In Paradise: A Novel (7 page)

At the intermission, Adina laments the fading interest in the Shoah among young people in Israel, where any mention of it may be met these days with bored indifference: it is stale history, the new generations say, as wearisome as those dreary old survivors and their nightmares. Even worse, say too many young Israelis, most of those survivors had been sluts or cowards.

“
What?
Snot-nose bastards. What do
they
know about it?”

“Bravo! Yes! Correct!” A young Zionist kibbutznik, full of himself to bursting: “So who’s not sick of all this shit about the Shoah, right? Okay? So never again no more kvetching, okay? The survivors say, ‘Forgive the unforgivable,’ okay? So we forgive those people.” He points rudely at the Germans. “Let them sit in their old Nazi shit for a thousand years, okay? But in Israel we are home and we are staying, and all those Arabs can go fuck themselves while we move on.”

If that kid has moved on, Olin is thinking, why is he so angry? Why has he spent good money on this pilgrimage into the past which by the looks of him he can’t afford? He shakes off Anders, who is chuckling into his ear again: “So now we move on, we go ethnic-clean, okay? Croats, maybe? Those Croats might be very nice today.”

“Some of us can never move on,” intones the melancholy Rabbi Glock, who for a thin man has too much tremble in his chin. And Earwig snarls to no one in particular, “You sucked it up in your mother’s milk, that hate.” Which hate? Olin wonders. For all the sincere good will, there are so many old hates in this hall. Earwig, for instance—who does this guy hate most? Nazis? Catholics? Georgie Earwig? The human species? Who had his mother been, and where?

Swooping in to tidy up her point, the Israeli professor wishes to register her solidarity with the young kibbutzniks. (Being young at heart herself, is what she means, says Anders.) Yes, it is time to move on. All those wars and massacres, those genocides, those hordes of refugees walking endless dust-choked roads to nowhere, scouring the earth for the last food and water—aren’t these never-ending tragedies of our own time dreadful enough without clinging to the Catastrophe of fifty years ago?

Dr. Anders Stern, setting levity aside, interrupts his esteemed colleague to protest. The Shoah was different from anything before it, a realm of horror so far exceeding past insanities as to risk escaping human history altogether. In the end, he says, all this race business is meaningless. “
Jewish
blood? What is it, really?”

The American Israeli is up again. “After so much, he wants to know what’s Jewish blood?”

Professor Schreier raises hand and voice. “Understand, Dr. Stern, I don’t mean to exempt Israel from criticism. To judge from our record in Palestine, we have learned very little from our own great tragedy. It’s all very well to observe Holocaust Day and blow that siren; I myself have cried, ‘
Never
again!
’ on the street corner in Tel Aviv—”

The American Israeli: “So what side are you on, lady? You a
real
Israeli or just some kind of a jihadnik—?”

“Hey, let her finish!” calls another man. “Look where we find ourselves these days with our homegrown apartheid!”

Adina nods and frowns at the same time. “That apartheid analogy is anti-Semitism, too, of course. True, our leaders invite it—”

“Right on, Prof!” bawls Earwig. “And when your bullet-headed politicians run out of cheap tricks and your swarthy inferiors are still standing in your way, what happens then? The Final Solution to the
Ay
-rab Question?”

The audience turns on him in a body, pointing fingers at his face.
Who is this guy anyway?
Another voice:
All you damned Jews in the Diaspora—!
Earwig cringes comically in this wave of denunciation, even summons it with the cupped fingers of both outstretched hands, as in
Bring it on, you sons-of-bitches, let’s see what you got.

“Diaspora, my ass-pora,” he jeers. And it is now, in the ensuing uproar, that he turns and enlists Olin with a burlesqued wink of complicity.

Why you dirty bastard! To compromise someone else so casually—how infuriating! Olin summons up a sort of smile intended to suggest that this guy’s outrages are mere childish provocations, not to be taken seriously. But Earwig won’t help even a little by returning Olin’s smile, for Earwig smiles rarely and never laughs, not ever, despite his chronic air of bitter amusement. The man is dead honest, Olin reminds himself, and he has honor of a kind and no self-pity: he does not hint at some horrific past to excuse his nastiness. But that gullied face, those ravines flanking his nose: Is this attrition what Ben Lama wishes everyone to see? That “G. Earwig, unaffiliated,” hunkered in his seat, could use a little healing, too? Does anyone have any idea where this man comes from, or care?

