Lumen

by Ben Pastor

  “He mustn’t, if you didn’t know he’d be gone today.”

  “We don’t work in the same office.” She is jealous of Retz, and hopes I will tell on him, Bora thought. He took another sip of wine. It was cellar-cool and it wetted his tongue pleasurably. “I work in Intelligence.”

  Ewa touched the napkin around her lips. In the unkind glare of day she knew that fairness of skin, hair, eyes didn’t make her look younger.

  Bora put down his glass. His statement seemed not to have surprised her, or else she drew on her acting ability not to show surprise. He realized he was callously staring at her and made no effort to remove his attention.

  Ewa was not deceived by it.

  5

  1 December

  A blustery wind was blowing from the west when Bora arrived at the army compound outside Tarnów, where Polish army prisoners were kept. Most of their officers spoke French, so he told Hannes he would not need him for the time being.

  “As far as I can tell,” the camp commander mentioned, leading him to the grass-poor expanse where several prisoners stood or walked in pairs, “they want to talk about the Russians.”

  Bora glanced over. Sentinels with rifles and sub-machine guns straddled the edges of the space. The prisoners had noticed the coming of the German officers, and turned to stare.

  “Why? Weren’t these men captured during our advance?”

  “No. They straggled in from the east after 17 September. The one over there is a Lancers colonel. Was a regimental commander in the Suwalska Brigade. He’s been here a week, and insists that he wants to talk to German Intelligence. I don’t want to tell you anything else. See what you can make of it.”

  The Polish officer had been allowed to keep his ankle-length greatcoat, though belt, baldric and shoulder straps had been removed from it. Bora drew close. They saluted and introduced themselves, and the prisoner’s face lit up at the sight of the golden yellow piping on Bora’s uniform.

  “Vous appartenez aussi bien à la cavalerie!”

  Bora admitted he did. “I’m not here as a cavalry officer, however. I have come to hear what you wish to tell us about your experiences with the Russians.”

  In Cracow, Father Malecki felt he had achieved a minor victory by convincing Sister Jadwiga to show him the canvas bag in which the guns had been stored. She had hidden it in the pantry, where it sat in a cupboard, filled with potatoes.

  “Who do you think brought the guns to the convent?” he asked her, one by one taking the potatoes out of the bag. The nun grimly placed them in a colander, flicking the eyes off them with her thumbnail as she did.

  Bora was called in to report to Colonel Schenck as soon as he returned to Headquarters.

  “The Polish officer retraced his way back from Białowieża with remnants of his unit,” he said. “They had to walk, of course, and twice were almost captured again by Russian tank patrols at the ford east of Tomaszów. There’s no question but that he sounds sincere, Colonel, even though he tells an incredible tale.”

  Schenck made a face of contempt. “You can’t trust a Polack.” He stepped around his desk to reach his chair. “On the other hand, you and I both learned in Spain what the Reds are all about. It’s a matter of choosing whom we distrust less.” He lowered his eyes onto the map Bora had the prisoner draw by memory. “And this ‘massacre’ would have taken place where?”

  “Where the place is cross-marked, Colonel. It’s a swampy area north of the river, with no communities of any size within fifty kilometres.”

  Schenck sat upright, as if pinned to the chair. He reminded Bora of the insects in the library glass case. “It’s a fantastic claim, Bora. What proof does he have?”

  “He gave me a list of names that could be transmitted through the Red Cross to Soviet authorities. The ranks of the dead range from captain upwards, with a number of colonels and lieutenant colonels among them.”

  “They could have died in battle. And all this might be just a ploy to sow discord between us and the Russians.”

  “I don’t know what the man could hope to gain from it. He’ll stay a prisoner regardless of how we get along with the Russians.”

  “There’s such a thing as spite, when one has lost everything else.” Schenck fixed his shiny false eye on the rainy window pane. “Wouldn’t it be a smash, though, to be able to prove that the Reds are purging prisoners as they did to their own officer corps?”

