Lumen (36 page)

“Don’t shoot!” Bora bolted from the disconcerted group of workers. By long strides he made for the direction Ewa had taken through the high snow, towards the Wawel Hill. Behind him, the soldiers trundled on a little more, then halted at his command.

Ewa had a frantic quickness about her, a scared-animal ability to scamper off. Hands and knees acted in concert to part the snow, her race was improvident but effective and through the white clumps she moved in nearly a straight line, unhampered by her short fur coat.

Bora’s metal-clad boots slipped on the ice under the snow. Height and a man’s body weight worked against him
in the race. His greatcoat was heavy and long, it impeded free motion. He lost balance and time while Ewa started up the incline that ran lush with grass most of the year, but was stark now and nearly unbrokenly white.

Already the guards from atop the Wawel bastions had noticed the escape and were crying out their own guttural warnings from above.

“Don’t open fire!” Bora shouted at them, though the wind took his voice and they might not have heard him.

Ewa’s neck scarf flew off and, like a blue disorderly bird snatched by the current, it was borne aloft behind her.

From this point, she could only hope to get to the closely guarded ramp that led to the gateway to the castle. Bora knew it wasn’t safety she was looking for. Anger threw him into a fury to keep her from getting herself killed, out of spite and refusal to give her that choice, to be a part of her death.

“You have to stop!” he shouted at her. “I command you to stop!”

Ewa looked back, midway through the incline. The terrain was very steep at this point. The snow was piled high on this side of the hill, where it had accumulated due to the wind, and she stood in the middle of it nearly to her thighs. Her face was small and livid in the distance. She seemed about to renew her race, then let her arms fall to her sides, and didn’t move.

Bora struggled to join her but did so quickly on his longer, booted legs. Ewa breathed hard, and so did Bora. Clouds of condensing vapour fled in front of them.

“I don’t want to be arrested, Captain.”

“There’s no choice.” Bora kept an eye on the dark, puppet-like figures of the guards atop the incline, armed with machine guns. “If you were to tell the judge about Retz and Helenka, you might get clemency from the court.”

Ewa’s painted lips were the only brightness in her pallor. “As if I’d speak to any court of my lover’s incest with his own daughter. How perfectly German of you. No, thank you.”

“Come along, then.” Bora extended his arm towards her. She noticed, with a little surge of flattery, that his holster had remained latched.

“My son’s dead, my lover’s dead. You could let me strike you, and then your men would have to kill me.”

“No.”

“It’d be easier.”

“Frau Kowalska, you’re neither Tosca nor Clytaemestra. This is not the stage.”

Bora’s hand reached her elbow, taking it firmly. Except for the kiss, it was the first time he had touched her. He led her back through the convulsed snow without looking at her, the boyish angle of his face turned away from her as on the night in her dressing room.

The car seemed very small down by the slow, icy ribbon of the Vistula, there where the equipment had been finally unloaded and the road was clear.

On his way to the train station in the morning, Bora had been reading a letter from home, and did not at first notice the slowing of the car.

“What is it, Hannes?” he asked automatically, without glancing up.

“Street’s blocked ahead, sir.”

Quickly orienting himself, Bora saw they’d come quite near the station, driving through the working-class quarter that separated the Old City from Army Headquarters. Twenty or so feet in front of the car, a helmeted, gloved SS
man had stood with his right arm raised, and Hannes was slowing down more.

Even from here, Bora could see that bodies lined the street: civilian bodies in bloodied nightclothes, and the SS had barbed wire, cars, dog. A truck parked in the street where snow had been trampled into mud. People already crowded under the tarpaulin, pinched white faces anxiously peering out in a double row. Entire families, it seemed, were being herded out of doors.

The helmeted SS man flagged the car down with deliberate, imperious slowness, so that Hannes’ braking became a full stop.

Bora rolled down his window.

