by Ben Pastor
In the accented German of a Sudete, “It isn’t much, panie kapitanie,” she said, “but I am responsible for it if it isn’t found.”
Bora hadn’t really been paying attention. He’d come up the stairs two steps at a time, anxious to change from his two days in the field before meeting Father Malecki. He’d found a note from the priest and surmised from it that something was amiss. So he had no wish to listen to the cleaning woman on the stairs. “What are you talking about?” he asked. “What ‘isn’t much’?”
“The hand towel, panie kapitanie.”
Bora impatiently turned the key in the lock. “I don’t know what you mean. Explain yourself, I’m in a hurry.”
“One of the hand towels is missing, and I thought maybe the captain knows where it is.”
Bora pushed the leaf of the door inwards, but did not step in.
“There were five bath towels for each officer, panie kapitanie. Five hand towels and five face cloths. I’m to take them down for washing every Sunday and Wednesday. One of the hand towels is missing, and I was told I have to pay for it if it isn’t found.”
Absent-mindedly, Bora entered the apartment and waved her in.
“Show me.”
Ten minutes later he was leaving for the convent, and absent-mindedness had turned to concern.
Father Malecki met him in the waiting room, and reported on his visit to Schenck. “I was asked direct questions about Sister Barbara, Captain. There was no time to waste, and your commander seemed an approachable man.”
Bora slapped his gloves on his thigh. “That’s beside the point. You shouldn’t have brought up the issue on two counts: the Army is an organization completely separate from the SS and the Security Service, and by mentioning my name as a possible go-between you now make it impossible for me to become involved.”
“I don’t see how—”
“Father Malecki, at some point you must start telling me the truth. You knew there was a Jewish convert in this place and you didn’t see fit to inform me. Because of it, what could perhaps have been prevented has happened. What else are you keeping from me?”
Grudgingly Malecki reported Sister Barbara’s dreams, though Bora didn’t seem impressed by the narrative.
“That’s the whole story, Captain. Can anything be done for her now?”
“I make no promises.”
“The archbishop isn’t willing to intercede. You see that you are the only person who can.”
Bora looked insulted. “Don’t try to convince me by flattering my sense of ethics, Father. I have a career.”
One hour later, it was exactly what Salle-Weber reminded him of, after listening with as much good grace as he was about to use with an army colleague.
“You’re wasting your time and attaching your name to useless pursuits. The other day I released the priest to you because I trust you know what you’re doing. You even wrangled the Lumen file from me, and found there was nothing you could use in it. Right now I’m willing not to put this meeting on record if you drop your request. Give it up.”
Bora took a moderate breath. “I’m not asking for consideration because she’s Jewish-born, you understand. She’s of some use to me in relation to the murder case. I’m not as sensitive as you seem to think I am.”
“Even so, Bora.” Salle-Weber balanced a pencil between his index and forefinger. Slumped in his chair, he didn’t seem as massive as he did standing up. “Recognize good advice when you see it.” He leaned back on his chair until the back of it creaked faintly. “Are you giving it up?”
“Yes.”
It was not physical weariness, but that evening Bora felt as tired as he ever had before. Even the steps leading up to his apartment seemed an obstacle that he wasn’t up to confronting.
Seeing Helenka at the top of the stairs only made things worse. He stopped with his hand on the rail, looking up.
“Fräulein Kowalska,” he said from where he was, “it’s late and I don’t wish to speak to you. I don’t know who let you into the building, but I urge you to leave right now. I’m not Major Retz, and I don’t entertain at home.”
Helenka clutched a knitted handbag in her gloveless hands. “I was waiting in the street. It was the porter who let me in.”
“I’ll talk to the porter in the morning. Please leave.”
“Captain, you’re rather conceited if you think I’m here to spend the night with you. I don’t even like you.”
“And I don’t want you in my house.”
“It’s about Richard’s death.”
Bora came up the stairs, one step at a time. “You said there was nothing you could add to it. Whatever it is, I’m sure it can wait until after tomorrow and in a less compromising setting for both of us. Good night.”
The scent of violets was on her. Bora was outraged by the recognition that she countered his weariness and belied it, because bodily he wasn’t tired at all. Within seconds he went from contempt to a state of mild arousal. He reached the landing, and as he did, Helenka went past him, starting down the stairs.
Sudden curiosity for what she might say about Retz tempted Bora to call her back. Out of pride he didn’t, or perhaps he was not sure of himself enough to let her into his house at night.
26 December
When he phoned the theatre on Monday morning, Helenka hadn’t yet arrived for rehearsal. Kasia took the call.
“Is there a message?”
“No.”
Clearly the caller was a German. Without a solid reason for it, Kasia was convinced it was the officer Ewa had pointed out to her, Richard’s colleague. Here came a chance for her to chat with him, and he didn’t speak Polish!
“Helenka usually gets here by nine o’clock,” she spelled out for him to understand. “Please call again at nine.”
Bora thanked her, and hung up.
From behind, on the door of his office, Schenck expressed his disapproval. “Captain, are you becoming involved with Polish women?”
Bora stood up and turned. “No, sir. It’s not a private call. It has to do with Major Retz’s death.”
