Father Elijah

by Michael D. O'Brien

  He said nothing.

  “You see, I am proud, Father Schäfer, but it is not sweet to my tongue. It is a bitter thing.”

  “Why is it bitter?”

  “I will tell you about that some day. Not now. Not here.”

  “All right. To return to your subject: it seems to me that you are discussing the basic problem of law. In theology, we maintain that social law must be grounded in natural law—the principle: God has written into creation.”

  “I don’t know who or what wrote them there in creation. But I do know that they are there, and I know also that disaster follows upon disaster for any society which ignores those principles. It is that which distresses me. I must speak about that.”

  “You may do more good than you think.”

  She sighed, “I hope so. But I suspect that most human beings aren’t really interested in the truth. They think in a chain of impressions, and they have been fed on pleasing impressions for more than a century. I am disappointed to say that there are numerous signs of impressionism here this week.”

  “And in your second talk?”

  “I will speak on law and conscience.”

  “Have you read the Pope’s encyclical on this subject?”

  “I have. He is obviously a man of outstanding intellect, and a visionary in his own way. There is much in it that I agree with.”

  “But not everything?”

  “Not everything. I am not a believer.”

  “I didn’t know that, though I suspected.”

  “Because of the company I keep? You don’t understand me in the least.”

  “I am sure that is true. But I think I understand you a little better now. I am grateful.”

  “If you come to the second talk, you may be among an audience smaller than your own.”

  “I regret that I will have to miss your talks.”

  “When do you return to Rome?”

  “Early tomorrow.”

  “So, your contribution to the congress is finished?”

  “Yes.”

  “You seem dispassionate about that point.”

  “Do I? I suppose I am. There is much about the proceedings that disturbs me. I will need time to consider many of the things that have been said here.”

  “Including the President’s remarks?”

  “Yes. He appears to have made some kind of departure.”

  “Departure? From what?”

  “The real question is, to what. I think he has taken this opportunity to move to a new level of public activity.”

  “He could hardly be more public than he already is.”

  “I mean another level of revelation, if you will. A kind of epiphany of his vision that has not yet been seen by many.”

  “You mean, of course, his opening speech last night.”

  He nodded.

  “It disturbed you?”

  He looked her straight in the eyes and said, “Didn’t it disturb you?”

  She looked down without replying.

  A minute later she looked up.

  “If you are leaving early tomorrow, there isn’t much time to see the places you knew as a child. You said you would show me. Are you free this afternoon?”

  His heart beat a hard stroke, against his will.

  “I am. Would you like to come with me?”

  She suddenly broke out in an unguarded smile. And Elijah felt a rush of pleasure.

  * * *

  After lunch they took a taxi to the northern end of the ghetto. In the passing streets, there was nothing to indicate that a city within a city had once occupied this area. Nothing cried out, no voices protested the catastrophe that had occurred here. Trees flowered all around them. Children played happily in the public gardens. He did not speak, and she did not attempt to break his silence.

  Standing in front of the marble memorial at the Umschlagplatz, he said, “The Nazis dispatched hundreds of thousands of ghetto Jews from this embarkation point. The rail line began here. It led to Treblinka.”

  “Your family went on the train?”

  “All of them.”

  “Did any survive the war?”

  “None.”

  They went down the street and turned onto Zamenhofa. She took his arm without comment. He felt numb, wondering why the gesture did not move him.

  I am old, he said to himself. The people who look at us, if any, see only a young woman taking an old man for a walk. A niece with her uncle. A daughter with her father.

  At the corner of Mila, he showed her where he had lived as a boy.

  “I lived on the fourth floor, in the apartment block that once stood here”, he said. “But everything was demolished. The Germans blew up the ghetto, building by building.”

  “Nothing remains?”

  “Nothing.”

  Then he remembered the crack in the stones that resembled a horse. He found it and pointed it out to her. During the past few days someone had colored in the shape with white chalk. A child, almost certainly. A child.

  “I was a boy here. I played on this spot. I recall how we used to pretend, my brothers and sisters and I, that the knight who killed the great dragon of Krakow came here after his victory and cut this shape into the stone with the tip of his sword, as a memorial to his brave deed.”

  For the remainder of the afternoon, they went through the Pawiak prison and the Jewish History Institute. At four o’clock, she asked if they could find a café. She needed to sit. She was hungry. He continued to feel the hideous numbness, although beneath it was a growing tension.

  At the edge of Old Town, they found a bistro. Anna ate a small meal and drank a glass of wine. He sipped at a cup of coffee.

  “Do you have a family?” he asked her.

  She looked up sharply.

  “I am a widow.”

  “I am sorry. Did you lose your husband recently?”

  “Several years ago.”

  “Is there anyone else?”

  “Two children, both at university.”

  “What are their names?”

  “We should talk about my life another time. This day is for you. I want to know about your past.”

