In Paradise: A Novel (16 page)

The others have all gone but she is there. “I saw,” she says. “The wound.” She takes his torn forefingers in her hand and with her handkerchief, not gently, dabs away the crust of blood and gravel.

“I saw,” she repeats, still holding his fingers. “He
kneeled
. Before the
Cross
.” She rolls her eyes heavenward, looking comically devout. “O Lord, bless this good man who prays.”

“No prayers today, miss. Sorry.”

“
Sorry, miss
, he says!” She opens her eyes wide in wonder. Still mocking her own piety, she raises her hands high, palms pressed together, as if in gratitude for such a miracle. “He
kneeled!
Alone in wind and snow!”

Emerging from the tunnel, they walk in silence down the frozen road, the only sound the light tick of their shoes. Maintaining her space, she hops across the frozen ruts rather than take his elbow. But at a certain moment—and both feel it when it comes—they turn slowly as they walk and look each other frankly in the face for the first time, look away at once, then look right back and this time hold, still walking.

“Who are you, then?” she murmurs.
Are your eyes telling the truth?
Is that what she means?
Are you only playing games? And if so, why?
Because in this terminus, in the very shadow of that gate, a feckless dalliance would be beyond all shame.

“I don’t know,” he says as they move onward. And her nod assures him she has faith that he is doing his utmost to be truthful.

Over and over, with no need of further speech or signal, they drift apart as on a transparent tether, snap back in place quick as two quick fishes.

Look at you, grinning your fool head off! You happy or what?
“I’ll going to miss you, Catherine,” says this happy man, but his intensity of feeling makes it seem that what he confesses in this moment is, “I love you.”

Instant doubt: is that his happiness reflected in her eyes? Can this rare creature be anywhere near where he is in his heart? If so, what can she be thinking? How can she behave as if this moment weren’t extraordinary, as if this road were just any old dirt road in Poland, leading from this point to that one, here to there?

And that vision of Emi in her dying—had that, too, been delusion? And his queer homesickness? He struggles to think clearly. Perhaps Catherine will assume he’s teasing her again, playing the romantic idiot, the old fool. And, under the circumstances, it might be best for all concerned if she believes that.

In his confused state, the light sound of their steps on the frozen road is the sole reality.

W
HERE THE ROAD
disappears under asphalt at the edge of town, he hangs back a bit, to give her space to arrive unaccompanied. Understanding his tact, she does not slow nor does she look back. Only once do they exchange a glance of scared bewilderment—
Did that really happen? If so, what was it?
—before she hurries off to vespers in the convent.

Olin’s edginess, watching her go, is caught by Earwig, who spits elaborately as he walks past. Well? Whose business is it that two mismatched people have made friends? Or even stumbled into an attraction? Leading an unworldly young woman astray would certainly be disgraceful were he playing games. He’s not! True, he’d gone too far with that silly spasm of affection on the road, but it’s hardly as though he’d compromised her with a vow of undying love. And yet, with only one day left, he already misses her so badly that after supper he stalks the cobbled courtyard, awaiting her arrival for the evening meeting. However, it is not Catherine who appears out of the dark but Stefan, who looks displeased to be seen coming from the convent. “Aha,” he says, as if Olin’s presence here has cleared up a mystery. “You’re waiting for her, I suppose.”

“You’ve known Sister Catherine for some time, it seems,” Olin says carefully.

“Amalia? Indeed I have.” He and “Amalia” were “old comrades” in the reform movement in their diocese. Her convent was no great distance from his seminary, Stefan is saying. They met in a group of progressive students.

“You submitted some sort of reform petition, right? And she supported you?”

Well, she signed his petition. And there were other circumstances, he adds, with a certain coyness that Olin dislikes very much. Which other circumstances? What is this man intimating here? Why is he so often nearby when Catherine is present, and never averts that impertinent bald stare when Olin stares back, to challenge him, but only smiles in the same knowing way he is smiling now?

These days, Amalia (Stefan says), disillusioned with the secular world, longs for the purity of her original commitment, of that cloistered life for which she is temperamentally so unsuited. He has always tried to educate her about all the scandals and cover-ups in Rome, he says, but she will no longer let him near for fear he might contaminate her fragile faith.

