In Paradise: A Novel (10 page)

A
FTER HIS MARRIAGE,
Alexei almost retired the black armband. His new wife, however, approved the look of it, at least when worn with his dark worsteds in the winter and pale linen suits in summer. And of course he donned it dutifully again to honor one parent then the other at their funerals a few years later, the bitterly disappointed mother and the father who never liked him much and eventually shunted him out of the lineage in favor of the grandson Clements, now a graduate student at university.

Once the old people were gone, Alexei’s Lily, apprised of Poland’s multitudes of counts and barons, was able to persuade her “Sasha” to ignore his father’s edict in regard to the baronetcy and award himself a higher rank while he was at it. (“Who gives a damn in America, my darling? I mean, there are so many of you!”) A bit sheepish, the new Count Alexei assured his son that the landed aristocracy in old Poland would never have bothered their heads about such trifles.

Had his father been rather a silly fellow, Clements wondered? Sometimes it seemed so. But he must have been a very sad fellow as well, for not two years after the death of his parents, Count Alexei Olinski wandered out onto weak ice on the town pond in early spring, the canvas pockets of his hunting jacket stuffed with lead weights cut from the anchor lines of his old wood decoy ducks.

Putting on that armband for his father’s funeral, Clements supposed that in wearing it, he was accepting a family responsibility for his mother, long neglected.

After the funeral, the Countess Lily had presented him with his grandfather’s gold cuff links and also a stray photograph (“Yours now, I should think”) that had turned up in his father’s dresser drawer. In the creased snapshot, a laughing girl with wind-danced curls and a comical air leaned far out a thatched ground-floor window to hail a goose passing by along the street. How pretty she was! Could this black-haired girl have been his mother? And the photographer his father? They assumed so.

“Why did he never show this to me, then?”

“Nor to me. Nor to his parents, either, I shouldn’t imagine.” She contemplated the photo. “No, no, this girl belonged exclusively to Alexei, goose and all.”

Really? he thought. Their son had no claim on her? But, stoic and reserved out of long habit, he kept these feelings to himself, where they belonged.

The sense of what she’d said overtook the Countess Lily a bit late. “Oh Christ,” she complained, less cross with herself than with him. Her tone turned harsh and her manner coarse, for she was drunk. “Don’t you ever complain, Clements? I mean, it can’t be good for you, bottling things up the way you do. It’s a little scary.”

“Please, Lily. It’s not important.”

Deep in her armchair, steeped in whiskey, she considered her stepson, nodding as if to say,
Yes, this may hurt
. “Skipped out on all of us, even himself,” she muttered. His stepmother was not unkind and nor was she quite bright, but she was straightforward and he trusted her. “Prettier than I ever was,” she said, “and a lot more fun than
he
was, from the look of her.”

She confessed she’d been jealous of Emi Allgeier before she understood how much Alexei had needed the disappearance of his great love in Poland, which affirmed the tragedy of war and loss that had given his life whatever resonance it had. She sometimes feared he’d only married his “American meal ticket” to avoid having to go abroad after the war to look for Emi and learn a painful truth he knew already, not that she was gone—surely the Olinskis had assumed that from the start?—but that she had been left behind through his weakness or betrayal or some failure of nerve that he could never face.

Had Alexei casually seduced and carelessly “knocked up” that little teacher, asked the Countess Lily, then snuck away to America without a word? And had he omitted this detail from his legend and lied about it ever since, first to his family and later to himself? “We might as well be honest, Clements. If I’m correct, the great love of his life became his lifelong shame. You never sensed this?

“No,” she continued, seeing his expression, “I’m not imagining things, love.” And out of guilt, her Alexei had let himself be bullied half to death by his dreadful parents. “And those old European snobs are
tough
! If I hadn’t come along to rescue the poor guy and move him over here to my place, he might have died without ever leaving home.”

As the last Olinski, Clements cropped that family name to “Olin,” his school nickname all his life. With no ache of Poland in his heart, indifferent to the
schlachta
title, he tossed out those rat-gnawed red boots, which had always seemed to him faintly ridiculous.

He kept a copy of Emi’s photo in his billfold, the original safe in his desk. His dreams were still visited by a long-lost girl who wandered the snowbound streets of a winter city somewhere in Hapsburg Europe—not the same, of course, but not altogether different from that girl leaning out her window to regale a goose.

Sometimes as in espionage films she awaited him at dusk under a streetlight on the corner—“the girl in the raincoat,” as he thought of her, high-pointed French collar turned up against the wind and cold, and war and fate, no doubt, into the bargain. In some fire-bright café, sipping golden cognac from fine crystal glasses, they explored each other’s eyes and hearts without a word. And awakening during the night, he would cling to her fleeting image long enough to trace its thread back down the tunnels of sweet sleep into his dream.

Where had they gone, those lovers? Out into the snow, of course, and onward into the night city; he saw them from afar in passage down snow-silenced streets to a thatched cottage. And he was welcomed into her fresh bed, where an oddly unerotic episode commenced as he awoke.

