Layman's Report

by Eugene Marten

  She would meet him there after Mass. She wasn’t Catholic. He reminded her to look for batteries and their mouths bumped, closed tight to the wind.

  The basilica was almost as old as the square and named for the Virgin. The entrance was flanked by two towers. One was taller than the other and there were white birds flying around it. At noon a trumpeter would emerge in the belfry and sound his horn, and would do so every hour after. He would not finish, though, because when he’d played it six hundred years ago to warn of the Tartar invasion, he’d been shot in the throat with an arrow just halfway through the song. Fred went inside.

  In the entrance he put his gloves in his hat and dipped his fingers in the baptismal font. The water was cold but it made you new again. Forehead, breast, left shoulder, right. He walked down the long central aisle through the nave, candles on each side, the vaulted blue ceiling lit only by high windows. The only electric light came from the chancel and he found an empty pew as close to it as he could get. He knelt, sat, looked up and ahead, under the sky of stone.

  The altar was fifty feet high and carved of wood and gilded and painted in many colors. In each wing were carved three panels telling three stories, one above the other, but the biggest was in the middle: five apostles marveling at the Assumption of the Virgin into Heaven, the folds of their robes like a turbulent sea in arrest.

  It was cold. When the choir sang the hymn rose in pale mists. The priest was young. All made the Sign. The Greeting, the mass murmur of the response—the clenched crowded sounds of the celebrants were foreign but needed no translation; Fred knew where they were going and followed softly under his breath. The Kyrie, the Gloria, a stout old woman in black smiling through tears. The brief silence in which you could ask of Him what you would, and Fred asked for His blessing as an officer of the Canadian courts, that the truth he sought be disclosed to him in whatever form He saw fit, that He see fit to provide them with toilets that weren’t hopelessly clogged, and he was going to ask that the good people of this country be delivered from the yoke of oppression, amen, but the priest was already praying, collecting their petitions.

  Someone wheezed behind him, struggling for breath as though that too were in short supply. Emphysema, maybe bronchitis; people were not well here. The pew filled with latecomers but Fred didn’t look up till the Rite of Peace. He turned to his right and shook someone’s hand, he turned left and the old woman in black kept smiling and did not see him. The priest took communion, the choir sang. The worshippers filled the aisles in long lines. Fred joined them hastily, looking at his watch—they had a train to catch. He kept looking at it till someone nudged him: your turn. He knelt before the distributing minister and heard Latin.

  “Amen,” he said and put out his tongue.

  Ite, missa est.

  He hurried back to the merchants’ hall with the taste of Christ dissolving in his mouth. She looked frazzled with language but had managed to buy an ashtray, a stack of doilies, batteries for the video camera.

  “Zwotty,” she said phonetically, “zwotty.” She said there was a colored guy talking Polish and this seemed to make up for certain things. “Are you hungry?” she asked. He was but there was no time—they could eat on the train. They went back to the hotel lobby where the draftsman and the interpreter were waiting for them. The interpreter was a tall man pushing seventy in a fleece vest and fisherman’s cap. He was German but born and raised in Lodz, spoke Polish, German, English, French, and Yiddish. Upon the invasion he was arrested by the Poles then liberated by the Nazis, drafted and later shipped to North Africa to serve under Rommel.

  “A good man but uppity,” he told Fred. (And overrated, in his opinion.) His entire unit was captured by the Americans and he spent the remainder of the war in Iowa, working in a cannery with twenty other POWs, opposite an American woman whose name he’d not forgotten. He passed her a note before he was shipped back to Europe, a sheet of paper folded eight times.

  “You didn’t drink the tap water, did you?” He’d already explained that Europeans did not drink tap water.

  They squeezed into a taxi standing outside—taxis were not permitted to cruise here. A stout white box that looked like a refrigerator on wheels and felt like it: the heater was broken. They headed for the depot northeast of the old city. It was a short drive and there was no more Renaissance stone, only the brute ugly lumps of the people’s architecture. The people whose architecture it purported to be were lined up for blocks in the shivering cold, not taking communion but waiting their turn to buy soap, vinegar, tobacco, spyritus.

  “Vodka,” the interpreter interpreted. Ninety-six percent alcohol. Solidarność posters on telephone poles and walls.

  The train left on time. They sat opposite a gray-haired man in a suit reading a newspaper, and a soldier listening to Elvis Presley through headphones. There were soldiers everywhere. The gray-haired man was drinking tea.

  “Where did he get that?” Fred’s wife wondered, and the interpreter leaned forward and spoke.

  “He says he brought it with him,” the interpreter said, and they saw a thermos beside him.

  “Isn’t there a dining car?” Fred said.

  The interpreter leaned forward again. There was a buffet in carriage seven, “full of kettles, and the kettles full of nothing,” the interpreter said, finding a line worth quoting. He and the gray-haired man spoke for a while. They learned there would be a dining room at the hotel, that the gray-haired man was a teacher who made the equivalent of a hundred dollars a month, that it would cost him a month’s pay to keep his three-room flat in coal through the winter. He said the Auschwitz hockey team was in first place, that one of his sons played wing. The other had been run over by a tank during martial law in ‘81.

