Lumen (23 page)

Malecki shrugged. “You know, I spoke to Mother Kazimierza two or three times a week for six months. Still, I can’t say that I knew her. My impression was of a well-schooled, opinionated, conservative, controlled and controlling woman.”

“The last kind of person you’d identify as a mystic.”

“Precisely. The archbishop asked the Holy See to begin an investigation because of the unofficial cult beginning to accrue around her in her own lifetime. She very much resented my presence at first. It was only after a direct order from the archbishop that I was allowed to visit regularly. No doubt she was an intense believer. Her relationship to God was exclusive, jealous, deeply felt. You read some of her meditations.”

Bora offered a cigarette to the priest. “I did. I found them sometimes banal, sometimes unintelligible. Her
descriptions of the ‘penetration of God’s light into the cleft of the soul’ I found frankly erotic.” With deceptive nonchalance, Bora busied looking for his lighter. “Father Malecki,” he said then, “was she involved with the underground?”

Malecki took the blow like a boxer. He’d expected the question would come at some point, but not now. It was too soon, and he was unprepared. He put his cigarette near to the flame, nervously sensing Bora’s alertness to an untruth, how he would perhaps understand the reason for his lying but take measures nonetheless.

Across the table from him, Bora put away the lighter with a weary gesture. In truth, he was beginning to feel the weight of the day upon him. Like a load of stones being suddenly tied to his neck and shoulders, he physically ached with the strain of the day. Colonel Schenck had made things worse by saying, “You administered the coup de grace; technically it was you who killed them.”

Father Malecki said, “Whatever I answer, Captain Bora, you will either disbelieve or follow up on it.”

“Absolutely.”

“Then my answer is not really relevant.”

“But your silence is.”

“Only by default.”

Bora tightened his lips. He tried not to show it, but was vexed in excess of disappointment. “I though we had agreed to collaborate.”

“Not politically.”

“No? I could have left you in jail, Father Malecki.”

“You have me in jail right now, just by asking me questions I can’t answer.”

When Bora stood, obviously about to leave, Malecki made a mild gesture to detain him, no more than a raising of his open hand. “You’ll find the contractor who worked
in the convent at this address, Captain.” And his hand lowered again, to extract a folded piece of paper from his breast pocket.

 

The telephone rang shortly after Bora had returned from driving Malecki home.

He recognized Ewa’s voice even before she identified herself. His first reaction was to put down the receiver.

She said, preventing him, “I’m not going to take much of your time, Captain. I realize how late it is.”

There were no signs of concern in Schenck’s countenance the following morning, when he mentioned, “Man the phone for me, Bora: my wife is still in the delivery room. It seems to be a breech birth this time around.”

“I’m sorry to hear it,” Bora said for the sake of saying something.

“Why? That’s the function of woman, Captain. A man risks his life in war, a woman in childbirth. I have an interview with the Governor General, but you can call me at this number if any news comes through. Did you get the priest out? Good.” Schenck took the Iron Cross from his pocket and hung it by the ribbon around his neck. “I see you recovered in a hurry from your mercy tangent. It was most unbecoming.”

At midday, when Bora finally phoned Schenck with the news of his latest paternity, Father Malecki was speaking to the nuns gathered in the refectory. He told them there was suspicion among the Germans that the abbess might have had contacts with the underground, and watched their reactions. Most of them seemed surprised by the possibility. Sister Irenka and Sister Barbara denied the
allegation because “it couldn’t be”. Sister Jadwiga brooded and kept silent.

Eyes planted on her, Malecki addressed the group. “If any one of you has knowledge of such contacts or any other political issues, I’ll be listening to confessions this afternoon. The safety of this entire community might depend on the information.”

 

Schenck’s satisfaction at having fathered a fourth son resulted in an afternoon off for Bora, the first since the invasion.

Now Ewa looked at Bora sitting across from her, with a blade of cold sunshine falling on him through the café’s window. Under the light, his jaw was smooth and as if scraped clean: it had the texture of a boy’s skin. Stern, unblemished. It was an impression of great tidiness, attractive yet intimidating to her. She recognized in him the pitiless prejudice of youth.

