Father Elijah

by Michael D. O'Brien

  He saw the Vistula bending around the core to the east, and then he knew that if he looked north he would see Muranow district, which had contained the ghetto. Piece by piece he located the original shape in his mind and superimposed it upon the parks and modern buildings. In the northeast he identified the most familiar area of all. The tenement block on Zamenhofa was gone. Only then did he realize that his hands were trembling and that for a very long time he had contained a secret room within his soul. It had always worried him that he had felt no longing to recall the life he had lived. He had assumed that what came afterward was of greater importance, and the past merely a shrouded memory. Of course, he had occasionally recalled the festivals and the prayers, the scoldings and the kisses, and the solemn discussions on philosophy. But these had faded into a theatrical background, vague, unexamined, a tone, an atmosphere, a world that had drifted away steadily as his life assumed an entirely different shape and name. On occasion, he had been pierced by split-seconds of longing for the beloved faces, or for the dirty gray apartment block and the three rooms on the fourth floor that had been his home. But never had it come to him as now that an entire portion of his existence had been cleaved from his consciousness. That he was a Christian, and a Christian priest, was beyond questioning. It was his life, his joy, and the fulfillment of all that was authentic within his character. Yet, there had been a keystone missing from the structure. He had been a child once. A Jew. Everything from that former existence had been demolished, and yet it had remained within him, dormant, still alive. He had sealed it away. Now the door was opening.

  He said Mass on the desk facing the north window. The portable Mass kit had been given to him by a German bishop on the day of his ordination many years ago.

  “This chalice, this paten, these candlesticks were made secretly in Dachau by a German priest”, said the bishop. “He died for the faith you have embraced. It is my greatest treasure. I ask you to accept it.”

  Elijah had taken the gift numbly, understanding the symbolism of the gesture, grateful for the meaning of it, but largely unmoved. Why had he been unmoved by it? He had corresponded with the bishop for many years, and they had become friends. But the small, remote zone of numbness had remained, had eluded explanation. Forgiveness? Yes, long ago he had forgiven everything. Perhaps it was simply a matter of failing to grieve. He had hated and later forgiven. But had he simply grieved to the very depth of his soul?

  After Communion, he sat in the light streaming through the window and felt the heat of the Presence within himself. He worshipped and embraced It. He rested against the Heart that beat within his own heart. The sense of disorientation and anguish diminished, and peace gradually filled his being. He looked out at the place where the ghetto had been and prayed for the hundreds of thousands of souls who had suffered there. Flocks of birds flew past the window in sprays of white and gold, red and black.

  He prayed for the souls of his family. When he had completed the final words of the liturgy, he prayed in Hebrew the kaddish, the prayer for the dead.

  * * *

  After lunching in his room, he went down to the lobby. The desk clerk signaled to him and handed him an envelope. It contained a message from the President’s appointment secretary, inviting him to the opening reception of the International Conference, to be held at the Palace of Culture and Science, at seven in the evening, four days hence. The commencement address would be delivered by the President. Would Professor Schäfer please join the President and his party for dinner beforehand at the Canaletto in the Hotel Victoria Intercontinental, five o’clock? R.S.V.P. There was a stamped reply envelope, which Elijah filled in and posted in the lobby mail box.

  He strolled out onto Jerozolimiski and was hit by a wave of heat. The sun was high over the city, the air was humid and noisy, but filled with the fragrance emanating from the flower stalls along the avenue. He walked east for ten minutes, fending off gypsies who wanted to read his palm, vendors who offered him tin cups of woda gazowa, and young, healthy, well-dressed beggars. He crossed over at Marszalkowska and went north toward the ghetto’s east side. A half-hour’s stroll brought him to Nowolipki. He turned left, went one block, and turned right onto Zamenhofa. He continued north a few blocks, as far as the corner of Mila.

