MALAN HAS DISAPPEARED, leaving the door open. Olin enters with a knock and trails his light step down a hallway to a whitewashed room with a bare white cloth on a wood table. Here in other days, he thinks, a silver chalice might have glittered, and candlesticks, and silver bowls.
In the vestry where he sleeps on an iron cot, the old man goes to his small stove and lights the gas under his kettle. “I feared you’d bring him in here,” he says shortly, retrieving a used tea bag and two chipped cups and saucers from the shelf above.
“You know him, then?”
“By reputation.”
But the old artist has no real interest in Mikal or his reputation and says no more. In setting his table, pouring the tea, he extends a bony wrist on which Olin can see (as he is meant to, he suspects; pride of precedence exists even in Hell) the faded blue number with three digits only that identifies the bearer as one of the earliest prisoners in Auschwitz. “Five years,” Malan says softly; he weighed less than a starved dog, he says, when he was freed.
Olin’s Polish friends knew Malan in the postwar years in Warsaw. In all those years, they say, he made no mention of the death camp: in some way, his unconscious sealed it off like the secret garret confining the wild bastard child or the mad brother. He was already elderly when a stroke set free his memory, and soon thereafter, like the escaped prisoner, Stanislav K., drawn by a longing he cannot explain, this fragile old man forsook the security of his family and returned to the vicinity of the dead Lager, envisioning a final work that might liberate him from its grasp before he died.
A kind of homesickness, both old men had called it—was that a clue? But if so, clue to what, precisely? What constitutes home?
He follows his host by lantern light down a steep ladder: his fingertips, extended for balance, rake a strange silk off spider-webbed stones. An earth-floored basement of four or five small chambers has the dank smell of a cave: from floor to ceiling on white-plastered walls, winding through the doorless rooms like a huge headless caterpillar, decapitated yet still probing, still seeking escape, this black-and-white mural with no beginning and no end is a pure hallucination of fragmented images and symbols across which hole-eyed specters drift in eternal nightmare.
“My God,” says Olin. Here they are, he thinks, all the hungry ghosts, the silenced voices, not descending from the heavens but arising from the dark.
Freshly astonished by his own creation, Malan makes no effort to explain it. “You can always read about the camp,” the old man whispers. “My pictures avoid showing the camp but it is everywhere in them all the same. It is in me.” Art, he believes—not art appreciation but the creation of it—is the one path that might lead toward apprehension of that ultimate evil beyond all understanding. “The hand can speak when words cannot,” he adds. “The only way to understand such evil is to reimagine it. And the only way to reimagine it is through art, as Goya knew. You cannot portray it realistically.”
The old man is grateful he feels strong enough to complete this vast creation that was sealed up inside him for so long; he only hopes it might fulfill a promise made to fellow prisoners, to record the horror of their suffering should he survive.
“I’ll die in peace, you see,” he murmurs happily, waving his cane as if to banish all those hole-eyed ghosts at last. He cares not at all that so few will see his masterpiece, which in any case will only last until the day this old chapel entombs it by crumbling into its cellar. Meanwhile, he suggests, local schoolchildren might be led down his ladder and a few at least might learn and understand.
Olin nods politely but says nothing. Sensing his guest’s skepticism, Malan falls silent. “No, I suppose not,” he says after a pause. Escorting Olin to the door, he changes the subject. “In Cracow,” he says, “you might wish to visit the old Franciscan cathedral and have a look at its modern stained-glass window. You’ll find something very interesting, I think.”
“What sort of thing?”
Malan ignores that question. He is astonished that foreigners would come from far away to sit in silence in the great dead ruin at Birkenau. “And what do you think about all day, out there alone?” he inquires shyly, pointing at the tower in the distance.
ACCORDING TO OLIN’S research notes, Tadeusz Borowski’s postwar years were spent in refugee camps and solitary wanderings: in a letter from Paris, he described himself as “a visitor from a dead, detested country.” But some of his stories and poems were being published, and in this period he would locate his Maria, now a war refugee in Sweden; eventually they would reunite and marry. In 1948, when his death camp narrative made him famous, he was twenty-five years old.
