In Paradise: A Novel (17 page)

“Probably both,” he says.

Nadia has overheard. “You say she died here? In this
Lager
?” All turn to look at him.
Why didn’t you tell us
, their expressions say. “It appears so,” he says shortly.

“Come on, Jaro!” Kind Becca is changing the subject, pointing toward the podium. “If our new Jew here can bear witness, why not you?” Jaroslav snaps back meanly, telling her to mind her own damned business. Abruptly, then, he rises. Though welcomed by Ben Lama, he does not go forward; he intends to make this quick. Eyes cast down, he mumbles all but inaudibly (“Speak up!”) in one short burst about the race dissension and dissolution that all but destroyed his family in that ugly war. “For them, maybe tragedy would be better,” he says, then sits down as suddenly as he had risen. “Like a jack-in-a-box!” laughs Becca. But she takes Jaro’s hand when she sees how he is trembling and is unoffended when he snatches it away.

H
E OVERTAKES
C
ATHERINE
as she leaves the building. Just as he feared, she stiffens when he touches her arm, pausing only to see what he might want. He has something to show her, he says. They perch on the cold edge of the stone bench in the court, where he brings out his precious photo. “This girl was my mother, you see,” he explains senselessly. Hoarse, he clears his throat and blunders on. “I didn’t want to exploit her story just to dramatize my own.”

She regards him with bewilderment. Was he ashamed of her?

Oh Lord, she’s missing the whole point.
No, no, of course not, he protests, why should he feel ashamed? He had only hoped to avoid unnecessary drama until he could be certain of the facts.
Not true. The facts were no longer in question, only your willingness to live with them.

She sits silent, awaiting some sign that she is free to go. He tries to smile but his mouth is dry, he has to swallow. “I suppose you see me a bit differently now? Perhaps like me a bit less?” He intends this wryly but hears fear in it, knowing she will hear it, too.

“Like you less?” She is too unpracticed in mendacity and tact not to hunt out ambiguity, club it to death. “Can it be you who likes you less?”

His nod concedes this: yes, that’s possible. (They had seemed so close only hours ago, why can’t she simply scoff away his distress?)

“Catherine? May I? Is it all right, I mean, to call you Catherine?”
Pathetic! Unbelievable! You’ve been calling her Catherine for two days!

“It is all right,” she sighs, looking mystified.

In desperation, he invokes their bond on that walk this afternoon, that exaltation. “You felt it, too, I think.” She nods. “And also in the Dancing?” She nods again, looking unhappy.
What a pity to speak of it
, she must be thinking.
You only smear the colors.
“So anyway,” he concludes stiffly, sitting back, desperate to recoup a little dignity, “I do think it’s important that we stay in touch after we leave here.”

She reminds him that this will not be possible, there can be no such prospect. But then she whispers, “You say to me that you will miss me. I say to you I miss you now this minute.”

Oh my God.
His start of joy gives way at once to alarm. He takes her hand, searches her face to be sure of what she means. What if she’s serious? What happens now? Has he cornered her, coerced her into this avowal to cushion his damned ego? How does he handle this? How does he protect her from her own impulsiveness? Protect her from herself?

Gently removing her hand from his, she crosses herself. “Yes,” she whispers. “The Lord has willed that this sister of Christ and this good man, her Jew brother, should meet here on Golgotha.” She touches cool fingertips to his brow in simple blessing.

“Ah.” He nods as best he can with the wind knocked out of him. Her blessing had been no more than Christian mercy, the sealing of some covenant or other.

But—
I miss you now this minute?
Hadn’t she said that, too? Could she be so fearful of the consequences that she has hidden her true feelings from herself, just as he had? Or is she the mature one, the wiser head prevailing, the first to awaken from that dreaming walk of yesterday and look hard at the impossibility of their situation?

The story of his life, continued: the impracticality of serious commitment to one woman, yet again.
Dr. Clements Olin, Jew brother of New England, wishes to announce his unrequited love for the comely novice Sister Catherine . . .

How right they were, his friends. How he regrets—how he
detests
—his foolish attendance on this much younger person in the role of mentor, taking advantage of her hunger for poetry and cultural ideas in a low effort to impress her and engage her affections, all the while nursing a lecherous curiosity about the live young body under those dead clothes.

He struggles to speak, to say anything at all that might salvage the moment or at least get it behind them, but she raises her forefinger to her lips as to a child, hushing further foolish speech. The tears welling in her eyes will never fall. She says, “We—everyone, I mean—I think what we are feeling in this place is much too large for one simple soul to understand, too powerful.” That transcendence of yesterday along the road from Birkenau, she agrees fervently, was like the Dancing, overflowing from some source they cannot know. “And this feeling of love overflowing is so strong that we become confused, perhaps take it for something else—”

“Something sentimental? We risk romanticizing the whole experience, I suppose you mean.” He wants to sound casual, to let go gracefully, but surely his cracked voice betrays him.

