Lumen (22 page)

Bora put the map away. A void seemed to open at the pit of his stomach, a sudden sharp ache. But he could not have made such an error: he couldn’t have misread the men’s intentions to that extent, it was impossible. He was prejudiced against the Security Service. He always thought the worst. What he should think was - what he should think was that the SD had met with the Polish army stragglers.

“Go back, quickly!”

They were at the middle point of the ford. Hannes put the car in reverse and caked mud spun from the tires before he was able to back up the incline and turn around. They roared past the trees in a storm of reddish pine needles, and devoured the flat space that separated them from the farm.

All Bora could make out from afar was a handful of soldiers leaving the barn.

The truck was empty. The staff car was empty. There was no one on the threshing floor.

Bora ran from the car, crossing the expanse of snow trampled over the muddy dirt. He halted on the doorstep of the barn.

The void in his stomach caved in.

“What have you
done
?”

The SD officer shouldered past Bora to get out of the barn, and stopped with him on the threshold.

All around the building, soldiers were bringing gasoline cans, and pouring a consistent trickle of fuel on its foundations. Stubble and hay were thrown on it by the handful. Bora smelled the gasoline and heard the soldiers move about, but paid no heed to them. His eyes were riveted on the dirt floor of the barn.

“For God’s sake, they’re not even dead!”

“Your job here was done when we came, Captain. Don’t you get involved in ours.”

Bora stepped forwards to enter, unlatching the holster.

The SD gripped his wrist. “I’m warning you,” and when Bora freed his hand with a twist of his arm, he pushed him hard against the door frame. “Don’t meddle.”

Bora pushed back. He took his gun out. The SD came chest to chest with him, shoving him, and Bora elbowed him back. Grimly they confronted each other by stance and hardness of muscles, vying for control of the doorway.

“I want your name, Captain.”

“And I want yours.”

Fire flared up next to them when it caught a tall bundle of straw and engulfed it in red, in a surge of suffocating smoke. The SD backed off, waving with contempt, and Bora walked into the barn.

Smoke was already starting to seep from under the disconnected planks all around the building. Bora’s boots pasted blood into the dirt floor as he drew close to the centre of the barn. The bodies were heaped there. First he saw the girl. Face up, she’d been shot through the forehead. Her left hand twitched frantically in the blood, where her mother’s arm pinned her down. The back of
her mother’s head had been blown off. Bora stumbled over a man’s bloody bulk to reach the girl. Straddling her body, he finished her off. Then he turned to the others, one by one firing point-blank into them. When he was out of shots, he changed clips and kept firing.

“
Herr Hauptmann, Herr Hauptmann!” Hannes called to him from the threshing floor. “The roof is giving way!”

Bora kept firing.

When he walked out, the SD vehicles had already left. Turning his head towards the well, he saw their wake braiding a storm of ice crystals on the dirt road that headed east. His eyes burned and ached with smoke, and he wouldn’t wipe them for fear of appearing moved, because he wasn’t.

Hannes stood by the car, his slight field-grey figure looking insignificant against the immense background of rolling pastures. His face was pale and averted.

Bora was not moved. Only conscious of an unbearable weight at the end of his arm. Morning sounds came from the fields. Very far, it seemed. The crispness of morning lovingly brought them to him, once he turned away from the crackling and smell of the flames.

Many times afterwards he would think of this day, and feel the drain of standing there with the bulk of the Walther weighing his hand, his arm down. There was a heaviness in the gun that wanted to drag him low, and sink him.

 

He found out after Hannes had driven halfway down the street, by the shop signs and shop fronts, that he’d instructed him to go the wrong way, past the Cracow Botanical Garden, nowhere near Headquarters.

At Headquarters, Colonel Schenck was not interested. He was not unamiable, but showed no interest in intervening. He said he understood.

