by Ben Pastor
A second roadblock manned by long-coated SS barred the sidewalk ahead.
“Turn left at the corner,” Bora said to Hannes. And as the car prepared to leave the noise and confusion of the barricaded street, a drop of blood - from where? How had it jetted or spurted here? - fell on the windshield. High up, where ice coating the glass outside the wipers’ reach stopped it from running, so that the blood sealed itself there, like a mark and an indictment.
The streets were deserted all the way from the turn-off to Rakowicka, where the low sun unfurled a chilly carpet of ice. On the brick wall flanking the garden of the old Academy, yard-long SS notices had been posted, with split text in German and Polish. Black on the pale yellow, thin paper surface, it read, “Investigation into the death of Maria Zapolyaia, a Catholic religious woman, has resulted in the apprehension of Polish criminal elements. The culprits” - a list of names followed, among which, no doubt, was that of the battered prisoner Bora had met - “were tried, found guilty and sentenced to death. The sentence has already been carried out.”
The Army tried to cover it up. Found guilty. The sentence has already been carried out.
Bora found that he could look at all this, hear all this, witness all this, and have nothing whatever to say.
13 January
The last person to come in for confession spoke English. Through the grid-lined window, Father Malecki understood well who it was, although there were no further signs of intelligence between them.
“In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.”
“Amen. Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.”
“How long since your last confession?”
Malecki found himself sitting back in the recess of the ornate wooden box that separated him from the world, listening to the words coming earnest and low through what privacy the metal screen afforded the other man.
“Everything is different now, Father. Right and wrong, honourable and dishonourable - they’re words and they are blurred to me until I sort them out again. No one can do it for me and it frightens me, it frightens me to have to choose. To have to pick one of the opposites when they’re so blurred, and walk away with it not knowing if I have done well, if the choice was wise, when I don’t even see the rims of wisdom any more. It’s gone empty before me, this great bowl of wisdom I was striving for and deluded myself that I was attaining, or even had attained in small part. There’s nothing in it. There is nothing in it.”
“But it’s not a sin.”
Bora rested his forehead against the grid. “The mask fell off the world, Father Malecki, and no face stands behind it. I am sick at heart.”
“Are you? This is the exit from Eden. Meeting the ‘opposites’, as you call them. Seeing that, contrary to your view from the Garden, they are truly good and evil, and the choice is yours, because you’re a temporal creature with an immortal soul whose health depends on what you do here, what you decide here.” Malecki was moved, because it seemed to him that Bora was silently struggling not to weep. “This, I tell you - whatever your choice, you will be crucified to it, nailed to it and bled white by it. You will live or die of it as surely as I speak to you now. More, others will live or die of it.”
The shadow behind the grid pulled away. “I don’t want to hear it.” But Malecki was ready for the reaction. He stepped out of the confessional, rudely keeping Bora from leaving. He pushed him back towards the niche between the confessional and the wall, in the dusk of the empty church.
“Tell me, do you think the abbess was a saint? Is that what a saint is, someone cloaked in her egocentric God-love to the exclusion of everyone else, basking in God behind closed doors? Saints aren’t so private, Captain Bora. They’re crucified to the unglamorous daily crosses of their love for others, their anger and outrage and striving to create hope for others. They wear robes sometimes, civilian clothes sometimes - even boots with spurs on them. And they need to be as prudent and wily as God will advise, serpents and doves in the hands of men. Do you understand? I am afraid for you: I, who should be inimical to you and what you represent!”
15 January, evening
“What a damn gift you have. Who can ever take it away from you?”
Having heard about Bora’s reassignment, Doctor Nowotny had invited himself to dinner and to a private evening of Schumann piano music. “Well,” he added. “A special Intelligence school and then the War Academy! That ought to keep you put until January 1941 at least. Will you have time to sneak home between lessons and tuck some germ plasma into your wife?”
“I hope so.” Bora had just that afternoon taken leave from Father Malecki, and the separation somehow made him feel orphaned. He sat at the piano, careful to hide those feelings, and his melancholy for Dikta’s silence over the holidays. “I miss her terribly.”
Nowotny sank into the armchair, with a big glass of cognac nestled in his hand. “Good for you, good for you. Mail a telegram to Schenck as soon as you make her pregnant, so that he won’t send you reminders of your marital duties.” He laughed. “Easy to say. Who knows where we’ll all be, two, three years from now.” He listened to Bora play for a while, mellowed by the music into sentimentality. “This much I can tell you, Bora. You will put crime solving behind you and concentrate on your army career. If I know what’s good for me, I’ll sooner or later put this heavy smoking behind me. Our incomparable Schenck will keep reproducing like a rabbit. What else is there?”
It was little more than wishful thinking on Nowotny’s part.
Within three years, he’d be smoking as much as ever. Schenck would die at the gates of Stalingrad before seeing his sixth son born, and Bora’s left hand would be blown off by a partisan grenade in northern Italy. His wife Dikta would secure an annulment shortly thereafter. All of them, all of them, would lose a war more disastrously than anyone could fear. Gifts could and would be taken away.
Tonight there was Schumann, and mild expectation, and the mercy of not knowing.
15 January, afternoon
“There is one thing I would like to ask of the sisters, and that is the print that hangs over the door of Matka Kazimierza’s old room.”
Sister Irenka puckered her face. “That detestable little picture of Adam and Eve?”
“That one.”
“You may certainly have it. Sister Jadwiga, fetch the print for the captain. Is it permissible to ask why you choose such image to remember us by?”
