Lumen (27 page)

Bora was the last person he expected here. Malecki stared at the visitor’s distraught paleness over the top of the newspaper, very casually, he thought, given his surprise. Bora spoke a few formal words of apology for coming without notice.

“Well, won’t you sit down?”

Bora removed his cap, which he rigidly held under his arm. “No, thank you. I have come to tell you that I cannot help Sister Barbara.”

“I see.” Malecki doubted this was the only reason for Bora’s ashen-faced presence. “I’m grieved to hear it. I was hoping you might assist us.”

“Yes.” Bora suddenly found he had to steady his breathing. Having kept control all day, his muscles began to tremble with the first inopportune release of tension, an unexpected and painful process. Stiffening his spine didn’t help the pain but stopped the chills at once. The priest’s avoidance of direct eye contact allowed him to think himself less obvious. “I have also come to say I received orders to conclude the investigation.”

It was closer to the truth than the first statement, but this wasn’t the reason for the visit or the distress. Malecki felt it.

“It’s a shame, Captain. Do we have any time left?”

“Two weeks.”

“God might lend us a hand between now and then.”

“Maybe. You know God better than I.”

Malecki folded and put away the newspaper. “I wish you’d sit down a moment. Must you rush off?”

Bora had hoped for the invitation. Impulsively, he sat facing the priest, tight-lipped, holding the cap on his knees.

What he needed to say, he could not say. He could not. It was forbidden. With all the prudence and repression of his upbringing, he swallowed back a gut-wrenching need to cry out to Malecki what he’d witnessed that morning. Words clashed and rammed inside him until by habit of self-control, wearily, he was able to keep them down. He skilfully opened a lesser wound in order to bleed his anguish.

“Father Malecki, my room-mate died last week. It troubles me. May I speak of it?”

 

At the other end of town, Ewa Kowalska found that she couldn’t avoid waiting for the same streetcar as her daughter. A few steps away, Helenka kept her face averted, and the cold wind made her eyes water.

“Helenka, look at me.”

The young woman only lifted her collar.

“Will you look at me, Helenka? I have to talk to you.”

Helenka wouldn’t turn. She held on to her purse, face in the bitter evening wind. Ewa reached for her arm.

“I told you I have to talk to you.”

Unexpectedly, Helenka wheeled around and shook herself free of the hold. There wasn’t enough light left for them to see clearly, and as from behind masks each looked at the other’s blurred countenance. Helenka felt a venomous desire to hurt the woman facing her.

“Mother, you’re old. You’re forty-six years old. What can you possibly say that even applies to my life? If it’s about Richard, keep from preaching to me, because you did what you wanted at my age. You’re just jealous because Richard fell in love with me. Don’t even try to talk about him.”

Ewa kept her temper by some miraculous effort. “I had no intention to talk about Richard. It’s your brother. He’s back in Cracow, and I met him this morning.”

“So?”

“He wants to know if he can come stay with you for a while.”

“Tell him no. I’m sharing the room with someone else. Why can’t he stay at your place? You have two bedrooms.”

Ewa could weep in frustration. “You know how difficult it is to come and go at my place. For the last two days a German patrol has been stationed at the end of the street. I can’t have him there.”

“Why not? It’s not like it’s the first time you had men over.”

The temptation to strike back choked her, but Ewa managed again. She said, swallowing her pride, “He says he killed somebody.”

The clanking arrival of the tramway under a small shower of sparks kept them from continuing the conversation. Helenka climbed on first. When Ewa followed, she saw that her daughter had chosen the seat closest to the conductor, making it impossible for her to speak in private.

 

On Karmelicka,
Pana
Klara tiptoed to the hallway at the head of the stairs to listen unseen, just in case Father Malecki was being abused by his German visitor. Through the partly open door, she didn’t hear the priest talk. The other voice spoke steadily to him, not in anger, posing earnest questions as it seemed.

