by Max Gross
For the Kowals, the experience was more thrilling than upsetting. The family convened a meeting in the kitchen and wondered aloud how long this spectral figure had been living among them.
“At least since January,” declared twelve-year-old Jakub, who was the most unaware of the phantom before that day. (It was July.)
Zuzanna was more conservative; she believed it could just be one or two months.
Oskar was the sole member of the family who believed it was a recent phenomenon. “I think it’s only been a few weeks. If it had been any longer we would have noticed him.”
How to shoo the phantom away was of greater immediate concern. “We’re going to have to camp out in the barn,” Oskar said. “We’re going to have to remain watchful. Doors locked. The barn door closed, not just the stalls. And we have to keep it up. If we do it for a few days and then forget about it, this guy will be back.”
“How do you know it’s a guy?” asked Jakub.
“Don’t be stupid,” replied Zuzanna.
So they held their vigil; in the early evening Jakub sat in the loft with the hunting rifle, an iPhone, and a battery of comic books. Zuzanna took over at around 11 p.m. Oskar took the 2:30 a.m. shift, going about the rest of his day in a state of exhaustion and crankiness.
However, the vagrant returned only a single time, so far as the Kowals were able to tell. One night in the middle of a rainstorm, Zuzanna heard the barn door rattle. She unlocked the breech of the rifle.
The young intruder was slippery with mud. His hair was unkempt and he had a long beard. He was rail thin, and wore a pair of black trousers and a white button-down shirt.
He walked slowly through the barn. When he passed one of the cows he affectionately ran his hand along the animal’s back, as if he knew her.
The Kowals agreed that at the first sign of a stranger a call should be made to the house phone with the single codeword: “Reksio.”*
As he got closer to the loft, Zuzanna rang the house, shouted “Reksio!” (without making sure anyone was on the line to hear), and stood up brandishing the rifle.
“Stop where you are!”
The vagrant froze. He stared at Zuzanna for a moment, and neither party knew what would happen next. After another second, the stranger turned around and dashed toward the barn door.
Zuzanna was no amateur at handling a rifle; she took aim and fired at the ground near the tramp’s feet. He didn’t stop or show any fear—even as the previously peaceful animals around him went wild—sprinting headlong into the rain.
A moment later, Jakub and Oskar came running into the barn, and Zuzanna spent the rest of the night reliving the thrilling one-minute encounter and trying to describe the unwashed vagrant. As they sat in the hay, the family agreed that they could no longer allow the stranger to come and go without consequence. Retaliatory action was needed. The next morning, Oskar went out to where the transient had set up camp and seized his meager belongings.
Nobody compared stories until years later, but what was probably the same transient appeared in Saint Stanislaus Abbey’s pantry the next evening, his fingers sticky with honey and a vinegar stain on his shirt.
The monk who had stumbled upon the 2 a.m. theft had taken a vow of silence, which he proceeded to break with a cry loud enough to wake up a dozen or so nearby monks.
Unlike in the barn the previous evening, the transient had no obvious path of escape. He merely put up his hands in a gesture of surrender. And what was Brother Konstanty going to do, exactly, other than to clutch his chest to make absolutely certain he hadn’t just suffered cardiac arrest as he waited for reinforcements?
Several of the monks came running into the pantry still in their nightclothes and stared wordlessly at the intruder.
“Who are you?” one of the older monks asked.
The intruder said nothing.
“Are you hungry, brother?” the monk asked. “Have you come here looking for food and shelter? All are welcome at Saint Stanislaus. There is no need to steal. We will take care of anyone who needs it.”
Still, the intruder said nothing. He resembled an animal from the wild, trying to assess the trap he had stepped in. He looked up and down at the men who had surrounded him but said nothing.
“What’s your name?” the monk asked.
Silence.
“Come, sit down,” the monk said. “Let us give you something proper to eat.”
