by Ben Pastor
Bora said, “Did you look into the complex of the convent below on that day, and if so, did you see something out of the ordinary?”
Pinching the stub with his bruised fingers, the prisoner sucked a last drag out of the cigarette. “Can I have another one?”
Bora tossed the pack at him.
“You want to know if I saw the dead nun?”
“Precisely.”
“We had nothing to do with it.”
“I know. Did you see her?”
Leaning forwards to get his cigarette near to Bora’s lighter, the prisoner nodded. “She’d been out there awhile, near the well.”
“Was she walking, sitting - was she alone?”
“At one point she was standing. Then she lay down, face down. Praying or something, I wouldn’t know. I didn’t see anyone else, but there could have been. I didn’t look out again for a couple of hours, and when I did she was still lying there. Except that now I knew she was dead. I could see blood around her through the field glasses. That’s all I know. I figured one of you had killed her.”
Bora replaced the lighter into his breast pocket, and buttoned it. “One of us?”
“Who else would kill a nun?”
The point didn’t merit arguing over, but Bora was intrigued. “What time was it when you saw her dead?”
“I don’t carry a watch. Maybe four thirty, maybe five. Within moments there was a hell of a confusion in the cloister - nuns and two German officers rushing around. One of them crouched down to touch the body, and that’s all I know because I didn’t want to push my luck and be seen. I went back inside.”
Bora, of course, had been the one who had touched the body. So, the abbess was still alive two, two and a half hours before his arrival with Colonel Hofer. “Did you hear a shot?” he asked.
The prisoner spoke with the cigarette in his mouth. “No. All afternoon, we were trying to listen to a radio broadcast inside. The channel was jammed, so we had to pay close attention to make any sense out of it. That was the day tanks came rolling down the street, too.” Spewing smoke, he gently massaged his distended left cheek. “We knew the SD could bust us any time, so we kept mostly out of sight.”
Bora stared at the wall behind the prisoner, a grimy unpainted wall with pockmarks of nails and scuffs from the backs of chairs. He tried to think back, to reconstruct his own schedule for 23 October.
He and Hofer had worked through the noon hour. From the midday meal until her death, Matka Kazimierza had been in the cloister, joined at one time or another by her murderer. At a quarter after sixteen hundred hours, he’d left with Hofer for the convent.
Thinking of the repairmen in the chapel, Bora asked, “Did you see anybody leave the convent?”
“After the killing? No. I told you I went inside.”
Jealously, the prisoner stuffed the cigarettes in his pocket when Bora walked to the door, and knocked to be let out.
Who else would kill a nun? Back at Headquarters, the prisoner’s question prompted Bora to list Polish personnel who might have had access to Radom guns: police officers, security guards - the military, of course. Collective, anonymous groups. Double-checking on his own schedule for the 23rd, he found that, except for one hour in the morning when Colonel Hofer had excused himself and asked him to man his phone, he’d been as bound to his desk as a dog to its chain. Would that everyone’s alibi were so easy to verify.
Standing by the window, Bora found himself staring at the pigeons crowning the church across the street. Unless the killer was an inmate of the convent (it could be, it could be), someone, somehow, had entered it undetected, worked his way to the cloister and left unseen after killing the abbess. Sombrely Bora recalled that in this very office Colonel Hofer had stood by him, holding back ill-concealed tears. Visit after visit, what had Mother Kazimierza prophesied to him that would cause him to weep? Poor man. Poor all of us, Bora thought, if we’re curious about the future. Better not ask, especially if you’re a soldier.
“Remember, we set off early in the morning!” Colonel Schenck stalked into the office, tossing a handful of forms on Bora’s desk and stalking out again.
That evening, when Bora found Helenka sitting with Retz in the living room, he scarcely paid any attention to them.