Just ahead, furniture and clothes were being thrown from balconies on the tenements’ higher floors. A sewing machine came crashing down, attached to its skinny table, metal pieces flying. Papers sailed in mid-air and floundered like shot birds. The car idled at the edge of an unspeakable disorder of objects and people.

There was shooting going on inside the houses. Bora recognized the smacking reverberation of gunfire within four walls. Echoing cries followed, shouted commands. More gunfire.

“What is happening?”

He had to shout the words to be heard. The SS man answered from where he stood, near the sidewalk where the bodies lay, not bothering to draw close even though he certainly knew an officer was addressing him.

“Haven’t you heard? We caught those who killed the Catholic nun.”

“
What?
”

“It was the Polish swine who were hiding on the rooftops near the convent. The Army tried to cover it up, but
we
got them. Now it’s just a matter of flushing their accomplices
out. All trains have been cancelled, so you’ll have to go back.”

Staring, Bora folded his mother’s letter and slid it in the cuff of his sleeve.

The SS man had turned away from the car. Blood flowing from the bodies was finding its way down from the street. When it reached the snow crust rimming the street, red flowers bloomed at the point of contact, a transitory efflorescence that flared out, and at once was no more than the mingling of blood and icy water into a pink slush.

“Move on and turn,” the SS man wheeled around to order.

Hannes started out again at a snail’s pace, aiming the car amidst the litter from above. Glass shards rained down, more debris.

Those who killed the Catholic nun. The Army tried to cover it up.
Bora knew what it meant, what it all meant, and yet a dullness of body and soul let him keep watching without any visible reaction. Hannes drove hunched over the wheel, his big ears translucent in the cold morning light like those of a sensitive, mute animal.

A second roadblock manned by long-coated SS barred the sidewalk ahead.

“Turn left at the corner,” Bora said to Hannes. And as the car prepared to leave the noise and confusion of the barricaded street, a drop of blood - from where? How had it jetted or spurted here? - fell on the windshield. High up, where ice coating the glass outside the wipers’ reach stopped it from running, so that the blood sealed itself there, like a mark and an indictment.

The streets were deserted all the way from the turn-off to Rakowicka, where the low sun unfurled a chilly carpet of ice. On the brick wall flanking the garden of the old
Academy, yard-long SS notices had been posted, with split text in German and Polish. Black on the pale yellow, thin paper surface, it read, “Investigation into the death of Maria Zapolyaia, a Catholic religious woman, has resulted in the apprehension of Polish criminal elements. The culprits” - a list of names followed, among which, no doubt, was that of the battered prisoner Bora had met - “were tried, found guilty and sentenced to death. The sentence has already been carried out.”

Bora found that he could look at all this, hear all this, witness all this, and have nothing whatever to say.

The last person to come in for confession spoke English. Through the grid-lined window, Father Malecki understood well who it was, although there were no further signs of intelligence between them.

“
In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti
.”

“
Amen
. Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.”

“How long since your last confession?”

Malecki found himself sitting back in the recess of the ornate wooden box that separated him from the world, listening to the words coming earnest and low through what privacy the metal screen afforded the other man.

“Everything is different now, Father. Right and wrong, honourable and dishonourable - they’re words and they are blurred to me until I sort them out again. No one can do it for me and it frightens me, it frightens me to have to choose. To have to pick one of the opposites when they’re so blurred, and walk away with it not knowing if I have done well, if the choice was wise, when I don’t even see the
rims of wisdom any more. It’s gone empty before me, this great bowl of wisdom I was striving for and deluded myself that I was attaining, or even had attained in small part. There’s nothing in it.
There is nothing in it
.”

“But it’s not a sin.”

Bora rested his forehead against the grid. “The mask fell off the world, Father Malecki, and no face stands behind it. I am sick at heart.”

“Are you? This is the exit from Eden. Meeting the ‘opposites’, as you call them. Seeing that, contrary to your view from the Garden, they are truly good and evil, and the choice is yours, because you’re a temporal creature with an immortal soul whose health depends on what you do
here
, what you decide
here.
” Malecki was moved, because it seemed to him that Bora was silently struggling not to weep. “This, I tell you - whatever your choice, you will be crucified to it, nailed to it and bled white by it. You will live or die of it as surely as I speak to you now. More, others will live or die of it.”