They gently took the intruder’s arm and led him to the kitchen table, and Brother Bogomil went into the larder to produce a loaf of bread, butter, an apple, a wedge of cheese, dried sausage, and a cold helping of stewed lentils.
The intruder ate without speaking or taking his eyes away from the monks who had cornered him.
“You needn’t fear,” the older monk said. “You can tell us your name. No one is going to harm you.”
The intruder stopped chewing for a few moments but didn’t speak.
“Do you speak Polish?” the monk said.
The intruder was silent.
When he had finished his meal, the vagrant was led to a spare bed and told that he shouldn’t feel any rush to leave. He looked distrustful, but accepted a nightshirt, a bar of soap, and the cot.
It was not an uncommon phenomenon; the hungry, leery wanderer who one day appears on the abbey doorstep. After being conjured, such a vagabond would invariably disappear again when he had a full belly, as if he had never been there at all. But the monks at Saint Stanislaus didn’t mind. Providing for the meek was part of their mission. Nobody expected praise or gratitude.
The vagrant’s inability to speak was also not so uncommon. The blind, the demented, and the deaf were all entrusted to the abbey over the years. It usually happened when the invalid was still a child whose parents hadn’t already invested too many years of their lives in its upbringing. But it was well-known that the monks would endure worldly burdens that weaker souls could not.
This vagrant, however, didn’t look slow-witted; just uncertain. And, perhaps, nasty. Like he had a poor opinion of the earth and those who inhabited it.
A few hours later, the vagrant was still on his cot when the wake-up bell sounded and Brother Bogomil came into his room to escort him to morning mass with the rest of the abbey. He looked embarrassed to still be in his nightclothes. He accepted a mug of black coffee (which he stared at curiously before tasting), and a few minutes later followed Brother Bogomil into the chapel.
The monks later noted that he was clearly not an observant Catholic; as the Abbot said the Latin prayers, the transient leaned forward, like he was trying to grasp the words.
The transient stayed silent through mass, and after it was over followed Brother Janusz to the kitchen, where he was told he could help him make breakfast.
The transient became known as Brother Wiernych.
This is not to say that he ever claimed the name as his own. He remained scrupulously silent, despite persistent efforts to get him to speak. But the monks needed something to call him. “Wiernych” means of the faithful, which sounded as good a name as any for a man who seemingly wanted to live the life of an ascetic. (None of the monks could detect any symptom of faith in him, but they weren’t about to call him “Brother Moody,” which probably suited him better.) So it was decided, and the silent man acceded to it.
Of course, any historian has a duty to be equitable to the players of his epoch; to see them as they see themselves. And, I concede, it is very possible that I am being unfair to Brother Wiernych. He was entirely veiled in his outlook, so there remains much that is unknown. He ventured no opinions. No eccentricities. No expressions of taste or favoritism. He remained a cipher, and only the creator of the universe knew the multitudes he might contain. But to the monks of Saint Stanislaus his mysteries were secondary to the discomfort he lent every room he entered.
This, and worse, was reported to the Abbot shortly after his adoption. Brother Bogomil, who had taken it upon himself to look after the vagrant, made an appointment with t
he Abbot and told him that Brother Wiernych didn’t understand manners, which was making everyone stay away from him.
“What do you mean?” the Abbot asked. “What does he do?”
“Basic table manners. They’re nonexistent.”
“I see . . .”
“He looks at everybody—stares at everybody—like he hates them. It’s unnerving.”
So the man stared. There were worse things, certainly, the Abbot pointed out. The good lord was the only one who knew the travails this man of the forest had endured before coming to Saint Stanislaus. Patience should be observed. Or, if Brother Bogomil preferred, he could talk to Brother Wiernych one-on-one about his behavior.
“I already spoke to him about this,” Brother Bogomil said. “He didn’t appear to understand or be interested.”
“Oh.”
“But that’s not entirely it. There’s more.”
“Oh?”
“He steals.”
