In Paradise: A Novel (13 page)

A
LREADY SHAKEN
by his morning in Oswiecim, then the
Judenrampe
, Olin finds himself painfully distracted by a cold draught from the direction of the fallen wing of the crematorium, some forty yards off to his left; it pierces his clothing on that side, chilling his skin under the armpit as if his parka had been slit by a knife of ice.

Uneasy, he remains behind as Rabbi Dan concludes the service at the ash pit and the others drift away. Then he turns—he
feels turned
, rather—toward that concrete tumble he has shunned instinctively since his arrival. He can neither withdraw that blade of ice nor set the pain aside as morbid or absurd: if anything, it has intensified, like the hard bite of winter in his frozen boots.

Unsteady, he draws near the ruin. In some cranny of his brain, he thinks, this place has awaited him all his life, ever since those nightmares of his boyhood.

Only the far end of the cellar chamber lies exposed. The rest is filled by huge tilted slabs pierced by rusted rods hard-twisted in the explosion by the falling mass of concrete. Behind the crematorium, over there in that thin wood, poor naked Emi, dragged at by her howled-out little sister, must have stumbled forward on numb lacerated feet at the shouted order, arms crossed over her breasts, hunched down so that her elbows might shield the dark patch of her pubis from the greedy cameras.

He retreats into his parka hood and pulls its throat cord tight against the cold, against the phantasms and spirits—the “wandering souls” of Sister Catherine, the hungry ghosts (Ben Lama and his Buddhists), the horde of the lost inhabiting the emptiness of this flat river plain in Poland. But inevitably he succumbs to the terrifying vision of that young woman seeking to hush her gnashing mother, shriek her love to the child clasped to her thigh as naked as a frog in the press of cold-fleshed bodies as more and more are packed in with them, giving off queer heat; gone wild, she fights to save her dear ones from being drawn under in the crush and suffocation.

The iron door, slamming, smashes feet and clawing fingers. A crack of light as, jammed by arms, the door reopens for a moment, is slammed again and bolted—that
clang
perhaps the signal to executioners overhead peeping filthily as demons as they seed the pandemonium below with white cyanide pellets dumped from black-and-orange canisters—this, perhaps, in those very moments when her baby was being dandled in the New World. He can’t get past this nor can he escape the screams and coughs of violent gagging, the raw stench as fluids spatter, the bursting eyes of the mad creatures below this rim where Emi’s only begotten child kneels shuddering a half century later. In the death struggle for the last exhausted air, the strongest clamber onto piles of weaker, and the young woman shrieks back at her voiceless sister as Peek is drawn beneath the human biomass that wipes her stare, the round hole of her mouth from the face of earth.

D
ID HE BLACK OUT?
How long has he crouched here on the cellar rim, on the point of vomiting, and so close to the edge that he must reach back and grab his bootheels so as not to topple in?

Regaining his feet, he staggers to find balance. He totters past the ash pit, peering about him until finally he locates those clumped figures far off down the platform toward the Gate. Dazed, he makes his way to the meditation circle, where he is overwhelmed at once by that silence of dead centuries and a universal solitude far lonelier than any he might ever have imagined.

T
OWARD DUSK,
a weeping German woman leads the circle in a lullaby for the slain children.
Guten Abend, gute Nacht / Mit Rosen bedacht.
The voices are tentative and shy at first, a low whispery singing, and some sniffle.

On the long trudge back to Auschwitz I, Olin is still slow and unsteady, and people peer at him as they pass by. Without turning, he is presently aware of Catherine overtaking, drawing near, with the chastened Sister Ann-Marie somewhere behind.

Now she walks beside him. He looks pale, she murmurs. Is he all right? “Well, I have felt better, it is true.” Still entangled in that ruin, his thought is jumbled and his voice hollow, faraway. In truth, he has no very clear idea how he is feeling—he feels quite literally
beside
himself, and has to concentrate to compose his face into some semblance of alert human expression.

To keep her close, he asks her to translate the last lines of that German lullaby sung on the platform. “Goodness,” she murmurs, “that sweet lullaby in such a place.” In this region of Hapsburg-Austrian culture, she reminds him, most of the educated Jews moaned their last prayers in the language of their executioners: even those who had no German surely knew this verse and sang it to the frightened children:
Early in the morning, God willing, you shall awaken; early in the morning, God willing, you shall awaken.

Trying to cheer them both, he teases her. “I suppose those voices singing in the snowfall remind you of those singing spirits you’ve been hearing.” And this time, she smiles back. “No,” she says, “mine only sing to me in Polish.” However, her smile is distracted. Across that clear face that yesterday hid nothing, dark emotions pass like shadows of bird flight on a wall. “I am sad today,” she tells him. “I think all feel this sadness. The heaviness in this dead air—” And she only shakes her head when he compliments her on her speech at the ash pond. Will there be consequences? Of course. Her words will inevitably be seen as disrespect for an ordained priest.

Why are you still smiling in this inane way?
He adjusts his grin.