Anders is still holding forth as they get ready for bed. As an evolutionary biologist, he questions whether a potential for evil behavior can be called “unnatural” or “inhuman”: if it is latent in our nature, as he believes, it is all too human. Our closest relative, the chimpanzee, can be brutal, murderous, but it is never evil, intentionally doing harm. A male lion may bloodily devour its young. But
Homo sapiens
is the only animal that will knowingly torment others, the weaker individuals of its own species perhaps especially. Thus the depraved Nazi trooper is lower than the beast because the beast knows nothing of the joys of cruelty—

“So the death camp is no aberration, only an extreme sociopathic manifestation of man’s fundamental nature, is that your point? I understand this, Anders, so if you don’t mind, I’m turning off the light.”

U
NABLE TO SLEEP,
he rises, dresses, makes his way downstairs and out into the streets, circling the
Lager
’s outer walls to the liver-colored bourgeois house at 88 Legion Street, just outside the barbed wire on the camp corner—the former habitation of camp Commandant Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Hoess, with its military row of hard tight evergreens and its concrete dog pen of a garden and its view down the perimeter street to the artificial pine knoll camouflaging the munitions bunker that served as the camp’s first gas chamber and crematorium.

Rudolf Hoess has mainly interested Olin because before his execution he composed a memoir said to be mostly trustworthy. At the end of World War I, age seventeen, he served as the youngest noncommissioned officer in the German army. Joining Hitler’s party in 1922, he soon proved his mettle by committing a political murder for its leaders and enduring six years in prison. In 1934, Hoess was conscripted for the black-booted SS; in official photographs of its high-ranking officers, he is the stocky man seen often at the elbow of his mentor, Minister of the Interior Heinrich Himmler, the tall triple-chinned Minister of the Interior in bottle-bottomed glasses. In May of 1940, after a tour of duty at the Sachsenhausen camp, Hoess was transferred to Oswiecim, bringing with him a squad of thirty condemned criminals to carry out SS orders as the barracks
Kapos
. By his own account, Hoess took such pride in his efficiency that photographers were invited from Berlin to record his operation for unlucky colleagues who had had no opportunity to visit.

Like perpetrators of atrocities worldwide, Rudolf Hoess would lay all blame on his superiors, describing himself as “a normal person overcome by a ruthless concept of obedience.” This appraisal of his own character seems almost rational when compared to the vainglory of Adolf Eichmann, for whom the knowledge that he helped consign five million Jewish human beings to their deaths was a source of “extraordinary satisfaction.” “I shall leap into my grave laughing,” Eichmann said.

The house is silent, its windows dead, yet in some dimension it is still inhabited, Olin thinks, by fat old Widow Hoess. “My family, to be sure, were well-provided for here in Auschwitz,” Hoess would write. “Every wish expressed by my wife or children was granted them. The children could live a free and untrammeled life. My wife’s garden was a paradise of flowers.”

The Hoesses and their four offspring, waited on by emaciated slaves, inhabited a brute heaven of gourmet delicacies, silks, furs, jewelry, and assorted loot stripped from doomed prisoners. His wife would sigh, “I want to live here till I die,” according to one slave (who may have survived, Olin supposes, thanks to furtive access to the family’s garbage). But Frau Hoess’s gourmandizing rapture, uninhibited by her surroundings, was matched by the indifference to human suffering not only of her husband and the SS and the
Kapos
in the camp but of those local people who took jobs inside these gates.

A surge of hatred: he is suddenly out of breath. (“They grew fond of certain slaves, we’ve heard,” red-haired Rebecca, his friend from Warsaw, has told him, “but as good Germans, they let them be taken to the ovens when their turn came.”)

After the war, the fugitive Hoess worked on a German farm until his arrest; like Hans Frank, the Nazi governor in Cracow who made off with the Leonardo, he was found guilty at Nuremberg of crimes against humanity, returned to Poland, and condemned to death. In April 1947, the last breath was yanked from stocky stone-faced SS Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Hoess on gallows erected near the entrance of his Krematorium #1.

