Lumen

by Ben Pastor

  “We may not.”

  The menu’s turn to be swept up came, and Sickingen was as unfriendly to it as he was to everything else tonight. “I let others educate you, Martin, but the old-fashioned basics of male behaviour haven’t changed from when my father taught them to me fifty years ago. A man doesn’t cry, doesn’t lie, doesn’t embrace another man; a man knows how to say ‘thank you’ to a woman he’s made love to; if necessary, a man unquestioningly fights to the death for worthwhile causes. These are the basics. Everything else you learned stands in your way, except for the love of God.” The old man moved his burly head from side to side in disapproval. “How will you go through tonight?”

  “I don’t know.” Bora stared at the cauliflower roses on the floor. “I’m off to the field early tomorrow. I might not go to bed at all.”

  They had dinner in nearly unbroken, army-school silence. Sickingen, who was a vegetarian and drank sparingly, was, despite the long trip, perfectly awake afterwards and would have returned to the subject of Dikta if Bora hadn’t promptly shifted the conversation towards politics. It worked, but didn’t turn out to be a good choice after all.

  Sickingen was even more outspoken than the last time Bora had seen him, which had cost him an argument with Dikta.

  “This political travesty, I see through it well. You were a part of it no less than the rest. From the start, you took to it like a horse to a saddle, and you’ve been jumping ever since. This ‘New Army’! Why do you think I resigned in ’35? Now you’ve sworn loyalty to that man - not to the Country, to that man - and you’re bound by your oath and God keep you when it comes to making choices between your honour and whatever else is given such name in Germany today. I’m asking you: how long will it be before they order you to do something your conscience as a soldier forbids you to do?”

  Bora thought of the files curling up in Schenck’s fiery stove.

  “I have good commanders,” he said nevertheless.

  “Ha! And who commands those? You’ll either make a bad soldier or a bad Christian. You can’t have both. Try to have both, and you’ll be a dead man.” Calmly, Sickingen knew he had hit the mark. “Choose, Martin. Right now, right now. Because your life you may lose regardless, but your immortal soul you’ll lose absolutely if you make the wrong choice.”

  Bora found the room insufferably hot. Out of respect for his stepfather he listened, but the talk exasperated him, and his mind kept burrowing back into the hole of Dikta’s refusal to come. He said blankly that he would choose wisely when the time came, as if he hadn’t already.

  It was only eight o’clock, and the night ahead of him seemed insurmountably long.

  By contrast, the back rooms of the theatre were cold and dank, and smelled of women.

  Bora knew it was a bad idea to come here. Perhaps the worst idea he could have followed tonight, this smelling of female sweat and perfume in the half-dark. Telling himself that he needed to speak to Ewa Kowalska was useless and in the end untrue. He needed to speak to a woman, and was too insecure to seek Helenka, because he was attracted to Helenka.

  Not to Ewa. Ewa was his mother’s age exactly. He thought short thoughts, walking down the steps towards the narrow corridor. Half-dark, damp and smelling, like a bowel the corridor enclosed him.

  His mother’s age. Exactly.

  He’d ask about the lost towel, ask if Ewa had been given a key to the apartment, ask about her visit to Retz the night before his death. He’d listen to her answers and leave.

  His boots provoked no sound from the cement floor, except for a tinkle of spurs when he walked too close to the wall. There seemed to be no one around on this festive night. In the end, Ewa might not be here either.

  Her dressing-room door opened at the very end of the corridor, where another poorly-lit, drab ramp of stairs led to the stage beyond. From the shred of yellow glare spreading on the floor, Bora could tell the light was on inside.

  “Come in.”

  Ewa might have been startled, but didn’t seem so. Having answered his rap on the partly open door, at his entrance she only lifted her eyes to him through the mirror.

  “Good evening.” Again she looked down. She had no make-up on and her paleness was real, unadorned. Old, Bora thought with relief. “May I help you, Captain?”