She is wary of his facetiousness: the eyes searching his own entreat him to finish with his fooling, make his point. “It is all very amusing, is it not?” she says, entirely unamused. Abruptly she breaks off their new rapport, such as it is. “Please pay no attention, Dr. Olin,” she instructs him. “It is only talk.” And he nods, puzzled.
What
is only talk? She seems more open to him—is this because he looks so needy?—but she cuts him off at once when he tries to learn her given name and something of her past. At his suggestion that in theory, at least, it might be nice not to lose touch, to meet again one day after they leave here, she squints at him as if unable to fathom why any honorable person might want such a thing.
“Nice?”
she says. “What is this ‘nice’?” It is forbidden in her strict order, she says, to use one’s secular name or to reveal one’s present whereabouts in Poland.

Before supper, still stunned by that vision at the crematorium, he must retreat outside and breathe cold air to calm himself. He needs to
be
with someone, confess something, spit out all this
feeling
. But what, precisely, is he feeling? He needs to be comforted without letting this be seen, without in fact confiding anything to anybody.

T
his evening the mess hall is strangely quiet. People seek corners where they won’t have to talk. He touches the photograph in his shirt pocket which he won’t be parted from yet cannot bear to look at; his fingertips keep drifting over to make sure that Emi is still there, still joyous in her window. When Becca plumps herself down and asks if something is the matter, he denies it. “Really, Clements? You feel fine?” She shrugs in disbelief, indicating the others. “Well, if so, you’re the only one who does. This place has finished us.”

Becca asks about his inquiries in Oswiecim. Too tired to dissemble, he pulls his photograph from his shirt pocket. “My mother,” he says in a numb tone.

“So
pretty
!” Becca turns to appraise his face, revisits the photo. “Looks sort of Jewish, don’t you think?” Returning the photo, she holds his eye. Is she teasing? Or just guessing, based on something Erna told her? He tries not to look startled, tries to smile. Shrewd Becca sorts through his expressions, sees that his eyes aren’t smiling. “So,” she says softly, conspiratorial. “Our dear Baron Olinski.” He groans, closing his eyes to convey impatience, weariness, and also to spare himself the stress of another lie.

Mischievous Becca keeps glancing at him knowingly to make him nervous, even claims she sees a slight resemblance between the girl in his photo and “that nun you hang around.” There is probing in her teasing and a note of disapproval, and his reaction is defensive. “Come on, Becca!” That’s just psychiatric shoptalk, he complains, pot-stirring nonsense.

“I thought I was only joking,” she says quietly. “And by the way, for somebody who feels just fine, you look just awful.”

He ducks further encounters by entering the auditorium early and slipping into an empty row near the back, and so he is startled and delighted—but somehow not surprised—to be joined at the last minute by the novices. Sister Ann-Marie blunders heavily into the seat beside him, with Sister Catherine cutting off her retreat on the far side.

T
HIS EVENING,
nobody goes forward to the stage. After these long days in the camp, depression has descended on the witness bearers like an inversion of the coal-soot fog that hangs in the outer dark of the night prison.

The tension is pervasive in the hall, as ominous as an undying echo. Needing to blame, some glare at Earwig, slouched in his usual isolation, and others at the knot of Polish men, still mired in their attitude that none of this wretched death camp business is any of their affair.
How much longer will these Jews and Germans chew at the rotten bones of their old corpse?
They seem content to ignore public condemnation. Inevitably, Becca’s exasperated voice inquires, “Why did you come, then?”

F
OR WANT OF WITNESS BEARERS,
Ben Lama himself goes forward. Looking exhausted, he extends his opened hands for a long moment, then lets them fall again. Before the retreatants can retire to insomnia and nightmares, he tries to dispel the murk and rancor by relating the strange parable from the Old Testament that Christians call the Dark Night of the Soul.
And Jacob, grappling in the night with the dark
angel of the Unknown, cries out, I cannot let you
go until you tell me your true name!
“In this place, we are all struggling with our dark angels,” Ben suggests. When the parable finds no resonance among them, he summons Rabbi Dan the cantor, he of the indomitable good cheer.

Joining Ben onstage, the cantor tells an ancient tale about a man in great sorrow who worries that he does not suffer enough. “And a rabbi comforts this man in his sorrow, saying, ‘The only whole heart is the broken heart. But it must be
wholly
broken.’” Smiling enigmatically (Indigestion, Olin wonders? Too many meals of cabbage soup or goulash, hard dark sour pickles, unrelenting bread?), Rabbi Dan raises his hands palms outward and repeats in a hushed whisper, “
wholly
broken,” but to judge from the perplexed faces, this teaching, like Ben’s parable, is not wholly understood.

The cantor draws the evening to a close by leading the congregation in
Oseh Shalom
, which he translates as “Making Peace by Making Whole.” Softly, softly, swaying as he sings, blessing all with a promiscuous sweet smile, Dan summons others from both sides, taking the hands of the two nearest, who reach out to the next. Slowly at first, the linked singers move up the aisle in a clockwise direction, “making peace by making whole” all the way to the rear and on around, returning down the other aisle.