Now Malecki was certain that Bora kept from him a much larger issue. Bora’s steadiness of voice and composure were not artificial, but layered too accurately not to betray the effort of the process. “So,” Malecki said, “your colleague’s death troubles you. From all you’ve told me, I don’t gather that you mourn his passing, even though the mode of it should.”

Bora stretched his legs in a first sign of relaxation. “The mode of it does, Father. There are some things, some small
things - details. They keep me awake at night, when I didn’t even care for him. A towel is missing from the house, the blade was left in his razor when he had a fetish against doing so. As you heard tonight, my colleague had as good a reason to be despondent as I can envision, still it troubles me. It’s a clear case of suicide, there were no marks of violence on the body, no indication of forced entry into the house. All the women who were involved with him have impeccable alibis. It troubles me, that’s all.”

Malecki clasped his hands slackly. “Perhaps you resent a lifestyle your education kept you from sharing.”

“It’s true, I did. I’m ashamed to say there were nights when I envied him.”

“What troubles you then may be your own resentment, not your colleague’s death. Moral men cannot escape desiring what they deny themselves. I for one am ready to make all kinds of allowances for their disgruntlement.”

Bora let go a little more, enough to toss his cap on Malecki’s bed. Talking about other things helped somewhat. It numbed the anguish without removing it, which meant it would return later, when he would be alone.

“Even when they’re unable to separate the practice of virtue from arrogance? Father, people without moral scruples seem always nicely shorn of pride, while
being good
costs me so much effort, I’m not even pleasant about it.” Sorrow wanted out of him and Bora still tried to give some other shape to it, so that the priest wouldn’t suspect. “What’s the point, Father Malecki? God doesn’t give a damn about any of us.”

There was no motive for Malecki to feel so sure of himself, but he came around Bora to shut the door of the room behind him.

“Really?”

“Really.”

“If you’re in the mood to blame God, blame Him in my face. I may not know Him better, but I’ve known Him longer than you have.”

At seven in the morning, Doctor Nowotny used his foot to close the door, since his hands were busy with cigarette and lighter.

“It’s the second time you’ve trundled into this office so early, Captain. What’s Schenck put into your head now?” When Bora handed him a sealed envelope, he stared at it. “And what’s this?”

“It’s the report of the autopsy performed on Major Retz, Colonel. I wonder if you’d read it for me.”

“Retz, Retz - the fellow that cooked his head in the stove? Well, what does it have to do with you? Oh, I see. I didn’t realize you quartered together.” Nowotny ripped the side of the envelope. “There was no need for my colleague to seal this, it isn’t a state secret. What do you want to know?”

“Anything you might find unusual.”

Nowotny scanned the report. “It looks pretty straightforward, but give me some time to read it. I’ll call you when I have something to say. Is anything wrong?”

“I’m just curious to hear a professional opinion, Colonel.”

“That’s not what I mean. I mean
you
: what’s happened to you?”

Bora evaded Nowotny’s scrutiny with a blank army stare. “Nothing has happened to me.”

After he left the hospital, the sleepless night threatened to catch up with him, and he spent the first minutes at work with his head under the bathroom faucet. What the cold water didn’t do, plenty of black coffee did, so that he
looked his usual prim self when Schenck called him in to report.

The events at Święty Bór did not appear in his notes, and although he felt guilty about it he made no mention of them to the colonel. Blaskowitz’s words prevented him. “Now that your career is in this envelope, give me something I can use,” the general had told him on dismissing him. “Bring me proof.”

While Schenck read through the notes, Bora thought of how he could “bring proof” directly to the general’s headquarters at Spala. With his schedule, it seemed only dimly possible.

Schenck lifted his live and dead eye from the notes.

“Much improved, Bora. You’re developing selective vision.”

Bora thanked him. Selective vision? He felt as if the last twenty-four hours had scooped out of him a careless enthusiastic life principle. The zeal that replaced it was severe and exacting and made him new to himself. All actions seemed untried as he took them.

“Colonel,” he said. “I wonder if I might be given two days to concentrate on some research.” He didn’t say which, in order not to lie brazenly. “The report on the abbess’s death is due sooner than I can possibly put it together by working after hours.”