“Yes, but it isn’t precisely to remember you by, Mother Superior. It is to remind myself of myself.” Bora felt himself blushing, and for once did not resist the reaction. “I have after all failed at my investigation, and I need a reminder of man’s pride.”
Father Malecki waited outside the convent, smoking a Polish cigarette. He saw Bora put the print in the trunk, and was tempted to smile.
Instead, he asked, “Have you convinced them that you couldn’t come up with a solution?”
“I don’t know. They seem resigned to whatever comes.”
“And I hear the SS are exhibiting the abbess’s bloodstained habit in one of the Wawel’s halls, along with the Radom bullet as a proof of Polish guilt. So. What have we learned from all this?”
Bora invited the priest to enter the car.
“I can only speak for myself, Father Malecki, and it’s elementary philosophy. Things aren’t what they seem. Certainties aren’t what they seem. There may be no certainties.”
“Ah, but there is Mother Kazimierza’s faith in some inner light.”
“Yes. Lumen Christi, Adiuva Nos. We’ll need it.”
“We’ll need it.”
They drove in silence through the alleys of Cracow’s Old City, under a cloudy sky that promised more snow.
“You never told me who Father Moczygemba was.” Bora tried to smile.
“Father Leopold Moczygemba? A pioneer of Polish immigration to America. He built the church of Cyril and Methodius in Bucktown - Chicago’s Polish quarter.”
“And then?”
&
nbsp; “And then he became the spiritual father of the Poles in Texas, but his flock chased him off when it realized the New World was not the promised land.”
“There aren’t any. Promised lands, I mean.”
“Right. Trust in the one and only Promised Land, Captain Bora.”
They knew they would not see one another again, and the feeling had a sharp, bitter taste for both of them. But they wouldn’t speak of it.
Soon they parted ways at the end of Karmelicka Street.
Epilogue
OBJECT: “Skylight” Dossier (ref. HOFER/ZAPOLYAIA), final informational to enclosed Appendices.
TO: US War Department Military Intelligence Division, Washington, DC
ATTENTION: LT. COLONEL WILLIAM C. DICKSON, US Army - Office G2
CLASSIFICATION: RESERVED
(Omissis).. In conclusion, on the basis of information collected to date, and verified in place by the sources “Pedro”, “Thomas” and “Karol” (see enclosed Appendices, S.D.1, S.D.1-bis, S.D.1-ter), the Cracow Office, as requested by Central Office G2 on date 20 January 1940, is able to confirm the substantial veracity of the information, ref. points 1, 2, 3, of present informational note.
1. The only copy of the final report by Wehrmacht Captain BORA (MARTIN-HEINZ DOUGLAS), ref: Object (ref. HOFER/ZAPOLYAIA, 7 typewritten pages, body 11, double space, on plain German Army stationery), was forwarded to the Central Office of Amt/Ausland Abwehr in Berlin. A first analysis of its contents (see enclosed microfilm transcription - ref. “Pedro”/SD.1) leads to the conclusion that it will be filed there, under the rubric Military Secret, 2nd class/Reserved, unless orders to the contrary are issued: orders that, according to information gathered, source “Pedro” is not likely to be issued.
2. Similar filing is expected for the report written “pro veritate” by the Revd Father MALECKI (JOHN XAVIER), SJ, for the Vatican Secretary of State. In reference to this, the source “Thomas” (see enclosed marconigram - ref. “Thomas”/SD.1-bis) confirms that the Vatican Secretary of State instructed the religious person in question to maintain the strictest reservation regarding Object. As for details of the beatification process of canonization of Mother Kazimierza, the argument lies beyond the scope of the present informational note.
3. SS Hauptsturmführer (Captain) SALLE-WEBER sent an “urgent and reserved” message to the attention of Reichsführer der SS HEINRICH HIMMLER, with copy to Head of General Government HANS FRANK, reporting Captain BORA’s “political unreliability”, and soliciting the application of “appropriate punitive measures” in his regard. According to source “Karol”, the Reichsführer HIMMLER, in consideration of the amicable relations the officer in question enjoys in the German Army Oberkommando, decided to insert Captain BORA’s name in the list of Wehrmacht company officers under “strong suspicion” of anti-Nazism (see enclosed S.D./1-ter/ref. “Kreisau-Counts”), reserving for himself the decision to apply more drastic measures in the eventuality that Hauptsturmführer SALLE-WEBER’s evaluation were to be confirmed in the future. Whether and how the discrepancy between Captain BORA and the political-military command cadre of the Schutzstaffel (SS) will become more acute and reach the breaking point, only time will tell. At present, no further factual elements exist in this regard, although the Cracow Office, after attentive examination of the documents gathered to date, is inclined to conjecture that in the immediate future..(omissis)
The present informational note was written in date 22 January 1940, and approved by the US Consul General before its transcription in code.
Awaiting acknowledgement of receipt.
KEVIN J. LOGAN,
US Consulate General,
Cracow, Poland.
BITTER LEMON PRESS
First published in the United Kingdom in 2011 by
Bitter Lemon Press, 37 Arundel Gardens, London W11 2LW
www.bitterlemonpress.com
Copyright © 1999 by Ben Pastor
This edition published in agreement with the Author through
PNLA/Piergiorgio Nicolazzini Literary Agency
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced in any form or by any means without written
permission of the publisher.
The moral rights of Ben Pastor have been asserted in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
eISBN : 978-1-904-73869-5
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