Lumen

by Ben Pastor

  At the theatre on Szczepanski Square, actors were rehearsing.

  Ewa leaned with her hip against the wall unconvincedly, holding the receiver between ear and shoulder. “I don’t know, Richard. I might be busy tonight, I just can’t tell. We’re getting ready for a new production. No, it’s nothing you’d be interested in.” She nodded to Kasia, who stood by with her finger on her cheap little wristwatch. “Look, I have to go. You can call me later-I don’t know, five, six.’Bye.”

  Kasia took a slip of paper out of her pocket, and dialled the operator. “Well?” she asked while waiting for the connection.

  Ewa shrugged. “I don’t want to talk about it. Do you have a cigarette?”

  “No, I’m fresh out. Yes, yes, operator? Please give me this number…” Kasia read the number from the slip of paper, and then reached out for Ewa’s woollen sleeve. “Wait a second, wait a second. I have something to tell you.”

  In the Jagiellonian University, the gothic vaults of the Collegium Chymicum sent back the men’s voices in harsh, slapping echoes. Bora did not take part in the exchange, balanced as he was on the stepladder to reach for books on the twelfth shelf. When he came down with a fragile leather-bound volume in hand, old Professor Anders had his back against the stone pilaster by the window. Schenck faced him with the list.

  At closer look, Anders’ leonine head and mane of white hair made him look venerable, not so much old as prematurely aged. He was saying in excellent German, “I must protest, Colonel! Haven’t you taken enough? You have already removed the best in our collection. These aren’t historical texts that concern Germany!”

  Schenck glanced over to Bora, who had opened the book on a small table and now leaned over to study its frontispiece.

  “Hartman Scheden,” Bora read. “From Nuremberg - his 1480 Chronicle of the World.”

  “Take it.”

  Anders charged with unsuspected energy towards Bora. “I hope you know this is outrageous and illegal, Captain,” he warned, though Bora avoided eye contact and continued to check titles off his list. Schenck laughed.

  “You may laugh,” Anders raised his tone. “But I tell you it is stealing! It is nothing but stealing!”

  A rustle of clothing caused Bora to look up from his list. Schenck had grabbed the professor by the lapels, driving him against a glassed-in massive shelf. His skinny, booted frame vibrated like a metal rod. “Watch your tongue, old man.”

  Anders could not hope to free himself, but held his own. “Watch my tongue?” His voice boomed under the vaults. “For you? You are nothing but thieves!”

  Bora cringed at the words. Twice Schenck struck the old man full force with the back of his gloved hand, so that his grey head lolled from side to side against the shelf. Shoving him towards the middle of the room, he sent him knocking against the table where Bora was. Bora lunged to keep a frail book from hitting the floor, but already Schenck was summoning him.

  “Leave it, Bora. Take what you have and let’s get out of here.”

  They paused in the courtyard below, where a sickly blade of sunshine came down to cut out deep shadows in the archway. Soldiers hauling boxes came down the steps. Schenck had quite recovered his control, and stood now with fingers hooked in his belt, supervising the operation of removal. He caught Bora’s fluster through the corner of his good eye, and showed no patience for it.

  “Does name-calling trouble you, Captain?”

  “I think it troubles the colonel as well.”

  “Me? Why? We are thieves! I just didn’t want to admit it in the face of a Polack.”

  Ten minutes earlier, Father Malecki had got off the streetcar at the head of Franciszkańska Street, bound for the Curia. He’d noticed the two German army vehicles by the university, and wondered what new abuse was being visited upon them. In a suitcase, he carried small bundles of bloodstained surgical gauze and handkerchiefs the nuns had soaked in the abbess’s blood after death; a strange load, had the German sentinel at the streetcar stop asked to see it.

  The secretary of the archbishop himself threw a less than enthusiastic look into the suitcase.

  “His Eminence appreciates your prompt collaboration in this, Father Malecki. There are many steps to be taken before we even begin considering the possibility of making relics out of these.”