“If you start feeling sorry so early on, Bora, you’re screwed. What should you care? We have our orders and the SD have theirs. It was only an accident that you didn’t happen to have similar orders. And these Polack farmers - they aren’t even
people
, they’re not even worth reproducing. I can see you’re perturbed, but believe me, don’t start caring.” Bora said something, and Schenck interrupted. “We’re
all
in it. If it’s guilt, we’re all guilty. This is the way it is.”

“I cannot accept this is the way it is, Colonel. We also have laws.”

“So early on, and you’re already talking about laws? You yourself have come tearing down through Polish villages like a cyclone in your first days here. What laws? Leave things very well alone. First you report to me about the hanged Ukrainians, and now it’s Polack farmers. Harden your heart, as the advice was given to us at the beginning of this campaign. It’ll do you good in life. You’re just a young captain with scruples, not a relevant or even useful position at all.” Schenck patted his shoulder. “Go to your office and get ready for the staff meeting.”

Bora felt as though he’d been dropped from a stunning height. For the next few minutes he fingered through papers on his desk, without even seeing them.

Schenck checked on him from the doorway. “By the by, Bora, I’m expecting a phone call from Germany. My wife is in labour. Should the telephone ring while I’m chairing the meeting, I want you to answer and pass it to me at once if it is from the hospital. And another thing-I got word from Salle-Weber that your American priest is in the slammer for obstructing search operations. You have my permission to get him out after you’re done here.”

 

Without questions, Father Malecki followed Bora out. They had hardly exchanged any words at all since Bora
had shown up in the cramped detention room with an SD guard in tow. They now sat side by side in Bora’s car under a dim evening sky.

“Should I take you home? I know where you live.”

“No, thank you.”

“I see. To the American consulate, then?”

“Absolutely not.”

Bora didn’t feel like playing guessing games. “Where do you want to go, Father Malecki?”

“Let’s go have a drink.”

The back room of the
Pod Latarnie
was a cosy tavern.

Malecki’s American clerical garb, with trousers instead of a cassock, didn’t make him immediately identifiable as a priest. Bora chose a private table to the side, but could tell by the way Malecki slipped the scarf off his neck that he didn’t mind showing his Roman collar.

“I’ll have a Ż
ubrówka
,” Malecki told the waiter.

“Yes,
Ojciec
.”

“What’ll you have, Captain Bora?”

“I’ll have the same.”

Malecki hadn’t been a priest for thirty years without having gained a good insight into men. He observed Bora distractedly play with the car keys, rigid in excess of his profession. It was the kind of rigidity that counters the need to slump.

“Do you know what you ordered?” he asked him.

“No.”

“It’s the best flavoured vodka, with forest herbs from Białowieża.”

Bora lifted his eyes to the priest. Whatever troubled him - Malecki doubted it had anything to do with his being arrested - he wouldn’t voluntarily speak of it. He decided by the sullen bent of Bora’s lips that it was best not asking him at this time.

The waiter brought the drinks.

“Here you go,
Ojciec
.”

Bora felt a little better after the drink. He pulled back on the padded leather seat. “I’m sorry you were detained, Father Malecki.”

“It wasn’t so bad after I convinced them that I wasn’t Polish.”

“I would have thought the American consulate would obtain your release.”

“They don’t even know I was arrested, I think.”

“Didn’t you tell the SS?”

“I told them I was a British subject.”

“You
didn’t
.”

“I did, and it wasn’t a very bad sin. It wouldn’t have been so easy after tonight, since the answer from the British Embassy in Warsaw was expected in the morning. But thanks to you I don’t have to worry about that.”

Bora shook his head. “You’re very unorthodox, for a man of God.”

“There are times when one must defy orthodoxy.”

Bora was struck by the words. He knew they were not aimed at him, yet they sank in with the ease of a blade.

“What times are those, Father Malecki?”

 

It was the first evening since Retz’s death that Ewa had returned to rehearsal. The play opened the following day.

Kasia caught up with her in the dark outside the theatre, and together they walked to catch the last streetcar until morning. At the corners the wind was so chilly, they had to wrap their coats about themselves and bury their faces in the collars.

