by Tova Reich
For the first time in a very long time, Norman was again filled with that indescribably satisfying sensation of nachas, of pride in one’s child, of which he had been so sorely deprived for far too long. He put off dealing for the meantime with the palpable affronts directed against him personally, to which he was of course painfully alive—he would get her back for them later, you could depend on it—choosing instead to bask vicariously in the reflected glory of the compliments to his daughter. He smiled with radiant parental pleasure. “Yes,” he confirmed, “Nechama’s a nun, Sister Consolatia of the Cross, right here at the Carmelite convent at Auschwitz. I’ve been trying to get there all morning.”
“The Carmelite convent? I know exactly where that is,” Marano said. “It’s right next door to the interfaith center where I’m staying with Roshi.”
“You’re staying at the interfaith center?” Norman was truly perplexed. “I thought you were staying in the camp itself. I was wondering how you got out here—since all the others were locked in. I saw them behind the gate myself, they were like prisoners.”
Marano shook her head. “That’s so ridiculous,” she said. “There are a million ways to get out. They probably just got a charge out of pretending to be prisoners—it’s a radical turn-on, for sure. Of course Roshi and I aren’t staying in the camp itself, the vibes are much too heavy there. We’ve been doing this horror-healing tour for years. We’re way past that scene. The camp is for—campers.”
Norman decided then and there to abandon all pretense and claims to dignity, to bare himself in his pressing if temporary and uncharacteristic neediness to this inconsequential person whom, in any case, he would probably never see again in his entire life. “The thing is,” he explained, “I have to get into that convent to see Nechama. Arlene—that’s my wife—she’ll kill me if I don’t get in, but I don’t have a clue how to go about it.”
“Piece of cake, Normie,” Marano assured him, “piece of cake! You should have said something before. Tommy’s on very intimate terms with the nuns. He does business with them all the time. He’ll get you in—and it won’t be that expensive either, don’t worry. He’ll probably even be willing to take a check this time since he knows you’re out of cash. I’m pretty sure he feels he can trust you by now. And you know what? I can walk you over most of the way. I’ve got to split anyhow, I’ve got to get back to the center. Roshi’s probably still sleeping. I have to go wake him up now and help him get ready so that he can get to Birkenau to lead a meditation session.” Sighing the tamed, domesticated sigh of a beset, put-upon but withal tolerant and fulfilled personal assistant to an important player voluptuous with power, Marano began the task of extricating herself from that too-low chair, rising with difficulty to her edematous feet in their embroidered Chinese slippers and turning to Tommy Messiah, who had wandered off a short distance for a private consultation with Shimshon. “Tommy,” she called out, “can you get Normie into the convent?”
Tommy Messiah cupped his ear with an exaggerated flourish. “The coven?” he echoed.
“The convent, Tommy, the convent!”
He took a few steps closer. “The covenant?” he made another stab, his face screwed in uncertainty.
“Tommy, please, just pay attention for a minute.” Marano pronounced exactly: “The convent, the Carmelite convent—you know, the nuns? Can you get Normie in?”
“Ah, the fucking convent!” Tommy Messiah gave an angelic smile. “No problem! Five thousand bucks. Make it out to ‘Cash.’”
When Norman handed him the check—a museum check, unfortunately, but it was all he had with him at the moment, it made him very uneasy to use it but this was an emergency, it was his only chance to get in to see Nechama, he would reimburse it the minute he got home—Tommy Messiah stood there scrutinizing it for too long, like a doctor mulling over the X-ray of a fatal diagnosis. Maybe he doesn’t read English very well, Norman reassured himself, trying to quell his simmering anxiety. Then, apparently satisfied, Tommy Messiah folded the check carefully and slipped it into one of his glowing new running shoes, which he wore without socks. He had to be at the convent that day anyway, he advised Norman, to deliver an order to the nuns—“a splinter from the true cross,” he added with a grin. From his pocket, he produced a small black velvet jewelry box, snapped it open, and, like an illusionist about to perform an amazing trick, showed each of them in turn how it was absolutely empty, there was nothing in there at all. With the same tweezers that he had loaned to Marano to squeeze the last drop from her joint, he picked up a tiny wood sliver from the ground and set it down with a minor flourish, like a priceless gem, on the plush black cushion of the box, displaying it all around again, this time to demonstrate the wondrous phenomenon of the splinter’s appearance for their universal gasps and applause. Then he clicked the box shut, slipped it back into his pocket, and, pleased with his performance, executed a sweeping bow.