  “How awful for him,” Fred’s wife said into the cup of her hand. Her stomach growled. The soldier sleeping to “King Creole.”

  There were many stops. The ticket inspector came through. The interpreter dozed and they woke him and he interpreted, rolled a cigarette and smoked it through a wood holder inlaid with tiny gold beads. He’d had it since the war. The draftsman lit his pipe. He sat next to an Australian girl who was traveling alone around the world and said she liked the smell. Snow squalls buffeted the train and they rode past frozen polluted streams, hayfields, the flat plain in exact squares portioned out by some commissar of equity. Greenhouses, outhouses, horsedrawn carts with truck tires, a tractor in a field, driverless. Another old woman in black with a sack on her shoulder.

  The teacher sneezed or said something as they pulled in.

  “What was that?” Fred’s wife said, as if it might have to do with food.

  He recommended they visit the town, time permitting; there was a kosher vodka distillery, a synagogue housing the Jewish Center.

  “Oświęcim,” the teacher said again.

  They took two rooms at the hotel. It smelled like sulfur and gasoline. The desk clerk was a young man with bad teeth and a mustache like Walesa. He gave them their keys and a bottle of water for each room. Then he asked in Polish if they had any bubble gum, but they had chewed all they had on the train.

  “Thankyouverymuch,” he said. Elvis again.

  The rooms bare but clean, beds with iron rails, radiators, wash basins. The bathroom down the hall, and the smell.

  “That smell,” she said.

  “Naphthol,” Fred said. “Kills bugs dead.” But he wasn’t sure where he’d smelled it before.

  They took a late lunch. The dining room looked like a cafeteria but the waiter wore a short-waisted jacket meant to be white. There were no other diners and no menu and only one item being served: sour cream soup with a slice of boiled egg at the bottom of the bowl. A warm carbonated drink that tasted vaguely of apples. They barely finished.

  “Like it already came back up,” the draftsman said and it stayed with them, the taste they would take in their mouths through the gate, under the wrought-iron welcome.

  The interpreter kept nodding off during the meal.
When they’d done he retired to the room he was sharing with the draftsman to take a nap. He suffered from gout and fallen arches, and since there were English-speaking tours and he had been so useful already, they decided to let him rest.

  The hotel had once been the officers’ quarters. It had also been the administration building, reception center for inmates, and a brothel. The adjacent wing was now the Visitor Center. There were restrooms in the basement, but they were still in Poland and women carried half-rolls in their bags. Upstairs was a bookstore, an information desk, a small theater, the exhibit hall. Walls hung with photographs, paintings, drawings, maps. Memento mori. Someone had tethered a desiccated figure to a barbed-wire fence post, the arm crooked at a right angle to form a familiar shape.

  Fred’s wife stared. “Is that supposed to be…?”

  “Work of art,” Fred said.

  “Then what’s it doing here?” the draftsman said, and they went into the theater.

  Fifteen minutes of black-and-white footage the Soviets had shot when they’d liberated the camp. Fur-hatted soldiers escorting Communist political prisoners to a version of freedom, one of them a woman named Olga. The film showed every half hour.

  But the camp was not unpleasant. The barracks made mostly of red brick, the roofs thick with clean blankets of snow. They called them blocks and gave them numbers but there were wide avenues of crushed brick and granite between them, plowed and lined with poplar trees, and except for the sentry boxes and barbed wire it might have been a rustic apartment complex or a summer camp in the off-season. The guide wore a two-piece blue uniform similar to that of the Salvation Army. She took them on a short detour around the back of the kitchen to show them the fence. A sign said HALT STOJ! and the guide explained that the fence had been electrified. She showed them the porcelain insulators connecting the rusty wire to the fence posts that leaned inward, scythelike, at the top, and said inmates had been known to end their misery by walking up to the fence and grabbing it with both hands.

  “‘I’m going to the fence,’” she said they would say, and everyone knew what they meant.

  One of the American students, a tall girl with round glasses, wrote it down in a notebook, a mitten in her mouth.

  “What’s the drop?” Fred said.

  “I’m sorry?” the guide said.

  “Voltage,” he said.

  “This I’m not sure,” the guide said. “Enough to kill you,” she said then, and another of the students suddenly declared he’d had enough of World History II, “I’m going to the fence!” and stepped forward and grabbed the wire, convulsing violently with his head thrown back, mouth and eyes wide open, his performance so credible no one risked laughter till his teacher snatched him away by the back of his coat collar and apologized.

  The guide issued a warning. She had a wide pretty face and thick ankles.

  Block 4. Baby clothes: tiny shoes, dresses, bonnets, sleepers. Schematics and models and canisters of pellets, bolts of cloth and a shirt, said to have been woven of human hair. For sale during the war.

  The barracks were heated.

  “You can smell it,” Fred’s wife said.

  “It’s turning to powder,” the Australian girl said, her voice thick like she was choking on it.

  Some of it was still in braids. The light was dim, they could see themselves in it.

  “It’s all gray,” the kid from the fence said. “I thought it doesn’t age.”

  “Everything ages,” his teacher said.

