by Ben Pastor
Afterwards, Bora drove out of the club with a headache, and no desire to go back to his address. He stopped at the first hotel on the way, took a room and proceeded to stay awake until the time came for him to get up.
5 December
It was very early in the morning, and Doctor Nowotny knew that Bora had to have a good reason to want to see him before going to work. When he heard it, a ripple of hilarity threatened to come up his throat, but he sent it back down with a gulp of hot coffee.
“How long have you been married?”
“Four months.”
Nowotny raised his eyebrows. “A-ha. And how much time did you actually spend with her?”
“Less than two weeks.”
This time Nowotny laughed. “And after ‘less than two weeks’ you worry about not having yet generated a child for the New Germany? He, he, he. Give time to time, as my father used to say. Tell me this, have you been screwing standing up?”
Bora knew he should have not come, and should have not brought up any of this. “A few times,” he mumbled.
“In a hurry, eh? Just couldn’t wait. Well, haste and fertility don’t necessarily go together. You ought to take your time. The missionary position, of course, is reputed to be the best for the purpose, though I’m a great supporter of more ferarum myself. You’re a horseman - the next furlough, spend it on top of her.” Nowotny drummed the desk with his fingers. “Myself, I’m not married. I have no children. I have no patience with relationships, and give me the army any day. It doesn’t mean I don’t like to see a young woman popping at the seams with a baby, but it doesn’t have to be my own to make me happy or proud to be a German. Sure, when it comes right down to it, we’ll need the replenishment. We lost over sixteen thousand in this campaign alone, and we’re only at the start.” He kept smiling, because Bora had a frown. “Russia’s turn isn’t so far away, mark my words.”
Nowotny felt a sting of regret, or pity, which was as much a part of his nature as the hardness he showed others. The man before him was in so many ways untried, unaware, just beginning to be hurt. He still wore the beautiful uniform of testiness and idealism and blessed arrogance. Nowotny had an odd premonition of grief for him, as if not so far in the future the clean hard looks would be tried, and pain burst his courage. It was an ever so brief sensation, unwarranted in that he hardly knew Bora. He should hardly care.
So he said, gruffly, “What country do you think is going to get it next?”
“It is not my place to speculate.”
“But I bet you think we can take it all.”
During his lunch break, on a hunch, Bora travelled down the extension of Karmelicka to Salle-Weber’s office on Reichsstrasse. After some prompting, Salle-Weber admitted a file on Mother Kazimierza existed, but was not sympathetic enough to share it with Bora. All he said was, “She was an aristocrat, from an old, politically involved family. Even had she not been a big-mouthed nun, we’d have had a file on her. There’s nothing in it that would help your investigation, so don’t ask to see it.”
“May I at least see the folder?”
The folder was slim, only a few pages in Bora’s reckoning, and on the tab the label read Lumen. His heartbeat accelerated.
“Why the title?” he asked.
Salle-Weber put the folder away, and locked the cabinet. “It was a codename we came up with. You’re the college man here, you should know what it means.”
“It’s Latin for ‘light’.”
“There you go.”
“And it’s the first word in her L.C.A.N motto: Lumen Christi, Adiuva Nos.”
“Clever, eh? Now go about your business, Captain. I haven’t the time to chat over dead nuns. The file is closed.”
Bora didn’t want to insist with Salle-Weber right now, all the more since he’d put in a request for permission to interrogate the partisans flushed out from the houses around the convent. He left the office with a sense of euphoria. Mother Kazimierza had predicted she would die “through her name”. Could the codename be what she referred to? He was anxious to read Malecki’s notes once more.
It was again beginning to snow when he came out of the building. Silvery flecks fell in slow spirals here and there, and the air was already below freezing. Beyond the Vistula, low on the horizon, a pale gold ribbon of sky linked the layered clouds. A shaft of light came from it and went to illuminate some distant hillside elsewhere. Bora was bound for those hills in the morning.
In the car, he flipped through Malecki’s notes until he found what he wanted.
“The abbess often referred to Christ as ‘her Light’. Her favourite quotation was from Matthew 6:22.”
The quotation was not reported, so Bora had to wait until the next time he’d see Malecki to ask.
At the Old Theatre, Retz talked to Kasia when Ewa didn’t seem disposed to listen to him.
“What’s the matter with her? I called her three times today, I sent her a pound of butter. I shouldn’t even be out of my office right now.”
Since Kasia spoke no German, the words were obviously aimed at Ewa, who sat smoking in front of her mirror, one leg dangling nervously over the crossed knee.
Through the mirror, though she didn’t look directly at it, she discerned Retz leaning towards her friend with an anxious posture of shoulders and face. Kasia turned to her. “Ewa, whatever he’s saying, will you listen to him?”
Her silence did not discourage Retz, although he came dangerously close to self-exposure to cause a reaction.
“Does Ewa think I’m seeing somebody else? I’m not seeing anybody else! Tell her she just has to come. My room-mate is going to be away for two days. We’ll have the house to ourselves for two days. I’m not seeing anybody else, and she just has to come!”
