Lumen (11 page)

Only afterwards, during his afternoon visit to the convent, Bora learned from Father Malecki that she had borne the brunt of the holy abbess’s mood swings.

“But as we say in America, Captain, it was no big deal. I don’t want you to have the impression that Mother Kazimierza was actually unkind. Like all unique and gifted people, she had her ways.”

Bora maintained a remorseful face. “I’d say she did. In one of her prophecies, she covertly referred to Polish Marshal Śmigły-Rydz as a traitor.”

“You read that.” Father Malecki sighed deeply. He sighed as one who wants to expel all from himself: air from his lungs and a moral weight from his chest. He
still resented Bora, because Bora spoke unadornedly to him and chose not to use diplomacy, which Malecki would find more palatable. Bora was too direct. Youth had much to do with it, or lack of humility, even though it wasn’t really arrogance in Bora’s case. It was a conviction, zealous and intolerant, something more missionary than military, more spiritual than firmness of character alone.

“In the end,” Bora was saying now in his unaccented continental English, a well-educated, upper-class speech, “In the end, Father Malecki, I found out that the holy abbess was not so loved after all. She remained a princess aside from and beyond her position as head of the convent. Some of the sisters, you will forgive me, seem to have hated her outright.”

“Hate is a strong expression.”

“Death by gunfire is a strong expression.”

Malecki made a rash cutting gesture with his hand. “Here you go again, suggesting that one of the sisters… it’s preposterous!”

“I’m not suggesting anything. I don’t know how the abbess died. All I know is that envy and resentment ran deep among her subordinates. I’m a long way from making suggestions yet.”

When the priest reached into his pocket for his Polish cigarettes, Bora prevented him by extending to him a pack of Chesterfields. Malecki took one, and Bora lit it for him.

“I don’t think I’m telling you anything you didn’t know, Father, by saying there were Polish ‘patriots’ hiding in one of the houses nearby. The SD flushed them out thoroughly on the day after the abbess died. Just before I came here today, I climbed to the top floor of that house over there.” Bora pointed at a tall building across the
street. “You were in the cloister, Father Malecki, and very visible to the naked eye. Even with my ordinance pistol I could have easily shot you through the head or put a sizeable dent in your frame.”

Malecki didn’t appreciate the humour. “Good of you not to have done it.”

“I had no reason, God forbid. As I suspected, any shot fired from the neighbourhood would have penetrated the abbess’s body at a very different angle. In other matters, I have come to admit there was a remarkable lack of bias in her prophecies. She stated facts that would or might happen, without taking an open nationalistic stance. That attitude might have irritated the Poles as well as others.”

“‘Others’? You Germans, you mean.”

“We’d find less blatant ways to dispose of politically troublesome church people. But let’s say yes, for the sake of impartiality.” Bora smiled. “Without sharing it, I understand the neutrality of a true saint in matters of political ideology. There’s no objective good or bad in the Godhead, if the Godhead transcends the mere game of relative opposites.”

Malecki pricked up his ears. “That’s a dangerous speculation, Captain. Are you trying to equate the principle of evil with the principle of good?”

“I’m saying they’re necessary value judgements, but value judgements none the less, time-bound and contingent.”

“You confuse value judgements with values of obligation!”

“Why, Father Malecki, it’s the Jesuits who say that the end justifies the means, and that all that leads Godwards is good. That kind of theology isn’t my cup of tea, but it might have been the Holy Abbess’s.”

On Thursday, one month after the incident, Bora was riding with Hannes to the countryside west of Cracow with the nun’s murder in mind.

With an eye to the rainy countryside, he pulled out of his map case a plan of Our Lady of Seven Sorrows convent. It was over fifty years old, he’d wrangled with the archbishop’s secretary to get it, and the newer buildings in the neighbourhood didn’t appear on it.

Even though the interpreter did his best over the bumpy country lanes, it was impossible to read the map in the car without incurring the risk of tearing the flimsy paper. Bora put it away in despair.

“Hannes, how far is it?” he asked.

The jug-headed, dwarfish Silesian turned back just at the time necessary to drive into a hole that sent them both tumbling on the seats. “Another half-hour, Captain.”