That, of course, was a far larger accusation with a greater standard of proof than Brother Bogomil could offer.
“How do you know?”
Things had gone missing since Brother Wiernych had taken up residence in the abbey. While the monks of Saint Stanislaus owned relatively little, what they did possess was of great sentimental importance. A gold cross that Brother Gawel’s sister had given to him when he was a child had vanished from his night table. A picture frame disappeared from another monk’s bedroom, and the photograph it contained—of the monk’s mother—reappeared in the rubbish bin a day later without the frame. Sausages and jugs of beer went missing from the larder. A silver chalice couldn’t be found in the storage closet.
“Still,” the Abbot said, “as the Good Book says, judge not lest ye be judged.”
“There’s more.”
One of the monks, Brother Kacper, was an accomplished professional artist, whose oils and watercolors not only hung on the walls of the abbey but traded for hundreds—sometimes thousands—of zlotys in Warsaw and Budapest. The previous day (in an incident that would push Brother Bogomil to call for this meeting with the Abbot), as Brother Kacper had dabbed one of his paintbrushes into his box of watercolors he had discovered that someone had replaced the brown paint with human dung.
The Abbot was so taken aback that he knocked over a lamp on his desk.
“He took out the brown and put in excrement?” the Abbot repeated, astonished.
“Yes.”
“But how do you know it was Brother Wiernych?”
It was a childish question, even if it was a legally critical one. This mischief had not visited the abbey a few months earlier, and now it had. The only change had been in the presence of the new, disliked monk. The services of Hercule Poirot were unnecessary in decrypting the riddle.
However, beyond these inescapably damning—but inescapably circumstantial—facts of the case there was nothing else to connect Brother Wiernych to the desecrations. He refused to speak and thereby could not be induced to offer evidence against himself. There were no witnesses to any of these crimes. None of the pilfered items were ever found in Brother Wiernych’s possession. He was never observed in the toilet stalls handling fecal matter in anything other than the prescribed way.
But little thereafter could convince the rest of the monks that he wasn’t responsible. Even the Abbot conceded that he was likely the culprit, as he tried to fathom what could push a man to such a revolting, arbitrary act.
“Assuming he’s guilty,” the Abbot concluded, “there’s very little that can be done. We’re not going to turn an obviously unstable man out into the forest to be devoured by wild animals.”
Many of the monks believed that was precisely what should be done. Or, if not turned over to nature, at least turned over to the police. It was not a violation of Christian ethos or brotherly love to protect oneself from a predator. But the monks of Saint Stanislaus also believed in obedience, and they were not about to contradict the Abbot.
Precautions, however, were necessary. Doors were bolted. A new lock was installed on the kitchen door that was fastened at night. Brother Wiernych was no longer allowed to work in the kitchen or around the chapel, but was given a mop and a toilet brush and asked to clean the bathrooms as his prime labor in exchange for room and board. He performed this with the indifference the other monks had come to find so enraging.
It was also understood that the other monks should monitor him. As he mopped the floors, another monk scrubbed the sinks. When Brother Wiernych cleaned the toilets, another replaced the towels and soap. When he went to the dayroom to watch TV (the greatest repository of Brother Wiernych’s free time), another monk watched with him—even though television was something generally frowned upon.
Still, it is remarkable what men can become accustomed to, and gradually Brother Wiernych became nothing more than a single chipped crystal in the great chandelier of Saint Stanislaus.
His status was low. He would never be trusted alone among the valuables of the abbey, or where he might have opportunity to micturate in the holy water. But his monitoring became less rigorous over time.
He still didn’t speak to any of his fellow monks, but that was to be expected. (He was not the only one at the monastery who brooded in silence.) Instead, he wandered the abbey grounds and sat alone in the garden. He walked in the woods. He removed his shoes and stalked barefoot along the banks of the lake.