  All the while she was rummaging in a zippered cloth bag for hairpins. The hairpins resembled the short fir needles at Święty Bór. She placed them on the dressing table, which was like Helenka’s but more orderly. Above the table, stuck between the mirror and the wall, a hand-tinted postcard of Tosca leaping off the top of Castle Sant’Angelo and a snapshot of Richard Retz. The Retz of twenty years ago, when he and Ewa were Bora’s age. Now she was, he thought again, his mother’s age exactly. The hairpins joined their companions in a little row.

  “May I help you?” she repeated.

  It was too cold for her to be in her slip. Dimly Bora understood that the blouse crumpled over the back of the chair had been worn until a moment ago, until the moment he knocked on the door, but it didn’t matter really. He derived elementary, unexpectedly guiltless pleasure out of staring at her breasts, diverging and erect in the cold, sumptuous like Dikta’s, whom he should be thinking of if he wasn’t.

  “I have a few questions.”

  She continued to busy herself with the hairpins, so Bora kept his eyes on her.

  “About Richard, I suppose.”

  “Yes.”

  Ewa turned to him while placing the last hairpin on the dressing table The motion caused the cloth bag to fall from her lap. “Oh, dear.”

  Beads from an unstrung necklace and buttons rolled from the bag in a clicking race, which she could not prevent but tried to stop, leaning from her chair. Bora halted the roll of a bead with his foot. He picked it up, and another came circling. He reached for it and for two more, nearly under the edge of the dressing table, crouching to retrieve those.

  Ewa said, “Thank you,” when he began to rise to put the beads in her hand. They were large beads, shiny and red against the palm of her hand like apples from infinitesimal Edens. She closed her fist around them, and the red was gone. Bora pulled back to come to his feet, but neither quickly nor prudently enough. He was saying, “No,” when she held his neck to kiss him.

  A terror seized him as he found that Ewa kissed better than Dikta, better than the women he’d known in Spain. Her tongue was like silk reaching for the moist floor of his mouth, dipping in it and curling back to pour her own wetness in, to arouse the clean edge of his tongue against itself. He began to bristle and harden without kissing back, tasting her, letting her for ever so brief a time into his mouth only because he needed to be bodily wanted beyond his ability to say no. Kneeling by her chair, he saw and felt himself in bed with Dikta, or himself with Ewa, or Helenka, but it was Dikta’s muscular belly that he craved, the tight cleft in her blondness, and Dikta’s mouth. It was seconds before he forcibly pulled away from Ewa, so that the bony, taut angle of his face was averted from her.

  Out of the theatre, he didn’t remember walking to the car and starting it. He didn’t even know the time or the streets, other than he hopelessly drove a little distance to the dark edge of the park and then he had to stop and try to compose himself, but it was too late for composure. Blood tided and banged in his throat, his veins. He didn’t dare touch any part of his body, afraid to precipitate an orgasm. Like fire, with a cresting ache, need made him sweat despite the cold of the car until he was wringing wet beneath his shirt, trying to breathe in and out when his lungs wanted to stop air in his throat.

  His jaw set hard. Eyes closed, he pulled back on the seat. Carefully, he thought, but with the motion the cloth of his breeches fretted the skin of knees and thighs up the painful, engorged cluster of his groin. Breathing became short, difficult. Bora kept his hands contracted on the steering wheel. Still, arms and shoulders began bracing, locking stiff each muscle, each joint, so that he trembled with the excess of tension and in the end had to suffer the great
craving to break through him. He fought to keep from crying out when it flooded his groin as if life’s dam were yawning open to pour out of him in jolts, and after disgorging itself he’d have no life left, a sweet, sweet dying.

  It seemed to go on for ever, this thick, long draining into his clothes. Bora’s head was driven against the back of the seat, he could hear himself groan and harden again and start to let go, let go and relax in guilty shivers.

  His throat unlocked enough for him to swallow, and breathe again. Cold night air filled his chest, but he wouldn’t open his eyes to see the night around the car.

  His linen and leather-trimmed breeches felt warm, soaked, sticky. Back and shoulders grew numb. Fingers, palms, wrists unlocked, grew numb. Bora would soon go from feeling relieved to feeling filthy, and a crazy want to weep for Dikta filled the interval with unbearable loneliness and sorrow. He loved her, he loved her. His guts and sinews and soul loved her. And he wasn’t sure she loved him any more.