  Malecki found himself in agreement. “Martyrdom is another issue that requires much investigation.”

  “Oh, we wouldn’t mind a holy shrine in Cracow!” the secretary said with sudden levity. “We should compete with Częstochowa then.” He regained his aplomb when the American failed to show amusement. “Actually things aren’t as simple as that. Word of mouth has amply circulated news of the abbess’s death. We’re even now in the process of printing funerary notices. Her followers will readily accept the idea that God called her back to Himself, but should murder be openly suggested, we might face an outrage, even a riot.”

  Malecki thought of the army vehicles he’d seen parked by the university. “I doubt there’s much physical chance for unarmed folks to revolt.”

  “The people would automatically see the Germans’ hand in her death, all the same.”

  “We don’t know that the Germans’ hand isn’t in it.”

  The secretary led Malecki to his well-heated office. He showed him a black-bordered poster with the abbess’s name, dates of birth and death, and the L.C.A.N. motto.

  “By tomorrow morning you’ll find these pasted up and down the streets of this city. If you are asked about the circumstances of the abbess’s death, mental reservation might come in handy.”

  “So, I should lie.”

  The secretary seemed peeved at having to spell it out.

  “Yes, Father Malecki: you should lie.”

  20 November

  Sister Irenka’s mousy face puckered. She seemed to smell trouble, nose wrinkled and mouth gathered tight. She swept a brief look Bora’s way, immediately to return her attention on the greenness of the cloister below the balcony. Were Bora to insist on direct information about the murder, he knew she’d try to walk away from him.

  “What shrubs are those?” Bora was asking instead.

  Sister Irenka kept the pucker on her face. “Jałowiec is the Polish name. It has nothing to do with what you want to ask.”

  “No?” Bora paused briefly. “What I want to ask, you’re not willing to tell.”

  “I am willing, but not certain. I think one should not.”

  “I see.” Unaffectedly, Bora leaned over the balcony. “Jałowiec, eh? Wacholder is the German name. Of the juniper family. Down there, by the well - that’s boxwood, isn’t it?”

  Sister Irenka followed with her eyes the direction to which Bora pointed. “Our Mother Superior was a saint,” she blurted out, and Bora recognized an inflection of pretence, or a curt concession to someone to whom it’s useless to explain things anyway.

  He waited a moment before observing, “I imagine saints are not easy to live with.” He stared frowningly into his notebook as though something in it were more interesting than the matter at hand. His nonchalance in flipping pages concealed his interest well enough for the nun to keep quiet at first, accepting the comment.

  Then she said, with a little voice, “It takes a saint to live with a saint, yes.”

  Bora admired the cleverness of the answer. He looked up and met the cool demeanour of the nun, the firmness of her eyes. He said, very directly, “I have an outsider’s impression that the whole convent revolved around her routine, not necessarily to the benefit of the community. I’m sure donations came in because of her, but how well does a stream of visitors fit in with the contemplative life?”

  “There were days when nothing ever got done, not even praying, because of the visitors.”

  Bora rested the notebook on the ledge of the balcony, and his hands on it. He had such punctilious calm built around himself, Sister Irenka could read nothing more than mild agreement in his face.

  “We loved her, naturally,” she added.
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  Bora nodded. With the tips of his fingers he ran the cover of the notebook up and down, as if to smooth invisible wrinkles on it.

  “But did she love you, Sister?”

  21 November

  When her turn came, Sister Jadwiga didn’t want to talk. She was shy, or reticent, or both.

  Only afterwards, during his afternoon visit to the convent, Bora learned from Father Malecki that she had borne the brunt of the holy abbess’s mood swings.

  “But as we say in America, Captain, it was no big deal. I don’t want you to have the impression that Mother Kazimierza was actually unkind. Like all unique and gifted people, she had her ways.”

  Bora maintained a remorseful face. “I’d say she did. In one of her prophecies, she covertly referred to Polish Marshal Śmigły-Rydz as a traitor.”

