by Ben Pastor
“From his concerto in A minor.”
“You have a gift.” Nowotny nodded with his head towards the sink, for Bora to wash up. “I can tell piano hands when I see them. You have a good span, good muscle control. I’d give my left hand to play Schumann the way you do - but then I wouldn’t turn out to be much of a pianist, would I?”
Bora dried his hands before buckling his belt. After a knock on the door, a nurse peered in with the mottled images of the X-rays in hand. Nowotny held them against the light for some moments, attentively looking at them. He shook his head afterwards.
“Well! I guess you got close to getting a wound badge after all. Your skull is fractured.” He pointed at a serpentine line on the hindmost quarter of the temporal bone. “There isn’t much we can do about it, save giving you painkillers for the time it starts hurting in earnest.” He handed Bora a small bottle. “Call me if you need more than this to sleep at night. Otherwise come back a week on Friday and we’ll have the stitches out.”
At Bora’s entrance that evening, Retz stared.
“What the hell?…” He averted his face from Bora’s bloody uniform, and wouldn’t let him finish explaining. “Take it off, take it off! It looks awful, take the damn thing off!”
He heard Bora walk to the bathroom and turn on the water in the sink.
“Wash the sink after you’re done!” he cried out after him. “I hate the fucking sight of blood, and don’t want it there while I shave!”
Bora changed before joining the major in the living room. He now noticed that there were flowers in a vase, and a bottle of wine on ice.
“That’s better,” Retz said. “Do you remember what day of the week this is?”
“Yes, I know. I’ll stay out until late, Major.” Bora was beginning to have an atrocious headache, but added nothing to what he had said. He sat in the armchair and rested his shoulders against the padded back of it. When he closed his eyes, fragmentary images of the incident down the street from the convent flashed before him. A meat-chewing animal seemed to eat in spasms at the right of his head.
Retz wouldn’t look at him. “Well, you obviously expect to be asked. What’s happened to you?”
Bora told him.
“You don’t say! What did we do about it?”
“The SD shot five men against the wall of the Jesuit church.”
“Well, thank God for the SD.”
Bora opened his eyes. Major Retz was turning the bottle inside the ice bucket. “Schloss Vollrads, 1935 vintage. She’s worth it.”
Making leverage on the back of the armchair, Bora turned to leave the room. He was groggy with blood loss and beginning to feel nauseous. Retz’s impatient glance at his watch didn’t help. “I’ll be out of here in a moment, Major,” he said. “Just the time to wash my face in cold water one more time and figure out where I’m going to spend seven hours.”
“You should have thought about it earlier!”
“Yes, Major.”
Five minutes later, Retz hammered with his fist on the bathroom door. “What the hell are you doing, Bora? Are you throwing up in my damn bathroom?”
Bora was too sick to talk back. He held on to the rim of the toilet bowl with both hands, and his icy, clammy forehead on them.
“Hurry up, and wipe it clean afterwards!”
Bora had to give in to another heave of sputum before shakily lifting his head to answer the insistent hammering.
“Goddamn it, Major - will you let me vomit in peace?”
The wire from the Vatican, signed by the Secretary of State, instructed Malecki to remain in Cracow until further notice, and collaborate with any official investigation into the abbess’s death.
Father Malecki lit himself a cigarette. It was a German brand he’d obtained through the landlady’s son, a pale yellow five-count pack marked Sondermischung, with an Army seal. Collaborate with the investigation. It was more easily said than done. In the confusion following the incident he’d been unable to determine if Polish authorities would be involved in the case. German cars were cordoning off the convent when he’d arrived for vespers on Monday, and although he’d seen neither Hofer nor Bora he’d been told by Sister Irenka that they were inside.
She’d expounded on the tragedy at length. “The colonel’s in a terrible state,” she’d added. “He passed out in the waiting room and the young captain had to all but lift him off the floor. We’re terrified at the thought that we’ll be blamed for his getting sick, as if losing the abbess weren’t enough!”