10 December
Father Malecki woke up with a sore throat. He wasn’t one to get ill often or nurse himself once he did, but this morning he had to force himself to get up. The room was extremely cold. He touched the radiator and felt cold metal. On the dry sink, the blue-and-white wash basin he’d filled last night had a thin layer of ice on the surface.
When he went downstairs for breakfast, Pana Klara told him the furnace had gone off during the night.
“Can it be repaired?”
“I’m afraid we ran out of coal, Father, and there’s none to be had just now. You don’t look well. Why don’t you at least stay in bed? I’ll get you another quilt.”
“On Sunday? You know I’m due for early mass at the convent.”
After waiting for more than fifteen minutes at the streetcar stop, Malecki had to conclude that there’d be no transportation today. So he walked the windy streets at daybreak in growing discomfort, and had a full-blown cold by the time he reached the convent’s sacristy.
It was still dark outside and Helenka couldn’t tell whether Bora was awake, but a strip of light filtered from under his door when she left Retz snoring in bed. Lovemaking had been good once Retz slept off his drinks - not long, just good. Now she felt a warm, pleasurable laziness that no longer called for lying down.
She went to the kitchen. Bora had already had coffee, and there was enough left for her to fill a cup. Helenka looked around. The counter was tidy, the whole kitchen well equipped with china cabinets, double sink, large gas stove, an ice box typical of men who don’t do their own cooking: there was nothing in it except for some butter, milk and white wine. A forgotten box of kosher salt sat in the pantry. Cups had been left out for the cleaning woman to wash. Helenka finished her coffee and rinsed her cup.
She could hear small noises from Bora’s room when she stepped back into the hallway. A drawer being pulled out and pushed in, stepping around in boots. Next door, Retz’s heavy breathing rose and fell in regular waves.
The bathroom was spotless, especially considering two men lived there. Washing her face, she thought military training might be accountable for the orderliness. Towels were folded neatly, the soap sat dry in its dish. She was curious about who used the aftershave. From the pungent scent from the uncorked bottle, she recognized it as Retz’s.
She wondered why Bora was up so early on Sunday morning. Did he work on Sunday? Retz slept in. He wouldn’t drive her to the room she shared with a girlfriend until after breakfast.
She sighed, looking at herself in the mirror. After breakfast. She was finding out that food was an important part of going out with Germans. Being fed decently, having breakfast, real coffee. How mercenary, in the end.
She liked Retz, his gruffness and shameless want of her. It made her feel a little unclean but she liked him. She even cared for him, a little.
Bora was opening the window in his room. On tiptoe, Helenka stole to the library and turned on the light.
So, this panelled, book-lined space was where Malev had written some of his works. She admiringly walked around the shelves, read some of the titles. His plays in Polish and German formed an incomplete leaning row, since most of those in Yiddish had been removed.
On a round table by the armchair lay an open book with a photograph as a marker in it. Helenka looked at the photo. It was a blond young woman on horseback; the dedication read in German, “To Martin, from his favourite horsewoman Benedikta.” It was dated a year ago exactly. The young woman looked healthy, haughty, sure of herself.
“Good morning.”
Bora’s voice revealed no surprise at finding her in the library. Greatcoat on his arm, he was dressed in a simple field uniform and was obviously about to leave th
e house.
Helenka nodded her head. “Good morning.” She felt awkward for having his book in her lap. Bora didn’t seem irritated by the fact. He stared at the book, however, and Helenka put it away. “I didn’t mean to pry. I thought maybe Jacob Malev had left it out.”
Bora half-turned towards the bookshelf. He wasn’t angry at her. Rather, he felt a kind of impatient sorrow for her embarrassment. “I’m looking for a dictionary.” He chose to justify his presence here. In fact, he had meant to look up the word Lumen before leaving. Now he reached for the Latin book and decided to take it along on his drive east.
Huddled on the armchair where he’d sat to read until late last night, Helenka was embracing her retracted knees.