While Norman was struggling to convince himself that whereas Tommy Messiah might quite properly be ready to cheat a bunch of ignorant and unenlightened nuns, he would certainly draw the line at ripping off a fellow Jew, especially such a savvy Jew as Norman Messer who would never let him get away with it in the end, and especially when it involved sacred relics pertaining to the Holocaust, the sound of a siren, so distant and ignorable at first, someone else’s headache, grew steadily louder and more searing. “Oh, my God!” Norman cried, as if vaulting out of a trance, “it’s the cops! This is a disaster! Get rid of the grass! Get me out of here!” Yet even in the grip of his panic and distress, Norman was struck by how similar the sound was to the sirens featured in every single World War II and Nazi movie he had ever seen—pulsating, ominous, mounting and then subsiding in intensity, a new wave rising as the old wave faded out, a menacing descent into inescapable doom. For Norman, it rendered everything that was happening to him at that moment cinematic, unreal, fictional, slow-motion, and dreamlike. “Time to split,” Tommy Messiah announced.
In the next frame, as if they had carried out this emergency routine a thousand times before, like the crew of a submarine fathoms deep in the ocean in dozens of thrillers that he had also seen, Norman watched with detached interest as each of them swung into action, performing what looked like assigned, well-rehearsed roles in a planned maneuver. Marano shoved the minuscule remnants of the cannabis into a cleft in her loincloth. She calmly folded her chair, scooped up in her arms all the Nazi helmets, firmly placed one on her own head, and distributed three of the others to the three men. “Walla!” she exclaimed at the completion of these tasks, personalizing Voilà! as she did every other word, and she took her designated place alongside the cart, clutching the two remaining helmets along with her portable chair. Meanwhile, Tommy Messiah and Shimshon swept all of the merchandise off the stand into the two patched garbage bags and tied them securely. Shimshon handed one bag to Norman, stationing him on the side of the cart opposite to where Marano was waiting, and with the second bag over his shoulder, he single-handedly, in a truly dazzling feat of strength, hoisted Marano and child, plus helmets and chair, onto the tabletop. Holding Marano securely in place from that side, he indicated to Norman to do the same from his. At this point, Tommy Messiah, already positioned at the head of the stand, began to push, which was when Norman first realized with the pop of a quiet, interior O, that the entire shop was on wheels. In this way they ran for their lives—four Jews in Nazi helmets, two carrying a bundle over a shoulder with one hand, trotting on either side of the cart, holding on to it and its passenger with the other, the third bent over straining and pushing energetically with both hands, and the fourth, a stupendously pregnant woman, perched on top with two Nazi helmets upside down nestled in the bowl of her lap and a flattened beach chair like a lid over it all. Panting and sweating, Norman both ran along and watched himself running at one and the same time. Shimshon was bellowing out enthusiastically, “Onward Christian soldiers, marching hup, hup, hup!” to spur on and goad their pursuers, as the Polish police in t
heir vehicle with its throbbing, oscillating siren flashing its heart-clamping red light drew nearer and nearer until the tires screeched to a halt on that provincial street pitted with potholes. Tommy Messiah stopped short, whirled around, and rocketed the erect middle finger of his right hand triumphantly into the air. “One hundred meters, kurwa twoja mac, you sons of whores!” he yelled. Then, turning to his comrades, he announced, “We have crossed the line. They can’t touch us now.”