N
ext morning at the Christian service, upset because she has forgotten to bring the small crucifix for the token altar, Sister Ann-Marie grabs up a charred scrap of plywood from the railbed and gouges a crude cross into the platform gravel, then slings her tool aside in a rough gesture that seems disrespectful not only of the Cross but of this small shivering congregation and perhaps even the martyrs they are here to honor. Her gouged symbol desecrates the last steps of those prisoners who were herded up this platform toward the Golgotha of those waiting woods—or so, Olin suspects, Sister Catherine might be thinking.

“Please take more care, Sister,” Catherine reproves her in an undertone. In response, the culprit wrenches the silver crucifix from her own throat, snapping its chain, then thrusts crucifix and prayer book at the other before plunging her face into her hands and sinking to her knees with a torn sobbing.

Bending to murmur into her ear, Sister Catherine urges her to rise at once. The girl only blubbers, face twisted, inconsolable, and despite his pity, Olin finds himself repelled by the heavy moles on her pasty skin, the unpowdered acne and moustache, the red eyes puffy with self-pity.

The lot of very plain young women has always struck him as monstrously unjust. What spark missing from the eyes, the smile, what scent or fleshly chemistry, could make such a fatal difference in two faces whose cast of feature, to a blind man’s touch, might be identical? The two might share similar natures, biologies, desires, capabilities, the same urgent drive to be passionately wanted and to love and procreate. Yet one will be set aside by a mere gene, some minute strand of protoplasm undetectable by the known senses, that condemns her to an unfulfilled existence—unless, that is, she should happen to be spared by an unusual intelligence or wit or lively manner of the sort so lacking in poor Ann-Marie.

Like most men, he has carelessly assumed that such misfortune is what impels a young woman to commit heart and mind and yearning body to the nun’s barren calling, with only the love of poor emaciated Christ to see her through. He pities this girl truly. Yet at this moment, even so, he is annoyed that this creature has embarrassed Sister Catherine. When Ann-Marie can’t be coaxed onto her feet, he steps behind her, reaches down and locates her soft armpits and with a great surge of distaste heaves the dead weight of her up off the gravel.

Taken aback by Olin’s intervention, Sister Catherine waves away another man who has stepped forward to help; she does this so brusquely that the man raises his eyebrows, then permits himself a sort of smile when a moment later, as she attempts to assist Olin from the other side, the two bump foreheads in the act of lifting.

“I’ve never bumped heads with a nun before,” Olin whispers. He laughs quietly and she bites her lip, then gives in to a bright peal of girlish mirth that charms him—that in fact delights him, though he senses how close her laughter comes to the frantic laughter of an overtired child up past its bedtime that may shatter in wails from one moment to the next: for whatever reason, this young Catherine is in despair. Observing them, Ann-Marie decides she is being mocked—
“Oh!”
—and is instantly up there on the Cross with Jesus; twisting free, she rushes off the ramp and on across the snowy tracks, bound for the fence and the nearest gate that might lead to a place of refuge in the women’s compound.

Sister Catherine does not call after her. She considers the misshapen cross—“the
wound
,” she murmurs in a small queer voice—then distances herself from it a little before leading a bare service with no altar.

Just as well Priest Mikal is absent, Olin supposes, exchanging a wry look with the man who tried to help. He had not recognized the ex-monk Stefan, whose fur hat conceals the monk’s tonsure encircling his scalp like a fallen halo.

Sister Catherine whispers to her group that under ordinary circumstances, Sister Ann-Marie would never permit herself to behave in such a manner. As an unsophisticated peasant girl taught by country priests, she is naturally upset by the shock of her first exposure to a death camp and also certain anti-papist rants which have made a painful situation that much worse. She does not have to say that for a devout novice, the discovery that failed Catholics were prominent among those responsible for Auschwitz-Birkenau has been excruciating.

Catherine herself looks harried, as if at any moment she might sink into a heap as the other girl had done, simply unravel. “Yet you have borne it,” he reminds her.

“Yes,” she says, looking around to see if the missing sister might have reappeared. “These days we must persevere, try to see clearly. There are decisions.”

What sort of decisions? For Sister Catherine? For the Church? Surely something more urgent than Earwig’s abuse is badly troubling her. Even if she won’t confide in him, he wants to engage her in some way, tease her a little, to lighten the atmosphere between them.
Stop inspecting her! Where are your manners?
But really, how
alive
she looks in her distress, almost pretty in her way, even in heavy black habit. He checks an absurd impulse to reach out and lightly touch her cheek.
Want to bless her or something? You’re
ridiculous!

Olin says, “I was just wondering why Priest Mikal doesn’t attend your services.” “He is not our priest,” she says too sharply, “and anyway, he can’t be everywhere: no doubt he has duties to attend to at the church.”

“I’ll just go have a look for Ann-Marie,” he tells her. “
Sister
Ann-Marie,” she says, plainly regretting the entire unsuitable exchange.