Schenck gave back the notes. “I expect so. We owe it to old Hofer, don’t we? Two days is more than I want to spare you, but I’ll give you thirty-six hours starting in the morning.”

 

“I don’t think you believe I was in love with him.”

Helenka wore her hair pinned tightly at the nape of the neck, and her face seemed bare now that she had no make-up on it. The dressing room was very narrow and
poorly lit except for the over-illuminated mirror, in front of which she sat. Like a dead black bird, a wig rested in a cardboard box. Paunchy jars and rouge sticks, hairpins, curls of hair pulled from the comb after disentangling the wig - there was a variety of feminine objects strewn on the dressing table.

Bora recognized Retz’s phone number pencilled on the wall by the mirror.

“You see, Captain, it wasn’t like it was for Ewa and him. Ours was different. I can’t explain it to you.”

Bora stood behind her chair with hands in his pockets, following her motions as she opened one jar, then another, and with two fingers began smoothing the mixture on her face.

“I know what being in love is, you don’t need to explain it.”

She glimpsed at him through the mirror. “But you’re married. It’s not the same. I know it becomes stale when you’re married.”

“My marriage isn’t quite stale yet.”

A new pallor was created on Helenka’s face by the salve she daubed on. When she spoke, the inside of her mouth looked bright pink by contrast. “What I meant to tell you last night is I don’t believe Richard had any reason to kill himself.”

“Perhaps none you knew of.”

She ran rouge over her lips, first on the lower lip then on the upper. Small hooked gestures, still controlled. Against the white of the skin, her mouth was turned into a moist red wound across her face. “You don’t understand. He loved me too much. Men in love don’t kill themselves.”

“It depends on whom they’re in love with.”

“You still don’t understand! Even if he had a thousand reasons to commit suicide, Richard would have told me
about it. He called me that morning, you know. He was getting ready to come see me after the rehearsal.” Her hand trembled too much now for her to apply mascara on her eyelashes, so she waited with the soot-black little brush suspended, quivering. “He looked forward to it, he said. He had bought me a gift. Is that the sort of conversation a man has while he’s turning on the gas to suffocate himself?”

“We hardly know what goes through a suicide’s mind.”

“But I didn’t phone him, he called
me
! Wouldn’t he have something better to say to me if he was about to die?”

Bora stared at the limp blackness of the wig, which Helenka now lifted and primped in her hands. The gift she mentioned must be the boxed engagement ring he’d found in Retz’s bedtable. He’d decided to ship it to the widow, all the more since Retz had given away his wedding band. Helenka tucked the blond fleece on her neck under the wig.

“I need to ask you a few questions,” Bora said.

“So, that’s why you came after work. What kind of questions?”

“Some of them are personal, but I don’t ask them for personal reasons.”

Now Helenka seemed another creature, born out of the mirror. Dark and white, with that crimson slash across her face, her clear eyes like glass splinters set in the blackness of painted lashes and brows. She was newly alien, nearly frightening to him.

“Very well. Ask.”

Half an hour later, Ewa ran into him in the uncomfortably cold, narrow semi-darkness of the backstage corridor as he came out of Helenka’s dressing room. Bora brought his hand to his visor in a salute.

Whatever was in Ewa’s mind, she said, “How nice to see you, Captain. Are you staying for the play?”

“I’m sorry, I have no time.”

“Pity.”

They stopped face to face. Ewa, too, was transformed. Like swatches of night sky, a black dress gathered and fell around her body, making the whiteness of bare shoulders and the deep line of breasts glare from the twilight. Her lead-white face seemed to Bora bloodless like those of dead women he’d seen sprawled on threshing floors and barn floors, a reminder that made him physically cringe. He thought, with sudden shame, of the bloody and torn cotton briefs around the farm girl’s knees; her belly was no less white, and like mashed snow with blond grass on it. A queasy need to get out of here overtook him.

The corridor was narrow, and when he moved, their bodies nearly touched.

“I must go.”

“Good night, Captain Bora.”