Lumen (16 page)

 

She went to the kitchen. Bora had already had coffee, and there was enough left for her to fill a cup. Helenka looked around. The counter was tidy, the whole kitchen well equipped with china cabinets, double sink, large gas stove, an ice box typical of men who don’t do their own cooking: there was nothing in it except for some butter, milk and white wine. A forgotten box of kosher salt sat in the pantry. Cups had been left out for the cleaning woman to wash. Helenka finished her coffee and rinsed her cup.

She could hear small noises from Bora’s room when she stepped back into the hallway. A drawer being pulled out and pushed in, stepping around in boots. Next door, Retz’s heavy breathing rose and fell in regular waves.

The bathroom was spotless, especially considering two men lived there. Washing her face, she thought military training might be accountable for the orderliness. Towels were folded neatly, the soap sat dry in its dish. She was curious about who used the aftershave. From the pungent scent from the uncorked bottle, she recognized it as Retz’s.

She wondered why Bora was up so early on Sunday morning. Did he work on Sunday? Retz slept in. He wouldn’t drive her to the room she shared with a girlfriend until after breakfast.

She sighed, looking at herself in the mirror. After breakfast. She was finding out that food was an important part of going out with Germans. Being fed decently, having breakfast, real coffee. How mercenary, in the end.

She liked Retz, his gruffness and shameless want of her. It made her feel a little unclean but she liked him. She even cared for him, a little.

Bora was opening the window in his room. On tiptoe, Helenka stole to the library and turned on the light.

So, this panelled, book-lined space was where Malev had written some of his works. She admiringly walked around the shelves, read some of the titles. His plays in Polish and German formed an incomplete leaning row, since most of those in Yiddish had been removed.

On a round table by the armchair lay an open book with a photograph as a marker in it. Helenka looked at the photo. It was a blond young woman on horseback; the dedication read in German,
“To Martin, from his favourite horsewoman Benedikta
.” It was dated a year ago exactly. The young woman looked healthy, haughty, sure of herself.

“Good morning.”

Bora’s voice revealed no surprise at finding her in the library. Greatcoat on his arm, he was dressed in a simple field uniform and was obviously about to leave the house.

Helenka nodded her head. “Good morning.” She felt awkward for having his book in her lap. Bora didn’t seem irritated by the fact. He stared at the book, however, and Helenka put it away. “I didn’t mean to pry. I thought maybe Jacob Malev had left it out.”

Bora half-turned towards the bookshelf. He wasn’t angry at her. Rather, he felt a kind of impatient sorrow for her embarrassment. “I’m looking for a dictionary.” He chose to justify his presence here. In fact, he had meant to look up the word
Lumen
before leaving. Now he reached for the Latin book and decided to take it along on his drive east.

Huddled on the armchair where he’d sat to read until late last night, Helenka was embracing her retracted knees.

Bora sensed an odd affinity with her for being here and having shared that chair, and although he wasn’t attracted to her he grew close to arousal, just because she was a woman and it was early in the morning and they were alone in the room
. The rustle of her skirt
, Garcia Lorca had written,
was like knives slicing the air.

She said, “I hope Richard told you yesterday that I’d spend the night. I didn’t mean to inconvenience you.”

It was a strange apology, which made him angry at Retz for creating these situations. For all his haste, Bora didn’t want to leave the room before saying so. “It’s difficult for me not to think of the reason why you come.” It was a confusing, accusatory statement, and he sought to correct it, aghast at what he actually said next. “I miss my wife very much.”

“She’s beautiful,” Helenka said, glancing at the photograph. “I can see why you miss her.”

Bora looked away. He hadn’t meant to reveal himself. The thought that she had just made love turned him suddenly insecure and shy and desirous: not of her necessarily, but
of the act itself, because she’d been entered by a man, and he was looking at her and sensed the unspoken, troubling essence of that intimacy.

“I must go now.”

He was perspiring when he reached the street below, and it was a relief to plunge into the frigid snowy air of the morning. He had just enough time to drive by the convent before his appointment with Colonel Schenck.