  He stood and looked at the place where his apartment should have been. The buildings were completely different. New trees grew there. Children played on the sidewalk. If he squinted his eyes, there would be nothing different about them, except that they did not have skullcaps or earlocks or the tassels of the tallis-kot’n showing beneath their garments. They were dressed like modern children everywhere. Cars rushed up and down the street. A teenage boy went past strumming a guitar. Old ladies sat smoking cigarettes on the front steps of a Soviet-style tenement.

  “Are you lost, Father?” called one.

  “No”, he replied. “Can you tell me, Pani,” he said in Polish, “are all the street numbers the same as they were before the war?”

  “Eh?” said one, looking at the other. “I don’t know. We didn’t live here then.”

  “I’m looking for 112. I used to live there as a boy.”

  They looked him up and down.

  “The Jews used to live here. You are a Catholic.”

  “I am a Catholic. And a Jew.”

  The women looked perplexed and turned away, ignoring him.

  He walked slowly up the sidewalk. The street seemed much narrower than he remembered it. There was more light. More trees. Approximately halfway up the first block north of Nowolipki, on the left. Yes, yes, surely this was the place. Rows of new buildings had replaced the tenements that had once lined this section. He looked down at the pavement and found a patch of cobblestone. Yes, there was the cracked stone that resembled a horse’s head.

  “I played here”, he said. “My feet touched these stones. . .”

  He did not stay long. He continued to walk aimlessly through the maze of avenues, courtyards, and alleys. Eventually, he found himself leaving Muranow and moving toward the waters of the Vistula. He did not know where he was going, nor where he wanted to go. The thought of returning to the lush sterility of the hotel did not attract him. He thought perhaps that he might see the river. He passed the corner of Nalewki where he had escaped from the ghetto by squeezing past a cart that was going through the gate with a load of brushes. They shot at him—there. He stopped and stared at the spot. Yes, there.

  He ran from them. He was hungry and extremely weak, but in a final burst of desperation he galloped away from the whistles and the ugly German shouts, Halt! Halt! The tallis flew out behind him, and his feet were soaked in the slush from the cold rain. He heard the whiz and ping of bullets.

  Going by intuition more than memory, Elijah now retraced the route of his terrified flight. He walked slowly toward Old Town. More than fifty years had elapsed. Yet he saw the boy fling himself down the streets with two big soldiers clomping hard on his heels; he heard with his own ears the pounding of his heart, felt the aching of his throat and the wailing of wind in and out of his lungs. Tearing in and out. In and out. This way three blocks, then right into the old quarter, left into an alley, right, left, double-back, a courtyard. A dead end. Despair. The approach of death. He hid in the alcove of an entrance. The jelly of his legs collapsed, and he fell backward into the bookshop of Pawel Tarnowski.

  Father Elijah’s interior compass did not fail him and within fifteen minutes he was standing in the courtyard, staring at the day’s second resurrection.

  The lime tree was gone. The buildings appeared much the same although many of the finer details had changed. The frame of the shop window was painted bright yellow, not green. The door was new. The gold letters of Sophia House were gone, replaced by a gaudy sign advertising Galician folk art. In the window were brightly colored boxes, wooden dolls, tapestries, cheap icon prints laminated on wood.

  He went in. A bell on the door jingled, but the shop remained unattended for some minutes. He stood staring at
the interior, astonished that it was completely transformed yet mysteriously familiar. The windows and the doors were situated where they had always been. The lighting was modern. He knew that behind that curtain there was a staircase leading to the apartment on the floor above, and that it would have a ceiling of ornamental stucco, and that inside a bedroom closet there was a secret staircase to the attic, and that in the wood-paneled attic there could be stacks of boxes, a window to the roof and a burst of memory that might be unbearable.

  “Can I help you?”

  A young woman had come out from behind the curtain. She was heavily made up and wore her hair spiked like an American rock star.

  “No, thank you, Pani. I merely wish to look, if you don’t mind.”

  “To look is cheap. Look your fill.” But she did not seem happy about it. He smelled hot sausage, frying onions, and boiling cabbage. A television was screeching hysterical cartoon plots in the back room, and two young children were squabbling about changing the channel.

