by Ben Pastor
A malicious desire to gossip about Helenka and to see Ewa’s reactions nearly caused her to snap back at the porter, but still Kasia controlled her temper. An idea came to her. “I have urgent need to see Ewa Kowalska,” she said, all the while unwrapping the margarine and pushing it into the narrow window of the porter’s cubbyhole. “Will you let me go up?”
The porter reached for the margarine, sniffed it and gave it back. “She lives on the fourth floor, first door to the right. ‘Going up’ is just what you’ll have to do: the elevator’s out of order.”
It was nearly five o’clock in the evening when Father Malecki awoke from his nap in the parlour’s armchair. He’d slept soundly, and could not remember his dreams except for the last one, which was bizarre enough to stick in his memory.
He’d dreamed that he was getting ready for mass. From the wardrobe where his vestments were kept, the bleary-eyed, moustached man who wanted the relics leaped out, holding hands with one of the nuns.
The nun’s face was nondescript, no one that Malecki could identify. She was wearing an oversized portrait of Mother Kazimierza around her neck. It looked like an ancient medallion with the abbess’s profile at the centre, surrounded by the letters L.C.A.N. From the depth of the wardrobe, a bright light came forth like a beacon.
“What’s that light?” Malecki remembered asking the nun in his dream.
“Why, Father, don’t you know? It’s what killed the abbess, and what made her a saint.”
Shielding his eyes from the light, Malecki had reached for his surplice, unable to see it but feeling for it by touch. There was a spray of bloodstains at the cuffs, on the side and at the lower hem.
“Now you too have a relic, Ojciec!” the moustached man had shouted, skipping out of the sacristy with the nun. “Just make sure you tell the German that you know where the repairmen went!”
Mister Logan had come out of the wardrobe last, clearing his throat. “The consul thinks you should return the relic of the surplice, Father Malecki. It’s against American policy for you to become a saint outside of the country.”
This is what happens when one has a bad cold and receives foreign-service officers, Malecki told himself. Sneezing into his plaid handkerchief, he left the parlour and climbed the stairs to his room.
7
12 December
“She’s a dear girl,” Sister Irenka asserted, hands clasped in her ample sleeves as in a muff. “Her dreams may be no more than that, but then perhaps they’re worth your enquiring about them.”
Father Malecki savoured the mint drop as its coolness coated his tongue and began to rise to his nostrils. He was regaining some of his sense of smell. The odour of onions frying in the convent kitchen floated, though faintly, to his nose. He said, “How long has she been at the convent?”
“She took her vows two years ago on Easter Sunday. She’s originally from Biała, south of here. She’s also a convert from a very strict Jewish family, which says much for her.”
“Was she close to the abbess?”
Sister Irenka wrinkled her nose like a spiteful girl. “I associated with the abbess more than anyone else in the convent, as I’m sure you noticed. Not even I was close to the abbess. However, Sister Barbara entered this order because of Mother Kazimierza. She was converted on Easter Sunday seven years ago after a bout with infantile paralysis.” Father Malecki now remembered the pudgy young nun with a stoop. “A medal from Mother Kazimierza is credited with her conversion and, according to Sister Barbara, with her healing as well.”
Had he not dreamed of the nun wearing a medallion? Malecki thought so, but made nothing of the coincidence at this point.
“Would it be better for me to speak to Sister Barbara in confession?”
“It will be up to you, Father. Why don’t you meet her meanwhile? She’s been unwell since the abbess’s death. The doctor thinks it’s nerves, but the doctor doesn’t truly understand women or nuns.”
Sister Barbara worked in the kitchen. She came to meet the priest in the waiting room with high windows, cold and spotless and under the sad watch of the crucifix.
“Praised be Jesus Christ,” she greeted him.
“Always, Sister.”
“Sister Irenka told me I should meet you.”
Unlike the other nuns, she was very dark of features. Sister Irenka had bluntly said that she knew the first time she’d set eyes on her that she must be a gypsy or a Jewess. Malecki had seen Spanish and Italian nuns in Chicago looking like her, with mournful black eyes that seemed to well up from the soul.