The shadow behind the grid pulled away. “I don’t want to hear it.” But Malecki was ready for the reaction. He stepped out of the confessional, rudely keeping Bora from leaving. He pushed him back towards the niche between the confessional and the wall, in the dusk of the empty church.

“Tell me, do you think the abbess was a saint? Is that what a saint is, someone cloaked in her egocentric God-love to the exclusion of everyone else, basking in God behind closed doors? Saints aren’t so private, Captain Bora. They’re crucified to the unglamorous daily crosses of their love for others, their anger and outrage and striving to create hope for others. They wear robes sometimes, civilian clothes sometimes - even boots with spurs on them. And they need to be as prudent and wily as God
will advise, serpents and doves in the hands of men.
Do you understand?
I am afraid for you: I, who should be inimical to you and what you represent!”

“What a damn gift you have. Who can ever take it away from you?”

Having heard about Bora’s reassignment, Doctor Nowotny had invited himself to dinner and to a private evening of Schumann piano music. “Well,” he added. “A special Intelligence school and then the War Academy! That ought to keep you put until January 1941 at least. Will you have time to sneak home between lessons and tuck some
germ plasma
into your wife?”

“I hope so.” Bora had just that afternoon taken leave from Father Malecki, and the separation somehow made him feel orphaned. He sat at the piano, careful to hide those feelings, and his melancholy for Dikta’s silence over the holidays. “I miss her terribly.”

Nowotny sank into the armchair, with a big glass of cognac nestled in his hand. “Good for you, good for you. Mail a telegram to Schenck as soon as you make her pregnant, so that he won’t send you reminders of your marital duties.” He laughed. “Easy to say. Who knows where we’ll all be, two, three years from now.” He listened to Bora play for a while, mellowed by the music into sentimentality. “This much I can tell you, Bora. You will put crime solving behind you and concentrate on your army career. If I know what’s good for me, I’ll sooner or later put this heavy smoking behind me. Our incomparable Schenck will keep reproducing like a rabbit. What else is there?”

It was little more than wishful thinking on Nowotny’s part.

Within three years, he’d be smoking as much as ever. Schenck would die at the gates of Stalingrad before seeing his sixth son born, and Bora’s left hand would be blown off by a partisan grenade in northern Italy. His wife Dikta would secure an annulment shortly thereafter. All of them, all of them, would lose a war more disastrously than anyone could fear. Gifts could and would be taken away.

Tonight there was Schumann, and mild expectation, and the mercy of not knowing.

“There is one thing I would like to ask of the sisters, and that is the print that hangs over the door of
Matka
Kazimierza’s old room.”

Sister Irenka puckered her face. “That detestable little picture of Adam and Eve?”

“That one.”

“You may certainly have it. Sister Jadwiga, fetch the print for the captain. Is it permissible to ask why you choose such image to remember us by?”

“Yes, but it isn’t precisely to remember you by, Mother Superior. It is to remind myself of myself.” Bora felt himself blushing, and for once did not resist the reaction. “I have after all failed at my investigation, and I need a reminder of man’s pride.”

Father Malecki waited outside the convent, smoking a Polish cigarette. He saw Bora put the print in the trunk, and was tempted to smile.

Instead, he asked, “Have you convinced them that you couldn’t come up with a solution?”

“I don’t know. They seem resigned to whatever comes.”

“And I hear the SS are exhibiting the abbess’s bloodstained habit in one of the Wawel’s halls, along with the
Radom bullet as a proof of Polish guilt. So. What have we learned from all this?”

Bora invited the priest to enter the car.

“I can only speak for myself, Father Malecki, and it’s elementary philosophy. Things aren’t what they seem. Certainties aren’t what they seem. There may be no certainties.”