From that point on it was a companionable stroll on that balmy June day in the gravitational field of the Auschwitz death camp, as they went on taking in the overrich air of this cloaca of the universe on their promenade in the direction of the interfaith center and the Carmelite convent, Lady Marano still being conveyed like a prize melon or a blue-ribbon sow on the way to the fair on the pinnacle of the cart by her three gallant musketeers, Athos, Porthos, and Norman. Tommy Messiah tersely allowed that the invigorating chase episode that had just done them all so much good in the exercise and physical fitness department had no connection whatsoever to the smoke curling upward from their illegal substance, as some might have rashly supposed. Rather, it was one of the byproducts of restraints imposed on the free-market system, which banned within one hundred meters of the death camp complex kiosks, stalls, and other forms of commercial competition that would cut into the profits of the Auschwitz museum’s own souvenir, tchotchke, and Nazi and Holocaust memento and memorabilia reproduction and knockoff shop. This was information for all of them, but especially for Norman, to absorb and ponder as they walked on in silence. When they reached the new red brick Center of Information, Meetings, Dialogue, Education, and Prayer in Auschwitz, Shimshon effortlessly lifted Marano off the cart, with both hands this time, and set her lightly down on the ground. “I better go see how my kids are doing in Birkenau,” he said. “Eh, it was very nice running for dear life from a Polish pogrom again, along with my fellow Jews, thank you very much for the déjà vu. Eh, I think the time has come to get my dreamers ready for the return to Zion.” Marano, looking now like a chastened and reformed little girl, sang out in her unique and elusive accent, “See ya, Normie,” and turned to take up the personal assistant duties that awaited her in the interfaith center. Norman and Tommy Messiah then set off again, pushing the cart, now loaded with both bags of merchandise, the beach chair, and all the helmets except for the one still on Norman’s head, toward the new Carmelite convent, which very soon loomed up in front of them with its overhanging roof and eaves draped like the coif and veil of a nun—a giant, monster, nightmare nun, Norman thought, and she has swallowed up my Nechama.
As they waited at the door of the convent for someone to admit them, Norman took off his Nazi helmet and handed it back to Tommy Messiah. “Keep it,” Tommy Messiah said, “it’s worthless.” Norman, who really did appreciate a freebie, especially one with a value that a philistine and a nobody like Tommy Messiah was in no way qualified to assess, stood there holding the helmet in front of him with both hands, like a proper suitor who had respectfully removed his hat coming to pay a call. The door was opened by a nun in a brown habit, with head lowered and eyes chastely cast down beneath the shade of her veil. Norman’s heart leapt—could this one be his Nechama?—but she betrayed no sign of recognition, perhaps under threat to her life, Norman speculated. “I have a delivery for Mother Flagelatta,” Tommy Messiah said, “two items.” First, from his pocket he drew out the small black velvet box and handed it to the nun. Next, pushing Norman like an oversize package into the darkened building, he added, “And the Holocaust Museum American.”
“Sign here, please,” Norman heard Tommy Messiah request of the nun. Turning toward the light for a farewell glimpse of the outside world, Norman watched as the hustler extracted from another pocket an Etch-a-Sketch key chain that he held like a small slate in the palm of one hand for the nun to affix her signature, stroking her cheek with the hairy backs of the fingers of his other hand as she labored with the tip of her tongue between her teeth. Get your filthy paws off my daughter, you scumbag, Norman was thinking, fuming within—don’t you have any respect at all for a woman who has dedicated her life to prayer and contemplation?
He was led into a long, high-ceilinged reception area with a stone-tiled floor, paneled in dark wood and furnished very sparsely with a few rough tables and scattered straight-backed, uncomfortable-looking chairs, on one of which, almost exactly in the center of the room, the nun who was perhaps Nechama but who was restrained from communicating with him, her own father, on pain of dire punishment, indicated he should sit. She did not linger but noiselessly left him almost at once, sitting there alone on that ungenerous chair in the middle of that long room with his legs squeezed tightly together, the Nazi helmet resting in his lap like a codpiece, like the sole article of clothing left for reasons of modesty to a patient who, with heart pounding, awaits the momentous entry of the examining physician. Extending the length of the room along two walls, a little higher than halfway up to the beamed ceiling, was a narrow gallery with a wooden balustrade, along which ran a row of open archways, with corresponding open archways in a row along both lengths of the walls of the ground floor, where he had been ordered to remain seated. Through those openings he could see identical nuns in brown habits moving silently, floating dizzyingly, flickering in the archways like distress signals at sea and then vanishing. Perhaps there were many nuns—he had read somewhere, though, that they rarely kept much more than twenty at any one time in a convent, which, he reminded himself as he kvelled and gloated inwardly, rendered all the more impressive Nechama’s acceptance by the Auschwitz Carmelites, the Harvard of convents—or perhaps it was just one nun passing swiftly through those mysterious inner chambers, creating the impression that she was many, just one busy little brown bird of a nun with a luminous white breast flitting softly from nest to nest, an optical illusion. Then, emerging from one of the ground-floor archways, bending her head, stooping because of her great height, an Amazon nun was dieseling toward him like a truck driver, which signified to Norman that there had to be at least two nuns. By a process of elimination the second, normal-sized nun desperately letting herself be glimpsed in those openings and then frantically disappearing was surely his Nechama.