She waves a pale hand at the surrounding dark. “And still they are singing in me, Mr. Olin. In you also?”

Singing in me?
“I suppose so, Catherine.” He is thinking of Malan’s hole-eyed specters.

Leading them back onto safe ground, she tells him how grateful she was that he spoke out in defense of the German “friends.” However, he must look stricken still, for she touches his hand in concern. “Mr. Olin? How are you feeling now?”

He is taken aback by her tenderness. “I do wish you’d call me Clements,” he invites her, wishing he hadn’t, knowing she won’t. Gruffly, he tells her he feels fine, tells her again how moved he’d been by her brave words at the ash pond, all the while aware that he is blithering like any idiot, twining himself in lies and contradictions.

She rises to go. He jumps up, too, fishing the autumn-colored amber from his pocket and pressing it into her hand. “A keepsake. Please. So you won’t forget all our good talks, I mean. Our walks along that road.”

She draws back in alarm, as Wanda had. “Please, Mr. Olin, no, I cannot accept!” But to his astonishment, tears are coming that she cannot hide, and it is now when her face curls and she is pitiful and plain that he knows how precious to him she has become.

“Catherine, listen,” he whispers. “You fear a negative report, isn’t that true? But Father Mikal assured me—”

“How can they refuse me?” she bursts out. “It is my calling.” Like St. Catherine, she had offered her life to the good Lord, not to those old red-robed men in Rome. Who, she says, would entrust the sacred gift of this one life on earth to a hierarchy of usurpers unworthy of respect? If necessary, she declares fiercely, she will ordain
herself,
live a devout life outside the convent walls, join the great emancipation of the nuns that must surely come! Go forth into the world with the Lord’s blessing and drive the last false priests out of the temples—!

But as she withdraws toward the convent, she looks frightened by her own bravado. “Everything will be all right,” he calls after her stupidly, full of emotion, and then—stupider still—“Don’t worry, Catherine, you’ll see. I shall take care of you.”

“Take care of me?”
She crosses herself, incredulous. “By no means will that be necessary!” She is gone before he can undo the damage.

H
E MOUNTS THE STAIRS
slowly to the dormitory floor, goes to the naked washroom to piss out his chagrin. In the rust-pocked mirror over the stained basin, he derides the spurned suitor who washes his hands of himself in vain and must shake the water off and dry his hands down his trouser seams like a little boy for want of a coarse paper towel. Never has he felt so clumsy, so inept, so immature. The face in the mirror fairly glowers in self-detestation.

Who are you anyway, some kind of a dumb Polack? Some weird kind of a Jew? Merely an idiot? Whatever made you think your ridiculous infatuation was reciprocated in the smallest way? She’s been trying all along to tell you gently that the last thing she needs right now is some old fool blundering into her life and causing trouble.

He harangues his mirror image as he had so often in his first years at university, usually drunk and not infrequently ashamed of some callow utterance or unkind act of the previous hour that he hadn’t been quite ready to face up to.

H
AD EITHER GRANDPARENT EVER KISSED
or hugged him? He could scarcely recall their touch except to slap or shake him, and that rarely, since as a shy and lonely child, he had been disobedient only through confusion. Not that he’d missed being pecked by thin cold lips or embraced by the bony arms of those old stalks with their queer odors—in fact, the idea repelled him. But his father hadn’t been much good at affection either, and he supposed he had longed for something always missing—indeed, ached for it—if only perhaps a hug when he was sad, or at least some sense that he belonged with a group of human beings whose affection might help fill that empty pit at the bottom of every breath he’d ever taken.

And now his life is all too much and much too suddenly a shambles. Today he is a Jew who knows next to nothing about being Jewish. How ironic, no, how
grotesque
it would be if even now he remained infected with some old strain of anti-Semitism contracted from those snobs who raised him, having discovered too late that in this last of the Olinskis, they were fostering some damned bastardly little Jew. How bitterly they must have resented him, this ill-begotten David, seed and symbol of their disappointment in a drunkard son.

Still, they had done their duty by him. As they saw it, sparing him the rumor of his provenance had been a kindness. Had his father been braver and more truthful, of course, they might never have ransomed some little smeller they had never laid eyes on. Sound arguments against it would surely have been found. The paternity, indeed the very existence of this “David” might have been disputed, in which case he would have perished with Miss Emi Allgeier in the last burning gasp of an earthly passage too fleeting and too terrible to count as life at all.

Emmeline Allgeier? You came looking for her, yes, if telling yourself so makes you feel better. But how clearly did you understand that was why you came? And did you really wish to find her? Wish to
learn that laughing Emi in the window was gone and lost forever in the wastes of history, along with every soul who ever knew her voice or took delight in her or might have mourned her?

Her only mourner is this whiner in the mirror.
That
you, David? Welcome to bloody Poland, man. This was your
decision, you whose heart fastened on that instinct that something
awaited you in the “dead, detested country” of old
Vorarbeiter.
Well, now you know, right? So make the best of
it.