  “If it’s true, close to one hundred ranking prisoners of war were mass-murdered against all laws and conventions. It may not be the only case, or it might happen again if we do not intervene.”

  Schenck didn’t say no, but his forefinger moved back and forth in familiar reproach. “It’s hardly our business to ‘intervene’, especially now. You know the procedure. Send the original of your report to the War Crimes Bureau, and copies to the High Command, Army Group Ic, Foreign Office liaison officer, et cetera. The Polish dead are not our concern here. If, when we travel east, we hear of anything having happened to our men, that’s when I’m ready to nail the Reds over war crimes.”

  3 December

  It took a heroic effort for Father Malecki to relate politely to Bora the next time they met. Mindful of the archbishop’s words, he extended his right hand to the German.

  “I confess I’m not entirely sincere, but my habit requires that I apologize to you.”

  Bora bowed his head as he shook the priest’s hand. “We’re even, then, since I choose to apologize even though my uniform requires that I do not.”

  “I found the bag used to conceal the handguns.”

  “And I found the priest who sent the repairmen to the convent. Where’s the bag?”

  Malecki handed it over. “Where’s the priest?”

  “He’s dead.” Out of his breast pocket Bora extracted a folded piece of paper. “His body may be claimed at this hospital.”

  A jolt seemed to go through the American, but he controlled himself. “Any reason for his death?”

  “A heart attack.”

  “Father Rozek was in his late twenties!”

  Bora examined the bag. It was a square, olive-drab backpack of the type issued to the Polish infantry. No identification was visible anywhere on it. He said, “Sometimes young people have heart attacks.” Negligently, he gave the bag back. “Tell Sister Jadwiga she can keep it.”

  “It’ll interest you to hear that she’d noticed the presence of the bag on the roof just before the SS searched the convent. She fretted over it, but it remained there all the while without being discovered. Trust me, the sisters don’t know who put it there or when any more than you do.”

  Bora didn’t argue the point. “We’ll see. As for me, I lost my only chance to find out who the repairmen were. I hope you believe me when I tell you that I’d much rather for Father Rozek to be still alive.” He took an illustrated article on Teresa Neumann out of his briefcase. It was from a British magazine, and Malecki read the title, Saint or Charlatan? “Because it’s in your immediate field of interest, Father, I’d like to talk for a while about mysticism. I’m told this Bavarian woman is a fraud. Since you spent half a year studying Mother Kazimierza, I’m anxious to hear your conclusions about the veracity of her visions.”

  “The political ones?”

  “The political and the non-political ones. I’m not totally devoid of intellectual curiosity in this.”

  4 December

  The woman was young, ash-blond and too thin. She was not wearing the yellow pumps, and the low heels of her shoes were worn and scuffed. From the hall, Bora could see Helenka Kowalska standing in the vestibule with her coat folded on the crook of her arm. He’d heard Retz come in with her a moment ago, but didn’t stop playing until the major actually walked up to the piano.

  “Enough fancy fingerwork. Have a schnapps with us, Bora.”

  Bora stood, without saying yes or no. Retz had gone out to dinner with her for the past three days, but this was the first night he brought Ewa’s daughter home. Seda
tely Bora followed him to the living room, was introduced and was handed a glass of cherry-flavoured clear liquor.

  “Your health, Bora.”

  The manoeuvre failed to dispose Bora towards leaving the house of his own accord. It had been snowing for two hours, the roads were iced over and he didn’t feel like obliging Retz on a personal whim. He kept a calm eye on the major in case he should directly suggest his departure, ready with an answer.

  Next to Helenka, whose figure was childlike in the narrowness of hips and shoulders, Retz seemed rough-hewn and as though unfinished, a sketch of himself. The vicinity of a table lamp showed how her face-atriangular, high-browed little face resembling a Cranach portrait - was framed by delicate down, an impalpable glitter on her forehead and the hollow of her cheeks. Her legs were bony, but her breast - no doubt about it, Helenka’s breast, like her mother’s, was beyond reproach. Bora found that her blondness reminded him of Dikta a little, though his wife was taller, more athletic. More his size. Helenka was too small a woman for either Retz or himself.

