by Ben Pastor
“Well, of all the nerve!” She strode across the room to throw the shutters open. “You’ll have to get out right now, see? Right this minute!” She turned around, and the words froze in her throat.
Two armed German soldiers were standing at the sides of the bed.
12
5 January
In the convent’s waiting room, Father Malecki gasped. He rested his back against the wall behind the bench, trying to look less surprised than he was.
“Is that what you think happened?”
“That’s what I think happened,” Bora said. “I was ready to give up, and to show you just how ready, I’d have been satisfied to say that it was an act of God. Even that, given the amount of gunfire that was still occasionally fired in October, some stray bullet shot in the air had found its way down to the cloister, and killed the abbess as she lay down in her trance. But now I know better. It could be nothing else, and I have been knocking about the whole thing long enough. But unless I get permission from my commander to follow through with a quick trip to Germany, it all remains in the realm of speculation.”
“Forgive me, but it’s a chilling prospect.”
“Yes, and without certain proof, unless I can lay my hands on the gun. You understand that my interpreter’s words is what started me thinking about it, so it wasn’t a case of particularly clever thinking on my part. Whether I like it or not, the guns found on the convent roof - however they managed to get there - have in fact nothing to do with it.” Here Bora looked straight at Malecki. “We arrested the missing worker, Father.”
Malecki sustained the stare, coolly enough. “I see. Did he?…”
“All I will tell you is that we know who he is and what he did, which does not concern you. True, he did join the crew. And, true, he did absent himself at four fifteen to retrieve the guns from the roof. But he did not shoot the abbess. Had he done so, the report would have been heard from the chapel, or the church, or the kitchen, especially when fired in an acoustically resonant place like the cloister. The killing happened ten or fifteen minutes later, when the sisters were singing in church, the repairmen back at work, and the tanks made a racket just outside the walls. And if nothing else but her name killed the abbess, just as in Sister Barbara’s dream, we now know she meant her file name, since, as you just heard, Lumen does in a roundabout way connect with this.”
Looking elsewhere, Malecki noticed out of the corner of his eye Bora’s uncharacteristic slump. “And if you’re right?” he asked.
“If I’m right, the truth will be exposed.”
It was late in the evening, and Bora sounded tired. Malecki perceived motives for that weariness quite removed from the matter at hand. Personal motives, he suspected, more intimate than Bora cared to share with others, or even justify to himself.
“If it were true, Captain, I doubt the scandal could be kept within the circle of the sisters or the Curia’s staff.”
“That’s not for me to worry about, especially tonight. Remember, no proof for the time being, and I won’t be able to see you for a few days. Let’s hope to make sense out of the possibility when we meet again.” Bora lifted the collar of his coat, readying himself to leave. “May I give you a lift home?”
“I won’t say no.”
Outside the wind had fallen, and the cold was more bearable.
Bora let the priest in and started the car. Waiting for the motor to warm up, he said, “Your comment about my blind spot, Father Malecki-I can’t deny it’s been there. I used to think it was because I didn’t like my room-mate, but perhaps there are other reasons. More uncomfortable, less honest reasons. I realize I must remove it.”
Malecki half-smiled in the dark. “You are hard on yourself, Captain.”
“Am I? Maybe. I’d have made a good priest had I not chosen to be a good soldier.” The car began to move slowly down the icy street. “Naturally, being a soldier allows for a certain frailty of the flesh, which might account for my choice.”
“We’re all frail. The breaking point varies, that’s all.”
While Bora drove the priest to Karmelicka Street, from Kasia’s house Ewa reached the theatre in a frenzy. There was hardly anyone there. Helenka and her seamstress heard her call from the corridor and joined her.
“What happened?”
“They took Kasia - the Germans took Kasia!”
Helenka understood at once what the implications were. “When?”
“Some time after she left this morning. They’ve seen soldiers carrying her off.”
Helenka dispatched the seamstress to find a glass of water, and pulled her mother into the dressing room. She closed the door. “What about him?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know. No word about him, I’m sure the Germans took him as well.” Ewa was catching her breath, with both hands pushing her disarranged hair back from her face. “Right now we have to think about ourselves, Helenka.”
Helenka gave her an amazed look. “You can’t be serious! Your son’s just been arrested, and—”
“There’s nothing we can do for him. Or Kasia.”
“No? Well, how like you it is! You never cared for him, and you don’t even care for him now!”
Ewa was regaining her control in the measure Helenka had let go of hers. “And what about yourself? You wouldn’t hide him in your house any more than I would. Let’s be frank, your brother hasn’t been in touch in three years, we didn’t even hear from him until he got in trouble and came looking for help. I did the best I could, I found him a hiding place.”
“Yes, and now Kasia has paid for it! How egotistical can you be?”
Ewa spaced her breathing with the actress’s skill, entirely collected. “It’s a matter of practicality, Helenka. Do you really think that my going to the Germans would help your brother or Kasia? If Richard were alive—”
“Don’t mention him! I don’t want you to mention him!”