  Lights off, motor off, a car with an SS plate was parked by the snowy kerb in front of his doorway.

  Bora braked behind it, in a sudden alarmed hurry to prepare himself for trouble.

  Even before he opened his car door, Salle-Weber’s unmistakable silhouette exited the SS vehicle. The street was dark between lamp posts, and his square-shouldered image had an ominous blackness about it. Bora came out.

  “A few words with you, Captain.”

  “Surely.” Bora locked his car, keeping his wits about him. “Should we go inside?”

  “No. Let’s walk.”

  Bora looked Salle-Weber’s way. Not at him, since there wasn’t enough light to read the expression on his face.

  “Walk? Where?”

  “Start walking.”

  Podzamcze Street ran long and straight at this point, and enough of the snow had been ploughed from the centre of it to allow for slow, somewhat treacherous pacing. Further down, the next lamp post drew a circle of light like a faint moon, and Bora took a step in that direction. Salle-Weber did the same.

  “Where were you just now?”

  Bora decided to answer the truth, all the more since he might have been seen leaving the theatre. He was horribly self-conscious, and only grateful to be wearing the heavy winter uniform and greatcoat. The moisture was now starting to dry and feel gummy and uncomfortable on his inner thighs. His linen had become glued onto him, because he wouldn’t reach for himself even just to rearrange his clothing. The cutting cleanness of the night made the sensation of filth very real.

  There must be signs another man could sense, he was sure, but Salle-Weber was not looking at him. Adjusting his pace to Bora’s, as soldiers do by habit, Salle-Weber rifted the icy snow with his greased boots, hard-hewn face turned to the dim glare ahead.

  “Your conduct is very unbecoming a German officer, Captain Bora.”

  “Because I went to see an actress?”

  “No. Because you have a sow’s propensity to grub with your nose in dung.”

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Just keep in mind this is the time of year when swine get butchered and hung.”

  Bora felt a limp pain across his shoulders when he tried to stiffen again. His muscles were sore. He needed to wash and sleep, and maybe this was not happening at all. He said, testily, “Unfortunately my job seems to bring me back to pigsties daily.”

  With a brusque reach of the arm, Salle-Weber turned him around. “Be careful, Bora. I don’t appreciate humour.”

  “And I don’t understand your metaphor. Put it plainly to me.”

  Snow crunched under their steps like small squeaky voices, followed by a snapping sound when a frozen puddle or sheet of ice broke through.

  When they reached the sallow circle of light drawn by the lamp post on the dirty snow, Salle-Weber halted, and Bora with him. It was starting to snow again. Like frozen moths or wind-blown cinders, flakes entered the circle of light in weary spirals. Salle-Weber removed a nonexistent speck from Bora’s coat.

  “You know, Bora, I can smell your kind, and it’s only because of the energy and good promise you’ve shown so far that I bother to address you at all. Take heed. If you live, there’s still time for a hopeful career, with plenty of fighting ahead of us to test it. You have no experience, so don’t presume of yourself. Don’t spoil the promise. Bury your arrogance, or rest assured, you’ll be buried with it.”

  “Are you threatening me?”

  “Threats presuppose an option. I’m informing you.”

  Bora heard the words escape him, and Dikta’s note might have everything or nothing to do with them. He faced Salle-Weber so that the light made him fully visible to the SS, only a step away.

  “Well, Standartenführer, the street is deserted. We’re alone. It seems to me a perfect time to solve your problem.”

  Salle-Weber might have actually entertained the thought, because the suggestion unsettled him for a moment.

  “Not quite,” he said afterwards, resuming his walk by stepping out of the circle of light. “When it comes, Bora, it’s not going to come so easily. Nor when you’re ready.”

  2 January

  A subtle, clean spear of light transfixed the room making the dark denser, like liquid pressing around a filament of gold.