  “Is evidence of exposure to cyanide gas,” the guide said.

  “Has it been analyzed?” Fred asked.

  “By Forensic Institute in Krakow.” She said it Crackoff and the kid who’d gone to the fence repeated it like a dirty word.

  The girl with the glasses and notebook asked how much, and the guide told her how many.

  “One hundred forty thousand,” she said. She said the Russians found fifteen thousand pounds of it packed in paper bags and the girl wrote it down.

  She asked about skin. Lampshades.

  “Was in Buchenwald,” the guide said.

  Shoes. Half a roomful like a clearinghouse of plunder—men’s, women’s, children’s, unpaired, all time-dyed to the same neutral monochrome but for the scattered flare of red leather. Pyramids of empty luggage, suitcases marked with names as though further use were expected of them. A display of prosthetic limbs like spare parts for artificial life, wooden arms reaching, hands open, legs bent at the knee as if removed in the act of prostration. Striped uniforms, a knot of eyeglasses like a tumbleweed of wire and glass, dentures, hairbrushes, toothbrushes, cans of shoe polish, prayer shawls, wristwatches, gold and silver fillings—mined from corpses en route to the ovens, she said.

  The tall student with the glasses and notebook raised her hand and asked the guide if she belonged to the Communist Party.

  The guide tried to smile. “This is not part of tour.”

  “Would it be the Party’s position,” the student asked anyway, “that what happened here is as much the ultimate product of capitalism as it is the logical outcome of ethnic persecution?” She sounded like she was reading. “Perhaps more so?”

  The guide had blonde hair pulled back in a tight bun. “Party has no official position here,” she said. “It does not concern with logic and production. It is share the opinion of the world, that this was crime against humanity.”

  “What are they talking about?” Fred’s wife whispered.

  “Ideology,” Fred said.

  “Dead is dead,” the draftsman said, and Fred took off his glasses.

  * * *

  He was just finishing when he heard the guide’s voice, dribbled on his shoe and zipped, hurriedly kicked white snow over the yellow.

  “You are lost?” she said.

  “I was just having a…” He stopped, saw it between them and the wire: a big rectangular shape in the ground, metal ladders curving up out of the sides.

  “If it were summer I could take a dip,” Fred said.

  “What is dip?” the guide said.

  He gestured toward the rectangular shape. It was empty but for snow. “I didn’t know there was a swimming pool here.”

  “This is not swimming pool,” the guide said. “Is reservoir for fire brigade.”

  Fred walked to the other end. A tall pedestal with a ladder attached, behind that a shallow basin with drain and fixture as for the cleansing of feet.

  “A reservoir with a diving board?” he said.

  “If it was swimming pool, then for political prisoners only,” she said. Some of the rest of the group was gathering about.

  “Well which is it?” Fred said.

  “Is under study,” the guide said. “By Museum Committee.”

  “What is that?” one of the students said.

  “It looks like a pool,” another one said. The girl with the notebook seemed to be sketching something. Cameras were not allowed.

  “Possible reservoir,” the guide said. “Not part of tour. But while we are here,” she said, and pointed to the double row of tall trees that ran the length of the camp behind the barracks. The wind picked up and two of them leaned into each other as if exchanging a secret.

  The Black Wall was not black, it was gray. Portable. Three joined panels made of logs and covered with cork. Like an altar. There were red and white roses in front of the Black Wall.

  To protect the bricks of the courtyard, the guide said. They’d stood facing it, their backs to the rifles.

  “Can I touch it?” Fred said.

  “To touch is not permit,” the guide said, and asked for a period of silence in memory of the twenty thousand (estimated) inmates who’d stood there. Fred faced the wall, his back to the silence. It did not occur to him to think that this was the last thing you would see before the true and final blackness took you. That you wouldn’t hear the shot that pushed you into it. It occurred to him to say, “Where are the bullet holes?”

  “Is reproduction,” the guide said.
“Not original artifact,” and a snowball flew from somewhere, exploded on the cork.

  The guide said, “Medical experiments.”

  “Why are the windows covered?” the Australian girl asked. Sheets of plywood, also painted black.

  “Symbolic,” the history teacher suggested. A word scrawled on a blackboard.

  “Who’s that?” one of his students asked. She was looking at a display in front of the covered windows, at the photograph of a man in uniform. Dark-haired, aristocratic.

  “Hello,” another girl said. “Can Tom Cruise play him in the movie?”

  “There’s a movie?” Fred’s wife said.

  “Dr. Mengele,” the guide said. “Camp physician. Was call him Angel of Death.” She recounted his experiments: dye injected into the eyeballs of children in an attempt to change brown to blue, amputations and mastectomies performed without anesthetic, subjects exposed to ruinous extremes of temperature, to mustard gas, malaria, typhus, shot in select limbs, wood shavings and ground glass rubbed into the wounds to initiate infections of tetanus and gangrene; an attempt to create Siamese twins by sewing the veins of children together.

  Children were a special interest of his, the guide said. And twins and dwarves and gypsies.

  “Of little or no scientific value,” she said.

  “Can we go inside?” someone asked.

  “Is not possible,” the guide said. “We go to punishment block.”