“Well, what about it?”
“I’m not sure.”
Schenck was unconvinced. “Steer clear of women, whatever the reason. With your wife coming soon, you must at all costs avoid states of mind that might bring about involuntary loss of seminal fluid and weakening of the germ plasma.”
“I believe I can control myself, Colonel.”
“Don’t be so confident.” Schenck lifted from Bora’s desk the map with the itinerary he would follow in the morning, glimpsed at it and put it back. “Speaking of other matters you’re involved in, I want you to conclude the investigation on the nun’s death as soon as possible, with a provisional statement and recommendations if no solution is available. Unless you can prove to me that the Polish underground assassinated her, for example, there’s no sense in keeping things up in the air. I want a full report two weeks from now.”
Bora showed none of the disappointment Schenck’s words gave him. “May I be candid in my report?”
“Naturally. But remember that I have a stove in my office, too.”
10
28 December
The place was identified on the map as Święty Bór. It did not figure as a stop in his itinerary and Bora would have gone past it, if a mounted army patrol hadn’t halted his car down the road from where the forest began.
“I’m in a hurry,” he rolled down his window to say. “What is the matter?”
He recognized the lieutenant leading the platoon from one of his previous errands in this wooded region. A plump young man, he approached the staff car and greeted Bora with an unusual strain in his behaviour. “Please, Captain Bora.” He leaned towards the window, whispering, “I urgently need a word with you.”
Bora looked at his watch. “About what? Be quick, I have to be in Wiślica by noon.”
The lieutenant’s eyes stole past Bora to Hannes. “In private, sir.”
Bora
told Hannes to park at the side of the road, where the platoon mounts were also gathered, and left the car door open to signify his haste. “What is it, Lieutenant?”
“This way, please.”
The growth of fir trees reached very close to the road at this point. The lieutenant led Bora in that direction. By the hoofprints in the snow, Bora could tell the platoon had come through the woods.
The lieutenant straddled a bush, still whispering. “It’s a miracle you should be coming this way now. There’s something going on beyond the woods. I think you should take a look. The men called my attention to it.”
Bora followed in the tangled brushwood. His greatcoat became caught in low branches here and there, and he intolerantly freed himself. “What’s something, Lieutenant? A military operation? This had better be justified.” But he was already uneasy, angry at his uneasiness.
The lieutenant turned around to bid him silence. The terrain climbed after a while, where the trees grew closest and tall. Soon the road seemed lost behind the curtain of other trees behind them, and very far. More and more uneasily Bora trod on, removing the sweeping branches of the firs from his way.
“There’s a clearing ahead.” The lieutenant spoke with his hands mostly. By the angle of his advance, Bora understood they were following a wide half-circle to their destination. No snow had penetrated the woods, and the earth lay strewn with crunchy fir needles, broken twigs that snapped under one’s steps. The horses’ hoofmarks were only visible where the animals had slipped on the vegetation carpet, or the bare soil was clayish and still warm enough to receive the imprints. Larches began further up, on a steep, rocky incline.
The lieutenant halted short of the incline.
“Listen.”
Bora stood still. Now that his movements no longer awakened a rustle underfoot, silence followed. Straight ahead, deadened by trees and the rise in the land, the staccato sound of single gunshots marred the silence.
He climbed alone, hands and feet finding anchor on exposed roots and tangled brushwood. From below, the lieutenant watched him anxiously. “You’ll need these.” He stretched his field glasses up to Bora.
Bora ignored the offer. He had reached the shrubby crest of the incline, where he crouched to look. His shoulders braced and hardened into a vigilant and then aghast immobility. Field glasses in hand, the lieutenant clambered to his side. “Here, take them,” he insisted. “I don’t care to see any more.” And he dropped down again.
When Bora returned to Cracow that evening, a red afterglow made the bristling skyline of steeples resemble its own eerie forest. Pointed as firs, shaggy with crosses and spires, the churches punctured the red sky, and it seemed to Bora that the sky should burst and sag upon them.
As always, Hannes had taken Florianska to bring him home through the Old City.
“Take a right here.” Bora caused him to slow down and turn the steering wheel at a sharp angle. “Go to Karmelicka.”
The house where Father Malecki lived was tall and not unlike the other tall buildings which darkness was overcoming from the ground floor up. “Leave the car,” Bora dismissed Hannes.
He looked up at the façade before ringing the bell. The eaves were the only part of it that still held a flesh-coloured tinge, while the sky all around had grown sickly grey. Father Malecki’s window, who knows, might be the one where a light shone through the glass.
Two clumsy steps backwards were all that Pana Klara could think of to disguise her distress at the visit. She improved on it by continuing to step back as if to invite Bora in.
“Which floor?” Bora asked in Polish.
She lifted three fingers. When she started up the stairs after him, Bora made her a sign to stay. “Dziękuję,” he thanked her, and went up alone.
Father Malecki was reading a week-old copy of the Chicago Tribune Logan had set aside for him at the consulate.
“Come in, Pana Klara,” he replied to the knock on the door. “It’s open.”
