In Paradise: A Novel (18 page)

True, he would never have chosen to be
Jewish, to declare publicly, I am a Jew. He doesn’t feel it. Must he feel it? Only a masochist would reassign himself to an alienated group that even in the U.S. may sometimes be subjected to subtle or covert exclusion.
Is it
really so shameful to avoid being excluded? To avoid being . . .
well, stigmatized? Isn’t that the word you’re dodging? (Can you
tell us, sir, just why you feel that being Jewish
is a stigma?)

You don’t have to be David, remember? If you can’t handle it, it’s not too late to turn your back on the whole business. Just go home and shut up.

In the mirror, the shadow of a smile, a very small one. And he says aloud, “You’re just a poor old Jew now, Baron. And you do have to be David, like it or not.”

The only whole heart is the broken heart, but it must be wholly broken
, wasn’t that what the rabbi told them? That more breakage may be awaiting him he does not doubt. It’s right there in those eyes in the mirror. He can see it.

I
N THE BAD LIGHT
in his room, Olin can scarcely write his notes and anyway, still madly restless, he is sick to death of words.

A shout on the stair, a senseless banging, then a gleeful Rainer in the doorway. Those two florid ladies from München who adore the handsome and distinguished Herr Doktor Professor Olin? And had been so shocked when the Herr Doktor Professor wore that horrible pink triangle at Birkenau? Well, imagine their dismay upon hearing his confession earlier this evening! “First ting, filty perfert iss!” protests Anders in his idea of comic German, clapping his hands over his ears, “
Und
denn
,
next ting,
ein
Juden
!”

Rainer laughs loudly, Anders, too. When Olin barely smiles, Rainer retreats down the stair. But this damned Swede won’t let it go, he will beat this joke into submission or know the reason why.

As Olin turns off the weak light, Anders parodies the traditional drinking song in which the singer bids adieu to his companions. “A Jew, a Jew, kind friends, a Jew (Ja, ja, a Jew!). I can’t no longer shtay mit you (Shtay mit you!).
Ja, ja,
dey hank mein hardt from a veeping villow tree, und der vorld don’t hurt no more from me . . .” Here the Nordic Jew runs out of lyric and invention and his song dies when in the dark his roommate does not stir or make a sound.

I
N DREAM,
O
lin wanders the haunted corridors of the night barracks. In his hand like a token of admission is his photo. Is her face the one he seeks among those pale bald creatures looming off the walls? The shorn heads can’t console him, and the missing one is nowhere to be found.
Mama?
he calls.
Mama? No butterflies live here, Mama!
And from the black tarn of his dream, a child’s voice whispers, very near,
Oh Mama, you never even knew how much I missed you.

I
n the early morning of the day of departure—the bus will leave for Cracow at midday—he sets out alone toward Birkenau under a shifting sky withholding snow. Soon it is snowing, and the cold whiteness encloses him in the snow silence. Early in life, if only in the womb, he might even have traveled this mud-rutted road where on this morning a half century later his boots strike his native earth. This road with its shoulder of hard-pruned trees is the road he feels fated to travel to some final destination.
Heimgang
—the peculiar word hangs in his consciousness—is that a German word? These Germans have denied it, looking puzzled, yet in his poor brain it has an intimation that no other word seems to convey. Homegoing? The way home? It has fate in it, and that elusive homesickness.

Figures scattered down the road behind neither catch up nor drift back to await company, having no more wish than he does, it appears, to call out to others and thereby dispel this unnamable odd longing that has drawn them to walk this road alone on this last morning.

From down the platform, he glances back as the figures emerge singly from the tunnel and his heart jumps because Catherine is there, her blue beret passing through the fence into the women’s compound. Has she seen him? Next time he turns, she’s gone.

At Crematorium #2, heart-shaped prints of a small deer traverse new snow on the tilted slabs of collapsed concrete from beneath which—how many days ago?—those icy emanations had seeped forth to chill his soul. Precariously, dislodging rotting bricks, he climbs down into a corner of the cellar. In a crevice of the poisoned chamber small winter-bitten mosses and pale fungi and sparse lichens have established life.

Here he chips out a niche and painstakingly inters his Polish amber, entreating Emi to forgive him this small offering already refused by others after taking all these years to come find her.

A
T THE GATE
,
he gazes all about about him one last time. The day is not far off, he supposes, when commercial interests will protest that these old pasturelands, having outlived their usefulness as an exhibit of the state museum, are a shocking waste of real estate and taxes. The last barracks, the last guard post, all that barbed wire and broken brick, will be stripped off and scavenged. The spring woods and high picket fences will soften if not quite conceal the naked slabs of those indecent ruins and in time the weather will transform the ash pits into lily ponds, and broad fresh meadows will be suitable once more for butterflies, wildflowers, children’s voices, Sunday strolling, picnics, trysts, walked dogs, escaped balloons, and all manner of municipal occasions. Even its picturesque old name, Brzezinka, can only enhance the marketing potential of the grand development to follow. Birchwood Estates? The Birches? Birch Tree Meadows?

T
HEY ARE EMBARRASSED
by a last encounter in the courtyard. Almost shyly, he invites her to join him on a visit to the Leonardo portrait in Cracow: if the museum is closed by the time they arrive this afternoon, they can go there first thing in the morning. “If novices still wore wimples, you would look a bit like her,” he suggests, producing his postcard of Cecilia.

She inspects the card politely, starts to frown when he watches too intently. Returning it, she whispers, “Please, do not look at me that way.”