Bora sensed an odd affinity with her for being here and having shared that chair, and although he wasn’t attracted to her he grew close to arousal, just because she was a woman and it was early in the morning and they were alone in the room. The rustle of her skirt, Garcia Lorca had written, was like knives slicing the air.
She said, “I hope Richard told you yesterday that I’d spend the night. I didn’t mean to inconvenience you.”
It was a strange apology, which made him angry at Retz for creating these situations. For all his haste, Bora didn’t want to leave the room before saying so. “It’s difficult for me not to think of the reason why you come.” It was a confusing, accusatory statement, and he sought to correct it, aghast at what he actually said next. “I miss my wife very much.”
“She’s beautiful,” Helenka said, glancing at the photograph. “I can see why you miss her.”
Bora looked away. He hadn’t meant to reveal himself. The thought that she had just made love turned him suddenly insecure and shy and desirous: not of her necessarily, but of the act itself, because she’d been entered by a man, and he was looking at her and sensed the unspoken, troubling essence of that intimacy.
“I must go now.”
He was perspiring when he reached the street below, and it was a relief to plunge into the frigid snowy air of the morning. He had just enough time to drive by the convent before his appointment with Colonel Schenck.
At Bora’s coming into the sacristy, Father Malecki sneezed into his plaid handkerchief.
“Gesundheit.” Bora said. “The sisters told me I’d find you still here.” He was rummaging in his pocket, took out a flat box of mint drops, and presented them on his open palm. “My mother sends me Altoids wherever I go. It’s her way to keep me well, I think. You may have them.”
Malecki looked miserable. He put a mint drop in his mouth, but would not accept a ride back to his apartment in the German staff car.
“As you like,” Bora said amiably. “The streetcars are scheduled to start running again at nine. You won’t have to walk. How did you catch such a bad cold, anyway? Surely the weather isn’t any better than this in Chicago!”
“No, but there’s less chance for furnaces to stop running in Chicago. If you’re here for mass, you’re late.”
“Oh, I don’t go to church these days. I’ve only come to say that I’ll be busy and won’t be seeing you for a few days. You’ll kindly let me know of any developments at my return.”
No sooner had Bora left the sacristy than Malecki went to open the closet where vestments were kept.
“All right, come out.” Vexedly, he looked inside after the man obeyed. “Look what you’ve done with those damn muddy boots.” He took out the stained vestments, with a critical eye checking the hems for tears in the cloth.
Now that he saw him in the full light, Malecki was sure this was the same man he’d spoken with on the stairs of his house.
“Look, I told you before. I have no intention of dragging the sisters or the American government into whatever you’re doing. The convent is off-limits to arms and armed people, and you’ll have to avoid coming to see me at the house as well. Why are you here, anyway?”
Kneading his cap with both hands, the man was bleary-eyed, with the look of one whom constant tension has made into a mask of strain.
“If the convent’s off-limits to armed people, what’s the German after? He comes around!”
Suffering from his cold, Malecki didn’t like to be confronted. He briskly stepped past the man to get his scarf from the coat stand. “It has nothing to do with politics. Look, I have to go, and I’m not leaving you behind. Tell me your business, and let’s be done with it.”
Having heard what the business was, he had to lean against the door of the sacristy, unwittingly swallowing the powerful mint Bora had given him. It went down his sore throat with a chilly burn.
“A relic?” He coughed.
“Yes.”
Malecki snorted through his aching and congested nose. “No new relics are acknowledged unless by authorization of the local bishop. I can’t give you anything of hers, even if I had anything to give.”
“But she’s a saint.”
“Miracles have to be approved all the same. Besides, ‘nothing new, or that previously has not been usual in the Church’ may be resolved on without consulting the Holy See.”
“A saint’s a saint, Ojciec.”
The man’s insistence was testy, Malecki saw well that he wouldn’t get rid of him easily. He put on his coat and edged the man out of the sacristy. “You seem to know more than I do.”
“She’s worked miracles.”
