collaboration. If the song is sung tomorrow, we’ll close the church down.”

  Malecki swallowed an improvident word, by force. He could see that the German would carry out orders, and there was no speaking sense to him just now. The missals fell one after the other, some landing open, others bouncing on their edges. Like red-and-black serpent tongues the bookmark ribbons flicked out from the pages.

  Malecki began retrieving the missals and stacking them behind the soldier who handed them open to Bora. When Bora had nearly finished, he started gathering the crumpled pages as well. With a thud, the spur-clad boot landed close to his hand.

  “Leave those alone, Father. We take those along.”

  Malecki did not pull his hand back, still holding on to the one page. He didn’t look up at Bora. His eyes stayed on the sheen of black leather. “Surely there are things an officer of your upbringing could be doing other than this, Captain.”

  Bora dropped the last missal at his feet, and stepped back.

  At his command, the soldier swept all the crumpled papers inside a canvas bag. Malecki stood slowly, and confronted Bora’s hand extended towards him.

  “Do not force me to pry your hand open, Father.”

  Malecki opened his hand. Bora picked the torn paper from it, and gave it to the soldier. Politeness of demeanour and voice belied his resolve to intimidate, but he said, “You know nothing about my upbringing, Father Malecki. And my upbringing has nothing to do with the things I have to do.”

  28 October

  At noon on Saturday, Salle-Weber blasphemed in the receiver.

  “Where?” He stretched the telephone cord to reach the map of Cracow on the wall opposite his desk. “Where the hell is that? Oh, I see it, I see it now. Why, how many? Was it our own or was it the army? Well, I should have known! How can you tell me an SS platoon was caught off guard? And in the presence of army officers, too!”

  The incident did not elicit such anger in the army hospital, where army surgeon Lieutenant Colonel Nowotny was about to go to lunch. Leaving his office, he caught sight of the army officer waiting a few steps away in the corridor. There was a prodigious amount of blood on his face and collar, and down the front of his uniform.

  Nowotny decided to delay his lunch. “This way, Captain.” He hooked his forefinger to invite him in. “Let’s take a look. Did you get X-rayed?”

  Bora said he had.

  After flashing a light in his eyes to check the reaction of both pupils, especially concerned with the left one, Nowotny wiped with cotton and looked inside Bora’s right ear for evidence of internal bleeding. Bora winced.

  “Well, you drove yourself here and walked on your own two legs, so you’re not as badly off as you could be. Do you remember what happened?”

  Bora told him, complying with the physician’s request to hold out his hands. Nodding, Nowotny leaned over him. A robust, greying man, with healthy skin and a careless five-o’clock shadow, he h
ad good humour written on his face, in his warm, dark eyes. And if powerful noses mean character, he enjoyed a no-nonsense, prepossessing one.

  “Shake my hand. Now with the other hand. All right. Look straight at me. Follow my finger with your eyes.” As if the nature of the incident struck him as humorous just now, Nowotny began to laugh. “All I can say for you is that you must be from Prussia or Saxony, judging by the hardness of your skull. It’s a miracle if it didn’t crack. It sure bled enough.”

  Bora said nothing. He had switched to a pain-control mode during the probing and cleaning of the wound behind his ear, while Nowotny chatted about how handy it was that German haircuts made it unnecessary for him to shave the skin.

  “It’s a good-sized hole, and the edges have retracted. You’re going to need stitches, so it’ll sting a bit. What were you doing, were you in the middle of a ‘spontaneous manifestation of welcome’?” Bora looked up as much as he could, irritably, and got his head pushed back down for it. “Stay put.” Blood started pouring again, and Bora had to cup his hands to keep it from soiling his breeches.

  “I hope you won’t consider yourself a casualty because of this.”

  “I don’t consider myself a casualty.”

  Nowotny handed him a cloth to wipe his face, and continued his work. “So, who throws rocks at German officers?”

  “I don’t know. It hit me from behind. I didn’t see who did it - there was plenty of rock throwing.”

  “Were there arrests?”

  “Yes, there were arrests.”

  While they waited for the X-rays to be brought in, Nowotny washed his hands in the sink, looking over his shoulder as Bora put his tunic back on.

  “So, have you been playing the piano for many years?”

  “Since I was five. How did you know?”

  “I heard you play the other night, during the reception at Headquarters. Schumann, wasn’t it?”