  “You read that.” Father Malecki sighed deeply. He sighed as one who wants to expel all from himself: air from his lungs and a moral weight from his chest. He still resented Bora, because Bora spoke unadornedly to him and chose not to use diplomacy, which Malecki would find more palatable. Bora was too direct. Youth had much to do with it, or lack of humility, even though it wasn’t really arrogance in Bora’s case. It was a conviction, zealous and intolerant, something more missionary than military, more spiritual than firmness of character alone.

  “In the end,” Bora was saying now in his unaccented continental English, a well-educated, upper-class speech, “In the end, Father Malecki, I found out that the holy abbess was not so loved after all. She remained a princess aside from and beyond her position as head of the convent. Some of the sisters, you will forgive me, seem to have hated her outright.”

  “Hate is a strong expression.”

  “Death by gunfire is a strong expression.”

  Malecki made a rash cutting gesture with his hand. “Here you go again, suggesting that one of the sisters… it’s preposterous!”

  “I’m not suggesting anything. I don’t know how the abbess died. All I know is that envy and resentment ran deep among her subordinates. I’m a long way from making suggestions yet.”

  When the priest reached into his pocket for his Polish cigarettes, Bora prevented him by extending to him a pack of Chesterfields. Malecki took one, and Bora lit it for him.

  “I don’t think I’m telling you anything you didn’t know, Father, by saying there were Polish ‘patriots’ hiding in one of the houses nearby. The SD flushed them out thoroughly on the day after the abbess died. Just before I came here today, I climbed to the top floor of that house over there.” Bora pointed at a tall building across the street. “You were in the cloister, Father Malecki, and very visible to the naked eye. Even with my ordinance pistol I could have easily shot you through the head or put a sizeable dent in your frame.”

  Malecki didn’t appreciate the humour. “Good of you not to have done it.”

  “I had no reason, God forbid. As I suspected, any shot fired from the neighbourhood would have penetrated the abbess’s body at a very different angle. In other matters, I have come to admit there was a remarkable lack of bias in her prophecies. She stated facts that would or might happen, without taking an open nationalistic stance. That attitude might have irritated the Poles as well as others.”

  “‘Others’? You Germans, you mean.”

  “We’d find less blatant ways to dispose of politically troublesome church people. But let’s say yes, for the sake of impartiality.” Bora smiled. “Without sharing it, I understand the neutrality of a true saint in matters of political ideology. There’s no objective good or bad in the Godhead, if the Godhead transcends the mere game of relative opposites.”

  Malecki pricked up his ears. “That’s a dangerous speculation, Captain. Are you trying to equate the principle of evil with the principle of good?”

  “I’m saying they’re necessary value judgements, but value judgements none the less, time-bound and contingent.”

  “You confuse value judgements with values of obligation!”

  “Why, Father Malecki, it’s the Jesuits who say that the end justifies the means, and that all that leads Godwards is good. That kind of theology isn’t my cup of tea, but it might have been the Holy Abbess’s.”

  23 November

  On Thursday, one month after the incident, Bora was riding with Hannes to the countryside west of Cracow with the nun’s murder in mind.

  With an eye to the rainy countryside, he pulled out of his map case a plan of Our Lady of Seven Sorrows convent. It was over fifty years old, he’d wrangled with the archbishop’s secretary to get it, and the newer buildings in the neighbourhood didn’t appear on it.

  Even though the interpreter did his best over the bumpy country lanes, it was impossible to read the map in the car without incurring the risk of tearing the flimsy paper. Bora put it away in despair.

  “Hannes, how far is it?” he asked.

  The jug-headed, dwarfish Silesian turned back just at the time necessary to drive into a hole that sent them both tumbling on the seats. “Another half-hour, Captain.”

  His first thorough interrogation of a Polish superior officer lay half an hour away, Bora thought, and he couldn’t get Mother Kazimierza out of his head.

  26 November

  She was still on his mind on Sunday morning, when he and Retz were riding in the major’s requisitioned BMW back from breakfast at the officers’ club.

