In Paradise: A Novel (15 page)

D
URING THE VISIT
to the Auschwitz museum on the first day, someone asked the guide why he made no mention of the murdered homosexuals. Well, they were not so many, the guide muttered. Not true, said the questioner. Speaking as a homosexual, he was outraged that even in the death camp these despised men had to wear pink triangles as badges of shame.

Last evening, a basket of pink flannel triangles had turned up by the mess hall door. This morning, at an ecumenical service on the memorial terrace, a number of people wear pink triangles under their coats. But the only ones besides the gay man and Olin who display them in full view on their parkas are young Rainer from Berlin and that earnest rabbinical student who blows the shofar. (Perhaps Sister Catherine has noticed his gesture; he takes her small nod as approval.) But when the cameraman draws near and points his camera, Olin waves him off, hoping that Catherine (who no longer stiffens when he calls her plain “Catherine”) won’t think him a hypocrite because of his reluctance to be recorded on film wearing that badge.

Rainer is chortling, much amused because those younger German women who are forever gushing that Herr Doktor Olin is such a gentleman, so mannerly, so handsome, are shocked by his pink badge.
Mein Gott! Him?
But these sturdy ladies are not nearly as offended as the gang of laborers tramping past on the public path across the
Lager
.

Olin wonders if he exaggerates—if he only imagines—the hostility in those stubbled lumpy faces cramped with cold. No, he does not, it’s unmistakable. But what stops his heart is something he glimpsed while waving off that camera. Scanning the rows, he rediscovers the pink triangle pinned on the lapel of the black overcoat worn by Priest Mikal.

Crazy bastard! You’re preaching at their church!
To divert attention from the priest, he waves his fingers at the laborers, feigning good fellowship. Spotting his pink triangle, they stop short on the path, they back and fill, jeering at this homo and his motley gang of troublemaking foreigners. Inevitably Mikal’s badge is spotted, too.
The new priest at the church!
Even when they move on, they continue to turn, walk backward, pointing, spitting, as the filmmaker, recording the whole episode, taunts Olin with a pantomime of those waggled fingers that, far from distracting the local men, had first drawn their attention to the priest.

U
neasy and restless throughout meditation, he soon leaves the
Lager
and, following Malan’s directions, locates the winding road downriver toward the artist’s deconsecrated chapel on the bluff. He has not gone far when he is hailed by Father Mikal. That he resents this priest as a threat to Sister Catherine is no excuse to hurt his feelings by being rude or cold, and even less so is the fact that Mikal may be the suspect priest mentioned by Earwig that first day on the platform. In any event, he’s stuck with him and they go on together.

Father Mikal, out of shape and out of breath, says he understands that Dr. Olin had been present yesterday at the Christian service on the platform which Sister Ann-Marie had fled; he’d be grateful for Dr. Olin’s recollections of the episode and any observations he might care to make.

Perhaps he should ask the novices themselves, Olin says curtly. “I have,” says the priest. Clearly his inquiry has gone nowhere and he does not care to say why. Instead, he, too, expresses reservations about Dr. Olin’s “friendship” with Sister Catherine, whose spiritual guidance here is his assigned responsibility. To an impressionable young woman who has already suffered abuse on this retreat, an agnostic influence could be disturbing, he suggests, as would careless exposure to secular poetry leading to discussions of Church doctrine for which—“if you will permit me, sir?”—neither party would seem qualified.

Father Mikal, nervous and unprepossessing, with unprepossessing breath, is nonetheless civil and soft-spoken, and Olin wishes to be civil, too. He inquires brusquely how the priest happens to know so much, since he never seems to associate with his charges or attend their services. “No,” says Mikal. “I am unwelcome.”

“Unwelcome?”

With fingertips, the priest crosses himself minutely at the collar. “Forgive me,” Olin says. “I know you can’t reveal—”

“I have offered to hear Confession, you see. Give absolution. Twice. They have never come. Perhaps Sister Catherine has mentioned this?” Olin shakes his head, more and more unhappy. Like him or not, the man’s isolation is painful. “But you have heard something, no doubt?” the priest insists. “Rumors, perhaps? From the convent?” It seems he’s been warned by the mother superior that Sister Ann-Marie had brought malicious gossip from their diocese. “I wished to caution you, sir, that’s all. For Sister Catherine’s sake.”