  The woman stood watching him with a bored expression.

  “You looking for a souvenir? A gift for somebody?”

  “I used to live here”, he explained. “When I was a boy. During the war.”

  “Oh, the war. Before my time.”

  He pointed to the ceiling.

  “I lived up there.”

  “All that’s been locked up since I came. Nobody ever goes there. Maybe it’s empty. Maybe it’s got treasure”, she chuckled. “The landlord has the key.”

  “This was once a bookshop. The man who owned it, his name was Pawel Tarnowski. Have you heard of him?”

  She shook her head.

  “I don’t know him.”

  “Do you know what became of him?”

  She shook her head again and looked toward the back room. She shouted at the children to turn down the volume of the television.

  “Maybe the landlord knows”, she shrugged.

  “Can you give me his name?”

  “Why not? Everyone knows him. He’s owned this place since the war. He was a communist. Of course, nobody’s a communist any more. Right? Old Boleslaw always lands on his feet. He’s a capitalist now. An aristocrat.” She laughed with a mouth full of rotten teeth.

  She wrote the name and address on a scrap of paper and handed it to him.

  “There you go. Watch yourself. He’s a snake. But don’t tell him I said so. Wait! On the other hand, please tell him I said so!” She opened her mouth wide again, but Elijah did not stay long enough to hear the laugh.

  He found the address, south of New Town, in a quiet, tree-lined street of fashionable apartments overlooking the Vistula. The landlord’s suite was on the fifth floor, the top. A brass plate on the door said, Boleslaw Smokrev, Broker, Dealer in Antiquities, Assessments, Estates.

  A hard-looking man in his thirties answered. He gave Elijah’s religious habit a sharp look.

  “Yes?”

  “I wish to speak with Pan Smokrev, please.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I am Father Elijah Schäfer, a visitor to Warsaw. I wish to meet him.”

  “For what purpose? You want to buy or sell some items of significance?”

  “No. It is a personal matter.”

  “The count is ill. He can’t see anyone.”

  “My regrets. May I leave a message for him?”

  The man nodded curtly.

  Elijah wrote his name on the back of a piece of paper, the name of his hotel, and the message: Regarding Pawel Tarnowski.

  “I will give it to him when he wakes. If it is a matter to which Pan Smokrev can respond, you will be contacted shortly. If it is a matter that he can’t be troubled with, you won’t hear from him, and you won’t call again, please.”

  “I see. Thank you. Good-day.”

  The man did not return the greeting. He closed the door.

  Elijah returned to his hotel on foot. He had walked several miles and arrived quite exhausted. He slept until early evening when room service knocked and brought him coffee. On the tray was an envelope.

  The note said: Come tomorrow, 9 A.M., B. Smokrev.

  The handwriting was shaky, blue ink on thick card stock, tinted mauve.

  The sky had opened its dams the following morning, and the streets-were awash with heavy runoff. The smash and patter of the rain was a delight to his ear. The heat gradually lifted. Shortly before nine o’clock, he managed to hail a taxi. Minutes later he was riding up an antique brass elevator to Smokrev’s apartment. The same hard-faced young man opened the door and beckoned him in.

  The suite was spacious, carpeted with oriental rugs, and appointed with antique furniture of the heaviest, most oppressive kind. The walls were covered with paintings from various periods. The atmosphere was one of opulent gloom.

  “This way”, said the man. He led him down a long hallway and into a bedroom. They were met by a uniformed nurse who conducted them into a second bedroom connected to the first by a glass double-door. There, on a four-poster covered with red silk, lay a wizened man. He fingered a remote control in his hand and a miniature Japanese television at his elbow flicked off. The old man was covered with brown spots, and his pale eyes leaked a stream of yellow fluid. His expression was sardonic, his glance guarded.

  “Count Smokrev,” said the manservant, “this is the one who left the message.”

