“I must say that when you told me about this,” Rokovski said quietly, “I came back by the museum and looked carefully at the painting on exhibit. I inspected it as best I could without drawing attention to myself.”
“So did we,” Jeffrey replied.
“I could find nothing that left me thinking that here was a forgery. Nothing. But I am not an expert at classical painting, and I thought that perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps, you understand, just perhaps. And now that I stand here before this original, I see that indeed I was.”
“It is a masterpiece,” Katya agreed quietly.
Some of the other exposed paintings that littered the cramped little room were quality pieces, but there was something more to this one, something that drew the eye despite the room’s poor lighting and the painting’s relatively small size. The pale face framed a pair of dark eyes whose depths contained an unfathomable spark, a mysterious light that demanded attention.
It was indeed a master work.
* * *
That evening, while waiting to go to the airport and meet Alexander’s plane, Jeffrey told Katya of his talk with Gregor. She listened to his account with the same absorption that she had shown him the evening before. At the conclusion she told him, “You’re going to have to reach some decisions of your own before you can pray for Alexander, Jeffrey.”
He nodded. “I’ve been thinking about that.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’ve got to get my own relationship with God back in order,” he replied.
She reached across and took his hand. “It’s the way I have always dreamed of our relationship beginning.”
He stared at her. “This is what you’ve been waiting for?”
“I couldn’t say it, Jeffrey. I couldn’t ask. It couldn’t be something you decided on because of me. It had to be something you did for yourself, for Him.” She drank him with her eyes. “It’s been the hardest thing I have ever waited for in all my life.”
“All this time, all . . .” Slowly he shook his head. “This is incredible.”
“My father became a Christian because it was the only way that Mama would marry him,” Katya said. “Mama once told me she thinks making him give that promise was the greatest sin she ever committed. It kept him from ever finding Christ on his own, and in the end it drove him away from both of us, because he was living a lie, one she forced on him.”
“So you waited,” Jeffrey breathed, dumbfounded. “And hoped.”
“And prayed,” she added. “Prayed harder than I have ever prayed for anything in my entire life.”
“But why the distance, Katya? Why the coldness? Was that because of your father, too?”
“No,” she replied quietly. “Well, yes, I suppose in a way it all comes back to that first great hurt. But my first year at university, I met an older man. I gave too much too fast, Jeffrey. I didn’t take time to see who it was that I was spending time with. I let myself be taken in by a lie, by a mask he wore because it suited him. I can look back now and understand that all he really wanted was to have me. When I refused, and explained that my faith didn’t allow it, he tried every way he could to force me away from God.”
She dropped her eyes to the hand she held in hers, her voice as gentle as the finger stroking his palm. “I was so busy trying to convince myself that deep down he really cared for me that I couldn’t see the truth. And because of that I stayed around longer and let him hurt me more. I did not understand how a man could lie so, could care so little for me as a person that he would keep tearing at what was most important in my life, trying to destroy my faith just so he could sleep with me. Then one day I finally realized that he didn’t care for me at all, just for my body, just for satisfying some hunger of his. It made me feel like dirt.
“After that, my life revolved around my studies and taking care of Mama. “ She looked up, gave him the slightest hint of a smile. “And then this dashing young man came up to my table at the university, and he was neither a student, nor a believer. All the same problems, all the same mistakes, all over again.”
She reached across and traced a feathery line down the side of his face. “And I could feel myself falling head over heels for him,” she whispered, “like I had never fallen for anyone in my entire life. And I was so scared, Jeffrey. So very scared.”
“There’s no need to be frightened, Katya.”
“I’m beginning to believe you,” she said, and leaned forward to kiss him.
CHAPTER 24
Alexander was his normal silent self on the ride into Cracow from the airport that evening. Jeffrey played the patient companion and said little of his own activities, other than the fact that perhaps the solution to their export document problem had been discovered. Alexander replied to the news with a single nod of his head and the request that they go straight to Gregor’s apartment instead of the hotel.
Gregor limped out to the landing, greeted his cousin with the traditional pair of kisses and the words, “You have been on my heart night and day, dear cousin. Night and day.”
“I am grateful.” Alexander seemed unsure of why he was there. “Is it too late for us to speak?”
“Of course not. I have just put on water for tea. Come in, come in.”
Gregor led him to the apartment’s only comfortable chair. “Pull it up close to the bed, cousin. I have perhaps done a bit too much today, and my bones are eager for a rest.”
“Perhaps I should return tomorrow, then.”
“Nonsense. I can rest while we are talking.” He turned to the alcove and asked over his shoulder, “Will you take tea with us, Jeffrey?”
He looked uncomfortably at Alexander. “Maybe it would be better if I left.”
“There is no need as far as I am concerned,” Alexander replied. “You have walked with me this far; you may as well be in for the kill.”