  “There isn’t much to see”, he apologized.

  “There is a great deal to see.”

  “It’s all in the memory, you know. When my generation is gone, it will become entirely a page in a history book.”

  “Do you think so? I think the world won’t forget. Warsaw is a haunted city. So many dead. So many little plaques on every corner commemorating the fallen.”

  “The memorials are admirable. But it’s not the same.”

  “The same as what?”

  “It’s not the same as growing old with the living. Millions of stories were not passed down to the next generation. The next generation perished. We few who survived grew old when we were still children.”

  She watched his eyes for some time. Eventually, she ventured: “No doubt it’s the lawyer in me, Father, but I sense that there is more—something you are not telling me.”

  “If I were to begin to discuss the more, it would take forever.”

  “I have time”, she replied quietly.

  “There is a place that is important to me, as important as the site of my home.”

  “Will you take me?” He nodded.

  Minutes later, they entered the side street in Old Town and stood in front of Sophia House.

  “One whole winter I lived there, in that building.”

  He told her the story. When he was finished, she asked him about his protector.

  “His name was Pawel Tarnowski. He was one of the hasidei umot haohm—the ones we called righteous Gentiles. He risked his life to hide me. He fed me with his meager supply of food. He demanded nothing in return.”

  “How extraordinary. What kind of man was he?”

  “A solitary soul. A devout Catholic. A book-lover. This was bookshop then. He published some things, too, before the War.”

  “You are sure he didn’t su
rvive the War?”

  “I am sure.”

  “How did he die?”

  “He was gassed at Oświęcim. Auschwitz.”

  “Tell me, how did it happen? How was he arrested?”

  “We were betrayed. It happened very suddenly; there was no time to think; no time to discuss anything. He gave his life for me.”

  Elijah recounted the last night he had spent in the House of Wisdom.

  “He stood in the way of evil, you see. He stood as a bulwark, and he let the full force of what was intended for me land on himself. He did this for a boy who didn’t value what he believed in; he did it so I would have life.”

  “Why did he do it?”

  “I really don’t know. He was a philosophical sort of man—actually a young man with everything to look forward to—but for him, I think, life was only as good as the principles he lived by. He died as much for that as for me.”

  “Was he a friend?”

  “Yes, a friend, in a way. I was only seventeen. He was as much a friend as a man like that can be to a child.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He was old in a way that I have become old, but in a different way. He had suffered something very difficult, but I never knew what it was. Some grief perhaps, or a lost love. He wrote an interesting little play I stumbled upon a few years ago. It was published in East Germany after the war, by a former officer of the Wehrmacht who had stolen it from him. Pawel lost everything, you see.”

  “Everything except his principles.”

  “That is true. Interestingly, the plagiarist repented toward the end of his life and admitted publicly what he had done. It ruined his not inconsiderable reputation. The book was published recently in Polish, under the name of its real author.”

  “What is the title of the play?”

  “Andrei Rublev. It is an imaginative re-creation of the life of a famous Russian icon painter. Have you heard of it?”

  “No.”

  Elijah sighed, “No, you wouldn’t have. It’s not well known outside of the Polish literary community, where it has a small following. It’s probably not a great work of literature. But he poured his heart into it. It’s about the search for beauty and for love in a fallen world.”

  “A well-examined theme in literature.”

  “The favorite of serious writers.”

  “One might even say, the favorite theme of the human heart.”

  “I suppose that’s true.”

  She pointed to the second floor. “You lived up there?”

  “Above it, on the top floor, hidden in the attic.”

  “Can we go in and look at it?”

  “I saw it a few days ago.”

  “Is it the same?”

  “The Germans destroyed Old Town, but pains have been taken to reconstruct it exactly. It’s the same and not the same.”

  “You are not the same.”

  “That’s certainly part of the difference.”

  “I would like to see it, if I may.”

  “Anna, I would prefer not to go up there today. It was something I had to see alone. It would become something different if I went there with you. I hope you understand.”

  “I understand.”

  He looked up at the blue-black sky above the rooftops.

  “What are you feeling?” she asked.

  “I don’t know how to describe it. Numbness mostly. Regret for the death of a good man. Gratitude. And guilt that I am living because of his sacrifice—the usual conflicts felt by survivors of the Shoah.”

  “Is that all? Nothing more?”

  “I feel—how can I tell you?—I feel that this man whom I barely knew gave me freedom. At the time, I was a child and didn’t really understand what he was giving. And now that I have returned I understand it more.”

  “Isn’t it a curious thing, that you should feel such freedom in the site of your captivity, while you felt such oppression in the Palace of Culture, where every second word is freedom!”

  He looked at the roof of the House of Wisdom and whispered, “Yes. That is it.”

  “It’s late”, she said. “We should return to the hotel.”

