by Tova Reich
She indicated the two paintings high on the wall at either end of the room, one of a woman robed in a draped, flowing garment, reclining in an ecstatic pose with head thrown back, eyes closed and mouth open rapturously, presenting to be pierced by the spear of the winged male figure erect over her—Teresa of Avila, founder of the Discalced Carmelites, fun-loving mystic with a bias against sullen saints. The other was a portrait of a Jewish girl who, as usual, was having much less fun, Norman noted despondently, too serious, too intense, in brown nun’s habit and white wimple, dark shadows from staying up nights studying circling her formidably intelligent eyes, no doubt first in her class in every faculty at the university—Teresa Benedicta, born Edith Stein of Breslau, Germany, a nice Jewish girl gassed at Auschwitz.
What was the deal here? Norman was anxiously struggling to figure it out. This pituitary wonder who insulted him so unforgivably by referring to his people as dogs and to himself as his own daughter’s “ex-father,” whatever that meant, this big brother cross-dressing as big sister who knew without benefit of introduction not only exactly who he was but also evidently everything there was to know about him—was this hideous extortionist intimating rather crudely to him that if he wrote a major check right this minute she would let him see Nechama, novitiate and postulancy, cloister and contemplation, be damned? God help him, what was he to do? All he had on him were museum checks. It was bad enough that he had already used one to pay off a blackmailer like Tommy Messiah. But if it ever got out that he had made a mega-donation with a United States Holocaust Museum check to the Carmelite convent at Auschwitz, of all places—to the notorious nuns who had once taken over the camp’s Zyklon B storehouse, who prayed every canonical hour for the conversion of the Jewish dead, who when they moved to these new quarters left behind inside the death camp that twenty-six-foot cross like a finger in the eye of the Jews—all hell would break loose, it would be the end of the party, the end of the Holocaust. If only he still had cash on him; cash could always be finessed, laundered, camouflaged from the authorities. But of course she would want far more than he would ever have carried around, even if he had bedecked himself in secret traveling pouches from clavicle to anklebone; she probably would accept no less than fifty thousand at the minimum just for starters. Maybe what he should do is to give her the kapo and Jude and gay and ghetto-police armbands as a down payment, as a kind of security, as a token of goodwill, and at the same time make a pledge for fifty grand to be sent as soon as he got home by Federal Express in cash that left no fingerprints, on condition that she would allow him to see Nechama now. He was formulating in his mind how to segue into the negotiations—Does FedEx deliver to Auschwitz? he was thinking of asking, but it came out instead, Does Auschwitz deliver to Fed-Cross?—which set her off again, like a firecracker igniting under her seat, like a gunshot at the starting line. “The cross? Your mind is still stuck on the cross? The cross, I would have you know, was blessed by the Holy Father before a million of his faithful compatriots, at a solemn mass in an open field in Krakow, and carried by the nuns to its present spot in Auschwitz, planted in the holy soil in front of our old convent, where it shall remain forever. You can tell your people of the Jewish persuasion that although they may have succeeded in getting the Carmelite sisters out of the camp temporarily, they will never uproot the cross even for one minute—never! Why do you people of the Jewish persuasion insist on acting as if you were the only victims at Auschwitz? Seventy-five thousand Polish Catholics were martyred there too. Let there be equality of worship, I say. You can have a little synagogue, and we shall have our churches. You Jews—why must you always demand special treatment and privileges? Why must you pride yourselves on being the chosen people of suffering?”