“Don’t ask anything, Kasia.”

“Who’s asking anything? I’m just walking.”

As soon as she arrived home, Ewa Kowalska removed her stockings, careful to handle them with wet fingertips, so that cuticles would not cause runs or snags. After putting on a pair of worn slippers, she stepped to the telephone at her bedside and dialled a number she knew by heart. Smoking, she waited to lower the receiver until it was clear that Bora was not home.

Her head ached. She had smoked too much in the past few days and now her throat felt dry; she worried her voice might give way tomorrow. She kept vinegar-and-water on her bedtable, and having poured a tablespoon of vinegar in a half-glass of water, she gargled until tears ran down her face.

Some irritating radio tune, sung by a shrill female voice, came floating from the kitchen through her bedroom door.
Nur du, nur du, nur du-u-u
. Ewa went to turn the radio off. She turned the light off. Seated on the bed, she closed her eyes. She couldn’t sleep. She was tired and couldn’t sleep. It ached in and out, this anger and loneliness.

She needed to talk to a man, and found that she was angry at Bora for not being home.

 

At the
Pod Latarnie
, Malecki said, “How did you come to the conclusion that by ‘her name’ the abbess might have meant
Lumen
?”

Bora closely observed his small empty glass as if it were anything but a plain small glass. “I’m not at liberty to say. It’s not a conclusion, Father, only a viable possibility. If the abbess meant that she would die ‘through her name’, and the name is
Lumen
, by understanding what is meant by it I might discover who killed her. The Latin dictionary was helpful, but I can’t connect any of the meanings given with a cause of death. I remembered that in philosophy we refer to
lumen naturale
as the cognitive powers of the human mind, unaided by the grace of God.”

Malecki nodded. “The
lumen gratiae
.”

“Yes. On the other hand,
lumen
might represent a physical entity. The word also means ‘window’ and ‘opening’. Should we think she was shot through a window?” Bora glanced at the waiter and shook his head when asked whether he wanted another drink. Father Malecki did the same. “Now, admitting that the abbess was right in her prophecy and that I’m right in pursuing this lead, does it mean that
lumen
is the
cause
or the
agent
of her death?”

Malecki dabbed his nose with the handkerchief. “Do we even have a firm motive for her death?”

“So far, only the political overtone of her utterances.”

“She was more apocalyptic than political, Captain.”

“Maybe.”

“Well, do we have suspects?”

“Only faceless and nameless ones.” Bora moved the glass away. “I did consider the possibility of someone - even from my army - finding his way into the convent some time before the colonel and I got there. Someone who could have killed the abbess, and with the confusion of the times, could be far from here by now.”

Malecki appreciated Bora’s discomfort at the supposition. “But how would a stranger enter the convent without being seen?”

“I don’t know. Whoever placed the bag of guns on the roof managed to enter.” With his forefinger, slowly, Bora followed the edge of the table. Malecki thought this might be a good time to say that he knew where at least one of the workmen could be found. But Bora was already thinking of something else. “Father,” he asked, “what percentage of the abbess’s prophecies have come true?”

“It’s difficult to judge. Most of them haven’t yet come to pass. Of those referring to the events in the recent past, perhaps six out of ten.”

“Would you call it a remarkable percentage?”

“I would call it indicative. The theological view of prophecy is bound to the instances we encounter in the Old and New Testament. St John of the Cross said that God makes use of different means to transmit supernatural knowledge: at times words, at other images and symbols, or any combination of those. Mother Kazimierza was highly literate, so words and puns constellate her prophecies. I would expect
Lumen
to imply some sort of double entendre - if that’s the right expression. To return to her quota of successes, in some cases she was patently wrong. When I first arrived, she informed me that an older woman close to me would die within six months. Young or old, the only woman in my life happens to be my mother, and by the grace of God she’s alive and well to this day.”

“Unless the abbess meant a contingent closeness, and considered herself the woman in question. After all, the word
nun
originally meant ‘old lady’.”