  “Well, why don’t you sit down and chat for a while?” Retz was suggesting. “Don’t tell us you have to read or study, Bora!”

  Bora settled in the armchair closest to the door, at an angle from the sofa. “No, but I have to get up very early tomorrow morning.”

  Retz scoffed. “At your age I could stay up all night and not even know it!” He turned to Helenka, who pensively looked around the room. “He’s not as hidebound as he sounds.”

  She said, “I knew the people who used to live here.”

  Bora drank half of the schnapps and put down the glass on the coffee table. He saw Retz make a face that wanted to be humorous but wasn’t really.

  “Why, luby. Yids lived here!”

  “I know. And now you do.”

  “Who lived here?” Bora asked. Retz sat so close to her, Helenka had to lean forwards from her seat on the sofa to look over.

  “Jacob Malev, the playwright. Have you heard of him?”

  “No.”

  “No? He wrote his first play for Esther Kaminska.”

  “I have never heard of her either.”

  As expected, it wasn’t long before Bora found himself out of his lodgings for the night.

  Cursing as he struggled to free his car from the snow accumulating by the kerb, he felt the tires spin, and only by rocking the vehicle back and forth on its tracks was he able to get over the icy rut. Wind from the river blew a hard snow up the street, and the gigantic shadow of the Wawel Hill rose across from it above a whirling white storm. Forecasts said it wouldn’t last, but here it was for tonight.

  Helenka or no Helenka, tomorrow he’d have it out with Retz. He refused to choose another billet, and these night rides had to end one way or another. Bora’s car skidded at the first curve, and he found himself advancing crabwise for several metres, sliding as he went along.

  It was unusual for Pana Klara to come knocking on his door after dinner. Father Malecki had been reading his breviary and came with it in hand, a finger stuck between the pages to keep his mark.

  The old woman spoke in a low voice, glancing furtively over her shoulder. “There’s someone to see you, Father.”

  “At this hour? Who is it?”

  “I don’t know who he is - middle-aged, drooping moustache. A labourer of some kind. I wish you’d see him quickly and send him on his way, Father.”

  Malecki grew impatient. “Well, where is he?”

  “I wouldn’t let him come up. I’m sorry. Please go see him downstairs. Make sure the front door is closed if you have to talk to him.”

  Malecki knew how cold the stairs of the draughty old house were. He grabbed a woollen sweater from his dresser and left the apartment. The electric light in the stairwell was one of those that automatically shut off after a few minutes, and the bulb went out just as he started down the first ramp. At the risk of breaking his neck going down the worn steps he groped in the dark down to the next landing, where he turned the switch on again. He leaned over the wrought-iron banister trying to see who waited two floors below. All he could make out was a dark cap and the shoulders of a man with hands in his pockets.

  Shivering in the chill of the stairwell, Malecki said, “Who are you, and what do you want?”

  The man swept the cap off his head. He answered with what seemed to be a password, which Malecki dismissed. “I don’t know what that means. Speak straight.”

  “Ojciec Malecki, we need your help.”

  “I still don’t know what you mean.”

  “We were told you’re one of us.”

  God knows why, but for an instant Malecki thought that Bora was setting a trap for him. He started to say, “I think you have the wrong person…” and the words died in his mouth. The man was holding a letter with the LC.A.N. heading and the heart-and-crown device.

  “We were told that we could depend on you in an emergency.”

  “By whom?”

  “Ojciec Rozek said so.”

  The name alerted him, but Malecki wasn’t given time to say anything.

  “It’s the matter of a bag of weapons, Ojciec. We desperately need them before the Germans find them.”

  Malecki paused. He was about to give back the letter, then changed his mind and stuffed it in his trousers’ pocket. “Too late. The Germans have found them already, and it could have cost the sisters their lives. Don’t you pretend to be amazed or put out with me, it won’t work. Whose hare-brained idea was it to hide weapons in the convent?”