Somewhere a bell was tolling twelve, and Norman understood very clearly, as if an antiphonal bell were pealing inside his own head, that this anti-Semite held in her merciless hands not only his own immediate fate, not only whether or not he would get to see Nechama in the small window of time allotted on this June afternoon, but also the fate, twenty-four hours of every day, of his hostage child—her essential survival. This was not a person to antagonize. There was no advantage to him on the face of this earth in engaging in a competitive victims’ match with this terrorist and abductor by pointing out to her that seventy-five thousand dead Polish prisoners of war were small potatoes compared to over one million Jews, men, women, and children, gassed and incinerated at Auschwitz alone for no reason other than that they were Jews—we Jews, madam, are still the undisputed winners and champions in this category, I’ll have you know. Why were the Poles trying to elbow in so crassly on the rewards of victimhood, such as they were? What was the meaning of all these sordid attempts to Christianize the camp with churches and convents and crosses if not blatant historical revisionism, to disguise the pope’s complicity in Hitler’s grand scheme, to skew the future perception of Auschwitz by establishing it as a place of Christian martyrdom? But there was nothing for him to gain by hammering all this bile and bitterness through the thick crust of her Polack head, Norman recognized, and what is more, there was everything to lose in terms of safeguarding his Nechama. Instead, he foraged desperately in the dregs of his brain for a sop to offer to this implacable enemy, a deal of some sort. We of the Jewish persuasion are famous for making deals, he would say to her, a compromise with something for everybody—for example, why not replace the twenty-six-foot wooden cross, which was perishable after all and would one day rot, with a circle of permanent time and weatherproof stone slabs embedded forever in the ground in concrete, each one engraved with a quote, from a Catholic pope, from a Jewish rabbi, from a Muslim imam, from a Buddhist monk, and so on, a regular convention of equal-opportunity, religiously correct, pluralistic diversity staking an eternal claim right in the heart of the death camp. But just as he was about to propose this creative solution of which he was certain that his father, in his lust for a deal, would have signed off on with a huge gala and media extravaganza, and his daughter also would have approved in the spirit of shared ecumenical victimhood, the pure sound of women’s voices lifted in song bathed his ears. Mother Flagelatta announced, “It is the hour of Sext, the hour that Jesus was nailed to the cross.” A procession of nuns clutching rosaries at their breasts, Nechama from the shtetls surely among them, with heads bowed and pale faces tunneled deep within their brown hoods, appeared at the far end of the room from beneath the portrait of Saint Teresa of Avila, chanting “Gloria Patri” with crystalline sweetness, “Kyrie Christie Kyrie” as they crossed the center of the hall past Norman standing in the shadow of the prioress, “Ave Maria” as they disappeared at the other end under the vigilant eye of Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, that headstrong Jewess, Edith Stein.
He was desperate to know—which of these hollowed-out faces, these wistful, enigmatic voices calling to him, which one was his daughter? It was too cruel to go on tormenting him like this. He was ready to debase himself, to fall on his knees, which in most cases a good Jew would rather die than do, especially before an overgrown Christian of questionable gender dressed in nun’s drag, but, as he fervently hoped, at least no one he knew was watching him at this moment, and even if someone were, as a father he was still nevertheless prepared to prostrate himself in supplication at the jumbo-size feet of this torturer for the simple grace of an answer to his question—which of these worshippers is my daughter? But gazing down with contempt upon him, the prioress replied to his thoughts as if he had already uttered them out loud: “Sister Consolatia is a daughter of the Church. Your daughter no longer exists.” An anguished plea then burst impulsively, wildly, out of him from some uncharted internal wellspring of self-degradation. “I must see her, you have to let me see her,” Norman cried deliriously. “I’m being eaten up alive. I’ve been diagnosed with terminal cancer. It has spread all over my body. I’ve come from my deathbed for one last glimpse of my child. The doctors say I have just a few weeks left to live.” She must have thought he was raving, bu
t—who could say?—maybe he was unwittingly speaking the truth. Cancer was a stealth operator. Maybe he had already been invaded, maybe, unbeknownst to him, sentence had already been passed.