“Ewusia, I think he needs you.” Kasia simpered. “I wouldn’t be so tough on him.”
Ewa sucked on the short butt of her cigarette, squeezed tight between thumb and forefinger. “He can call me again after work, if he wants to.”
6 December
The hefty tines of the pitchfork showed a viscous coating of darkish red, and straw had been used to absorb the blood from the barn floor.
Bora scribbled on his clipboard. No noise came from the outside except a bellow now and then from the disconsolate cow tied to the barnyard fence.
“She needs to be milked,” Hannes mumbled as he was going out of the barn.
Bora ignored him. Trailing his eyes on the snow-patched distance between the hut and the barn, he noticed signs of raking across the yard. “He dragged himself here from the house,” he told the unkempt, angry-faced soldiers beside him. “The dirt is mixed with blood here and there.”
“Sepp wasn’t found in the barn,” one of the soldiers spoke back. “We found him behind there in the slop, Herr Hauptmann, with the hogs trying to grub into his belly.”
Bora scraped the bloody edge of his sole against the door jamb.
“So. You all came together, the four of you. Was there anyone else but women here?”
“No, sir, there wasn’t.”
Having cleaned the edge of his boot, Bora stared at it. “And what were the three of you doing while Sepp got himself impaled in the house?”
The soldiers stayed stiff at attention. When Bora looked up, he saw on them the mien of wary dogs. The man who had been doing the talking said, “We’d been out on patrol all night, Captain, we were dog-tired. We took a breather of an hour or so. Sepp went inside to ask for something to drink.”
“‘Something to drink’? Wasn’t there water in the well?”
“It’s cold for well water, sir. These people keep ale sometimes. He went asking for some, and they killed him.”
It required no effort for Bora to sound harsh. “I have three Polish nationals with bullets through their heads out there. Who killed them?”
“Sir, we had to do something about Sepp! They were nothing but—”
“I don’t give a bloody damn what they were, Private. There are three dead w
omen out there and I want to know who killed them.”
“We just had to, sir.”
“‘Just had to.’” Bora placed the clipboard under his arm and capped his pen. “It still doesn’t answer my other question. Where were the three of you while your comrade went into the house? You weren’t around or you’d have heard the scuffle. Did you hear the scuffle?”
Just then Hannes called from the barnyard fence. “The medical examiner has arrived, Herr Hauptmann.”
“I’ll be out in a minute.”
When Bora joined him in the yard, the physician was kneeling by the three dead women, with one hand lowering the skirts of the youngest one.
“Get me the men out here, Captain. Tell them to drop their pants.”
In his room on Karmelicka Street, Father Malecki debated whether he should show the archbishop the compromising letter from the abbess. It only said that he, Malecki, could be trusted if the need arose. It had no date and was addressed to no one in particular, but still he decided to keep it to himself for the time being.
He should have thought that underground agents might have been among those visiting the abbess in weeks past. Bora had made no mention of German suspicions in regard to that, but then Bora wouldn’t. Malecki regretted not asking his night visitor to put him in touch with the men who’d worked at the chapel roof on the day of the crime.
So he sat in his room with the note staring at him, tempted to burn it one moment and to keep it as evidence the next. If by any chance the strange meeting last night had been a trap set by the Germans - well, he hadn’t fallen for it. But then, he could see no reason for a trap. There was no reason.
Except, of course, being accused of collaborating with anti-German forces and being expelled from Poland. Bora would have free rein in his investigation then.
Malecki rested his forehead on the window pane, careful not to touch his sore nose. Most of the snow had melted and the street below was bare and lonely except for two bundled, helmeted German guards, patrolling with equal pace on the sidewalk.
The torn, bloody cotton briefs were draped around the younger woman’s knees. Her bruised belly looked like mashed snow with blond, red-streaked grass on it. Bora’s lips contracted as he forced himself to look.
“I’m sorry to show you this, Captain, but it’s relevant to the facts. She also has bruises and chunks of hair missing from her head. I believe this was done by two men at least.” The physician waved for the medics to come and remove the bodies, and followed Bora, who had started for his car. “What you reconstructed is a sound analysis of the sequence of events: the men came to the house to ask for a drink, and whether or not they got it, they began to take liberties. The women resisted, so two of the men carried the girl out and raped her; the other two men tried the same indoors, and one of them got himself impaled in the back room. However it went, there was confusion, and by the time the women were corralled back together, everyone had forgotten about the soldier who dragged himself to die in the barn. As you pointed out, there’s no mud around the women’s shoes. They weren’t the ones who threw the body in the slop. Where I disagree with you is concerning the guilt. I think the killing was quite more cold-blooded than you envision. The women were made to lie side by side and were executed that way. Not an angry spur-of-the-moment reaction. And the wilful removal of the dead soldier from the barn hints to an attempt to manipulate our emotions by facing us with a German soldier murdered in the dung.”
Bora tossed his clipboard in the back of the car. “I will have my report by tonight. When may I expect yours?”
The medical examiner watched Bora’s interpreter milk the cow by the barnyard fence. There was no pail, and the milk simply sprayed out onto the ground. “If you are willing to wait one hour, you may have it today.”