Five days later, Malecki knew no more about it, and they hadn’t been able to assist him at the Curia or at the consulate either. The news had been kept from the local press, but was starting to circulate by word of mouth. He worried about the notebooks on Mother Kazimierza he’d left in the library of the convent; they were written in English, of course, but Bora spoke it like a native.
And Mother Kazimierza, Mother Kazimierza - killed by gunfire in the enclosure of her own cloister! There was something more terrible than just death in this. Hardfaced, Malecki rested the cigarette on the edge of the window sill. Murder. It was murder, naturally. He shook his head in anger. What’s natural about murder? And would the Germans - biased, heartless killers in their own right - be the ones to investigate this murder?
Without eating his food, Bora sat at the table in the smoke-filled restaurant as long as he could, and then walked out, up the stairs to the street level.
The fresh air of the night was actually edging towards the cold of winter. It’d be raining and sleeting soon, he could smell it in the air. The temperature and grey skies of Cracow were much like Leipzig. It’d soon sleet in Leipzig, too. There were no stars out, or else they were cancelled by the glare of street lights.
Laughter and voices loudly speaking German came from the restaurant behind him like from some happy nether region. Bora stood on the sidewalk breathing the night air as one drinks water.
He doubted he could drive himself home. His head pounded with blinding intensity, but it was mostly the medication Nowotny had given him that lowered his alertness. The phosphorescent hands of his wristwatch indicated only eleven o’clock. Christ, he thought, that was all - eleven o’clock. He had no idea what he’d do for the next four hours.
Against his better sense, he got in the car and drove out of the Old City, straight past the river. It was his intention to go to Wieliczka, but he missed the left turn and found himself well on his way to the mountain resort of Zakopane before an army patrol halted him at a roadblock. Bora didn’t argue with the soldiers’ reasons for stopping him. He backed up the car to the shoulder of the road, and turned the motor off.
The soldiers were a little surprised that an officer would choose this place to sleep off a hangover, but wouldn’t do more than wonder.
29 October
Jewish forced labour were washing the side of the Jesuit church when Malecki passed by the next morning, bound for mass at the convent. This church and the larger complex of the convent stood at the two ends of the same narrow street, as if to bless its length.
With brushes and buckets steaming in the cold air, old men with armbands scrubbed the bloodstains of yesterday’s execution from the tender pastel colour of the stucco wall. Soapy, reddish trickles of water already ran off the basalt kerb of the sidewalk into the drain. SD soldiers stood guard. Malecki thought they’d ask him for papers, and went as far as getting them out of his wallet. They didn’t ask, but with a tight heart he walked past the silent work detail.
Novices were singing in the small chapel when he arrived at the convent. Their high-pitched, thin voices travelled the vaulted spaces of hallways and rooms like ghosts of sound.
The nuns flocked to him. They told him they’d heard the shots of the improvised firing squad and had feared for him.
“No, no, I was in church,” Malecki reassured them. He followed Sister Irenka to the room where the coffin was still laid, and asked to be left alone to pray.
At the same time, a
cross town, Bora turned the key in the lock, opened the door and listened for noises from the interior of the apartment. The radio blared some inane little song that went, Nur du, nur du, nur du. Noise of rushing water in the bathroom meant the shower was on. The door to Retz’s bedroom was ajar, but the shutters in it were still folded.
Without moving from the vestibule, Bora tried to sense if anyone else was in the apartment with Retz. His head had considerably cleared overnight, and other than that he was sore for having uncomfortably slept in the car, he felt rather well. He sniffed the air, as if he could tell the presence of a woman by it. Ewa Kowalska would have to have worn a pint of perfume for him to detect it through the smell of stale smoke. The rush of water stopped.
Bora closed the door noisily, and at once Retz’s voice came from the bathroom. “Is it you, Bora? What kept you so long?”