That same year, he returned to Poland, joined the Communist Party, and became its virulent propagandist, and in this period, he made a “special mission” to Berlin for the satellite government—apparently successful, since he was soon assigned another. Borowski never talked about these “missions”: was he ashamed of them, Olin wondered? A friend who years earlier had been tortured by the Gestapo for crimes against the state was now being tortured by Polish security on a like charge, presumably to extract a confession before the show trial at which Borowski was scheduled to testify: did he fear he might be coerced to malign his friend by the threat of torture or return to prison?
In the last year of his life, he told a friend that in regard to his literary gifts, he might as well have laid a shovel handle across his own bared throat and stood on it (a favored Kapo method of extinguishing fallen slaves too weak to work).
Which Borowski was it, then—the corrupted, cynical Vorarbeiter Tadeusz of the death camp stories or the real-life “Tadek” who (according to his fellow poet Czeslaw Milosz) had behaved well in the camps? Which man sank onto his knees in July 1951 as if to puke into the toilet and stuck his head into the oven and turned on the gas, ladies and gentlemen, at twenty-eight years of age, just three days after the birth of his first child, a baby daughter, unable to live his life even one more day?
Why? Because he had betrayed his great gifts as a writer? Because toward the end he had betrayed his wife and longtime lover by succumbing to an affair with a young girl? Because he feared that to save himself he might be forced to betray—or had already betrayed—his imprisoned friend? Or because as a lifelong idealist, he was fatally depressed by the realization that Europe—mankind—had learned nothing from years of suffering, and nothing had changed?
In this war morality . . . the ideals of freedom, justice, and human dignity had all slid off man like a rotten rag. We said there is no crime that a man will not commit in order to save himself. And, having saved himself, he will commit crimes for increasingly trivial reasons . . . first out of duty, then from habit, and finally—for pleasure.
In suicide, Borowski had borne witness, too.
TOWARD DUSK, headed back along the platform toward the Gate, Olin discovers the outline of the mutilated cross under light snow. Two days earlier, he had lingered only long enough to kick at the gouged gravel with his boot toe. Today he is determined to scrape and smooth that cross as a gift to Catherine, and looks for that plywood shard that Sister Ann-Marie had tossed aside. But her implement is lost under blowing snow, and in the end he reaches down and tries to blur the scar with swipes of his gloved hand. However, the compacted gravel is still frozen, and finally he gives up and straightens, arching his back. Then, with a curse, he drops onto his knees and rakes at the rough cross with numb clawed fingers. In the end, it relents and is mostly leveled but not before his gloves are worn through and his fingertips are scraped and bleeding, stuck with black gravel; in the cold air, they sting when he tries to brush them off. “Bloody hell,” he whispers. He gets to his feet and walks on toward the tunnel, his sore hands shoved into his parka.
The others have all gone but she is there. “I saw,” she says. “The wound.” She takes his torn forefingers in her hand and with her handkerchief, not gently, dabs away the crust of blood an
d gravel.
“I saw,” she repeats, still holding his fingers. “He kneeled. Before the Cross.” She rolls her eyes heavenward, looking comically devout. “O Lord, bless this good man who prays.”
“No prayers today, miss. Sorry.”
“Sorry, miss, he says!” She opens her eyes wide in wonder. Still mocking her own piety, she raises her hands high, palms pressed together, as if in gratitude for such a miracle. “He kneeled! Alone in wind and snow!”
Emerging from the tunnel, they walk in silence down the frozen road, the only sound the light tick of their shoes. Maintaining her space, she hops across the frozen ruts rather than take his elbow. But at a certain moment—and both feel it when it comes—they turn slowly as they walk and look each other frankly in the face for the first time, look away at once, then look right back and this time hold, still walking.