  Father Malecki lay in bed, emerging from a dreamless, beneficial sleep such as he hadn’t enjoyed in months. He admired the spear of light through half-closed lids, how it reached from a fissure in the shutter to the core of darkness.

  Mother Kazimierza’s favourite words came to his mind: “…but if the light in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness.”

  The mystery of what Lumen meant might very well be a light shining through the dark of unsolved crime and unspoken hostility. Malecki thought that if no solution ever came, he’d learned meanwhile how much more there was to nuns, to saints, to patriots and to German officers.

  With less than nine days to the deadline, the Curia was considering acceptance of Sister Irenka as a new abbess at Our Lady of Sorrows. Malecki had heard from the archbishop’s secretary that anyone but a mystic was what the convent needed now.

  But things were not through with Mother Kazimierza, not quite: the archbishop wanted recommendations about her from him, Malecki. Pressure would begin building soon in the Polish Church to recommend her beatification, and proven miracles would be needed. Malecki would have to express in writing whether the stigmata and fulfilled prophecies qualified for the name.

  As the morning sun moved, the spear of light changed angle and began to widen, flatten, fade. Malecki sat up scratching his neck and yawning, with a lazy mind to open the window and do his weight-lifting.

  When he went downstairs for breakfast, Pana Klara first complained apologetically that there was no milk and the bread was stale, and then pointed out to him a sealed envelope on the lacy tablecloth.

  “A German orderly left it an hour ago. You were sleeping so well, Father, I didn’t think you should be roused on account of him.”

  The note was handwritten, and from Bora.

  “We must proceed with the investigation. I’ll meet you on Thursday at the convent, eighteen hundred hours sharp.”

  3 January

  The group of stray Polish soldiers had been gathered in the next room. Bora had slept poorly, and chain-smoked while he prepared to interrogate them. Salle-Weber’s words hadn’t left his mind for one moment, but their impact was seemingly not enough to keep him from feeling drowsy now.

  So he smoked, and the room began smelling like the apartment after Retz and Ewa had spent the night in it, a stale odour of cigarettes. Bora opened the window to let the hazy air flow out of the office.

  If sleeping poorly weren’t enough, he’d even dreamed about Retz towards morning. The mode of his death, Father Malecki had said. Bora had awakened with the damnable doubt that Retz’s death troubled him because he didn’t understand it. He wanted to tell more about it to Malecki, and if all went well by Thursday evening
he’d have had a chance to speak to the cleaning woman again and to one of the medics who had worked on Retz’s body.

  His stepfather left late that afternoon. True to form, he insisted on walking to the station from the Francuski, so he and Bora passed under St Florian’s gate, where a side altar was carved in the wall, protected by shutters now open. A nun was praying in front of it.

  “What should I tell your wife?”

  Bora looked at the drab curtain of government buildings lining the other side of the street past the round red-brick ring of the Barbican wall. “I wrote her a letter.”

  “Did you send it, or shall I hand-carry it?”

  “I’d appreciate your giving it to her.”

  With the envelope, a small package came out of Bora’s pocket.

  “I sure as hell wouldn’t send her gifts,” Sickingen blurted out. “You ought to send a gift to your mother instead.”

  “I have one for her also. Here.”

  Sickingen wanted to pass by the square where the monument to the victory against the Germans at Grünwald had been dynamited and lay now in a scattered heap of stone blocks. “I want you to take a picture of it and send it to me,” he told Bora. “It’ll serve me as a reminder of the idiocy of your political choice. You do have a camera, don’t you?”

  Bora only said that he’d send the photograph.

  After seeing the general’s train off, he drove to the hospital. Doctor Nowotny was not in, but in the emergency room he found one of the medics who’d retrieved Retz’s body.

  The medic didn’t mind talking. “I remember it well - my first suicide. The major was kneeling on the kitchen floor with his head in the gas oven, slumped forwards. What was he wearing? Uniform breeches, boots and shirt. No tunic. Had there been a towel lying around in the kitchen, I’d have used it, because I smeared my hand on the inside of the oven. There were no towels around, so I ended up using a dishcloth.”