In Paradise: A Novel (19 page)

E
arwig will be dropped off at the airport. Before moving up the aisle to take leave of Ben Lama, he mutters a sour sort of thanks to Clements Olin. “You never liked me but you heard me out.”

“Matter of fact, I couldn’t stand you,” Olin says. And because both know that this is true, they can grin ruefully, just once, as they shake hands.

R
ABBI
J
IM
G
LOCK
squashes into the aisle seat beside Olin with scarcely a pause in his ongoing plaint. He is grievously disappointed in his death camp experience and “heavy of heart” as well, perceiving all Poland as “one big cemetery.” Though the man strikes Olin as doom-ridden and narrow, he has the courage of his own closed mind and a faith strong enough to brandish the Torah’s strictures against “that travesty you people call ‘the Dancing.’”

The rabbi’s skepticism is shared by Anders Stern, who admits he was queerly stirred by the event but has no patience with abstractions as diaphanous as “joy.” For most of their companions, however, that nameless joy will not be stifled; it persists on this last afternoon in a debate that grows frenetic in the need to isolate its nature before these firsthand witnesses can scatter, leaving the skeptics to dismiss the strangest experience in all their lives.

The English lady behind Olin is convinced that the joy which arose out of the Dancing was pure ecumenical energy, the pent-up compassion of so many people “bonding” in prayer with others of good will, all striving to bring healing to the martyrs. (Rabbi Glock, glancing Olin’s way, rolls his eyes—
Oy vey!
—in the first collegial response these two have shared all week.)

Rainer notes that poor deaf Beethoven was the same notably joyless man who concluded his Ninth Symphony with the triumphal
Ode to Joy
: what, he inquires, was Beethoven’s queer “joy” if not transcendence?

Feeling unbearably
alive
in one’s own being, as in sexual abandon, Olin reflects—mightn’t that draw near it? He recalls how Thoreau had celebrated that vital joy in his atavistic impulse to devour the raw heart of a deer that is slain bare-handed. In similar spirit—this is Ben Lama—the Zen poet Ryokan wrote of a glad willingness to exchange the most magnificent metaphor about the sea for the immediacy, the pure reality, of one splash of cold surf full in the face.

Over and over they inquire about the source of such an unanticipated blessing. Some say it is pure “Love”—like “Truth,” Olin reflects, a word half-rotted in most mouths, his own included. Do they mean love of God or love of life or love of the nameless martyrs, the lost millions? Or love right here in this moment for all these disheveled fellow passengers? Love of all hapless humankind, saints, sadists, heroes, perverts, torturers, the lot—in effect, compassion for the human condition, the unconditional acceptance of every last two-legged crotched creature, so isolated and accursed among all beasts in knowing it must die?

Inevitably, their attempts to
understand
grow rarefied, cerebral, words upon dead words. (“All the Universe is one bright pearl,” Master Dogen wrote. “What need is there to understand it?”) And finally Olin turns away, pressing his forehead to the cold window glass of winter dusk trying to clarify his feelings about Catherine and Mikal and also that confused amateur Jew who sits here with him.
You don’t have to be David, remember? But I do.

As the bus enters the outskirts of the city, he is drawn back into the debate by something Rabbi Dan is saying about Birkenau. “Without for a moment forgetting the sorrow, there was joy,” he says. “People said strange things such as, ‘How can I leave?’” Another voice cries, “Yes! That’s
it
!” and another, “I felt that same way! Kind of . . . well, you know—
homesick
!” And a Frenchman rarely heard from all that week shocks them all and horrifies himself. “Oh, my beloved Birkenau!” he cries.

“What did he say? Beloved
Birkenau
?” Glock wails. “What kind of sick craziness is
that
?” But the Frenchman in his guilty rapture can only sigh as if entranced,
“Mais oui, c’est ça. C’est Birkenau, mon amour.”

A
T THE HOTEL
he learns that the first bus was met by a mother superior in a church van. At the front desk, under Olin’s name, a page torn from Catherine’s diary.

What is this deep presence holding Birkenau together, causing its visitors not to flee in horror but to return down that long road over and over, taking strength from a strange power not fading down with age into the history of long ago but running through the marrow of this earth . . .