When Sister Catherine and the others return to the circle, Olin stays behind to kick at the mutilated cross with his boot toe, trying to smooth it. Stefan has lingered, too, apparently entertained by his frustration, but Olin soon quits, in a hurry to catch up, nodding to Stefan curtly as he passes. When he glances back a minute later, the man has already set off in the opposite direction, toward the tunnel.

O
LIN LEAVES THE CIRCLE
after the first meditation period and makes his way across the tracks and through the fence into the women’s compound. (By what warped code were the sexes kept strictly separate while awaiting death?) In one of these preserved barracks lived Tadeusz Borowski’s beloved fiancée Maria, arrested with him. In another, Dr. Mengele performed his hideous experiments on twin children. And somewhere here—this haunts him—a wistful child scrawled on the wall: “No butterflies live here.” This river lowland must have breathed mosquito clouds in warmer weather when every last butterfly, beetle, worm, and spider was devoured on sight by the famished prisoners, and the root of the poorest weed. Once the grass was gone and the river rose in rain and flood, mud oozed over these floors; in the dry summer, the prisoners choked on the hot dust, hallucinating in the dream of water.

Each barrack held seven hundred women and a few children in the animal reek of small tight rooms. He locates the fading crayon drawings depicting a schoolhouse and some happy kids pulling a hobbyhorse and a toy dog—the famous “children’s paintings,” so poignant in their effort to be cheerful, whose height above the floor suggests that they were actually the work of mothers desperate to help starving children through those endless hours.

Alone in the last of the bare rooms, he calls out to the missing Ann-Marie. Nobody answers. Fearing the scrape and whisper of thin shoes, he retreats outside to find his breath.

T
HAT AFTERNOON,
Olin walks into the town, armed only with a surname and his precious snapshot of that dark-haired girl leaning out of her thatched window. The melancholy nature of his quest and its high likelihood of failure—are these the real reasons he has put this off? Nobody is left at home who might hold him to account; they hadn’t wanted him to come here in the first place. Yet he feels a peculiar obligation to the girl in the photo, and perhaps a vague responsibility to his late father as well. And he also needs the knowledge that he tried.

With no realistic ambition, then, beyond putting a duty behind him, he locates the town hall–courthouse on the square. Here nobody, it seems, much wants to help a nosy foreigner hunting through old records, a stranger speaking archaic Polish and quite possibly intent on bringing more notoriety to their town. Next he walks the streets on the lookout for some older citizen who might point him toward a neighborhood where another elder might recall that name or recognize the window of the old thatched house in his photo or even, impossibly, the girl herself.
Could that be our young schoolteacher? The old doctor’s daughter?
But knowing the unlikelihood of any such encounter, he only feels more aimless and depressed.

The few pedestrians in the shabby streets look poisoned by a stranger’s cordial smile and deaf to his greetings. Windows appear tight shut all over town. But rumors must have flown before him, for on the next corner four men stop to stare in a hard knot of closed faces. After a consultation, they turn toward him, forming a loose line that does not quite bar his way.

His greeting is met with suspicion and his queries mocked doltishly, with feigned incomprehension. The guy in front, a bareheaded man in a red scarf, hands jammed into torn pockets of his scruffy jacket, pretends that the stranger’s accent is outlandish, unfathomable; another masticates the name he seeks, turning it over and over on his tongue as one might test a suspect mushroom. Finally, with a small stiff bow, Olin turns his back on their hard raillery, retreats the way he came. Wandering around town this way is useless. His mind assures him he has done his duty, so why won’t his heart tell him he has done his best?

On his return, Olin is startled to be hailed cheerily by a girl’s voice: he turns to see Mirek’s pretty Wanda in an upstairs window. “Baron Olinski!”—can that be what she said? Before he can respond, she is summoned rudely by a voice somewhere within; a quick wave, then the smile is gone and does not reappear.

G
LAD TO BE FINISHED
with Oswiecim, he is curious to see what might have become of that part of the estate indicated on his old family map of Brzezinka village and environs which he’d compared with the chart in the museum; it appears to be located beyond the farther crematoria, in an outlying area of the vast camp.

Georgie Earwig, suffering sore knees, readily abandons meditation and uninvited tags along when Olin follows the path through the low wood that separates Crematoriums #3 and #4 from the fallow winter fields outside the fences.

Beyond the wood, a storm-split tree stands by itself in a long meadow of thick high grasses that according to his map might have belonged to the estate. On the camp chart, this meadow seems to be the site of a mass grave used when the overloaded ovens fell behind schedule: is it only his imagination that under these heavy grasses glazed with ice the ground is soft, unstable, that it quakes in a sickening way beneath his boots like a great grassy jelly? His companion steps gingerly as if he, too, had noticed that in this place the very ground is rotten.

They do not speak of it, nor even mutter, until well clear of that meadow. But the unspeakable experience weakens their defenses, and Olin risks a rude retort by asking where the other man was born. He means,
Who the hell are you, anyway? Why are you here?
Earwig only shakes him off. He growls but does not answer.