“And the good of my own soul?”

“That, too,” the priest says wryly, for which Olin almost likes him.

At the bend in the river road ahead, the shuttered chapel sits stranded on its knoll. As if anticipating Olin’s arrival, the old artist stands waiting in the doorway.

“Sister Catherine need not be afraid I will submit a negative report,” Father Mikal says quietly, observing the old artist before turning to start back. “I won’t. I admire her courage, and, if circumstances permitted, I would generally support her views.” Clearly he wishes Olin to transmit this message, if only to ease Catherine’s mind, and this is kind of him, Olin reflects, no matter what. Probably those convent rumors are no more than hearsay, cruel as well as false, but if so, why has this wretched Mikal gone so far out of his way to invite trouble?

“Why did you
do
that?” he calls after him, exasperated. “Wear that damn triangle, I mean,” he adds when the man turns. And the priest calls back, “Perhaps because you did, Dr. Olin. Reminding me of my duty as a Christian. And anyway, as the person who prepared those triangles, I had no choice.” He seems to be trying to smile but cannot quite manage it. Setting off once more, he stumbles while blowing his nose—an uncoordinated man thrown off-balance when he tries to wave the wrong hand over his shoulder.

M
ALAN HAS DISAPPEARED,
leaving the door open. Olin enters with a knock and trails his light step down a hallway to a whitewashed room with a bare white cloth on a wood table. Here in other days, he thinks, a silver chalice might have glittered, and candlesticks, and silver bowls.

In the vestry where he sleeps on an iron cot, the old man goes to his small stove and lights the gas under his kettle. “I feared you’d bring him in here,” he says shortly, retrieving a used tea bag and two chipped cups and saucers from the shelf above.

“You know him, then?”

“By reputation.”

But the old artist has no real interest in Mikal or his reputation and says no more. In setting his table, pouring the tea, he extends a bony wrist on which Olin can see (as he is meant to, he suspects; pride of precedence exists even in Hell) the faded blue number with three digits only that identifies the bearer as one of the earliest prisoners in Auschwitz. “Five years,” Malan says softly; he weighed less than a starved dog, he says, when he was freed.

Olin’s Polish friends knew Malan in the postwar years in Warsaw. In all those years, they say, he made no mention of the death camp: in some way, his unconscious sealed it off like the secret garret confining the wild bastard child or the mad brother. He was already elderly when a stroke set free his memory, and soon thereafter, like the escaped prisoner, Stanislav K., drawn by a longing he cannot explain, this fragile old man forsook the security of his family and returned to the vicinity of the dead
Lager
, envisioning a final work that might liberate him from its grasp before he died.

A kind of homesickness
, both old men had called it—was that a clue? But if so, clue to what, precisely? What constitutes home?

He follows his host by lantern light down a steep ladder: his fingertips, extended for balance, rake a strange silk off spider-webbed stones. An earth-floored basement of four or five small chambers has the dank smell of a cave: from floor to ceiling on white-plastered walls, winding through the doorless rooms like a huge headless caterpillar, decapitated yet still probing, still seeking escape, this black-and-white mural with no beginning and no end is a pure hallucination of fragmented images and symbols across which hole-eyed specters drift in eternal nightmare.

“My God,” says Olin. Here they are, he thinks, all the hungry ghosts, the silenced voices, not descending from the heavens but arising from the dark.

Freshly astonished by his own creation, Malan makes no effort to explain it. “You can always read about the camp,” the old man whispers. “My pictures avoid showing the camp but it is everywhere in them all the same. It is in me.” Art, he believes—not art appreciation but the creation of it—is the one path that might lead toward apprehension of that ultimate evil beyond all understanding. “The hand can speak when words cannot,” he adds. “The only way to understand such evil is to reimagine it. And the only way to reimagine it is through art, as Goya knew. You cannot portray it realistically.”

The old man is grateful he feels strong enough to complete this vast creation that was sealed up inside him for so long; he only hopes it might fulfill a promise made to fellow prisoners, to record the horror of their suffering should he survive.