  “Ah, yes”, said a small croaked voice. “You wish to purchase my icon collection. You’re the art expert the cardinal said he would send. You tell that wicked fellow he will not cajole me out of what’s rightfully mine. I bought my collection legitimately, and I did not (here the old man roared with an amazing volume), did not, confiscate them from churches. You tell him that if he continues to spread those slanderous rumors, I am seriously going to consider a legal suit against him—and his entire Church. The Church in Poland will reel for decades from the shock! If he wants my icons, he must pay, just as everyone else does!”

  “Count Smokrev, I have not come from the cardinal. I come as a private individual. I am from Israel.”

  “Israel, eh?” he said suspiciously. “Why do you want to see me?”

  “I am the man who left the message about Pawel Tarnowski.”

  “What do I have to do with him, eh?”

  “During the war he was a resident of a property now owned by you in Old Town.”

  The manservant whispered in Smokrev’s ears, and the old man grunted.

  “Yes, yes, now I remember. You left a note yesterday”, he groaned. “An elderly person isn’t permitted to rest.”

  “May we talk together? It is a matter of great importance to me.”

  “Leave us”, he said to the manservant and the nurse. They went out and closed the glass doors, but the nurse sat on a lounge chair within sight and bent her head over some embroidery.

  “I don’t know anyone by the name of Tarnowski. Was he from Tarnow?” he cackled.

  “No. From Warsaw. He was a bookseller.”

  “I knew no booksellers. My circles were entirely different. The intelligentsia.”

  “He also published books before the war. I suppose that’s a kind of intelligentsia. He also wrote a play that was published in Germany after the war. It came out under a false name. It was later republished in German under the name of its true author. It appeared for the first time in Polish only after the fall of the communists.”

  “What is your interest in him?”

  “I knew him.”

  “So?”

  “He helped me.”

  “What is that to me?”

  “He saved my life.”

  “How did he save your life?”

  “He hid me.”

  “You were with the underground?”

  “No.”

  “A Jew?”

  “Yes.”

  Smokrev cackled again.

  “A Jew! A Jew! In a priest’s costume! How delicious! Always a delight to meet a traitor to his race!”

  Elijah remained sil
ent.

  “A betrayer of his faith!”

  Smokrev calmed himself down, and when the cackling had ceased, and he had wiped his eyes, he snapped, “I repeat—what do you want of me?”

  “I see that you know nothing of my benefactor, sir. But it would be a great kindness if you would permit me to visit the premises now owned by you in Old Town.”

  “The little shop where that hag sells imitation folk-art to the Americans?”

  “The little shop, yes. Above it is the apartment and the attic where I lived. It would mean a great deal to me.”

  “Why should I do you a favor? Who has ever done me favors?”

  “I beg you, sir.”

  “He begs me”, snorted Smokrev.

  Elijah’s heart sank.

  “He begs me”, muttered the old man.

  Elijah stood, bid him good-day, and left.

  * * *

  He woke at seven the following morning. He said Mass at the window overlooking the city, prayed for the victims, prayed for wily survivors like Smokrev, and for the success of the papal mission. He experienced a period of consolation after Communion, a touch from the Lord that reassured him. Still, he felt a lingering sadness that he had discovered no more about the destiny of Pawel Tarnowski. He spent the morning reading through the Apocalypse and praying for the success of his meeting with the President. The day after tomorrow he would face the lion, if indeed the President was such a beast.

  After lunch, a hotel boy brought a mauve envelope to the door. Inside was a black key and a message.

  Dear Tourist from Israel.

  Go, look inside the empty box of your past. Then do me the favor of reporting to me what you see.

  Smokrev.

  When he entered the shop, the woman looked up from the newspaper she had been reading, a rope of red licorice dangling from her lips.

  “You’re back”, she said irritably.

  “Count Smokrev has given me permission to see—”

  “I know, I know”, she grumbled. “The old snake’s toady phoned this morning. Well, come this way.”