Her skin had no colour. Although she was no more than thirty, flesh hung about her cheeks as in one who has lost a lot of weight too quickly. A veil-like onion skin hung from the hem of her sleeve, and her nearness still smelled of onions.
Malecki had planned a direct approach, but now it didn’t seem easy to say anything to her. She kept an expectant, quiet defensiveness, which he might have to circumvent before trying to enter.
“Sister Barbara, you’re aware of my months of study here in relation to the abbess. Given Mother Kazimierza’s role in your life choice, I wonder if you’d care to tell me about your conversion.”
“I will, Father.”
To Malecki, ever since the abbess’s death, the convent was as though under a spell of silence. Even Sister Barbara’s voice-adeep monotone, a teacher’s voice - seemed unable to break the spell, and sounded dull, muted.
She was saying, “It’s always like the first dream. There are some variations, some details that reflect things that happened during the day, but the essence is the same.” Holding a black rosary in her hands, mechanically she rolled each bead of the chain. “I am in my father’s house at Biała. There is tsholnt on the table, so I think maybe it’s Friday, because that’s when that dish is prepared. My father is outside. I can hear him chopping through meat with his cleaver. It seems to me that every time the blade goes down, a voice next to me is saying, ‘Body of Christ. Body of Christ.’”
“Whose voice is it?”
“I don’t know. A man’s voice, but then I know it’s Mother Kazimierza’s voice, too. I feel that I have to get out of the house, but won’t be able to do so until my father leaves. My mother is in the back of the house, reciting the Kaddish for some relative who has died. I call out to her and ask who is it that died, and she says, ‘You, Bubele. How can you not know I’m reciting it for you?’” Sister Barbara glanced up, as if fearful of having said too much already. “Sometimes the dream stops here, but most often it goes on to the end.”
Malecki was interested in the end, of course, but didn’t pressure her. He sat with his right elbow on the knee, resting his aching forehead in the open hand. His cold was not gone, by any means. It throbbed in his sinuses and made him less alert than he needed to be.
The nun let out a small sigh. “When the dream continues, I have somehow got out of the house. My father seems to be very distant. I am standing on a brick platform and Mother Kazimierza is with me. She has her arms outstretched.” Sister Barbara’s eyes stole to the crucifix on the wall. “Like Him. Blood drips from her hands and feet, but she is smiling. She asks me if I would like to come with her. My legs feel bound, and I tell her that I would love to follow her, but I don’t think I’m worthy or even able. She simply takes my hand and starts walking. I had a dream similar to this part seven years ago, which is when I became well again. We walk and walk and walk. The platform follows us wherever we go. At one point Mother Kazimierza asks me if I want to be a saint. I say, yes, and she says that if I want to be like Christ they will come to take me away as they did with Christ. ‘Will you come also?’ I ask her. She opens her arms again and lies down on the platform. The same voice I heard in my father’s house I hear now, saying, ‘No one but my name.’”
From the nun’s silence, Malecki understood she had finished her story. “‘No one but my name,’ Sister.” He opened his eyes. “What does that mean?”
“I don’t know. I wake up in tears every
time, not because of what happens in the dream but because I am reminded that she is dead, and even though I know I should rejoice that she is with Christ, it is so difficult to accept her absence.”
Two days into her stay in Retz’s apartment, Ewa felt triumphant.
Brushing her hair in front of the sink, she watched him bathing in the tub. His fleshy knees rose from the suds, bald as his chest was shaggy, with tufts of wet hair that clustered and curled like blond shavings of wood. He’d been lounging in the bath for the past ten minutes, now and then adding hot water to the tub.
She said, “What happened to your wedding ring?”
Retz opened his eyes.
“I took it off.”
“I can see that. Why?”