  When they arrived back at the lobby of the Marriott she thanked him for the afternoon.

  “I won’t see you again”, he said. “I wish you well in your talks. I will pray for you.”

  “You needn’t pray for me. Just think of me from time to time.”

  They shook hands, and she went up in the elevator.

  The desk clerk waved to him.

  “There are some things for you. A lady left them.”

  There was a note from Smokrev’s nurse, explaining that on the night before his death the count had told her to package up the enclosed items and give them to the priest from Israel.

  Elijah went to his room and sat on the bed. He opened one of the packages and found a battered tin box full of papers covered in handwriting. The other package contained the icon of Saint Michael of the Apocalypse.

  Pawel Tarnowski gives you this gift, the count had said. You cannot refuse it.

  He stared at the gift until the evening sky turned black and the first spring stars appeared.

  He sat at the writing desk and wrote:

  Dear Mr. President,

  A man’s life is a small thing, but he holds it in his hands and gives it to another as the greatest thing in the world. I do not know your plans for the future. I cannot know for certain whether your vision will prove right or gravely mistaken. But I have learned that if one’s gift is not founded on absolute love, it merely contributes to the heap of violated lives that has amassed in our century.

  The One who is my life, and through whom I live, would speak to you, if you would hear Him. He would tell you that no man can save the world, least of all by saving a fallen humanity from itself. There is but one Christ. He, and He alone, is the Savior of the world. And He who was God did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant. And being in human form, He humbled Himself and became obedient unto death.

  With respect,

  Father Elijah Schäfer

  He put the letter in an envelope, addressed it to the President, care of the congress administration at the Palace of Culture. The desk clerk in the lobby promised to see that it was delivered.

  He returned to his room and sat by the window, holding the tin box in one hand and the icon in the other. The darkness in the room increased, and the network of Warsaw’s lights increased until it spread before him like a vast, garishly lit battleground on which dragons and white horses clashed in confused battle.

  He gazed out over the landscape of disaster, unmoving and unmoved. When eventually he pressed the icon against his breast, the numbness within him cracked, and he wept over the city and the world.

  XIV

  Rome

  He slept through most of the flight to Rome and arrived in a rainstorm. The city was suffocating under a muggy blanket of humidity and pollution, but he was relieved to be back.

  There was a note waiting for him in his mail slot at the college. Unsigned, scrawled in the handwriting of the cardinal secretary of state, it read: Can you see the gardener tonight at Severn’s place? We must discuss the spring planting. Phone my apartment to confirm.

  He made the call after supper and the cardinal answered.

  “Buona sera, Signore Giardinière.”

  “Buona sera. You have returned.”

  “Yes. You wish to discuss the spring planting?”

  “Indeed. Tonight at Severa’s? Eight o’clock?”

  “I will see you then.”

  “Are you well?”

  “I’m well, but once again, I believe our project has been frustrated. The parasites in the garden are growing stronger.”

  “I know. It’s all over the papers.”

  “Is it bad?”

  “Very bad. Worse than we could have expected. I will tell you when we meet.”

  Elijah arriv
ed shortly before eight. He went through the funerary chapel, past unlocked doors, and made his way down through the maze until he came to the side gallery. The door was open.

  Elijah stood by the entrance and observed. The cardinal did not at first notice him. He was perched on a camp stool, reading his breviary, squinting in the poor light of a kerosene lantern. On shoulder rested against the wall, the Roman letters P A L V M B A carved in the marble beside his head. He looked older, heavier, hunched, his silver hair slipping across his brow.

  When he looked up, Elijah noted the absence of his usual aplomb.

  “Ah, Father, welcome”, he sighed, rising. They shook hands. “It’s good to see you.”

  “I’m glad to see you too, Eminence.”

  “The veteran returns. You must be weary.”

  “A little. You said that the situation was bad.”

  “Yes. A nasty turn of events to say the least. Look at this!”

  He pointed to a sheaf of newspapers at his feet.

  “Go ahead, take a look. The New York Times, The Manchester Guardian, La Stampa, Figaro. There are others.”

  Elijah saw his own face staring back at him from every front page, von Tilman beaming into the camera, the President between them, arms around their shoulders. Screaming headlines:

  VATICAN SUPPORTS WORLD UNITAS CONFERENCE

  “There will be an article in L’Osservatore Romano clarifying the situation”, said the cardinal. “We will try to correct the misleading impression, but the damage is done. I’m afraid our attempt to bring the Catholic voice into that arena has backfired,”

  “It doesn’t make sense. I was only one of several dozen speaker No more than one percent of the delegates attended my talk. Furthermore, the record of my presentation has been lost—the victim of a technological blunder.”

  “I’m not surprised”, he said, disgusted. “This venture was a piece of opera from start to finish. You were invited there only for the purpose of constructing an artificial media event.” He flicked his finger at the pile of newspapers.