  “Matka Kazimierza suggested it. She’d warned us that we shouldn’t leave them there too long, but we could hardly show up after German officers had taken to visiting her. Damn, if we’d only - we did try to get the guns back on the day she died.”

  “Ha. I understand now. And why didn’t you?”

  “Our man was new, young. He screwed around and just lost his pluck. He took a wrong turn and ended up crawling up the wrong wall. He had to rush back and close the window before the sisters found him missing from the sacristy.”

  Malecki interrupted. “Your bungler wouldn’t by any chance have fired the shot that killed the abbess?”

  “Why would he want to do such a thing, Ojciec? He’d tagged along with the workers to get our stuff back, that’s all. Even his toolbox was empty. The guns were supposed to go into it.” The man groaned, shaking his head. “Damn. Damn, we didn’t need this one.”

  “Watch your tongue, and count your blessings if nothing disastrous comes of the finding. Fools that you are, there’s a German Intelligence officer who visits daily! What about your man, where is he now?”

  “I wish I knew. I told you he lost his pluck. He’s been gone since late October, maybe hiding in the country.”

  Malecki’s tenseness was such that he was startled by the squeaking of hinges one floor up. It was probably Pana Klara keeping anxious watch on the door of her apartment. “You can’t stay,” he spoke under his breath. “Quickly, do any of the other sisters know about you?”

  “I don’t think so, unless she told them.”

  The light went out again, and this time Malecki didn’t bother to turn it back on. They stood in the dark for the time necessary for the priest to discourage further visits and for the man to ask for the return of the letter from Mother Kazimierza.

  “Sorry, the letter stays with me.”

  When Malecki opened the front door, a tempest of small hard flakes was whirling in front of the street light like an immense swarm of moths. Touching his temple, the man sullenly said “Dobra noc,” slipped out and was gone.

  A few streets away, next door to the Jagellonian Library, Colonel Schenck didn’t have the heart to tell Bora to avoid temptation and leave the officers’ club. It wasn’t late, and after all Bora had done no more than sit down at a table with a stack of notes.

  But he couldn’t resist the temptation to lecture, so he joined him eventually, sitting across from him. Bora stood at attention.

  “Sit down, sit down
. I didn’t realize your stepfather is Generaloberst Sickingen, Bora. What happened to your father?”

  Bora remembered from previous conversations that Schenck disapproved of divorce, so he was quick to explain that his father had died.

  “I see. Did you know the general is coming to Poland?”

  Bora didn’t, and said so.

  “Well, you ought to be glad to see him. What have you there?”

  Bora showed him Malecki’s notes on the abbess.

  “I speak little English,” Schenck removed his attention from the papers. “I understand on the other hand that your mother is British-born. She’s racially pure, I hope.”

  Bora felt himself blush a little. “She’s quite racially pure, Colonel.”

  “Well, and how is it that her maiden name was the same as your father’s?”

  “They were first cousins.”

  “It’s not the best choice in marriage. In that sense, your half-brother is probably a better specimen than you are. Did you at least marry a pure German?”

  “My wife is entirely German.”

  “Let’s see a photograph of her?…”

  Bora took a snapshot of Dikta out of his wallet. Schenck observed it closely. “You should produce fair-haired offspring, providing that as a child you were lighter than you are now. Is your body hair dark or light?”

  Bora stared at the colonel. “Lighter than the hair on my head.”

  “These are important questions, you know.”

  “I realize that.”

  “You’ll fully comprehend how vital these questions are as the war goes on. This is no time to be romantic about reproduction. Love, sentimentalism - those bourgeois luxuries are not for the German man of today.” Schenck stretched his lean body on the chair. “I have no difficulty telling you that I fertilized my wife before marriage, inasmuch as I would never consider tying myself to a woman who couldn’t produce children. In two weeks I had her pregnant, and the third week I married her. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a daughter, but she did better ten months later.” He lightly tapped the floor with his foot, surveying the sparse population of the officers’ club. “I hope you have a high sperm count. A high sperm count is essential in these matters.”