At Bora’s coming into the sacristy, Father Malecki sneezed into his plaid handkerchief.

“
Gesundheit
.” Bora said. “The sisters told me I’d find you still here.” He was rummaging in his pocket, took out a flat box of mint drops, and presented them on his open palm. “My mother sends me Altoids wherever I go. It’s her way to keep me well, I think. You may have them.”

Malecki looked miserable. He put a mint drop in his mouth, but would not accept a ride back to his apartment in the German staff car.

“As you like,” Bora said amiably. “The streetcars are scheduled to start running again at nine. You won’t have to walk. How did you catch such a bad cold, anyway? Surely the weather isn’t any better than this in Chicago!”

“No, but there’s less chance for furnaces to stop running in Chicago. If you’re here for mass, you’re late.”

“Oh, I don’t go to church these days. I’ve only come to say that I’ll be busy and won’t be seeing you for a few days. You’ll kindly let me know of any developments at my return.”

No sooner had Bora left the sacristy than Malecki went to open the closet where vestments were kept.

“All right, come out.” Vexedly, he looked inside after the man obeyed. “Look what you’ve done with those damn muddy boots.” He took out the stained vestments, with a critical eye checking the hems for tears in the cloth.

Now that he saw him in the full light, Malecki was sure this was the same man he’d spoken with on the stairs of his house.

“Look, I told you before. I have no intention of dragging the sisters or the American government into whatever you’re doing. The convent is off-limits to arms and armed people, and you’ll have to avoid coming to see me at the house as well. Why are you here, anyway?”

Kneading his cap with both hands, the man was bleary-eyed, with the look of one whom constant tension has made into a mask of strain.

“If the convent’s off-limits to armed people, what’s the German after?
He
comes around!”

Suffering from his cold, Malecki didn’t like to be confronted. He briskly stepped past the man to get his scarf from the coat stand. “It has nothing to do with politics. Look, I have to go, and I’m not leaving you behind. Tell me your business, and let’s be done with it.”

Having heard what the business was, he had to lean against the door of the sacristy, unwittingly swallowing the powerful mint Bora had given him. It went down his sore throat with a chilly burn.

“A relic?” He coughed.

“Yes.”

Malecki snorted through his aching and congested nose. “No new relics are acknowledged unless by authorization of the local bishop. I can’t give you anything of hers, even if I had anything to give.”

“But she’s a saint.”

“Miracles have to be approved all the same. Besides, ‘nothing new, or that previously has not been usual in the Church’ may be resolved on without consulting the Holy See.”

“A saint’s a saint,
Ojciec
.”

The man’s insistence was testy, Malecki saw well that he wouldn’t get rid of him easily. He put on his coat and edged the man out of the sacristy. “You seem to know more than I do.”

“She’s worked miracles.”

Malecki stopped where he was, on the threshold of the room. He was familiar with the tales that had risen about Mother Kazimierza in the last six months, had investigated some and found them unsound when not ludicrous. The abbess herself had dismissed them angrily.

He said, “Miracles are something else that need proving.”

He didn’t expect the rude pressure of a gun barrel up his ribcage, and grew stiff with anger for it.

“You had better give us a relic of
Matka
Kazimierza,
Ojciec
.”

Malecki slapped the gun away. “I haven’t grown up in Chicago to be pushed around in a Cracow sacristy. You will give me one piece of information, and then go. When God wants to make a saint out of the abbess, he’ll let both of us know.”

But afterwards he did give the man a framed photograph of Mother Kazimierza that hung just outside his door.

 

When he left headquarters with Bora, Schenck had the face of a bridegroom. His happiness for going out in the field after weeks behind a desk was contagious, and Bora didn’t need much to be exhilarated those days.

They would ride to the Russian sector under the escort of an armed patrol; at the demarcation line they’d be met by a Red Army convoy and continue to Lvov for a round of talks with Soviet Intelligence.