  Retz had been jabbering for some time, and now said, “You have to come, Bora. You’ve never been there, have you? It’s educational, and before they seal it off you have to see it.”

  He meant the Cracow ghetto, and whether or not Bora felt otherwise, Retz was already directing the driver towards it.

  “I have to buy a gift for someone. There are good deals to be had these days, and the Supply Service has carte blanche in visiting the Jewish quarter. Besides, where else would we find shops open on Sunday? You can help me out with the language.”

  It had snowed overnight, and uselessly the sun tried to shine after the men parked by the brick bulk of the Corpus Christi church. Rims of ice ringed the puddles in the street, and slushy remnants of snow heaped in the corners.

  “Look up the Polish word for ‘shoemaker’, Bora.”

  Through narrow alleys, leprous with peeling plaster and dampness, they had reached a small enclosed square, where used clothing for sale hung from the wrought-iron fence of the synagogue. Odds and ends were piled up on blankets along the synagogue’s wall, and the unevenness of the cobblestone sidewalk made some of the objects stand askew or totter at the touch.

  Retz glanced at the glassware, brass and trinkets.

  “‘Shevtz’? Is that how you pronounce szewc?”

  Bora looked up from his small dictionary. “That’s how you pronounce it, Major.”

  “Well, all I want is a nice pair of shoes, with buckles on them.”

  Their coming had made an impression among the vendors up and down the irregular shape of the square. Right and left, haggard men moved away from the officers’ path as they walked towards Szeroka Street. Retz said, in the manner of a carefree tourist guide, “There’s a nice old pharmacy just down the block.”

  Bora watched the people move away, seeking the walls with faces downturned. “Has the major been here before?”

  “Some twenty-plus years ago, sure. The Yids weren’t nearly as skittish then.”

  A few steps ahead, the next storefront was no more than a deep doorway with a glassed-in shelf occupying one half of it. The shop sign was written in Hebrew characters, but the goods on the shelf spoke for themselves. Retz pored over the choice of shoes for some time, during which Bora kept a resigned eye on the dilapidated state of the houses around.

  “Those are nice, what do you think?” Retz pointed at a pair of yellow leather pumps.

  “They’re not easy to match. That is, if the lady wishes to match them with her outfit.”

  “Does it make a difference?”

  “I suppose not.”

  “Wel
l, I like them.” Retz indicated the cost in zlotys. “How much is that in real money?”

  “It’s two Polish zlotys per mark, Major.”

  “Well, then it’s not a bad price, is it?”

  Retz bought the yellow pumps. Outside the store, a small boy in clogs asked if he could carry the package for him, and Retz said he could. When they turned the corner at Józefa Street, Retz told Bora, “They’re going to start making army boots pretty soon, did you know that? They’ve already begun turning out decent ghetto-made Air Force insignia and shoulder straps.” When they passed a window that displayed boxed soap, cologne and cosmetic jars, Retz stopped to look. “I ought to buy something else. Maybe perfume or stockings - what do you say?”

  “The major would know best.”

  “Why? I do not know best, Bora. If I knew best I wouldn’t have taken you along for advice.”

  They entered the store followed by the boy. Stiff behind the counter like a cut-out image of herself, the shopkeeper nodded a nervous salute. She had a morbid pallor, where the darkness of her eyes made them seem like holes drilled in her face. She spoke a little German, so Retz did his own bargaining over a paunchy flask of essence, decorated at the neck with a sprig of cloth violets.

  He uncorked it and held it to Bora’s face. “Smell. It goes well with a young woman, wouldn’t you say?”

  It was the first clue Bora received that the recipient of the gifts was not Ewa Kowalska.

  “Make it two,” Retz was now telling the shopkeeper. “One for my wife.” He grinned at Bora.

  Clattering on the cobblestones with his wooden clogs, the boy behind them sounded like a small donkey. Bora continued to watch the people seek open doorways or stop against the house walls, eyes averted, faces averted. SD vehicles were stationed at every other street corner.