For a few seconds, taking back the postcard, he holds on to those slim fingers. Should he ever return to Poland, he is saying, he would be so happy to come see her—

She is trying hard to smile and free her fingers.
“Don’t!”
she commands him. He lets go. She has escaped whatever hold he had on her and does not wish to slip back, lose her footing—that’s how he reads this. And in his hunger to hold her, hug her to his breast to ease all this constriction in his heart, he actually emits a little yelp of pain. So ridiculous is this that he tries to smile but can’t manage that either. “I meant it, Catherine,” he says quietly. “I would have liked that very much.”

“I, too!” she cries, wide-eyed, thrusting the words at him, much as she’d thrust her diary that first day, and he senses something coming he won’t care to hear. It’s no business of his, he tells her hastily, there’s no need to entrust him with a confidence.

With a groan, she raises her palms to her cheekbones, peers at him between her fingers: it is all too much for her. “Everyone trusts Dr. Olin except Dr. Olin,” she whispers. And then she flees, as if remembering some urgent task that must be seen to before the bus departs. Clumsy in those heavy shoes, she is half-running toward the convent. And incredibly, at such a moment, he catches himself imagining the shifting of pale hips under those clothes, the meaty jiggle, as if that hint of a liaison made by Stefan, fanciful or not, somehow compromised her chastity and justified male lechery, making her fair game for ribaldry and speculation.

Ashamed, he does not call after her, simply watches her flee as if running for her life. Not once does she look back. And he vows that from this moment on, he will stay the hell out of her way, even as he gets it through his head that this creature who has taken him by surprise is no wraith awaiting him under snow-shrouded streetlamps of some cinematic winter city of Old Europe but a live young woman who under kinder circumstances might have accompanied him on the remainder of the journey. At this fateful instant of his life, right before his eyes, this girl whose warmth and lovely form he will never embrace and cherish is vanishing forever as he stands there watching, and he is astonished by the violence of his loss.

F
OR TRAVEL TO CRACOW,
she is assigned to the first bus, he to the second. Before disappearing through its narrow door, she pauses on the step, gazing about the courtyard, gazing everywhere. Can she be looking for him? Surely she must have discovered by now where he is standing, in the shadow of the portico at the main entrance. Yet she doesn’t wave and he won’t pressure her by waving or drawing near. Not until the klaxon warns of imminent departure does he give in and lift his hand, good-bye, good-bye. She only turns and disappears inside. No, she cannot have seen him after all; any other explanation is too painful.

Catherine’s bus is gone by the time Big Erna shows up in the courtyard. Not that she has come to see anyone off, she boasts, no, no, she just happened by. But to Olin, as he skirts past her on his way to the second bus, she mutters, “It’s all taken care of, Baron. He’s finished.”

“Who’s finished? Priest Mikal, you mean?”

“Priest!”
She spits that word out viciously and walks away.
Ah Christ
, he thinks.
Shit, shit, shit, shit. There’s just no bloody end to it.
“What if he’s innocent?” he yells from the doorway as the air brakes wheeze and the bus eases forward. But the big woman does not turn and anyway it’s much too late, it’s always much too late.
No bloody end to it.

A
LONG THAT STRETCH
of road east of Oswiecim, the base of his spine, anticipating, flinches, but Olin refrains from calling attention to the washboard staccato of bus tires where the road traverses the dead railway that vanishes into the forest. In his cramped seat toward the rear, eyes closed, exhausted, he thinks about Catherine and also Priest Mikal, whose only real offense may be that he is unprepossessing.

Soon Earwig comes and takes the seat behind him.

“I’m a fucking Romanian,” he says. “It’s official.”

It seems that kind Rainer had heard from Berlin, where wartime archives had been ransacked. About all they had to go on was the very little he could tell them, “but Germans being Germans—” He stops there, frowning. “Don’t get me wrong. They went to a lot of trouble. And they found the
Struma
.”

The ship
Struma
, an old Danube River scow, had been leased by fleeing Jews for a voyage from Constanta, Romania, over the Black Sea to refuge in Palestine. There the ship was notified that the British quota for Jews entering Palestine was already exceeded; she returned northward as far as Constantinople. Except for a few rich individuals fortunate enough to be “detained” with the captain and first mate at Constantinople, the seven hundred desperate passengers were nowhere permitted ashore. Eventually, engine disabled, stores of food and water exhausted, the derelict ship drifted back and forth on the Bosphorus tides as the Jews swarmed the rails, crying out to passing ships; next, she was dragged north by the Turks into the Black Sea as a hazard to navigation and abandoned some hundred miles off the coast. Here with all passengers she was blown up and sunk by a Russian submarine whose captain was later commended for valor and awarded the suitable medal. (The location of that enemy submarine, not the fate of those aboard, said Rainer, was what had drawn wartime attention in Berlin.) Besides the ten crewmen wearing the ship’s life jackets, the lone survivor was a David Stonior, age nineteen, who was picked up by fishermen from the floating wreckage and finally ended up in New York City.

“So you’ll go back to New York and try to find him, right?”

“Do I have a choice? Seven hundred screaming Jews. Think he’ll remember any names?”

“I don’t know,” says Olin.

They sit silent for a time. Finally Olin says, “That’s a terrible story. Terrible.”

“Maybe those Jews had it coming for turning away those good Roma people at Constanta.”

“Hey, it’s over, man, it’s
over
. How do you feel?” And Earwig says, “I don’t.
Feel
anything, I mean.” He considers Olin. “Which is a lie. How would
you
feel if you’d pissed away your whole damned life for nothing? Who gives a shit—who
ever
gave a shit—about some old Romanian Jew and his useless search? Why did I care so much?” Then he says quietly, “Maybe I just needed to know my name.”