Malecki stopped where he was, on the threshold of the room. He was familiar with the tales that had risen about Mother Kazimierza in the last six months, had investigated some and found them unsound when not ludicrous. The abbess herself had dismissed them angrily.
He said, “Miracles are something else that need proving.”
He didn’t expect the rude pressure of a gun barrel up his ribcage, and grew stiff with anger for it.
“You had better give us a relic of Matka Kazimierza, Ojciec.”
Malecki slapped the gun away. “I haven’t grown up in Chicago to be pushed around in a Cracow sacristy. You will give me one piece of information, and then go. When God wants to make a saint out of the abbess, he’ll let both of us know.”
But afterwards he did give the man a framed photograph of Mother Kazimierza that hung just outside his door.
When he left headquarters with Bora, Schenck had the face of a bridegroom. His happiness for going out in the field after weeks behind a desk was contagious, and Bora didn’t need much to be exhilarated those days.
They would ride to the Russian sector under the escort of an armed patrol; at the demarcation line they’d be met by a Red Army convoy and continue to Lvov for a round of talks with Soviet Intelligence.
“Given that the Wehrmacht had made it to Lemberg first.” Schenck sneered, bent on using the German name of Lvov. “It’s too bad we had to relinquish it.”
“Borders are reversible,” Bora said.
The staff car passed people going to church, grey bundled people who didn’t so much as look up. At the end of nearly every other street, churches rose against the sky like prows, or gigantic theatre props left over from forgotten performances. They had come to the cemetery by the rail junction before Schenck laughed in a delayed response to Bora’s words, “It’s true, they are.” And soon the staff car was speeding down the state route to Tarnów.
Once they left the city, no traffic - military or civilian - slowed their progress to the east.
Bora said, reading, “There are at least ten related but different meanings for the word. Light, torch, source of light, light of the eye, daylight…”
“Really?” Schenck threw an amused look at the cumbersome dictionary Bora held up. “I do think it was a good idea to get you into Intelligence business. You like to dig. You’re likely to dig up bones if you keep at it.”
They had passed the first line of hills east of Cracow, slung diagonally as fingers extending from the distant heights of the Carpathians. The weather forecast called for a clearing at midday, and already some widening wells of blue opened in the clouds.
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Fastidiously, Schenck removed his gloves. “Bora, after your request I went over Salle-Weber’s head, and we stand a good chance of getting our hands on the Lumen file. Salle-Weber will know the pressure came from you, but tell him you had nothing to do with it, that it was my idea. Captains can pull punches with captains, but not so well with colonels.” Schenck let the ripple of a smile cross his lips. “To think I almost joined the SS, some years back. It was the wholesale quality of their eugenics program that left me unconvinced.”
Bora waited until Schenck finished talking before looking into the dictionary again. Examples were given of the use of the word, in the singular and plural form; none of them seemed to apply in the least. He was beginning to think that Father Malecki was right. Attaching too much importance to a sentence only kept him from seeking out real reasons. He said, unthinkingly, “Colonel, would we eliminate someone like Mother Kazimierza?”
Schenck didn’t move a muscle of his leathery face. “Yes.” He said then, “Of course we would. If we found it useful to our cause or to security, we most assuredly would.”
“Have we?”
Again, Schenck’s face was motionless. He waited some time before answering. “I’ve seen perfectly good dogs go digging in the wrong places, Captain Bora. You have to refine your sense of scent before you end up wasting a lot of energy, and come up with a fat rock in your teeth instead of a bone. The answer is no.”
Bora tried not to feel embarrassed. Cheerfully, Schenck looked out of the window, to the fields that ran past the car. Tarnów had been left behind. Frequency of hills intensified ahead and only after turning due south before Lvov would the land grow flat again. “I suggest you also sharpen your sense of diplomacy before you ask the SS the same question.”
The first thing Father Malecki noticed upon entering Pana Klara’s house was the lack of cold dampness that had enveloped him each time he’d started up the stairs in days past.