A year after he arrived at Saint Stanislaus, a bolt of gray suddenly struck down the center of his black beard one night, which caused a certain amount of chatter among the monks in the morning. But, as always, Brother Wiernych left this unremarked on. He grew from lean and undernourished to heavy and deliberate.
On a purely physical level, he remained repulsive. He crammed food into his mouth like a starving animal and chewed with his mouth open. He expelled gas out of both ends of his body whenever the mood struck him, even if it was in the middle of a meal. He often slept through sermons and his snoring even annoyed the Abbot.
But while he was obviously strange, he also lived among strange men. The monks of Saint Stanislaus had removed themselves from the company of other men for an abundance of reasons, some of which were noble, and others suggested a certain immaturity in matters of the heart and body. Brother Wiernych was probably more normal than his peers, in that sense.
One of the reasons he watched as much television as he did was because he yearned for the form and company of women. When a beautiful actress appeared on the screen, he was transfixed. In the library he discovered a book of Renaissance art and gazed in awe at The Birth of Venus, which, fanciful as it was, stirred his desire.
Not long after Brother Bogomil first appeared at the Abbot’s office he came a second time, to request that Brother Wiernych be given a room to himself.
“How come?”
“He sins against himself every night.”
“Oh.”
Brother Wiernych sinned without even the artifice of shame. He left stiff Kleenexes on the floor next to his bed, not bothering to drop them in the wastebasket.
The flesh is weak, the Abbot believed. If Brother Wiernych could understand the language it might have been worth warning him that he was imperiling his mortal soul—but in the end it was a matter solely between him and God.
He moved Brother Wiernych to his own room.
16
Fleshpots
I would never recommend a life of poverty—but I will also say that once lived, it makes an appreciation for the finer things all the greater.
Yes, most of us were extremely pleased with our newfound fortune. And like any other carnivorous animal allowed its first taste of flesh, our appetites grew with every passing week. After a while, the treasures of modernity were no longer novel and filled with wonder; they came to be expected as a fair and just addendum to our lives.
Visitors kept streaming into our marketplace and leaving their money behind, and the merchants and innkeepers and craftsmen of our town had no intention
of sitting on this good fortune as the Katznelson Jews did. (Which is what we wound up calling those who refused to participate in the exchange; they eventually opened their own market on the other side of town.)
Sora Goldman, who knitted and sold sweaters and gloves that wound up commanding a fortune from the tourists—some going for as much as eight hundred zlotys—was the first to decide that her little cottage was an eyesore, and she was entitled to something more substantial.
She spent the next month nagging, wheedling, cajoling, and threatening her husband, Eidel, to build a grand, two-story house on the side of Kreskol opposite the Poczta and the new hotel.
“I just don’t know,” Eidel said. “What if what everybody says is true, and the currency collapses?”
“Then we will look very smart,” Sora replied. “Instead of keeping a lot of worthless paper lying around our little mouse hole, we at least bought a nice big house to worry about our finances in.”
A point that Eidel had to concede made more sense than he would have initially thought.
The Goldman house was finished at the beginning of autumn; almost immediately—after the furniture was moved in, rugs laid down on the floors, and the new chandeliers connected to electricity—Sora invited nearly everybody she knew (friends and enemies alike) to come through and inspect it.
A tradesman was summoned from Smolskie who installed a porcelain sink and commode for the second structure in town (after the Poczta) to have indoor plumbing, and one by one, the women of Kreskol put their fingers under the hot and cold running water to test it for themselves.
And the esurience for new real estate only increased. Chatzkel Ackerman, the woodsman who had constructed the Goldman house with six other men he picked, was suddenly besieged with requests. When he quoted seemingly outrageous sums for construction, plenty of comers told him that they wanted the winter to save, but would like to reserve his time next spring.
Construction proved such a financial boon—with more than two dozen planned by the time it became too cold to work—that men who had been previously employed in perfectly respectable professions such as tanning and engraving decided that they couldn’t afford to miss out and began calling themselves roofers or housepainters.