“Cancer is as a grasshopper in the eyes of the true Church,” Mother Flagelatta somberly intoned. From the folds of her habit, she extracted a card, which she lowered to him. “This is our Web site. When you get home, you may log on. Go directly to the prayer and blessing reservoir link. Check off ‘For Better Health, Physical and Mental,’ with a double check for Mental. It is my opinion based on long experience with those of your persuasion that you would also benefit from ‘For Overcoming Temptation,’ ‘For a Conversion,’ ‘For a Good Confession,’ ‘For the Grace to Bear My Cross,’ and ‘For a Happy Death,’ which I advise you to check off as well while you’re at it, since although the prices vary depending upon the request, there is also a special package deal for three or more prayers and blessings ordered at the same time. Then just type in your credit card information and your expiration date—and send. Within three days’ time you will receive confirmation that we have offered the requested prayers for you. It’s as easy as that, much less expensive and painful and time-consuming than surgery or chemotherapy or radiation, I might add, and no less effective. You can also send us an e-mail. The address is on the card. As you can see, Pan Messer, in this day and age, cancer is no excuse, it will get you nowhere.”
So they had a computer. This interesting piece of information registered deeply with Norman. It turned out that the Carmelite nuns of Auschwitz were on the technological cutting edge, just like the death camp they had targeted in the heyday of its killing operations. He wondered if they might even have more than one computer, perhaps an entire roomful. And here she had just a short while earlier pleaded poverty, lamented that their convent had nothing, put the squeeze on him for a dole-out, set him up for a major fund-raising sting. Still, what would have been the value now of throwing all of her hypocrisy and conniving right back up into her face? She had his Nechama in the vise of her hands, it was much too risky. Instead, with an exaggerated show of humility, he implored obsequiously: Out of the gracious goodness of her heart and in the spirit of Christian charity of which she was the premier exemplar, would it be at all possible for her to allow him to be in occasional, even monitored and censored, sporadic e-mail contact with his daughter? In response, she gestured up to the balconies where once again identical nuns indistinguishable from one another were sailing from archway to archway in their billowing brown habits with now and then the bright flash of white coif and wimple appearing and disappearing in the openings. “Your daughter?” she said. “All of our sisters are your daughters, and at the same time none of our sisters is your daughter. There is no identity or self in our convent, no individual in the e-mail. The individual and self are erased in all forms of expression. The author of every message is Anonymous.” She gripped his elbow forcefully and began to steer him firmly across the room in the direction of the exit—he was practically levitating. “What’s your problem, Pan Messer—you can’t tell us apart?” she inquired caustically. “Or is it that you can no longer recognize who your own daughter is? But, for that matter, you never really knew who she was—did you? For a person with such limited insight and understanding as yourself, I strongly recommend that you resolve your dilemma in the simplest way—by regarding all of us, myself included, as your daughters, and also that you make your peace with the fact that you no longer have a daughter. This is a paradox and a seeming contradiction, I know, but it is one that a poor soul with inborn handicaps like yourself must learn to live with.”
Norman wrestled himself free from her hold, hit solid ground hard, planted himself just inside the door like a dead weight, refusing to budge, poised to go limp like a noodle in nonviolent passive resistance using the method he had honed during his heady student protest days at the university. “I refuse to accept that,” he said boldly, liberated at last from her tyranny now that he had gotten such a negative evaluation, been extinguished as both a parent and a human being, not to mention the terminal diagnosis and fatal prognosis that he had inflicted upon himself; there was nothing left to lose. “I need to know right now,” he insisted, his composure as well as his resolve now fully restored. “When will I see my Nechama again?”
Mother Flagelatta, in the semiotics of piety, clasped her hands on the ledge of her imposing chest over the image of the Virgin on her scapular. “Most likely never,” she replied evenly. “Then again, perhaps one day soon we might deem it useful to release Sister Consolatia from cloister for short periods to serve as the public relations representative of our convent and our cross at Auschwitz—on television and other image-and-opinion-shaping media outlets controlled entirely by persons of the Jewish persuasion. It will be a daunting task, but she has taken a vow to obey and she will do whatever is necessary. As a convert from Judaism who has become a Carmelite nun at Auschwitz, and as the granddaughter of little Mr. Holocaust himself of the famous United States Holocaust Museum, she can be a most effective spokeswoman on our behalf. But of course that will never happen as long as your museum exhibition continues in its present form, especially your libelous anti-Christian film on the origins and sources of anti-Semitism, which has offended us so deeply. Until that film viewed by millions of visitors and impressionable youth is revised and corrected or, better still, burned with all of its clones and copies in a blazing auto-da-fé, I can assure you, Sister Consolatia of the Cross will remain profoundly cloistered, unavailable, and incommunicado, you may consider her case closed, she is dead to you.”