S
eparate prayer services for Buddhists, Jews, and Christians will be held each day on the platform or at the crematoria, and this morning, Olin accompanies the Israeli professor to the Christian service, which is led not by Father Mikal, who stands apart, but by Sister Catherine in the blue beret. Though Adina mostly agrees with Earwig’s anti-clerical opinions, she deplores his abuse of the young women as inimical to the spirit of the retreat. Furthermore, she has formed a good opinion of the older novice, whom she has sought out and spoken with.

He listens dutifully to Sister Catherine, bows his head during the prayer, and under his breath joins in the simple hymn caroled by the novices as they lead their little congregation back toward the circle. The pure voices rising and falling on a cold east wind out of Ukraine seem to him beautiful.

During meditation, breathing mindfully moment after moment, his awareness opens and dissolves into snow light. But out of nowhere, just as he had feared, the platform’s emptiness is filled by a multitude of faceless shapes milling close around him. He feels the vibration of their footfalls.

A
T NOON EACH DAY
outside the Gate, a wagon dispenses chunks of dark bread and a plain broth: the symbolic meal is eaten standing, using mouth and fingers in memory of those whose daily ration was foul watery gruel with a hunk of moldy crust.

In the shadow of the Arch, Sister Catherine dips her bread, neat as a squirrel. When he approaches to thank her for her morning service, she says, “All are welcome, sir.” The other novice gawks at him with peasant frown. “Here is Sister Ann-Marie,” says Sister Catherine, as if presenting a dull child, and her companion, closing her mouth, performs a clumsy sort of curtsy. Sister Ann-Marie is a short, heavy girl of thick complexion who, Olin suspects, has had less difficulty than she might have wished obeying her vow of chastity and probably has always known that she exists to serve. To judge from the sullen look of her, this does not mean she understands why this should be so, far less why she should accept her ordained lot without complaint.

When Sister Catherine attempts to thank him for intervening at the Kolbe chapel, he assures her he had meant only to protest that loud bullying of defenseless young women—here he stops short, for she is trying not to smile.

Is it because of his own prejudice that nuns make him so nervous? “You are Sister Katarzyna,” he says in Polish. “And your maiden name?” She closes her eyes for a moment before watching him turn red.
Who
would
ask
such
a
fool
question?
In English, she says, “I am called Sister Catherine.”

From the start, Sister Ann-Marie, with little English and no apparent interest in acquiring more, seems excluded from their conversation, though she stands right there. This bothers him more than it seems to bother Sister Catherine, who has scarcely glanced at the other woman since introducing her.

Sister Catherine has noticed after all that he’s been taking notes, for she holds up her own diary. “You see? Nuns bear witness, too.” When he confesses he has not come here to bear witness, she shrugs this off, not interested. “Doctor Professor D. Clements Olin, Polish-borned teacher-poet, yes? Who disapprove our Roman Church?” She waves the small green book at his eyes as if it contained proof.

“Not at all,” he lies, taken aback. “I attended your service this morning—”

The second novice suddenly exclaims, “You speak our tongue!”—accusingly, as if he were trying to conceal this fact for nefarious reasons. “Well, yes, Sister,” he says, holding Sister Catherine’s eye. “At least I used to.” And Sister Catherine, gazing straight into his face, says, “Sir, your spirit is hostile. Like your friend.”

“He’s not—” But he stops right there. To repudiate Earwig at this point would be weakness, perhaps some sort of betrayal, though in this moment he cannot think why.

Inspecting the bottom of her bowl, Sister Catherine is frowning now and blushing, too, apparently discomfited by her own bluntness. She is taller and older than the other, probably in her early thirties and similarly dressed in an ill-cut black cape and brown wool suit and galoshes. Her expression is quick and in its way fresh and appealing. Bright hazel eyes, uneven teeth, round red cheeks chafed—her skin looks sort of
scraped
. Gray-brown lips, plump but unpainted—a pity, he thinks, that she knows nothing of cosmetics. She doesn’t really need to look so plain.

He wants very much to be straightforward; her candor demands no less. “It’s only all that antiquated dogma—”

Sister Catherine actually steps backward as if slapped hard in the face. Sensing trouble from this foreigner, this
male
, her sister groans. “Yes,” frowns Sister Catherine after a moment, “yes, there is much to understand.” She taps her diary. “So far not much,” she admits. That small pained smile comes and goes.