“Given that the Wehrmacht had made it to Lemberg first.” Schenck sneered, bent on using the German name of Lvov. “It’s too bad we had to relinquish it.”

“Borders are reversible,” Bora said.

The staff car passed people going to church, grey bundled people who didn’t so much as look up. At the end of nearly every other street, churches rose against the sky like prows, or gigantic theatre props left over from forgotten performances. They had come to the cemetery by the rail junction before Schenck laughed in a delayed response to Bora’s words, “It’s true, they are.” And soon the staff car was speeding down the state route to Tarnów.

Once they left the city, no traffic - military or civilian - slowed their progress to the east.

Bora said, reading, “There are at least ten related but different meanings for the word.
Light, torch, source of light, light of the eye, daylight…
”

“Really?” Schenck threw an amused look at the cumbersome dictionary Bora held up. “I do think it was a good idea to get you into Intelligence business. You like to dig. You’re likely to dig up bones if you keep at it.”

They had passed the first line of hills east of Cracow, slung diagonally as fingers extending from the distant heights of the Carpathians. The weather forecast called for a clearing at midday, and already some widening wells of blue opened in the clouds.

Fastidiously, Schenck removed his gloves. “Bora, after your request I went over Salle-Weber’s head, and we stand a good chance of getting our hands on the
Lumen
file. Salle-Weber will know the pressure came from you, but tell him you had nothing to do with it, that it was my idea. Captains can pull punches with captains, but not so well with colonels.” Schenck let the ripple of a smile cross his lips. “To think I almost joined the SS, some years back. It was the wholesale quality of their eugenics program that left me unconvinced.”

Bora waited until Schenck finished talking before looking into the dictionary again. Examples were given of the use of the word, in the singular and plural form; none of them seemed to apply in the least. He was beginning to think that Father Malecki was right. Attaching too much importance to a sentence only kept him from seeking out
real
reasons. He said, unthinkingly, “Colonel, would we eliminate someone like Mother Kazimierza?”

Schenck didn’t move a muscle of his leathery face. “Yes.” He said then, “Of course we would. If we found it useful to our cause or to security, we most assuredly would.”

“Have we?”

Again, Schenck’s face was motionless. He waited some time before answering. “I’ve seen perfectly good dogs go digging in the wrong places, Captain Bora. You have to refine your sense of scent before you end up wasting a lot of energy, and come up with a fat rock in your teeth instead of a bone. The answer is no.”

Bora tried not to feel embarrassed. Cheerfully, Schenck looked out of the window, to the fields that ran past the car. Tarnów had been left behind. Frequency of hills intensified ahead and only after turning due south before Lvov would the land grow flat again. “I suggest you also sharpen your sense of diplomacy before you ask the SS the same question.”

 

The first thing Father Malecki noticed upon entering
Pana
Klara’s house was the lack of cold dampness that had enveloped him each time he’d started up the stairs in days past.

When he opened the door to his room, his impression was that he must be running a fever, because he felt warm. He freed himself of coat and scarf before noticing that the water in his wash basin had lost its veil of ice. Stretching one hand towards the radiator, he felt heat rising from it.

“
Pana
Klara!” he called out hoarsely. “What’s happened with the furnace?”

The landlady came up the stairs wiping her hands in a dish towel. “Things one wouldn’t believe, Father Malecki. An hour ago the coal truck came and the men knocked on my door to tell me there was a delivery for the tenement, and asked whether I was going to show them where to dump it, and sign a receipt for it. I told them I wasn’t about to sign anything because I hadn’t called them to begin with and I didn’t know what the bill was going to be. They told me there was no bill.”

Father Malecki sneezed into his cupped hands. “Well, what do you make of it?”

Pana
Klara took a card out of her apron’s pocket. “Instead of the bill, they handed me this. ‘For the priest,’ they said.”

The card was blank on one side. On the other one, in English, Malecki read, “
You should have accepted a ride
.”

 

As for Major Retz, he dropped Helenka at the corner of her street and watched her walk up the sidewalk towards home.