“No one is to be killed,” Gregor replied, returning from the alcove bearing two steaming glasses. Silently he nodded Jeffrey toward a straight-backed chair in the room’s far corner. “Although there would be no greater gift you could give me or your Maker than a decision to die to the things of this world.”
Alexander sipped at his tea. “Even if I did consider the act as a serious possibility, I would find it positively mortifying to see the look of satisfaction on some priest’s face. Imagine his pleasure at bringing a long-time offender like me to his knees.”
It was one of the few times Jeffrey ever heard Gregor take a sharp tone. “If he takes pleasure for himself, then he is no priest, no matter what his earthly garb.”
“Perhaps not, dear cousin. But your standards are sadly not held by all.”
“They are not mine and they are not standards,” Gregor replied hotly. He eased himself into a seated position on his bed and stretched his legs out with a sigh. “They are instructions, the first of which is true humility. You kneel to no mortal force when you cast your sins on the Savior. You bow your head to no mortal power.”
Alexander smiled. “Do I detect an open wound?”
“There are some human failings I find harder to forgive than others,” Gregor replied. “I do not ever want to think that a prideful Pharisee in priestly robes stood between you and eternal life.”
“Eternal life,” Alexander murmured. “There were times when I truly thought that I would live forever. Or at least that my days should never end.”
“God willing, you shall have eternal life. He stands and knocks at the door to your heart. Will you not let Him enter?”
Alexander reached over and patted Gregor’s shoulder. “You will be the death of me.”
“The life, dear cousin. The life of you.”
“An interesting concept. Quite an amusing change from the memories crowding up around me.”
“Memories far easier to bear if you bore them not alone,” Gregor replied.
“Yes,” Alexander murmured, turning his gaze toward his steaming tea. “The burdens have become quite heavy.”
Alexander hesitated, said to his glass, “It is so hard sometimes to understand how we feel. Our emotions are so very abstract. So we give them form, a name or place, and through this name an identity. For me, all fear, all dread, all hatred, is located at Florian’s Gate. These feelings, this place, I have avoided all my life.”
“Many of us have such a place,” Gregor said quietly, “although it is not always something with a form as concrete as yours. To walk through this portal would be to confront these fears, to press through them, and to leave forgiveness in their wake.”
“I could not,” Alexander replied. “You are asking the impossible.”
“Only because you insist on taking that walk alone,” Gregor said. “You treat your fears and your hatreds as your most precious possessions. You allow them to define who you are, where you go, what you think. Imagine, my oldest and dearest friend, how life might be if love were there in their place.”
Alexander gave no sign that he had even heard. He was silent for a very long time, the loudest sound in the room being the ticking of Gregor’s bedside clock. Then he said, “I survived my time of suffering because I was determined to live. It was my strength. My will. And yet, as I find myself coming to face the same door which I escaped from so long ago, I wonder, my dear cousin. The past reaches up to surround me, and at times I feel that I have escaped from nothing at all. And the strength of my will does not appear to be powerful enough this time to save me.”
Gregor shifted his head and looked upward, said to the ceiling, “It is possible to hurt so much, suffer so terribly, that life loses all meaning. This you know, my friend. You have seen it for yourself, and known its appeal. Death becomes not necessarily something welcome, but rather something acceptable. It can be a mental pain that pushes you to this brink, or emotional, or physical, sometimes even spiritual. Those who disbelieve the extent of another’s suffering simply because the wounds are not visible are not only insensitive, they are dangerous. They literally push a sufferer toward death’s door.”
“That is one accusation I would never make of you,” Alexander said quietly. “Your sensitivity is most painfully accurate.”
“One basic element of suffering,” Gregor went on, “is the way it makes time slow down. A sufferer finds it increasingly difficult to see beyond this moment of pain. He or she finds it almost impossible to believe that the suffering will ever end. It becomes the all in all of life. Pain is the start, the now, the finish.”
“Indeed,” Alexander murmured, his shoulders bowed, his head lowered almost to his hands.
“A sufferer comes to dread the night,” Gregor told the roof above his head. “Once it arrives, it never seems to end. The darkness can become suffocating in its power to isolate, to smother hope, to increase aloneness. The person thinks, ‘How long before I get up? The night drags on, and I toss till dawn.’ Those are the words of Job, my old friend. He knew, and he said it well.
“Yet in the midst of this intense suffering, God’s people have recourses that others do not have. In the thirty-sixth chapter of Job, the sufferer says to me and to all who know pain, ‘But those who suffer, he delivers in their suffering; he speaks to them in their affliction.’ Do you see, my dear Alexander? God comes to us in the midst of our pain. He promises to be there, to live through it with us. His presence is very real and very personal in such times.”
He turned to Jeffrey. “Would you be so kind as to take the Bible from the shelf there and read from the first chapter of Second Corinthians?”
“Sure.”
“Thank you so much. Begin with the second half of verse eight, would you, and read through verse ten.”