The towering nun, no doubt the inspiration for the terrifying abstraction on the prow of the building’s roof, was looking not at him as she surged ahead confidently toward his chair in the center of the room, but rather with evident pleasure down at the contents of the small black-velvet jewelry box, which she held open before her as she made her way forward. This giant must be Mother Flagelatta, then, the prioress for whom the box was intended, Norman reasoned as he stood up abruptly, the Nazi helmet striking the stone floor with a sharp clang that reverberated alarmingly throughout that silent cavernous hall. Hovering over him, Mother Flagelatta displayed the contents of the velvet box for his admiration. In the no-frills English of her native Chicago, she delivered a short welcoming homily. “The Holy Father has called Auschwitz the Golgotha of the modern world. The meaning of this is that like our Lord Jesus at Golgotha, all Jews murdered at Auschwitz carried on their shoulders Christ’s cross and endured the agonies of crucifixion. It follows then that every Jew crucified at Auschwitz awaits salvation, redemption, and resurrection through our prayers. Thus, every piece of wood in the vicinity of Auschwitz-Golgotha is holy, and may be regarded as a fragment of the true cross upon which a Jew was crucified, especially blessed when brought to us by a fellow Jew. So do not imagine for one minute that we have been taken in or duped or deceived by your Pan Messiah.” Her face, framed by the starched white linen of her stiff coif and wimple, Norman noted as he glanced furtively from beneath his brows up at her, was shocking in its coarse redness. He could see directly into the dark, swampy underbrush of her fleshy nose, and her breath that poured down upon him reeked of old cheese and garlic. Over her shoulders she wore the brown scapular of Our Lady of Mount Carmel to shield her from the eternal fires. He was powerless against her.
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With two thick fingers, Mother Flagelatta casually flicked off that splinter of wood displayed to such advantage on the black velvet cushion and sent it flying across the room to oblivion, and then buried the box somewhere within the folds of her ample brown habit. She raised her commanding arm in a sweeping gesture to take in the great chamber in which they were standing, and by implication the entire structure. “We built this without the help of a single zloty from the Jews,” she declared. “If the Jews had even one drop of decency and gratitude, they would have financed it entirely, as it was they who forced us to move five hundred meters from the camp, it was they who exiled us from our convent where we were best situated to offer our prayers on behalf of the souls of their dead brethren of the Jewish persuasion.” She paused to take Norman in for the first time, probing him with her gaze; a few seconds later, having apparently seen her fill, she went on from her intimidating heights. “I regret that it is not possible to show you around, Pan Messer. The sisters are cloistered. We would disturb them in their devotions, and soon it will be time for the noon prayers of the sixth canonical hour. Yet you in particular, as a member of the Jewish persuasion, a tribe with legendary moneymaking facility, and as the ex-father of a young professed who has reached almost the end of her third and last year of temporary vows as she grows toward the fullness of her vocation—you in particular have the responsibility to put an end to this stubbornness that has turned you Jews into little more than ungrateful barking dogs molesting everything in their path. You must lead the way and set an example by making a substantial contribution to our convent, no different than if your daughter were a student at a great university and you were quite properly the recipient of a solicitation. And when you return home you must also organize a telephone campaign to raise funds in our behalf. We are in need of so many things. We have almost nothing at all, only these bare rooms and our two Teresas.”