Retz smiled. He liked looking at her nakedness. “I didn’t feel like wearing it any more.” Ewa was big-breasted, though her breasts were still quite pert for her age. Only the once-perfect line of her buttocks had changed noticeably; her arms had always been rounded, dimpled at the elbows. Now that she reached for the back of her head with the brush, the yellow sprig of hair under her right arm showed. The right breast rose with the motion. “Doesn’t it tell you the ring means nothing to me, Ewusia?”
“Well, then give it to me, for old times’ sake.”
Water splashed in the tub as Retz sat up in it. “I couldn’t do that, Ewusia. What am I going to tell my wife if I don’t bring it back?”
“Who cares?” Vigorously, Ewa brushed through her hair. “She’s a sow.”
Retz tried to laugh. “Ewa…”
“Tell me she’s a sow.”
“She’s just an old girl.”
“You know she’s a sow. Tell me.”
Retz sank back into the water, this time nearly to his chin. “She’s a sow. All women are sows compared to you.” His head went under for a moment, and emerged again. “Is that all right?”
Ewa laughed. She grabbed the wide bath towel and tossed it at him. “That’s better.” When he began to stand up, the water-soaked heavy cloth clung around him and he fell back in the tub, laughing also. He struggled to get free from the towel, hands and feet splashing soapy water around the bathroom.
Ewa was sitting on the side of the tub when his head came out of the dripping cloth.
“Does being married to a sow make me a swine?” He stepped out of the water and reached for her.
She pulled away, slapping his hand. “You know it does.”
The woods started just off the road. From where Bora stood at Schenck’s side, the darkness of firs ate some of the luminosity of the sky. For two hours officers of the Russian 17th Rifle Corps had shown them more equipment taken from the defeated Polish army, bicycles and horse-drawn vehicles, heaps of cavalry harnesses. Among the other vehicles Bora noticed two convertible Polski-Fiat staff cars. He remembered the Polish cavalry officer had told him some of his colleagues had been dragged off to be shot after riding in their cars to surrender.
Schenck was anxious to read the Russian proposal for collaboration in Intelligence matters, especially as related to partisan activity. He champed at the bit while viewing more trophies. Where the woods opened into a snow-patched dirt expanse, a camp was set up, complete with table, chairs and bottles of liquor.
With the commissar constantly keeping pace with him, Bora found it difficult to have a private word with the colonel, and gave up the attempt of using the field latrine for the purpose when the commissar showed that he was headed in the same direction.
Colonel Schenck did not show half the anger Bora knew him to feel. Still, “Go ahead,” he said after a time, “tell these shit-headed Ivans that we have no reports that Polish nationals manhandled Ukrainian settlers in our sector. Make them understand that if we had such reports we would have followed up on them. Tell them I reject the insinuation that we have ignored reports.”
The discussion had been degenerating for the past quarter-hour, primarily on issues of communiqué-sharing and joint anti-partisan activities. The thin veneer of the occasional alliance began to wear down as soon as generalities were forsaken in favour of details. Schenck and the Red Army colonel made as unlikely a pair of bedfellows as Bora could envision, saving perhaps himself and the commissar. He translated accurately, feeling the tension of the job every time a word lent itself to misunderstanding or multiple meanings.
They were sitting at a long dining-room table incongruously placed in the middle of a clearing, fringed with fir trees and lined with Russian army tents. Everyday vodka, straw-coloured vodka from Georgia, the overwhelming dark one they called “huntsman’s vodka” sat before him. Bora decided he would not drink past the fourth glass, and chose his words, certain that he would ever more associate the resinous scent of firs with a sense of unease. Matters grew worse when a veiled accusation was brought up that German troops had fired on Red Army units, not only during the confusion of the first days, but as late as a week past. Schenck demanded a clarification, which came back as a naked indictment. In a rigid fury, he ordered Bora to counter with accusations of the opposite. “Give them dates, places, the whole of it. Show them pictures of damage to our equipment.”
Bora complied. The photographs were at once snatched from his hands by the commissar, before the Russian colonel had a chance to view them. An animated exchange ensued, during which Schenck grew irate enough to charge the Red Army with wholesale execution of Polish prisoners of war.