A surge of anger went through Bora, so that the pain in his temple awoke and startled him. “I’d like to take a bath when you’re done, Major.”
The gurgle of the bathtub drain preceded Retz’s coming out of the bathroom. Stark naked, he was pink-bodied and thick around the waist, with much blondish hair on his chest and groin. He was vigorously rubbing his head with a towel.
“You’ll have to wait a couple of hours, I’ve just finished the last of the hot water.”
Cursing under his breath, Bora walked to the living room, where the ice bucket was filled with water and the bottle beside it sat empty among glasses on the coffee table. Cushions had been bunched on one side of the sofa; on the other, a wet bath towel lay twisted, and was darkening with moisture the fabric below. Retz’s boots, his breeches and shorts formed a trail on the floor between the table and the door. On the gramophone cabinet, a record was still on the turntable, but the radio was no longer blaring, Nur du.
Bora waited until Retz poured himself a brandy and went to dress, before picking up the towel with two fingers. Stepping towards the window to open it, he knocked over one more drinking glass with his foot, and heard it circle around itself on the floor. As morning light poured in through the wide-open panes, he stooped to pick up the glass, closely inspected it for breakage, leaned over and threw it in the street below.
30 October
When Lieutenant Colonel Schenck came to see him privately after lunch, Hofer knew already that he had been replaced in his job. He harboured no resentment towards the wiry, youthful Schenck, and made it clear from the start.
“So, you’re my successor,” he mildly addressed him. “It was a good choice, I heard of your record.”
Schenck was polite. He wouldn’t sit down, wouldn’t discuss Hofer’s breakdown, but did say he’d come to talk over the death at the convent.
“As you know, we successfully kept the local police from the case. You understand we needn’t add to the complications of military rule by allowing a religious hysteria to build up around this.” He said the words with eyes averted, not wanting to give Hofer the impression that he was speaking about him, though Hofer understood it anyway. “Frankly, my first impulse was to sandbag the entire incident, but I realize this is a hard-line Catholic country, and General Blaskowitz advises that we make an effort to show concern. It is out of the question to allow Polish authorities to delve into this, all the more since we do not know which direction the inquiry might take - who the culprit was.” Schenck extracted a personnel folder from his portfolio. “You have a young officer under your command, new to Intelligence but well-schooled, with a brilliant record in combat so far, and a little too gifted to be used just to lead a company over a trench.” Schenck handed the file to Hofer, who nodded in acknowledgement of the contents. “Personally, I like the fact that he struck the Adelsprädikat from his name. We needn’t be reminded of titles or ancestral privileges in a modern army. I intend to assign the case to him, and unless you know details about his nature that would make him unfit for the job, he’ll start working at it as of tomorrow.”
Hofer gave back the folder. “I have no objections. I’d probably have done the same. I only hope you will not take him altogether away from the field.”
“Oh, no.” Schenck straightened to his full skinny length, smiling. “Young mules do best with heavy loads.”
A few streets away, Kasia laughed too much to keep the eye pencil straight, and smudged the thin arch of her left brow. “And he’s gained weight, too?”
Ewa Kowalska embraced her shoulders. She threw a critical look at the mirror, although the diffused light in the back of the dressing room made her face look taut and attractive.
“He’s still a good lover, if he doesn’t drink too much.”
Kasia’s eyes met hers. After unscrewing the top of a rather worn stick of lip rouge, she rubbed her forefinger on it and then dabbed her cheekbones with it, sucking in her lips in to mark the blush zone. “It’s easy to laugh, but I almost envy you. German officers make good money.”
“Money has nothing to do with it.”
“Then what does, nostalgia?”
Ewa shrugged, without letting go of her shoulders. “I don’t know. Power.”
“Power?”
“There’s power in it - in getting a man back.”
“Is he married?”
“Yes. No children, but he’s married. His wife’s a sow.”
Kasia laughed again. “Did he tell you that, or did you see a picture of her?”
“Neither. But I’m sure she’s just a sow. Most women are stupid sows.”