Stefan has pitched his voice louder, apparently intending this last supposition to be overheard by Sister Catherine, who now approaches down the convent path. “She thinks I’m some anti-papist fanatic maligning the Mother Church. The difference is that unlike your Jew friend, I know what I’m talking about. From the inside.”

“Unlike my Jew friend,” Olin says. “I see.”

Catherine has stopped. “What is it you want, Stefan?” she inquires in a low tense voice—less a question than a warning. The ex-monk winks at Olin and retreats inside.

Neither coldly nor warmly, she awaits him. “What has he been telling you, Mr. Olin?”

“Oh, only that you two worked together as young students. Flirted a little, maybe?” he suggests perversely. “I mean, that’s not so serious, young people flirting—”

“No
flirts!”

Cut off so sharply, he suffers a disagreeable foreboding, undefined and fleeting. With all her heart she had supported that petition, she is saying, feeling sorry for an idealistic young monk who had entrusted her with his life story. Only afterward had she suspected that much of his life story might be untrue.

Afterward? A liaison, then? The prude in him recoils from the image of that sallow monk possessing this warm young body standing so close at this moment to his own. Sensing something of his turmoil, she is flushing, too.

“I don’t mean to upset you, Catherine. I’m just teasing. As I told you this afternoon, I’m going to miss you very much, remember? Probably you thought I was just being silly.” He looks past those intent green eyes so as not to see it, should she happen to agree.

“Silly,” she repeats, tasting the word. His attempt to modify his avowal by making it sound somehow facetious has confused her, she is searching his expression for the joke. Evidently deciding he has been fooling all along, she musters a thin smile before proceeding indoors, and he has no choice but to smile with her; his fervent avowal of this afternoon has been reduced to banter.

With everything so unresolved, his lungs sag under the weight of tomorrow’s parting. He has been deluded even by himself, he sees that now. Among other things, he has never wished to recognize his unseemly attraction to the young female form hiding naked as a nut within the husk of her dull clothing. An unaccountable, in fact unthinkable, attraction, he would have said only two days ago, since quite apart from being sacrosanct, untouchable, she had looked so frumpy with that hacked-off hair, not his sort of woman at all.

A
pproaching the auditorium, Olin is pulled aside by Erna, who leads him back outside into the courtyard: the woman can’t stop hunting! Erna has sniffed out somebody’s uncle whose elderly brother-in-law, a longtime patient of Dr. Allgeier who later took work as a camp guard, recognized Madame Allgeier and her daughters on the selection platform in late 1942; he risked execution by the SS, he claims, for trying to slip them his lunch sandwich for old times’ sake. In fifty years, he has never forgotten how the young schoolteacher had urged him to go feed his damned sandwich to that other collaborator polluting her father’s house. “Looks like our little Jew girl hurt his feelings on her way to the cremo,” Erna grins. “She must have been a fighter, Baron. Not like you.”

F
OLLOWING
C
ATHERINE
through the door of the auditorium, he cannot see her face, which spares him the disillusioned look he fears. “As Adina keeps reminding me,” he whispers hoarsely from behind, “I’m old enough to be your father. ‘No fool like an old fool,’ right?” This angling for reassurance is contemptible: he could bite his tongue off. In his insecurity he has banished a spell, and their dance of spirits on the road this afternoon—if it had any reality at all—must be gone forever, just as he discovers how dear to him she has become.

C
ATHERINE TAKES THE SEAT
beside Adina Schreier. Unnerved, he does not join them. Rainer waves and so he moves in that direction. Unlike the Poles, the Germans are well-scattered, giving up comfort in numbers to avoid any appearance of defiant solidarity. Mercifully, most of the retreatants are well-meaning and are taking pains not to isolate these people, but the tension dispelled by the Dancing has been seeping back. In this toxic atmosphere, good intentions are eroding like the noses of stone gargoyles on cathedral peaks.

As he approaches, Rainer makes a place for him, but he does not stop moving, he must
act
, and in moments, he finds himself impelled onto the stage as if snatched there by a puppet master and set down on dangling limp legs behind the podium. Not at all sure what he needs to say, he gapes at the startled faces of Catherine and Adina in the second row.