“If Richard were alive, he might listen to either one of us. There’s no one else we can ask.”
“Well, Captain Bora has come to see you.”
“And you.” For a moment they stared, each waiting for the other to lower her eyes, neither of them doing so. Ewa said then, “Captain Bora has no interest in me.”
“You could at least try!”
“I’m not going to the Germans, Helenka. Don’t ask, because I’m not. Not for your brother, not for Kasia.”
Helenka backed up towards her dressing table, throwing up her hands. “I can’t believe what you’re saying. You’re not even willing to try?”
“It’s useless.”
“Well, I’m going to try.”
Instinctively Ewa tried to reach for her, and though Helenka shrank back, Ewa showed no resentment. “Don’t be daft. The Germans might not even know that he’s your brother, or my son, or that we know Kasia.”
“And don’t you think Kasia is talking, since it was you who convinced her to get involved? I’m going in the morning, before the Germans come for me.”
Bora closed the door of the library as if someone might bother him in the empty house. He walked to the shelf where the classics were kept, looking for plays written in German. From a boxed set of bilingual tragedy texts, Greek and German, he pulled out a book. The Eumenides occupied the last seventy pages of it. He began reading, first from one language, then from the other, to fully capture the meaning of the words.
“Eyes are like unto light
To the slumbering brain,
But in daylight our future is obscure…”
The more he read into the play, the sadder he felt, not just because of the contents. Pain and regret rose from the pages, whether the story dredged out of him some participatory grief for Retz’s death, or made him feel guilty about his death, or for letting Ewa kiss him.“What of the wife who kills her husband, then?”
and:“There is a time when fear is good…”
Afterwards, with the book on his lap, he sat contemplating the morbid rows of dried-up insec
ts in the glass case, their shiny outer skeletons gleaming. A time when fear is good. Maybe. Things weren’t easy any more. September had been the last easy month of his life. He felt trapped and angry for nailing himself to more responsibilities and ill-advised choices, as if he didn’t have enough to worry about. Why should he care about the way Retz had died? Retz had died as he had lived.
It made no difference. “I have to,” he said under his breath, rising to put the book back. “I have to care.”
Father Malecki was right, he was hard on himself, but only because he feared showing any weakness, at any time. There was no glory in it. So he’d make himself care about the way Retz had died, as he’d made himself write to Dikta congratulating her on her horsemanship, wishing her the best in the upcoming competition instead of telling her that he needed her.
He left the library, drew himself a bath and while waiting for the tub to fill he put a fresh blade in Retz’s razor and shaved with it, as if a solution ought to come by contagious magic from it, by thinking like Richard Retz for one night.
After the bath, he started for his room but in the hallway he changed his mind. He walked to Retz’s door, and without turning on the light he lay on Retz’s bed, over the quilts at first and then under them. In the dark there were no blind spots, and biases lost sharpness. Suspicion alone was keen enough to cut shapes in his mind.
Bora knew he could never fall asleep in this bed, and willingly surrendered to the play of logic that from one thought to another, from one possibility to another, like a magic lantern reeled the shapes of suspicion before him.
6 January
Bora had not sipped once from the cup of hot coffee on his office desk. He listened, balancing the chair on its hind legs. In his right hand, a pencil’s rubbery end tapped a silent rhythm on the wood of the desk.
“Why didn’t your mother come herself?”
Helenka had avoided facing him until now, but finally had to confront him. Bora’s appearance was less arrogant than the tone with which he’d said the words, and the motives behind the sentence could be too many for her to untangle now. Bora reached for the cup and brought his lips near to it.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I decided to come on my own.”
Bora nodded at the coming of an orderly, received a file from him and put it aside, where other files formed a neat stack.
“It’s interesting that you should be here to plead for your brother, when our reports indicate that both you and your mother refused to harbour him. Aren’t you close to him?”
Because Helenka wouldn’t say, Bora drank some more coffee, and then hugged the cup between his hands. “It’s a good thing you refused, of course. Only strange.” He lifted the last file he’d been given, ran his eyes over it and put it back. “Had we thought you or your mother were involved in the attempt to keep him from our authority, you’d be answering very different questions now. This woman Kasia, your mother’s friend, said she acted of her own accord. I doubt it, though my doubt doesn’t mean much at this point. But I still want to know why your mother didn’t come herself.”
“Would it help if she did?” Bora stared at her, and Helenka felt unnerved by the stare. “Perhaps she thought you wouldn’t be inclined to listen to her.”
“I’m listening to you, am I not?”
“But you’re not saying if there’s anything you can do.”
Bora put away the cup, even though he had not emptied it.
“I’d have to be God Almighty to do something for your brother. He’s dead.”
As expected, he had to wait until Helenka swallowed her tears; he was made uneasy by them but was unwilling to show it. He gave her his handkerchief and stood up to signal the end of the meeting. “There’s nothing I can do for the girl either.” His voice trailed off. “Tell your mother that I want to see her.”
Within minutes after dismissing Helenka, Bora left for two days in the field which would include a visit to General Blaskowitz. He had no memos for the general. Data and whole reports were in his mind, where more and more he was learning to store them, safe from tampering and destruction.