“Too romantic, you are thinking, Mr. Clements?” she has written beneath. “Too sentimentable?” Her instinct strikes Olin as rather beautiful. It is also, of course, romantic, “sentimentable.”

No signature, no word of parting.

T
O KLEZMER MUSIC
at the Ariel restaurant in the old Jewish quarter (where for want of Jews, nosy Anders soon discovers, the management, staff, chefs, and musicians are Christians to a man), they share an oddly festive supper, clinging to the last wisps of exaltation with toasts of the local slivovitz. In candlelight, Olin drinks stolidly as Anders Stern deplores an event in Bosnia the year before, when paramilitary gangs drunk on plum brandy much like this slivovitz had yanked back some seven thousand heads and slit the bared throats of every Muslim boy and man in a detention pen in the town of Srebrenica.

“Der final zolution to der Mushlim Probalem,” toasts the Nordic Jew in his thick-spittled rendition of a drunk Serb voice. Struck anew by the ice eyes and shining red lips refracted in Anders’s glass, Olin wonders why he had ever found this crude, cruel, yet not unkindly man amusing. (He will recall those eyes another day when he is startled but somehow not surprised by word from Stockholm of the baroque suicide of Dr. Stern.)

D
URING SUPPER,
the ex-monk Stefan brings word from Oswiecim of an assault on the new priest by local men who dragged him from his altar and rushed him out through the church doors, throwing his vestments after him into the street—a warning, they’d yelled, about what might befall him should he ever dare set foot in town again.

Was Stefan implying that Mikal was—well, that sort of priest? Stefan smiles in his insinuating manner. “One of
those
, you mean?” He shrugs: he only knew that the man had been removed from his parish by the bishop and transferred to Oswiecim—“to lay low, perhaps?”

“
Perhaps?
Isn’t this how rumors start?” Olin demands, not offering the man a chair. “In the convent, perhaps? Sister Ann-Marie? Something is missing in your story,” says Olin coldly. Where, he wonders, has that poor priest crept tonight?

N
EXT MORNING
the priest steps out of a doorway just down from the hotel, coat collar turned up against the cold and also to obscure his bruised unshaven face. Tersely he requests money for bus fare, he will pay it back. Fumbling for his billfold, Olin says thinly, “You’ll go home, then,” by which he means,
Where will you go now, you poor bastard?
The man does not bother to respond. Too violated to thank anyone for anything, he simply waits.

Offered coffee, something to eat, Mikal permits himself to be shown into a café. In a while, sitting up straight and adjusting his ripped collar, he says he has no parish to return to. These days, whole congregations vanish. In Europe, at least, the Church is dying.

“Our disrobed monk says the same thing. You know him?”

“That man never disrobed, not voluntarily,” the priest says sharply. “He was defrocked and excommunicated. He is ‘dead to us,’ as we say in the Church. But I think he has never let go.”

It seems that Sister Ann-Marie, upset by an ugly rumor picked up at the convent, must have repeated it to Sister Catherine, which turned Sister Catherine against him. But probably Sister Ann-Marie was not the source.

“You think it was Stefan—”

The other shrugs, uncomfortable. “These days, the mere fact that I was transferred out of my parish might have been enough.”

Priest Mikal has tried to forgive Stefan because Stefan himself as an orphaned child raised by the diocese had been molested by a depraved priest. Even so—he knew no other life—Stefan persevered as a seminarian, and later on, as a young brother on the path of holy orders, until he discovered that his molester was still active in another parish and realized that the greater sin would be to remain silent. Denied a hearing, he was browbeaten, bullied, ridiculed, and threatened with eternal damnation until finally he cracked and went along with the coverup. But he had made enemies, and before long his ordination was deferred and he was stripped of his monk’s habit. To be refused holy orders was a dreadful blow to a seminarian raised in a church orphanage, a choirboy, an altar boy, who knew no home but the Church. He turned wild and bitter, “obsessed, paranoid, a little crazy, even. Which does not mean he was wrong,” adds the priest carefully. But in the end his drunken solicitation of a young postulant novice who had supported his petition would provide the excuse needed by the hierarchy to get rid of him.