“I’m glad you asked that we meet,” she said.

“Why?”

She had a narrow smile. Twirling the spoon in her cup, she said, “Don’t look at me that way, Captain. Mondays aren’t my best time of the week, and I’ve been through a lot lately. ‘Why,’ you ask? I’m glad you think I might have something more to say about Richard. Something to explain things.”

“What is there to explain?”

“The fact that he killed himself. I heard it, like everyone else, from the cleaning woman.”

Salle-Weber was right, Bora thought. The news had travelled. He sat back on the metal chair, stretching the lean uniformed length of his body. “Well, Frau Kowalska, what can you tell me that you didn’t tell the SS?”

“It depends on your reasons for asking.”

“They’re eminently private. I didn’t like Major Retz, frankly, but a brother officer is a brother officer. I was his room-mate, I want to understand.”

With the crook of her finger in the handle, Ewa turned the cup on the saucer so that the handle was at her right. “I went to see him Saturday evening. He’d told me you wouldn’t be there, so I went. I had to talk to him.” She sipped from the cup, leaving the mark of her lipstick on the rim. “You might or might not know that Richard and I had been acquainted a long time. Since the last war, in fact.”

Bora said he knew.

“We’d have got married then, had there been more time. Maybe. It’s not important any more. What’s important is that I found myself pregnant and with an acting career just beginning to show promise. Luckily there was someone else in the company who’d always ‘cared’, and I fell back on his offer. It’s a fairly trite story so far, and it would have remained a trite wartime romance for ever if Richard hadn’t been what he was. Unable to keep to one woman.”

“Did you know that he had a wife in Germany this time around?”

“Oh, yes. That wouldn’t have changed things. And then, how can I put it-Istill felt I had some precedence over any other woman.” When she looked over the cup, Ewa saw that Bora’s face was averted and slightly hostile. “There is a young actress in my company, Helenka is her name.”

“Helenka Sokora?”

Ewa’s mouth hardened at the edges, though she was quick to relax again. “I see you know her.”

“I know
of
her. She’s your daughter.”

Ewa put more milk in her tea, and for the next minute seemed absorbed in stirring it. Only when the rustle came
of Bora crossing his legs, with the faint tinkle of his spurs, did she speak again. “It wasn’t that I resented Richard seeing other women. That’s the way he was. But Helenka - I couldn’t let him carry on with her.”

The instability of her hand was at once obvious to Bora, by the way the cup knocked against the saucer when she tried to lift it. Though his body stayed relaxed, he became very intent.

“Helenka was his, Captain.” Again she tried to lift the cup, and failed. “Richard didn’t know. My ex-husband suspected it, but didn’t actually know. Helenka has no idea of it and must never find out. It’s true that she and I don’t see eye to eye. We don’t like each other, we’re very similar yet very different. We live apart, we avoid each other everywhere except on stage. We dance very complicated dances to stay away from each other. When I heard through the theatre grapevine that she was going out with him, I was frantic, because Richard wasn’t a man to stop at polite niceties. I had no way of knowing if the irreparable had happened, but I hoped not.”

Bora’s face stayed still. He knew she wanted to know if Retz and Helenka had made love, and decided not to volunteer the information.

“So, you went to tell him?”

“What else could I do?” She rummaged in her purse and took out some papers that she handed to Bora. “I showed him her birth certificate, to prove to him that at the time he left I was already pregnant. I was frantic. I told him he couldn’t - that he couldn’t do this or plan to do this with his own daughter.”

Bora swallowed. “And how did he respond?”

“How did he respond?” Ewa shook her head. “He fell apart, Captain. He didn’t grow angry, or excited, nothing. He collapsed within himself, that’s all. I even felt sorry for
him. I asked him before leaving if he’d be all right. He told me to leave him alone.”

Bora was not brazenly taking notes, but Ewa had the strongest feeling that he was carefully storing the information inside. The sullen boyish face remained downcast, though he looked her way.