“Who are you, then?” she murmurs. Are your eyes telling the truth? Is that what she means? Are you only playing games? And if so, why? Because in this terminus, in the very shadow of that gate, a feckless dalliance would be beyond all shame.
“I don’t know,” he says as they move onward. And her nod assures him she has faith that he is doing his utmost to be truthful.
Over and over, with no need of further speech or signal, they drift apart as on a transparent tether, snap back in place quick as two quick fishes.
Look at you, grinning your fool head off! You happy or what? “I’ll going to miss you, Catherine,” says this happy man, but his intensity of feeling makes it seem that what he confesses in this moment is, “I love you.”
Instant doubt: is that his happiness reflected in her eyes? Can this rare creature be anywhere near where he is in his heart? If so, what can she be thinking? How can she behave as if this moment weren’t extraordinary, as if this road were just any old dirt road in Poland, leading from this point to that one, here to there?
And that vision of Emi in her dying—had that, too, been delusion? And his queer homesickness? He struggles to think clearly. Perhaps Catherine will assume he’s teasing her again, playing the romantic idiot, the old fool. And, under the circumstances, it might be best for all concerned if she believes that.
In his confused state, the light sound of their steps on the frozen road is the sole reality.
WHERE THE ROAD disappears under asphalt at the edge of town, he hangs back a bit, to give her space to arrive unaccompanied. Understanding his tact, she does not slow nor does she look back. Only once do they exchange a glance of scared bewilderment—Did that really happen? If so, what was it?—before she hurries off to vespers in the convent.
Olin’s edginess, watching her go, is caught by Earwig, who spits elaborately as he walks past. Well? Whose business is it that two mismatched people have made friends? Or even stumbled into an attraction? Leading an unworldly young woman astray would certainly be disgraceful were he playing games. He’s not! True, he’d gone too far with that silly spasm of affection on the road, but it’s hardly as though he’d compromised her with a vow of undying love. And yet, with only one day left, he already misses her so badly that after supper he stalks the cobbled courtyard, awaiting her arrival for the evening meeting. However, it is not Catherine who appears out of the dark but Stefan, who looks displeased to be seen coming from the convent. “Aha,” he says, as if Olin’s presence here has cleared up a mystery. “You’re waiting for her, I suppose.”
“You’ve known Sister Catherine for some time, it seems,” Olin says carefully.
“Amalia? Indeed I have.” He and “Amalia” were “old comrades” in the reform movement in their diocese. Her convent was no great distance from his seminary, Stefan is saying. They met in a group of progressive students.
“You submitted some sort of reform petition, right? And she supported you?”
Well, she signed his petition. And there were other circumstances, he adds, with a certain coyness that Olin dislikes very much. Which other circumstances? What is this man intimating here? Why is he so often nearby when Catherine is present, and never averts that impertinent bald stare when Olin stares back, to challenge him, but only smiles in the same knowing way he is smiling now?
These days, Amalia (Stefan says), disillusioned with the secular world, longs for the purity of her original commitment, of that cloistered life for which she is temperamentally so unsuited. He has always tried to educate her about all the scandals and cover-ups in Rome, he says, but she will no longer let him near for fear he might contaminate her fragile faith.
Stefan has pitched his voice louder, apparently intending this last supposition to be overheard by Sister Catherine, who now approaches down the convent path. “She thinks I’m some anti-papist fanatic maligning the Mother Church. The difference is that unlike your Jew friend, I know what I’m talking about. From the inside.”
“Unlike my Jew friend,” Olin says. “I see.”
Catherine has stopped. “What is it you want, Stefan?” she inquires in a low tense voice—less a question than a warning. The ex-monk winks at Olin and retreats inside.
Neither coldly nor warmly, she awaits him. “What has he been telling you, Mr. Olin?”
“Oh, only that you two worked together as young students. Flirted a little, maybe?” he suggests perversely. “I mean, that’s not so serious, young people flirting—”
“No flirts!”
Cut off so sharply, he suffers a disagreeable foreboding, undefined and fleeting. With all her heart she had supported that petition, she is saying, feeling sorry for an idealistic young monk who had entrusted her with his life story. Only afterward had she suspected that much of his life story might be untrue.