His first thorough interrogation of a Polish superior officer lay half an hour away, Bora thought, and he couldn’t get Mother Kazimierza out of his head.

She was still on his mind on Sunday morning, when he and Retz were riding in the major’s requisitioned BMW back from breakfast at the officers’ club.

Retz had been jabbering for some time, and now said, “You have to come, Bora. You’ve never been there, have you? It’s educational, and before they seal it off you have to see it.”

He meant the Cracow ghetto, and whether or not Bora felt otherwise, Retz was already directing the driver towards it.

“I have to buy a gift for someone. There are good deals to be had these days, and the Supply Service has carte blanche in visiting the Jewish quarter. Besides, where else would we find shops open on Sunday? You can help me out with the language.”

It had snowed overnight, and uselessly the sun tried to shine after the men parked by the brick bulk of the Corpus Christi church. Rims of ice ringed the puddles in the street, and slushy remnants of snow heaped in the corners.

“Look up the Polish word for ‘shoemaker’, Bora.”

Through narrow alleys, leprous with peeling plaster and dampness, they had reached a small enclosed square, where used clothing for sale hung from the wrought-iron fence of the synagogue. Odds and ends were piled up on blankets along the synagogue’s wall, and the unevenness of the cobblestone sidewalk made some of the objects stand askew or totter at the touch.

Retz glanced at the glassware, brass and trinkets.

“‘
Shevtz
’? Is that how you pronounce
szewc
?”

Bora looked up from his small dictionary. “That’s how you pronounce it, Major.”

“Well, all I want is a nice pair of shoes, with buckles on them.”

Their coming had made an impression among the vendors up and down the irregular shape of the square. Right and left, haggard men moved away from the officers’ path as they walked towards Szeroka Street. Retz said, in the manner of a carefree tourist guide, “There’s a nice old pharmacy just down the block.”

Bora watched the people move away, seeking the walls with faces downturned. “Has the major been here before?”

“Some twenty-plus years ago, sure. The Yids weren’t nearly as skittish then.”

A few steps ahead, the next storefront was no more than a deep doorway with a glassed-in shelf occupying one half of it. The shop sign was written in Hebrew characters, but the goods on the shelf spoke for themselves. Retz pored over the choice of shoes for some time, during which Bora kept a resigned eye on the dilapidated state of the houses around.

“Those are nice, what do you think?” Retz pointed at a pair of yellow leather pumps.

“They’re not easy to match. That is, if the lady wishes to match them with her outfit.”

“Does it make a difference?”

“I suppose not.”

“Well, I like them.” Retz indicated the cost in
zlotys.
“How much is that in real money?”

“It’s two Polish
zlotys
per mark, Major.”

“Well, then it’s not a bad price, is it?”

Retz bought the yellow pumps. Outside the store, a small boy in clogs asked if he could carry the package for him, and Retz said he could. When they turned the corner at Józefa Street, Retz told Bora, “They’re going to start making army boots pretty soon, did you know that? They’ve already begun turning out decent ghetto-made Air Force insignia and shoulder straps.” When they passed a window that displayed boxed soap, cologne and cosmetic jars, Retz stopped to look. “I ought to buy something else. Maybe perfume or stockings - what do you say?”

“The major would know best.”

“Why? I
do not
know best, Bora. If I knew best I wouldn’t have taken you along for advice.”

They entered the store followed by the boy. Stiff behind the counter like a cut-out image of herself, the shopkeeper nodded a nervous salute. She had a morbid pallor, where the darkness of her eyes made them seem like holes drilled
in her face. She spoke a little German, so Retz did his own bargaining over a paunchy flask of essence, decorated at the neck with a sprig of cloth violets.

He uncorked it and held it to Bora’s face. “Smell. It goes well with a young woman, wouldn’t you say?”

It was the first clue Bora received that the recipient of the gifts was not Ewa Kowalska.

“Make it two,” Retz was now telling the shopkeeper. “One for my wife.” He grinned at Bora.

Clattering on the cobblestones with his wooden clogs, the boy behind them sounded like a small donkey. Bora continued to watch the people seek open doorways or stop against the house walls, eyes averted, faces averted. SD vehicles were stationed at every other street corner.