7 December
“‘If therefore the light that is in you be darkness, how great is that darkness!’ That is the quotation from Matthew, Captain. It was a self-deprecating reminder the abbess used in her daily prayers. The image of light, as you probably noticed, is recurrent in her utterances.”
They sat in the convent church, and Bora was only half-listening. He had his mind on the drive back from the country, with reports that were couched in the impersonal language of the military so that horror became statistics. Colonel Schenck was not one to be moved, but was a pragmatic commander. He had recommended that the army patrol be indicted and the one soldier among them who hadn’t earned medals or citations during the invasion be executed.
“Have the sentence with his name and crime posted around the village near the farm where it happened, Bora. That’ll be lip-service enough.”
Bora’s eyes now wandered up from the altar to the baroque accretions of stucco reliefs in the apse, something resembling gilded barnacles in the overturned hull of a boat. He was glad Malecki was talking to him. He needed to hear the unexcited tone of a human voice, whatever the words were.
At his return from the field, Retz had laughed off his irritation at finding that his bedroom had been slept in.
“It isn’t like it’s your room, Bora! You use it when you’re in Cracow, that’s all. Ewa and I had a little get-together with friends, and there was need for some extra sleeping space. You wouldn’t even have noticed hadn’t the stupid cleaning woman decided to air out the mattress.”
So he had argued with Retz. It had been long in coming, and, all considered, he’d brought up everything with less anger than might have weakened his arguments. Retz had actually listened at first.
“Therefore,” Malecki was saying in his steady voice, “the image of Christ as bringer of illumination would be particularly significant to one whose spiritual convictions revolved around divine grace.” The priest had been speaking with his eyes on the devotional booklet by the abbess, and only now realized that Bora was distracted. “You disagree?” He sampled his interest in what was being said.
Bora looked at him. “Do I disagree on what?”
The theatre dressing room was cold. Whatever heat radiated from the coal stove only warmed a small area around it, and the two women sat close to it. Ewa Kowalska had got her feet wet in the slush outside the theatre. Her stockings were hung to dry over the mirror. Bare-footed, she stretched her toes towards the stove while rehearsing her part.
She was not happy with it, Kasia knew. It was a little part and Ewa had hoped against all sense to get the lead. Kasia said, “But darling, you played the Queen in the Libation Bearers and in Agamemnon before that. It makes sense that you should play her now.” Kasia wound her reddish hair around her forefinger, legs tucked under her body on the threadbare rug. “Just think of me, who only get to play the slavewoman or a member of the chorus most of the times.”
“You don’t have my experience.”
“I’m also common-looking. But I have been around the company long enough to deserve better. How did it go the other night after I left?”
“It went fine. Richard argued with his room-mate in the morning.”
“Oh? About you?”
“About Richard sending him out when I visit.”
Kasia laughed. Her teeth were the only beautiful thing about her, and she’d taught herself to laugh well. “The poor thing. Maybe Richard ought to find him a girlfriend. Maybe that’s what the argument was really all about.”
“I don’t know. Richard hasn’t spoken to him in two days. It’s funny how callous he can be about people’s feelings. He said he’ll try to get his room-mate transferred to other lodgings.”
“Well! You still have pull, Ewusia. Not every woman in Cracow can get a German officer evicted on her account.”
Ewa put away the sheets she’d been reading. She rested her head on the back of the overstuffed, worn armchair. With her extended bare foot she prodded Kasia’s back. Eyes closed, she began reciting her part.
“Asleep? What good are you, when you’re asleep?”
Kasia laughed with a shiver. “Your feet are cold! Next time you see Richard, why don’t
you find out if his room-mate is looking for company?”
6
9 December
The young Pole had bruises on his face. The left cheek was swollen. A blood vessel in his eye had ruptured, and the pale-blue iris stood out strangely against the red.
Bora gave him a cigarette, lit it for him and watched the prisoner puff from it with relish.
As one of the partisans flushed out by the SS from a tenement building across the street from the convent, his life wasn’t worth much at the moment. According to Salle-Weber, two of his companions had been shot while trying to escape. He’d sprained his ankle jumping out of a low window and the SS had nabbed him on the spot.
What they were getting out of him now was beyond Bora’s concern, although he, too, had questions. He began by waving the armed guard out of the room.
Past the barred window panes, the hour of day was imperceptible in the twilight of a dismal inner court. Bora kept his attention on the outside, feeling with his hand how draughts of cold air knifed their way in from around the window frame. He wasn’t himself sure whether by turning his back on a prisoner he meant to convey careless self-confidence, or that he was just unafraid. But he did look out into the sad day as he spoke.
“I’m told that you understand German, so this is going to be easy enough. You were on the top floor of the tenement on the morning of 23 October, the day before you were arrested. There were binoculars and weapons in the room you occupied, and right now the weapons interest me less than the binoculars.”
No word came from the prisoner. When Bora looked, he was smoking greedily. His battered face conveyed no readable emotions. He had heard, but no questions had been asked, so he stayed quiet.