He nods, coughs, clears his throat, and finally sets forth, taking refuge in the judicious manner of D. Clements Olin, Ph.D., embarked upon a formal lecture at his university. Surely we can all agree, he huffs, that Nazi Germany carried cold genocide further than any regime in this genocidal century, noisily supported, he puffs, by that rabble of Jew-haters who sprang forth like weeds not only here in Poland but in every one of the twelve countries represented in this audience this evening, his own included.

Though obvious, this indictment grabs attention, and in the quiet, in a quiet voice, he challenges any person present—French, Dutch, British, Belgian, Spanish, Swiss, American, no matter—to raise a hand who can honestly claim that his own nation’s history remains unstained in this regard.

Chairs budge loudly and heavy muttering pervades the room but no hand rises.

All nations, he continues, and all religions, cultures, and societies throughout history have perpetrated massacres, large and small: man has been a murderer forever. A dangerous animal tragically unbalanced by its own intelligence and predisposed to violence—

“Hear, hear!” calls Dr. Anders Stern, endorsing his own oft-reiterated point even while warning his esteemed colleague Dr. Olin that, however excellent his discourse, he’d better get on with it or risk losing his audience. Already somebody is calling, “Nobody came to this damned place to listen to a speech.” And another voice: “We’re here to bear witness, right? Tell your own story.”

“Why are you trying to hide the Germans behind generalizations about human behavior?” a third voice inquires. “How can you morally equate gangs of fascist killers with millions of innocent martyrs? Compared to European Jews, you Americans know
nothing
about anti-Semitism! You’re not even a Jew!”

In the doorway stands Erna, bare arms folded. Has she understood what that last voice had said? Will she contradict it? Will she expose him? Because other than Erna there are no witnesses, no records. The last few elders who might cobble up the truth will never have occasion to recall dead rumors and lost names of long ago.

He can return to the U.S. and resume his former identity as the historian and poet Clements Olin, isn’t that true?

Years before, half-listening to his car radio, he’d been assailed by a voice as aggravating as the pinpoint racket of the small hard-shelled insect that whirred its way one summer day into his inner ear; what had maddened him was the quasi-British accent he’d been trying to eradicate since those years after the war, when he’d been shipped abroad for schooling. What it was, in fact, was his own recorded voice, reciting his poetry. He hears that disembodied voice say now, as if speaking from afar, “You are mistaken, sir. I speak as a Polish Jew.”

In the hush, Adina’s face jumps forth from the second row like a pale balloon. Catherine, beside her, is nodding to herself, eyes closed, as if to say,
Oh Lord, I think I knew
.

Suppressing the truth a moment longer might have choked him: to feel clear again, all of a piece, he has to spit it out or give up breathing. But having done so while still not sure he has the courage of it, he must now fight down an impulse to retreat or at least explain why he has said nothing before now.

He informs the audience that he comes from an old Protestant family of this region which had fled to America just prior to the war, leaving his father’s pregnant fiancée behind. Born in Cracow, he’d been ransomed as an infant and baptized Clements soon after his arrival in the U.S. His mother vanished, and after that, his questions about her were stifled—out of deference to his father’s grief, he was always told. “I was strongly encouraged to forget her. But here in Poland, with kind local assistance”—he indicates the formidable Erna, who stands in the doorway, bare arms still folded, looking not kindly in the least—“some inquiries have been made.” Gasping, he must pause to find his breath. “And we have confirmed that her maternal ancestry was probably Jewish.”

“
Probably
Jewish?” somebody jeers: it’s Jaroslav, Becca’s sarcastic lover. “Are you suggesting she was ‘not quite Jewish’? Does that mean you’re not quite Jewish either?”

Ignoring Jaroslav, he says, “I believe today that from the beginning the Olinskis had little doubt about what became of her. And yes, perhaps, deep in my heart, I knew it, too.” He’d fled the confirmation of her fate far longer than he’d let himself believe: he’s had to face that fact, he says, since he arrived here. That his family lost track of Emmeline Allgeier, that’s one thing. People disappear in wartime. What he cannot forgive is that even
after
the Cold War, no one went looking for her. Was that because, if no trace of her ever turned up, there would be no evidence that his mother had perished in the camps, therefore no proof of Jewish blood in their precious lineage? Because that, he says, was almost certainly their main concern.