The prioress pulled out a sheet of paper from the bottomless cache within her habit. Norman could see the words “Holocaust Museum American” scrawled in red letters on top. Reading directly from this, she listed, frame by frame, her charges against the movie, but what it all boiled down to, as far as Norman could tell, was a nonnegotiable demand to cut out any and all narrative and imagery, overt or implied, that linked Christianity to anti-Semitic persecution or to Nazism or to Hitler himself if he ever wanted to see Nechama again. “Is it absolutely necessary to mention so gratuitously the irrelevant fact that the Führer was baptized a Catholic?” she demanded, her voice spiraling shrilly. “Does the only quote that you use of the Führer’s have to be something about finishing the job that the Church had begun? Are you not aware that the Führer’s anti-Semitism was racially motivated, the product of the godless Enlightenment, a neo-pagan manifestation with no connection whatsoever to Christianity, which has always been a moral and civilizing force throughout the ages? Is there no gratitude at all in the hearts of you people of the Jewish persuasion to the righteous gentiles, almost all of them Christians, who made such enormous sacrifices in your behalf in the Holocaust? How could I ever allow Sister Consolatia of the Cross, with her delicate and refined sensibility, to go out into a world where such lies and propaganda are promulgated—and by her former biological family no less!”
What’s the big deal? Norman was thinking. Though he had not one single smidgen of doubt that two millennia of Christian anti-Semitism and crusades and pogroms and blood libels and wall-to-wall persecution and oppression had led directly to the Holocaust, prepared the ground, and ripened the mindset, what difference did it make one way or another whether or not that point was rammed home in their stupid little museum movie when it was already written in blood, enshrined in hundreds of authoritative history texts, and was common knowledge throughout the universe? It struck Norman as monumentally absurd that this old battle-ax hovering above him armed with the mighty weight of the Church should care so much about an inconsequential little flick, and especially because, as a museum insider, he was fully aware of what a sloppy piece of work that movie was, put together by Monty Pincus in his usual botched, half-assed, it’s-good-enough-for-the-goyim way—that “finishing the job” Hitler quote, for example, plucked from some obscure, questionable source that could never be verified, those particular choice words might actually nev
er have been spoken at all, at least by the “Führer,” and then spliced to another quote from Mein Kampf with which it was in no way connected. As a matter of fact, that film had always troubled Norman, he was reminded now very crisply. He had always felt that something ought to be done about that film because of Monty’s cavalier inaccuracies. He had always maintained that the ethical thing would be to compel that slob Monty to publicly own up to his crappy scholarship and take the heat despite the scandal it would bring down on the museum, which would give his father a conniption for sure. But the old man would get over it. It was the right thing to do. If the Holocaust had taught even one lesson at all, Norman now reminded himself vehemently, it was that to remain a silent bystander as the perpetrator assaults the victim is just plain wrong. He could no longer remain a silent bystander as Monty perpetrated his deception against an innocent victim—the trusting public. It was a matter of personal conscience.
Norman gazed up at the chin bristles of Mother Flagelatta. Really, what he ought to do right now was to leak to this odious nun, off the record and not for attribution of course, the real inside poop about the film. He would be her deep throat. He would provide her with the ammunition so that she could follow through and do what was necessary and take Monty out. What did it matter if history was falsified in this film because he gave in to the demands of this fanatic nun, when it had already been so disdainfully tampered with by Monty? How many times had he obsessed to Arlene about his deeply held moral concerns with regard to that movie? She was his witness. Now when he returned home, he would be able to say to her that, at long last, although the job had not yet been completed, something was going to be done. There was hope.