On impulse, she thrusts the journal into his hands. “In here I practice my bad English,” she says. “Nothing is hiding.” Startled by such recklessness, he hastens to explain that while he is interested, of course, in a nun’s impressions—

“And you?” She points at his own notebook. “What is it? You reveal dark secret of Jew persecution by Saint Maximilian?” Her voice is soft but her face is tight.

To avoid any obligation to exchange notes, he tries again to return the diary, at the same time smiling to assure her that this fraught moment need not come between them, but she, perverse, won’t extend her hand to take it. “So. Dr. Clements, Dr. Olin, no need for nice nun witness after all?” More irony. Challenged, he opens the diary to this morning’s entry.

Just as he feared, she has discovered that the atmosphere in Birkenau is still swarming with “lost souls.” Oh Lord, he thinks, all those poor wandering souls! Many retreatants, he suspects, share her belief that the unburied dead—“the hungry ghosts,” as Ben Lama’s Buddhists call them—still haunt this emptiness, unable to find rest because they were forsaken. The more devotional go further, seeking to console through prayer the keening spirits that their mission has stirred up like a wind of bees. How fatuous, he thinks. Those multitudes are gone forever into a disappearing past beyond all healing, leaving no trace more tangible than the near-dust of all that hair in the museum.

She watches intently as he reads. And he is intrigued, despite himself, because she, too, has already been swarmed by those imaginary multitudes.

“Those feet passed right in front of me,” he whispers. “Some in ripped shoes, as you say, but many naked!”

But she seems uninterested in any bond their visions of naked feet might create between them. Her expression says,
Never mind those feet, get on with it.

Her hazel eyes search his face until he finishes. It’s those brows that curve down around the eyes that bring a wistful cast to her expression, a shadow of sadness, he decides. He extends the diary again, nodding judiciously. “Well said, Sister Catherine. Rather beautiful, I think.” Braving that gaze, he insists, “And please believe me, Sister, I do not feel hostile. I’m just troubled by the whole idea of papal infallibility—”

She snatches back her notebook, sets his empty bowl in hers, and returns both to the tailgate of the food truck on her way to the tunnel, Sister Ann-Marie stumping behind. Not until she nears the meditation circle on the platform does she turn to face him. She takes a deep breath. “Sir, His Holiness . . .” She is unable to finish.

At the circle bundled figures turn toward the burr of their low voices. He must clear things up quickly, put this bad start behind them.

B
Y MIDAFTERNOON
soft snow is falling, muffling four voices that rise from the cardinal points around the circle, north, south, east, and west, intoning names from registration lists obtained by Rainer from museum archives in Berlin—long lists that represent but tiny fractions of that fraction of new prisoners who survived, however briefly, the first selections on this platform and were tattooed with small blue numbers. The impeccable lists include city and country of origin, arrival date, and date of death, not infrequently on that same day or the next.

Column after column, page after page, of the more common family names ascend softly from the circle of still figures to be borne away on gusts of wind-whirled snow.
Schwartz, Herschel; Schwartz, Isaac A.; Schwartz, Isaac D.; Schwartz, Isidor—
Who? Isidor? You too?
The voices are all but inaudible as befits snuffed-out identities that exist only on lists, with no more reality than forgotten faces in old photo albums—
Who’s this bald guy in the back?
Stray faces of no more significance than wind fragments of these names of long ago, of no more substance than this snowflake poised one moment on his pen before dissolving into voids beyond all knowing.

M
ENTION OF NAME-CHANTING
that evening sends one German, Horst, off on another rant. To speak seriously of murder facilities with impeccable registration lists is utterly insane, the man is yelling, because death camps themselves are beyond all sane discussion, even by those few who survived. So how could mere visitors hope to grasp something unrecognizable even as pathology to anybody who is not insane himself?

Ben Lama nods. “There’s no space left on that platform for interpretation. It’s just there,” he says. “It just
is
.”

T
OWARD TWILIGHT,
the sharp-winged silhouette of a small falcon crosses the no-man’s-land of charred black chimneys—the only wild thing he has seen besides rooks in raucous flight over the snow-patched fields between the great dead camp and the world out there on the horizon, no farther from the platform than those faint church bells, that far rumbling of trains.

Olin? You’re right here in the region. Why do you wait?
He must at least try to locate some old inhabitant with a dim memory of the burned manor house or even, possibly, a clue as to the fate of that other family. He will go make inquiries, of course. Perhaps tomorrow.