Retz caught Bora’s attention. “I don’t know how we’re going to fit all the Jews in Cracow into this place. It’s true you can cram them tighter than sardines, though.” He put his gloves on, bending his head towards his colleague a little. “I’ll tell you a secret, Bora, though you probably guessed it already. I’m in love.”

Bora pretended stolidity. “With Frau Kowalska?”

“Why, no! Not Ewa. Ewa’s all right. She’s really all right in certain respects. No, much younger. Afresh little piece. God, how wonderful women are at twenty!” Retz couldn’t detect any sign of agreement or disagreement in Bora, so he said, “Satisfy a curiosity of mine, Bora: what do
you
do after hours? That is, other than playing Schumann or studying Russian. How do you keep yourself, you know, well-balanced?”

“I drive around, Major.”

Retz failed to understand the irony in Bora’s words. “Well, you ought to do something else other than driving around Cracow. Doesn’t it get tedious dealing with nuns day in, day out?”

“I do as I am ordered.”

The boy with the packages stopped before they came back to the Corpus Christi church, which marked the west end of the ghetto. Retz’s BMW waited north of the church, and, seeing the officers come, the driver opened the back door for them. The major tossed a coin to the boy, who put the packages in Bora’s hands and ran off with all the speed his clogs allowed.

Bora handed the packages to the driver. The visit had depressed him, though he was careful not to give that impression to Retz. Retz took his place in the BMW and said, “You should take life less seriously.”

Sister Jadwiga dried her hands with the rough cloth of her apron. She was a large nun with straggly grey hairs on her chin, something like a sparse beard coming out of prominent moles.

“
Niet.
” She spoke Russian fluently, but still wouldn’t talk to Bora about the abbess. Bora suddenly came to the point of losing his temper, visibly enough for Father Malecki to interject a few words of advice, which the nun took in sullenly.

“She doesn’t want to talk because she has something to hide,” Bora burst out. “She’s either seen something or heard something and doesn’t want to spill it out. I can tell her in Russian or you can tell her in Polish, Father. I will hear what the matter is!”

Malecki showed that he understood. “
Siostra
Jadwiga.” He began a stern homily that lasted a full five minutes. Bora didn’t understand it and didn’t care. He paced back and forth until the curt defensive replies from the nun grew longer and more tremulous. Malecki was breaking
down her resistance with a steady flow of hard-sounding words, at the end of which Bora turned away from the gory crucifix and to the unexpected scene of Sister Jadwiga beginning to cry.

Eventually she led the men out of the waiting room. They went through a bare hallway, up a ramp of stairs and down an elbow-shaped corridor.

Bora remembered having been here before. He recognized the plaster statue of the Madonna with a tinsel crown of stars. Sister Jadwiga stopped in front of it to cross herself, and he was about to ungraciously urge her forwards when she lifted the statue by the elbows and without effort rested it on the floor.

“What is she doing?” Bora asked.

Malecki said he had no idea.

Sister Jadwiga dabbed her eyes and blew her nose in a napkin-sized handkerchief before removing the embroidered doily from the statue’s pedestal. Carefully she folded the doily over the window sill and lifted the hollow wooden pedestal straight up.

Bora and the priest stared at the floor. Malecki didn’t move, didn’t breathe. Bora said something in German. The tinsel stars on the Madonna’s halo tinkled when he crouched to lift by the barrel one of the hidden guns.

Minutes later, they formed a most unlikely centrepiece on the nuns’ refectory table. Bora had been careful not to touch the stocks with his bare hands. Under Malecki’s troubled scrutiny he laid the weapons in a row, five of them.

One after the other, he released the clip catches to check the magazines, and laid them - full as they were - alongside each gun. His movements appeared to Malecki intentionally slow or exacting. Whatever hung in balance here depended on how Bora would take the presence of weapons in the convent.

“Ask her where she found them.”

Malecki repeated the question to Sister Jadwiga, and already Bora was adding, “Tell her not to lie to me. The SS searched the convent, so I know the guns were not under the statue at that time. I want to know where and when she found them.”