L
EAVING THE STAGE,
he avoids looking at Catherine. The Germans try to engage him with wan smiles but his Polish friends shift in their seats, look past his head, peer at their hands when he sits down nearby. At the intermission they rise and file outside for a smoke; having already decided (he assumes) that this damned American has been deceiving them, they will simply exclude him. Bumping past his knees, Zygmunt grumbles, scarcely looking at him, “So, then, Clements, you bear a little witness after all?”—sarcasm, not a real question, and well short of an invitation to rejoin them.

Sitting solitary in his row can only draw attention. He is already rising when shrewd Anders in the row behind says, “Come on, Jew-boy, let’s get it over with.” Taking Olin’s elbow as if he were infirm, the boisterous Swede with the loopy grin steers him outside and loiters nearby in case support is needed. In a moment, Earwig shows up, too.

The Poles finish their cigarettes before turning to acknowledge him. Only Rebecca smiles, taking his hand. “So, Baron, you are not too proud to be a poor Jew like me?” She might be the only one in this glum bunch, he thinks, with any play in her.

“I’ve only been one for a few minutes, Becca. I don’t know yet.”

The others listen, unamused. “Not that it matters in the least, dear Clements,” Nadia murmurs, resting her hand a moment on his forearm. “That ugly hate is finished in our country now. We are all friends, are we not, my Becca?” With a quick vixen show of teeth, she flashes a fake smile and Becca flashes one right back: both women laugh.

“The hating? It’s all finished, you say, Nadia?” As usual, dour Jaroslav has missed the joke. “Among our so-called intelligentsia, perhaps.”

Zygmunt is intent on Olin’s face. “No, excuse me, Clements, I do not believe it. You just don’t look like them, I’m sorry.”

“Them?”
says Becca, and Nadia protests, “Oh Zyg,
really
! Remember those blue-eyed ones we saw in Ukraine?”

Disliking all Poles on general principles, Earwig won’t waste this fine chance to offend them. “Any Pole who calls himself a man,” he growls, “would take this dirty Jew outside and shoot him.”

Anders hoots. “Shoot him? Hurrah! I say so, too! I have seen this Hebrew naked in our room!” Though he has seen no such thing, he points a damning finger at Olin’s crotch. “Circumcised, my friends. Utterly he is circumcised, this unfortunate Jewish! Better you shoot him!”

Amused at first, the Poles are quick to take offense at the implied insult from this wacky Swede. Nadia tucks away her smile. “Clements? Did I hear you call yourself a ‘Polish Jew’?” She is intent on this. “Because there’s really no such thing.”

“Maybe your people lived abroad too long? Forgot how all this worked back in the old country?”

“Forgot how
what
worked, Jaro? My father was Polish, my mother apparently part-Jewish. Why doesn’t that make me a Polish Jew?”

“Apparently
?
”
That sarcasm again. “Tell me, Baron, will the Polish part hang on to the patronymic?”

“As a Jew, I suppose you mean. I’ll let you know.”

“If your mama was Jewish, you are, too,” says Becca, taking his arm. “But our dear Nadia, this good, kindhearted Nadia, she is correct also. Even here in our brave new democracy, one is a Jew or one is Polish, never both, not really. New laws may say different but all Poles know this in their guts. You understand this, Clements? Jews in Germany liked to imagine they were Germans—‘German Jews.’ No Jew in Poland made that mistake.”

Becca’s tone has tightened. “So yes I am Jewish, and also I am Polish, but even among these good dear friends I do not call myself a ‘Polish Jew.’ What you have here, Baron, is Polish intelligentsia befriending their pet Jewess.”

Stung by her bitterness, her friends look exasperated and unhappy, but nobody dares contradict her. She is too volatile, he thinks, too smart. Too fucking dangerous.

When her companions return inside, Becca hangs back in the doorway. “Is it true, Clements? Your
schlachta
family never wished to know what had become of her?” Her tone is gentle but relentless. “But she is the real reason why you came here, yes? Or the reason you stayed away?”