“Get to the point, Bora. Ask them how they would like for us to make an international issue out of that.”
Brusquely, the Russian colonel left the table in a flash of steel-grey cloth. Vodka danced in the bottle and the glasses tinkled at his hasty departure. The commissar at first engaged in a silent staring match with Bora, and then rose from his chair and went to retrieve the colonel.
“Shit.” Schenck let himself go to frustration. “I didn’t mean to bring up the damn story of the Polack prisoners. What did you exactly tell him?”
“I kept it vague, but they still took it badly.”
“I can see that.” Schenck looked beyond Bora, at the tent in front of which their counterparts thickly discussed this turn of events among themselves. He reached for the bottle and poured himself a dose of dark vodka, which he swallowed in a gulp. “When they come back, let’s pay some lip-service. Tell them you didn’t translate correctly, that it was your mistake.”
“They’ll know it isn’t true, Colonel.”
“Make it credible. You’re young enough and low-ranking enough to take the blame.”
13 December
The afternoon was sunny and cold in Cracow. Helenka’s voice through the telephone made Retz lusty and hopeful at first.
“No, Richard. I can’t. I’m not even done preparing the part, and dress rehearsals begin pretty soon. It’s my first important role, and I can’t foul it up. We can see one another again after the first night, depending on how it goes.”
Retz groaned. “Do you mean we don’t get to spend any time together between now and then?”
“We can see each other for lunch or something like that. I just don’t feel I should be using time at night this way, that’s when I study the part best.”
“Well, people don’t make love only at night.”
“I don’t like hotels-I mean, for that kind of thing.”
“I’ll tell you what, luby. I’ll compromise. I’ll leave you alone for three days, and then I’ll call you and see if you want to get away for a couple of hours. Study hard those three days.” Retz flipped through the pages of his appointment book on the desk, looking for Ewa’s number. “I love you, too.”
There was only one telephone in the tenement where Ewa lived, so he had to wait until the porter went to check if Pana Kowalska was home, four storeys worth of slow climbing and descending steps again. It was one more disappointment to hear that Ewa was out. Pages flipped forwards in the appointment book.
“Yes, hello? I’m looking for Panienka Basia Plutinska - Yes, please put her on.”
> After liberally partaking of vodka over a satisfactory agreement in the woods, the appeased Russian and German representatives had adjourned with the prospect of more sight-seeing and dinner at Lvov. By mid-afternoon on the 13th, though, Schenck had had enough of the meeting. He waited until he and Bora sat alone in the car, while their Russian driver filled the tank from an aluminium can. Then, “Screw them all,” he spat out. “I’m going back tomorrow, Bora. Stay behind to supervise details, and meet me at the border. From there we travel to Tarnów and there we part ways. I expect you to resume your routine interrogation of Polacks before you return to headquarters.”
But neither Schenck nor Bora could avoid one more dinner with the Russians. Fish served raw, salted, in vinegar, opened the way to grouse swimming in cream, and to thick ham slices lying on beds of caviar and boiled eggs. Watching him eat, from the moment he sat down beside him, the commissar seemed to take perverse pleasure in challenging Bora with complex sentences and verb forms. Bora did well but was troubled, and he didn’t know why. Over a dessert of mazurek he finally understood.
“Tell me,” the commissar was saying, “how could a fluent speaker as yourself make such a patent mistake during our talks? I don’t believe there was a mistake at all, Captain.”
Bora took a discreet belly breath. Sedately, he put down the fork on his plate. From a bowl in front of him, he selected a small cake, whose thin paper wrapping he undid. “You call these ‘chocolate bears’, do you not?” He smiled. “I hope you’re not accusing me of lying.”
“No. Mistakes are more acceptable.”
Cracow was frigid, but the temperature in the Curia was drowsily pleasant, and it wasn’t easy to rouse the archbishop’s attention. If Father Malecki hadn’t felt compelled by the need to discuss Sister Barbara before Bora’s return, he’d have given up the effort. As it was, he allowed himself to insist.