“Well, Ewusia! Where does that leave me?”
Ewa came up to Kasia’s chair and embraced her. “Not you, darling. But you know that most of them are.”
1 November
Father Malecki didn’t say what first came to his mind. He looked at Bora standing at the other end of the convent waiting room, and had to make an effort not to bring up the issue of the torn missals.
Bora was leafing through a loosely bound typescript, but his eyes were on the American priest. There was a stern, challenging look on his face, unless of course it was a form of defensiveness.
“I was assigned to this investigation, Father Malecki. I didn’t ask for it.”
“Oh, I understand that.”
Because the priest’s eyes stayed on the document, Bora made a point of continuing to scan each page quickly. “Some utterances of the holy abbess were politically significant.”
Malecki kept a straight face. Today Poland had been officially incorporated into the Reich, and he had to be prudent. He was especially careful not to stare at the sutured wound on Bora’s head. “Their interpretation was, anything can be made of oracular responses.”
“I’d say that ‘Cross-marked flags from the West’ identifies us rather clearly, Father. What amazes me is that she referred to ‘The Round City and the Ram’ as leaders of the flags. Our army commanders are in fact von Rundstedt and Bock. It’s remarkable that she said this as far back as a year ago.”
“Well, I see that the good sisters have given you my notes. What do you think of them?”
“Technically, that your typewriter has a defective ‘R’. You have consistently tried to avoid words with ‘R’ whenever possible: ‘Might’ instead of ‘power’, ‘benevolence’ instead of ‘charity’ or ‘mercy’. From the theological viewpoint, I would not hazard comments-I don’t know enough about mysticism. Judging by your scepticism, though, I’d say you attended a Jesuit university. Wasn’t it St Ignatius who said, ‘No novelties’?”
Malecki grinned in spite of himself. Sunken in his broad face, the bright blue eyes revealed the quick labour of his mind. “I did attend Loyola University, and I am a Jesuit.”
Bora didn’t smile back. “I had some Jesuit teachers, but you know us Germans - our Catholicism has a monkish bent. And I’m not much for compromises, even though I can relate to the obedience and discipline of a ‘soldier of Christ’.”
“Well, that’s that. What will you do now?”
By a questioning gesture of his head Bora asked for permission to
take along the typescripts. Since he was already placing them in his briefcase, Malecki could only nod in acceptance. “I have to go back to work now. If you care to walk me out, Father, I’ll ask you a few questions.”
2 November
Doctor Nowotny didn’t expect Bora back so soon. He asked him how the wound was coming along, and lectured him when he heard of the nausea.
“You should have called me at once about that. Don’t you know that vomit can be a very serious sign after a head injury? It could have been the build up of intracranial pressure.”
“Obviously it wasn’t, Colonel. The reason why I’m here has nothing to do with my head.” Bora spoke for perhaps five minutes, during which the physician listened on the edge of his chair, half-intrigued and half-amused. When he could no longer keep the curiosity to himself, he interrupted.
“So, what’s with this sainted nun, other than she’d dead? Do we have the body, at least?”
“No.”
“Well, we’ll need the body.”
Bora had a frustrated look on his face. “It won’t be easy to have it released to us. I tried for the past two days, and got nowhere.”
“How high did you go?”
“I called at the Curia. The archbishop refused even to see me.”
“Well, how high did you go on our side?”
“I’m expecting to hear from General Blaskowitz’s staff this afternoon.”
Nowotny grunted. “Hans Frank is the one you want to go to.”
Bora didn’t answer. He let the issue fall, with a stern setting of lips. Nowotny couldn’t say if the reaction was due to his dispensing with Frank’s title of Governor General, or because Bora didn’t care to follow that avenue; he put a cigarette in his mouth and let it dangle from his lips.
Bora sat with stock-still rigidity. Nowotny smoked Muratti’s. He was now studiously standing the long, flat cigarette box on end at the centre of his desk.