Afterward? A liaison, then? The prude in him recoils from the image of that sallow monk possessing this warm young body standing so close at this moment to his own. Sensing something of his turmoil, she is flushing, too.
“I don’t mean to upset you, Catherine. I’m just teasing. As I told you this afternoon, I’m going to miss you very much, remember? Probably you thought I was just being silly.” He looks past those intent green eyes so as not to see it, should she happen to agree.
“Silly,” she repeats, tasting the word. His attempt to modify his avowal by making it sound somehow facetious has confused her, she is searching his expression for the joke. Evidently deciding he has been fooling all along, she musters a thin smile before proceeding indoors, and he has no choice but to smile with her; his fervent avowal of this afternoon has been reduced to banter.
With everything so unresolved, his lungs sag under the weight of tomorrow’s parting. He has been deluded even by himself, he sees that now. Among other things, he has never wished to recognize his unseemly attraction to the young female form hiding naked as a nut within the husk of her dull clothing. An unaccountable, in fact unthinkable, attraction, he would have said only two days ago, since quite apart from being sacrosanct, untouchable, she had looked so frumpy with that hacked-off hair, not his sort of woman at all.
FOURTEEN
Approaching the auditorium, Olin is pulled aside by Erna, who leads him back outside into the courtyard: the woman can’t stop hunting! Erna has sniffed out somebody’s uncle whose elderly brother-in-law, a longtime patient of Dr. Allgeier who later took work as a camp guard, recognized Madame Allgeier and her daughters on the selection platform in late 1942; he risked execution by the SS, he claims, for trying to slip them his lunch sandwich for old times’ sake. In fifty years, he has never forgotten how the young schoolteacher had urged him to go feed his damned sandwich to that other collaborator polluting her father’s house. “Looks like our little Jew girl hurt his feelings on her way to the cremo,” Erna grins. “She must have been a fighter, Baron. Not like you.”
FOLLOWING CATHERINE through the door of the auditorium, he cannot see her face, which spares him the disillusioned look he fears. “As Adina keeps reminding me,” he whispers hoarsely from be
hind, “I’m old enough to be your father. ‘No fool like an old fool,’ right?” This angling for reassurance is contemptible: he could bite his tongue off. In his insecurity he has banished a spell, and their dance of spirits on the road this afternoon—if it had any reality at all—must be gone forever, just as he discovers how dear to him she has become.
CATHERINE TAKES THE SEAT beside Adina Schreier. Unnerved, he does not join them. Rainer waves and so he moves in that direction. Unlike the Poles, the Germans are well-scattered, giving up comfort in numbers to avoid any appearance of defiant solidarity. Mercifully, most of the retreatants are well-meaning and are taking pains not to isolate these people, but the tension dispelled by the Dancing has been seeping back. In this toxic atmosphere, good intentions are eroding like the noses of stone gargoyles on cathedral peaks.
As he approaches, Rainer makes a place for him, but he does not stop moving, he must act, and in moments, he finds himself impelled onto the stage as if snatched there by a puppet master and set down on dangling limp legs behind the podium. Not at all sure what he needs to say, he gapes at the startled faces of Catherine and Adina in the second row.
He nods, coughs, clears his throat, and finally sets forth, taking refuge in the judicious manner of D. Clements Olin, Ph.D., embarked upon a formal lecture at his university. Surely we can all agree, he huffs, that Nazi Germany carried cold genocide further than any regime in this genocidal century, noisily supported, he puffs, by that rabble of Jew-haters who sprang forth like weeds not only here in Poland but in every one of the twelve countries represented in this audience this evening, his own included.
Though obvious, this indictment grabs attention, and in the quiet, in a quiet voice, he challenges any person present—French, Dutch, British, Belgian, Spanish, Swiss, American, no matter—to raise a hand who can honestly claim that his own nation’s history remains unstained in this regard.