Bora was the last person he expected here. Malecki stared at the visitor’s distraught paleness over the top of the newspaper, very casually, he thought, given his surprise. Bora spoke a few formal words of apology for coming without notice.
“Well, won’t you sit down?”
Bora removed his cap, which he rigidly held under his arm. “No, thank you. I have come to tell you that I cannot help Sister Barbara.”
“I see.” Malecki doubted this was the only reason for Bora’s ashen-faced presence. “I’m grieved to hear it. I was hoping you might assist us.”
“Yes.” Bora suddenly found he had to steady his breathing. Having kept control all day, his muscles began to tremble with the first inopportune release of tension, an unexpected and painful process. Stiffening his spine didn’t help the pain but stopped the chills at once. The priest’s avoidance of direct eye contact allowed him to think himself less obvious. “I have also come to say I received orders to conclude the investigation.”
It was closer to the truth than the first statement, but this wasn’t the reason for the visit or the distress. Malecki felt it.
“It’s a shame, Captain. Do we have any time left?”
“Two weeks.”
“God might lend us a hand between now and then.”
“Maybe. You know God better than I.”
Malecki folded and put away the newspaper. “I wish you’d sit down a moment. Must you rush off?”
Bora had hoped for the invitation. Impulsively, he sat facing the priest, tight-lipped, holding the cap on his knees.
What he needed to say, he could not say. He could not. It was forbidden. With all the prudence and repression of his upbringing, he swallowed back a gut-wrenching need to cry out to Malecki what he’d witnessed that morning. Words clashed and rammed inside him until by habit of self-control, wearily, he was able to keep them down. He skilfully opened a lesser wound in order to bleed his anguish.
“Father Malecki, my room-mate died last week. It troubles me. May I speak of it?”
At the other end of town, Ewa Kowalska found that she couldn’t avoid waiting for the same streetcar as her daughter. A few steps away, Helenka kept her face averted, and the cold wind made her eyes water.
“Helenka, look at me.”
The young woman only lifted her collar.
“Will you look at me, Helenka? I have to talk to you.”
Helenka wouldn’t turn. She held on to her purse, face in the bitter evening wind. Ewa reached for her arm.
“I told you I have to talk to you.”
Unexpectedly, Helenka wheeled around and shook herself free of the hold. There wasn’t enough light left for them to see clearly, and as from behind masks each looked at the other’s blurred countenance. Helenka felt a venomous desire to hurt the woman facing her.
“Mother, you’re old. You’re forty-six years old. What can you possibly say that even applies to my life? If it’s about Richard, keep from preaching to me, because you did what you wanted at my age. You’re just jealous because Richard fell in love with me. Don’t even try to talk about him.”
Ewa kept her temper by some miraculous effort. “I had no intention to talk about Richard. It’s your brother. He’s back in Cracow, and I met him this morning.”
“So?”
“He wants to know if he can come stay with you for a while.”
“Tell him no. I’m sharing the room with someone else. Why can’t he stay at your place? You have two bedrooms.”
Ewa could weep in frustration. “You know how difficult it is to come and go at my place. For the last two days a German patrol has been stationed at the end of the street. I can’t have him there.”
“Why not? It’s not like it’s the first time you had men over.”
The temptation to strike back choked her, but Ewa managed again. She said, swallowing her pride, “He says he killed somebody.”
The clanking arrival of the tramway under a small shower of sparks kept them from continuing the conversation. Helenka cl
imbed on first. When Ewa followed, she saw that her daughter had chosen the seat closest to the conductor, making it impossible for her to speak in private.
On Karmelicka, Pana Klara tiptoed to the hallway at the head of the stairs to listen unseen, just in case Father Malecki was being abused by his German visitor. Through the partly open door, she didn’t hear the priest talk. The other voice spoke steadily to him, not in anger, posing earnest questions as it seemed.
Now Malecki was certain that Bora kept from him a much larger issue. Bora’s steadiness of voice and composure were not artificial, but layered too accurately not to betray the effort of the process. “So,” Malecki said, “your colleague’s death troubles you. From all you’ve told me, I don’t gather that you mourn his passing, even though the mode of it should.”
Bora stretched his legs in a first sign of relaxation. “The mode of it does, Father. There are some things, some small things - details. They keep me awake at night, when I didn’t even care for him. A towel is missing from the house, the blade was left in his razor when he had a fetish against doing so. As you heard tonight, my colleague had as good a reason to be despondent as I can envision, still it troubles me. It’s a clear case of suicide, there were no marks of violence on the body, no indication of forced entry into the house. All the women who were involved with him have impeccable alibis. It troubles me, that’s all.”
Malecki clasped his hands slackly. “Perhaps you resent a lifestyle your education kept you from sharing.”
“It’s true, I did. I’m ashamed to say there were nights when I envied him.”
“What troubles you then may be your own resentment, not your colleague’s death. Moral men cannot escape desiring what they deny themselves. I for one am ready to make all kinds of allowances for their disgruntlement.”
Bora let go a little more, enough to toss his cap on Malecki’s bed. Talking about other things helped somewhat. It numbed the anguish without removing it, which meant it would return later, when he would be alone.