When Olin and Catherine rise to join the circle, Ann-Marie, between them, balks; when he reaches behind him, takes her moist hand with distaste and hauls her forth, she casts a frightened glance at Father Mikal, who stands at the back wall (“keeping an eye on things for Jesus,” snipes Earwig, who does not join either).

Oddly, the participants have not stopped. They continue up across the stage and down around again as if transported. Gradually shy smiles appear, a stifled giggle. Arms start to swing, then overswing, tossed high like the arms of children holding hands in schoolyard dances.

A number of celebrants look distressed that the clergy have not joined them; rather ostentatiously, a few have quit the hall. Some people who started gladly are already abandoning the circle, offering wan smiles to suggest that they’d only made a show of participation out of ecumenical solidarity until the childish folks still dancing come to their senses and realize as they have that this whole charade, if not precisely sacrilege, is bound to offend or infuriate some faith or other; it shows disrespect at the very least for the more dignified witnesses, not to mention all those martyrs being mourned.

Sister Ann-Marie’s hand is twitching in his grip like a caught animal. Then it is gone, leaving him groping in the air behind. But almost at once, his hand is retrieved by small warm fingers, not Ann-Marie (who is fleeing the circle) but Sister Catherine.

In the welling of relief he feels in the intimacy of fingers, he knows that she is present, right there with him. No need to speak, no need to think, but only to be wholly present in this moment, moment after moment.

Neither the participants nor the abstainers, it seems clear, have any idea what’s happening, and Olin is baffled, too, knowing only that in this simple ceremony something extraordinary is taking place, like a transfusion of elixir. What had struck him (when it didn’t stop) as a sentimental self-indulgence that ordinarily he would have fled after the first round—a death camp prance of grinning fools as in some lugubrious danse macabre of the Dark Ages, enacting mankind’s insignificance in the shadow of the scythe—has metamorphosed into gentle rejoicing, transcending the atmosphere of grief and banishing lamentation from the hall.

What could there be to celebrate in such a place? Who cares? He is delighted to be caught up in it. Clasping the precious hand, he just keeps moving. He moves with it, into it, and now it is moving him as the bonds of his despair relent like weary sinew and gratitude floods his heart. He feels filled with well-being, blessed, whatever “blessed” might mean to a lifelong non-believer.

Still softly singing, the remaining dancers cling to their momentum lest they lose the lift of this unholy exaltation like night insects spent in mating orbit. Then transcendence fades and the singing dies, until all at once, hands are cast away in a rush of self-consciousness, and the dance subsides into itself like a circle left on the still surface of a pond by some large form only dimly seen as it withdraws below.

Gathering new breath, nobody speaks, not yet. Then softly the silence implodes and awe arises, a sigh of bewilderment and gratitude, as with fulfilled lovers.

Olin turns to share his wonder with the novice only to find she is no longer there; she has slipped away among the milling people. In her place frets a dull changeling, Rabbi James Glock, who looks downcast amidst the eager sorting of astonishments. He had quit the circle early but apparently too late to be spared the lash of his own moral condemnation. Glaring at the beamish cantor, he is not in the least mollified when Olin comments quietly, “That was amazing, but what was it?” Says James Glock gloomily, “We’ll see.”

“The Rebbe Who Danced at Auschwitz! Famed in Hebrew lore!” Ben Lama giggles as he passes by, trying to tease Glock out of his indignation. Olin laughs, too, feeling gleeful. But Glock’s frown only deepens, and his groan is heartfelt and profound. He moves away, too caught up in his own strife to accept comfort.

Adina Schreier is exhilarated. She nods and smiles. Finding no words for what has happened but apprehending something all the same, they open their arms and share a brisk collegial embrace without a word.

O
LIN AND THE ISRAELI PROFESSOR
are invited to attend the nightly clergy meeting. There two earnest American Zen monks rush to support Rabbi Glock in deploring that offensive “dancing” (belatedly, since both had taken part). Adina sharply disagrees; in the Hebrew tradition, music and dancing may express a grief too deep to be fathomed by mere words.
Beyond, beyond, beyond all consolation
, she reminds them, quoting from the Mourner’s Kaddish.

From the night compound comes the plaint of the shofar, whose mournful note Adina interprets as “a sound from the breath of the heart, higher than reason.”

The professor is feverish with inquiry. Precisely because it was spontaneous, unanticipated, the Dancing was entirely in keeping with the spirit of this retreat; it was inevitable, she feels, perhaps a kind of benediction. The whole phenomenon excites her so that she has changed her mind about quitting the retreat and returning to Israel tomorrow and now looks forward to renewing her meditation on the ramp in hope of insight into what just happened.

Olin is astonished to hear such wonder in the voice of one so learned. He, too, hungers for clarification, but of what, precisely? The mystery has not been limited to this evening. Out on that platform at odd moments of each day, a presence had risen that, for want of a better term, he calls “earth apprehension” in his journal—a shifting of forces, ancient and unknown, that might have originated with the first life on the planet. Could this “dancing” be a symptom of “earth apprehension”?