“I’ll die in peace, you see,” he murmurs happily, waving his cane as if to banish all those hole-eyed ghosts at last. He cares not at all that so few will see his masterpiece, which in any case will only last until the day this old chapel entombs it by crumbling into its cellar. Meanwhile, he suggests, local schoolchildren might be led down his ladder and a few at least might learn and understand.

Olin nods politely but says nothing. Sensing his guest’s skepticism, Malan falls silent. “No, I suppose not,” he says after a pause. Escorting Olin to the door, he changes the subject. “In Cracow,” he says, “you might wish to visit the old Franciscan cathedral and have a look at its modern stained-glass window. You’ll find something very interesting, I think.”

“What sort of thing?”

Malan ignores that question. He is astonished that foreigners would come from far away to sit in silence in the great dead ruin at Birkenau. “And what do you think about all day, out there alone?” he inquires shyly, pointing at the tower in the distance.

A
CCORDING TO
O
LIN’S
research notes, Tadeusz Borowski’s postwar years were spent in refugee camps and solitary wanderings: in a letter from Paris, he described himself as “a visitor from a dead, detested country.” But some of his stories and poems were being published, and in this period he would locate his Maria, now a war refugee in Sweden; eventually they would reunite and marry. In 1948, when his death camp narrative made him famous, he was twenty-five years old.

That same year, he returned to Poland, joined the Communist Party, and became its virulent propagandist, and in this period, he made a “special mission” to Berlin for the satellite government—apparently successful, since he was soon assigned another. Borowski never talked about these “missions”: was he ashamed of them, Olin wondered? A friend who years earlier had been tortured by the Gestapo for crimes against the state was now being tortured by Polish security on a like charge, presumably to extract a confession before the show trial at which Borowski was scheduled to testify: did he fear he might be coerced to malign his friend by the threat of torture or return to prison?

In the last year of his life, he told a friend that in regard to his literary gifts, he might as well have laid a shovel handle across his own bared throat and stood on it (a favored
Kapo
method of extinguishing fallen slaves too weak to work).

Which Borowski was it, then—the corrupted, cynical Vorarbeiter Tadeusz of the death camp stories or the real-life “Tadek” who (according to his fellow poet Czeslaw Milosz) had behaved well in the camps? Which man sank onto his knees in July 1951 as if to puke into the toilet and stuck his head into the oven and turned on the gas, ladies and gentlemen, at twenty-eight years of age, just three days after the birth of his first child, a baby daughter, unable to live his life even one more day?

Why? Because he had betrayed his great gifts as a writer? Because toward the end he had betrayed his wife and longtime lover by succumbing to an affair with a young girl? Because he feared that to save himself he might be forced to betray—or had already betrayed—his imprisoned friend? Or because as a lifelong idealist, he was fatally depressed by the realization that Europe—mankind—had learned nothing from years of suffering, and nothing had changed?

In this war morality . . . the ideals of freedom, justice, and human dignity had all slid off man like a rotten rag. We said there is no crime that a man will not commit in order to save himself. And, having saved himself, he will commit crimes for increasingly trivial reasons . . . first out of duty, then from habit, and finally—for pleasure.

In suicide, Borowski had borne witness, too.

T
OWARD DUSK,
headed back along the platform toward the Gate, Olin discovers the outline of the mutilated cross under light snow. Two days earlier, he had lingered only long enough to kick at the gouged gravel with his boot toe. Today he is determined to scrape and smooth that cross as a gift to Catherine, and looks for that plywood shard that Sister Ann-Marie had tossed aside. But her implement is lost under blowing snow, and in the end he reaches down and tries to blur the scar with swipes of his gloved hand. However, the compacted gravel is still frozen, and finally he gives up and straightens, arching his back. Then, with a curse, he drops onto his knees and rakes at the rough cross with numb clawed fingers. In the end, it relents and is mostly leveled but not before his gloves are worn through and his fingertips are scraped and bleeding, stuck with black gravel; in the cold air, they sting when he tries to brush them off. “Bloody hell,” he whispers. He gets to his feet and walks on toward the tunnel, his sore hands shoved into his parka.