Jeffrey fumbled with the unfamiliar pages, eventually found the spot, read:
“We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired even of life. Indeed, in our hearts we felt the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead. He has delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will continue to deliver us.”
“In life or in death,” Gregor said, “we are in God’s strong hands.”
CHAPTER 25
“Nova Huta was considered a Communist masterpiece,” Katya told him the next morning as they drove toward their final appointment. “It was Poland’s first planned city, built to staff the largest steel plant in the world, the Lenin Steel Works.”
The driver turned off the main thoroughfare onto streets that were clearly not meant for cars. They were little more than broad sidewalks, about twelve feet wide. Graveled sections had been added at irregular points where cars could be pulled off and parked. Kerchiefed old women crammed together on a small front stoop and watched the car pass with grim suspicion.
“At the turn of the century, Cracow was once considered one of the jewels of Europe. Beginning in the year 900, it was the capital of one of the largest European kingdoms. It housed the third oldest university in the world. It had been Eastern Europe’s center of intellectual thought and scientific exploration for over five centuries. But the Communists feared Cracow as a breeding ground for dissension, and worked to destroy its preeminent position. They decided the best way to do this was to change it from a center of intellectual growth into a worker’s city.”
The three-story houses looked like dark gray barracks. They stood in endless rows beneath tall birch trees, stretching out in every direction as far as Jeffrey could see. Their uniformity was jarringly oppressive, at direct odds to the summertime green.
“So the Communists chose a forest preserve outside of Cracow for the new factory, and razed it to the ground. Homes for the tens of thousands of steelworkers were built, and slowly the factory itself took form. They constructed the furnaces to burn soft coal, since that was what Poland had the most of, even though it is the most polluting fuel on earth, and extremely inefficient.”
They pulled up in front of a building indistinguishable from its neighbors except for a faded number painted above the front door. The driver stopped the car.
“The result was that soon after the plant opened, it started raining black dust all over Cracow,” Katya continued. “That is why these buildings are this color, Jeffrey. They were originally white. The dust is so thick in wintertime that people have to brush it off their car windows before they can drive. Nowadays rain here is so acidic that it is killing all the trees in Cracow and eating away at buildings that have survived almost a thousand years.”
They walked up the cracked sidewalk, pushed their way through the front door, and followed Gregor’s instructions to the second floor. The woman who opened the door was not extremely old—Jeffrey would have guessed no more than sixty. But unseen winds and burdens of a hard life had aged her. Her walk was labored, her hands palsied, her eyes weak and watery behind thick lenses. She led them into her sitting room, walking on legs that seemed to battle against her, forcing to throw her body around with each step. But the pain did not slow her down; she fought against her body with stubborn determination.
She seated them on her sofa, asked if they would take tea, and disappeared into the kitchen alcove. Her voice drifted out.
“She asked what we think of Nova Huta,” Katya said.
Jeffrey hesitated, decided on the truth. “It’s not as bad as the high-rises. But I’d imagine all these black buildings look like something out of a nightmare in the wintertime.”
Katya turned and translated to the hidden woman. They were rewarded with a brief chuckle. “She says you are correct,” Katya told him.
The woman reappeared, wiping her hands on the little apron tied to her waist. “After the war,” the woman told them through Katya, “when you finished your studies the central government gave you a paper called a Work Directive. This paper told you where you would work, what you would do, and which place you would live.”
The woman pulled a straight-backed chair f
rom the narrow dining table, turned it around, and eased herself down. With a deliberate motion she wiped one edge of her mouth with an unsteady hand. “You were expected to work and live in this place for the rest of your life.
“Nova Huta was a new development then. It was one of the few places where new housing was going up. New housing meant electricity and indoor plumbing, a toilet for every family, and heat. My husband and I were sent here.
“There were problems. There are always problems. My husband managed a tobacco factory which was next door to the steelworks. We both came from good Warsaw families. All of the other people around here were steelworkers. They wore overalls and helmets and had steel smut on their faces all the time. When we arrived, we were the only people in the entire area with a university education. I cannot tell you how alone it made us feel.
“But you learn not to think about happiness, or wishing you had a different job or a better place to live, or neighbors who could be your friends. You just get on. You survive. You protect yourself. You find something to live for. A purpose. A profession. Something. For me, it was my family and my God.”
The teakettle began whistling; with visible effort she pushed herself from her chair and clumped into her little kitchen alcove. She continued to talk, her reedy voice holding an emotionless quality. “In the late forties,” Katya translated, “many, many families in Poland began receiving Work Directives, notices that they were to be transported to Siberia. They had twenty-four hours to put their lives in order. They could take twenty kilos of luggage. My stepfather was a mining engineer, and one morning he received a directive to report to a mine in a village that no one could find on the map. He and my mother and my grandmother were sent. My name was not on the list, we learned later, because my birth records had been lost. Otherwise I would have been shipped off as well. My mother took me to my godmother’s house, where I lived and waited for my parents to return.
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