“This is the fabric lurid myths are made of, Captain. How would
you
feel, if you were told that your lover is also your mother?”

“I wouldn’t have a lover so much older than myself.”

The words came out of him before he could stop them, and Bora was embarrassed by the empty arrogance of them.

Ewa looked away, and then at him again. “But I wager you’ve slept with women quite a bit older than yourself,” she said mildly.

“It’s true, I have.”

“Richard was your age when I met him.
I
was your age. It’s a wonderful time of life if one is wise. If one gives oneself wisely.”

Bora sat up, at once undoing the relaxation of his body.

“So, were you surprised to hear that he had taken his own life?”

“No. I was sad. I was sad and distressed, but not surprised.”

 

Even through the metal grid of the confessional, Father Malecki could tell that the nun on the other side of it was Sister Jadwiga.

She whispered some excuse about her worry after the bag of guns had been turned over to the Germans.

“I should have spoken up earlier, Father, but who was to know how the Germans would take it? On the morning
Matka
Kazimierza died, the colonel was here alone.”

Not since his cold had Malecki felt such a clammy sweat bead up on his forehead. Bora’s suspicions came back to him and he fought not to pressure the nun with the questions screaming inside him. “Yes?…” was all he said.

“I happened to be watching the door that day, because I knew the workers would be coming any minute to fix the roof. Instead, at ten or so, here comes the German colonel. He wanted to come in and see the abbess. I told him she’d be meditating until the afternoon, that no one was allowed to interrupt her meditations. He said he’d got a call from his family and that it was most urgent. He almost had tears in his eyes, you know. Still, I couldn’t help him. Then all of a sudden he asked me if I would at least go and fetch him one of the abbess’s books we have for sale.”

Malecki held his breath. “Yes, Sister. Yes. What else?”

“I didn’t see anything wrong in his request, so I left him in the doorway and went in the next room where I keep the extra copies and the cash box. When I came back, he took ten marks out of his wallet - that’s twenty times the price of the book, you know - paid and left.”

The irrelevance of the narrative came close to infuriating Father Malecki.

“Is that all?”

Sister Jadwiga lowered her voice to a hiss which the priest could barely make out, straining his ear against the grid. “No. The key to the door that separates the convent from the church hangs from a nail in the vestibule. When the workers showed up an hour later and I went to get the key to the inner chapel, I realized that the other key was gone. It was there before the colonel came, Father, and no one entered the vestibule between his visit and the workers’. What I think is—”

“Speak up a little, Sister.”

“What I think is, that he took the key, went into the church from the street, climbed up to the organ balcony and let himself into the convent from there.”

“Where’s the key now?”

“Back in its place. On the evening of the abbess’s death, one of the sisters found it in the hallway. You see, Father, I didn’t say anything because I thought maybe our mother superior was working with the Germans, which was a terrible thing for me to think. Now she’s dead and the colonel’s gone, and I don’t know what good it’ll do to anyone to let this be known.”

Malecki slouched back on the uncomfortable seat of the confessional, trying to check his anxiety. He was grateful to see, by the blurring of the silhouette past the grid, that Sister Jadwiga was leaving. He closed the little window then, and in the semi-darkness fumbled in the pocket of his cassock for Bora’s phone number at work.

 

Helenka did not expect to find Bora waiting in the square outside the theatre. She acted as though she knew she could not ignore him, but she gave him a quick nod and then began walking down the sidewalk.

From a few steps away, Bora said, “It’s better if you enter my car and we drive somewhere than if I walk with you on the public street.”

She stopped, without turning, shoulders squared in her flimsy coat. “I don’t feel like speaking to anyone right now, Captain Bora.”

“I think you should. I met with your mother this afternoon.”

Helenka was wearing the yellow pumps Retz had bought for her. When she turned, the soles of her new heels squeaked on the icy sidewalk. Her face was exceedingly
pale, so that the rouge on her lips stood out like a gash on a chalky mask.