The same could not be said for Father Malecki, who brought to the Curia copious notes on the case of the abbess. And though he kept to himself Bora’s latest theory, he mentioned the possibility of a resolution in the next few days.
“If the proof is found,” he added.
The Archbishop scanned through the paperwork without reading it, lending an impatient ear. “Yes, yes. It’s all well and good, Father. We shall know them by their fruit, that’s what I think.”
Malecki expected the reaction, but still he found it unjust. “If you’re referring to Captain Bora, Your Eminence, he is doing the best he can under difficult circumstances.”
“The ‘best he can’ hardly changes the fact that reports keep pouring from the countryside of dreams and visions of the abbess, and of miraculous healings through her intercession. Whether she is a martyr or not, I envision a new saint for Poland before long. Speaking of which, Father, it’s time you turned in your observations to the Holy See, don’t you think?”
Malecki bowed his head. “I believe Your Eminence is anxious to see me back in Chicago.”
“Or in Rome, Father Malecki. Wouldn’t you like to be in Rome for a while?”
Helenka didn’t find her mother at home, nor at the theatre. Only the seamstress sat in Ewa’s dressing room, stitching the hem of the long gown she wore on stage. The black satin resembled a cascade of dark water on her lap.
“Mother of God, Panienka, what has happened to you? You’re as pale as a ghost!”
Helenka swallowed, too angry to cry. She was too angry to speak, words were laced and tangled in her mouth. She neared Ewa’s dressing table and lowered her eyes to the crowd of objects on it. Cosmetics and boxes, wads of cotton, envelopes, cards, pictures. Coins. Hairpins. Tosca and Richard. Red necklace beads. Embroidered doily. Her frame trembled and swayed, as if she might fall over before being able to sit on her mother’s stool.
She didn’t fall, nor sit down. With a hooked reach of the right arm, she sent the multitude of objects flying from the table, breaking, rolling off, floating down, back and forth with the open hand she struck until all was thrown off. The seamstress watched her, open-mouthed, needle suspended on the cloth.
Helenka’s trembling was giving way to tears. “Tell Pana Kowalska that her son is dead. Tell her Kasia is as good as dead.” From behind the mirror frame she snatched Retz’s old photograph, and crumpling it in hand she blindly ran out of the dressing room.
8 January
Holding the unfolded map in front of him, General Blaskowitz stood facing the window, whose dim light cut Bora’s figure out of the winter day.
Bora had nearly finished speaking.
“Yesterday, which is the soonest I could return to Święty Bór, I saw that the entire area has been sealed off by mine-fields and is now under direct SD control.”
Despondently, Blaskowitz tossed the map on his desk. It fell on the floor and he prevented Bora from retrieving it with a dry denial. Bora stepped back.
For several difficult minutes the general remained silent, so that only the hum of the electric clock filled the stillness of the office.
In the end, he said, “There was nothing else you could do under the circumstances, Captain, and Colonel Nowotny acted wisely. You’re only starting to see what it means to put your career in a manilla envelope. Were you frightened?”
“At the edge of the woods? I was very frightened in my body, General.”
“Then the lesson worked.”
“It worked on my body, but I’m not ruled by that.”
Blaskowitz moved a forefinger from side to side in slow denial of Bora’s words.
“Disembodied mind and soul won’t serve you much, so you must keep them attached to the flesh like the rest of us. ‘Not ruled by your body’? You have to be ruled by mind, soul and body to do what you chose to do, no one quality over the others! No
w go back to Cracow. Perform your duties, observe things, take mental notes. Above all, take notes in your heart, because it’s there that they belong. For all practical purposes, this portion of the Polish war is over. The time is coming soon enough to reassign what even your strict commander terms a ‘promising officer’, an excellent interim solution.”
It was just as good that Blaskowitz didn’t repeat what he’d told Nowotny in private a week earlier: that he wondered how long his own high position in Poland would last.
9 January
The first thing Schenck told Bora when he returned to work was, “A Polish woman has been here looking for you. I thought I had given you instructions.”
Bora understood it was Ewa Kowalska, but gave up explaining it. “She’s racially compatible, sir.”
“Is she? Well, she’s too old for you.”
“I’m not taking her to bed. She’s the mother of the fugitive arrested for killing an NCO in Katowice.”
Schenck’s contempt relented a little. “I see. She’ll probably be back this afternoon. Your priest was just here, too. He told me you came up with a pretty inventive theory about the nun’s death. Too bad you can’t prove it.”
“Did Father Malecki leave a message, Colonel?”
“Check with the orderly. It seems he’s leaving Poland at the end of the week.” Schenck ignored the cloud of frustration that went across Bora’s face. “I see you asked to interrogate the woman who sheltered the fugitive. The SS are handling her. We merely supplied manpower to take her in: what’s your interest in her?”
Bora began unbuttoning his greatcoat. “Nothing military. I simply haven’t given up on trying to understand what happened to Major Retz.”
