Lumen (3 page)

Bora said he thought he knew.

“But do you know what it means?”

Bora looked away from the doorpost. “I think it’s called a
mezuzah
. It’s supposed to contain some holy script.”

Retz unbuckled his belt and holster, and tossed them on a chair. “If the place weren’t so nicely set up, I’m telling you, that thing would be enough to ask for relocation.”

Bora hadn’t yet crossed the threshold. He saw that, although the brass nameplate had been removed from the door, the family name printed under the electric bell was still readable, and it was a Jewish name.

Retz had gone into the bathroom. Through the half-open door, the sound of urine falling into the bowl could be heard. He called out to Bora over the trickling noise. “Look around - your bedroom is in the back.”

Bora took his cap off. Unlike Retz, it was the first time he’d stepped into their quarters. He glanced in the direction of a room straight ahead, a carpeted parlour where the shiny corner of a grand piano was visible to him. He was soon standing in front of it, and some nimble fingering of keys followed. Retz joined him leisurely.

“So, about Hofer. You’ve been driving him back and forth for a week and you didn’t know that his son is as good as dead? Has some dire disease, and he’s only four or five years of age. Late marriage, late child - the only child. The old man has been beside himself for the past year. The doctors told him there’s nothing they can do, so he lives day by day like he’s the one on death row.” Retz leaned with a sneer against the shiny frame of the parlour
door. “Well, I see
you
won’t have a problem adjusting to a Yid’s house.” He watched Bora eagerly look through a stack of sheet music. “Why don’t you play something? Can you play any of Zarah Leander’s cabaret songs?”

The abbess’s voice came distinctly through the door, addressing a sister no doubt, because Bora recognized the Polish word
Siostra.
Hofer stood two steps away from him in the convent’s corridor, white-faced. The thin layer of sweat on his balding forehead was not justified by the temperature of late October. The outside walls of the convent were massive and successfully insulated it from the heat and cold. Warm, it was not. When Hofer nervously checked the buttons of his tunic, Bora saw his hands shake.

Because of that, and because sunny days seemed to be scarce in Cracow, Bora would much rather be outside. Careful to show no annoyance, he lifted his eyes to the closest small window filled with sky and cut out like a cloth of gold in the bare wall. The abbess kept them waiting. The open air would be cool and brisk, with plenty of light left to drive to the river past the Pauline church or beyond the bridge towards Wieliczka, something he hadn’t had time to do so far. He imagined walking in the tender oblique sun through venerable streets.

Hofer addressed him harshly, with a tone of sudden strain in his voice, as if he could be harsher than this but chose to curb himself.

“You have no worries in the world, do you?”

Bora was taken aback by the words. He had tried not to look distracted, and was embarrassed. When he removed his eyes from the window, a greenish square floated in
his vision after staring at the bright window. “I’m sorry, Colonel.”

“That’s not what I asked you.”

“No, sir.” Bora overheard some imperious command from the abbess beyond the closed door, still he looked at Hofer’s resentful face. “I have responsibilities,” he said. “And I miss being home.”

“You have no worries.” Hofer said it as if it were Bora’s fault, with envious bitterness. He glanced at his watch, took a rigid step forwards and then returned to utter immobility, the cramped immobility of one who awaits the verdict in a physician’s office. “How long do you think it’s going to last?”

Bora didn’t mistake what Hofer meant. “I’m sure life tries us all, sooner or later.”

“Sooner or later? Sooner than you think, be sure.” Above the door hung a framed lithograph of Adam and Eve in the Garden, and Hofer pointed with his head to it. “That’s you, up there.”

Bora urbanely turned to the picture. Adam’s nakedness stood behind a providential arching branch. He looked stolid, wide-eyed, a well-built yokel to whom a flirtatious Eve was presenting a very small red apple.

“This war’s going to give you the apple, Captain.”

“I expect it will. Still I think I have a choice—”

“Oh, you’ll bite into it. Don’t you think yourself superior: when it’s shown to you, you’ll gobble it whole.”

The noiseless turn of the door handle was followed by a rustle of black and white, and a plain-faced nun cracked the door, only enough for her to look out.

“
Pulkownike
Hofer.” She invited the colonel to enter. “Please. The abbess will see you now.”

“Wait in the other room,” Hofer tossed the words to Bora. As he walked in, through the widening swing of the
door Bora caught a glimpse of another woman in three-quarters view: a tall, starchy, regal nun, whose eyes levelled a cold look on him. Then the door closed like a denial.

Walking back to the waiting room under the escort of a nun who seemed to have materialized out of nowhere, Bora paid closer attention to the sparse images on the walls, set off by the clarity of perfectly washed, drapeless windows along the corridor. The Stations of the Cross followed one another inside black frames. At a bend of the corridor, a colourful plaster statue of Our Lady of Lourdes stood on a doily-covered wooden pedestal. Despite the solidity of the building, when Bora went by, his booted steps made the metallic stars around her halo tremble and tinkle.

Although he’d come here every day he’d spent in Cracow for the past week, Bora still couldn’t figure out the ground plan of the convent. Rooms seemed to be everywhere; narrow hallways and steps leading up and down confused the visitor until one appreciated the silent, gliding presence of the nun to guide his steps.

“She was the classiest lay in Poland,” Retz reminisced after work over his tilted liquor glass. Eyes on the fifteen-year-old stage magazine spread on the coffee table in their apartment, he simpered, “You haven’t seen class and single-mindedness until you’ve see
her.
Look there.”

Bora looked. It seemed that in the 1920s critics had sworn by Ewa Kowalska. Picking through the printed words of the Polish magazine, Bora understood that her rendition of Dora in
A Doll’s House
was unrivalled, and men had loved her in Pirandello’s
It Is So
. She displayed strength, technical self-assurance, flair, et cetera. She promised to be a Polish Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse rolled into one.

From what Bora had heard elsewhere, less than twenty years later, Ewa Kowalska didn’t seem to fit the promises any more. She hadn’t adapted well to changes in style and interpretation, and in the end had argued her way out of the Warsaw theatre scene. It was on the provincial stages that she could still play the prima donna, and probably only because of the war she’d found herself once more in demand in Cracow. She rounded her income by doing translations from the French on the side, but, all in all, the officers said that her flat on Święty Krzyzka was still cosy in winter and had fresh cut flowers in the summertime.

Bora listened to Major Retz speak, and was actually curious to meet her.

“I don’t think she would be much interested in someone your age,” Retz dismissed his interest.

Bora wouldn’t argue the point. He’d already concluded from the odd array of bottles and smears on the sink that Retz dyed his hair to look younger, so he added nothing that could be interpreted as a wish to compete with him on matters of women.

Retz said, refilling his glass, “I’m meeting Frau Kowalska here next Saturday, Bora, so make sure you stay out until very late that night.”

“Until what time, Major?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Two, three in the morning.” Retz had a meaningful grin. “I haven’t seen her in twenty-one years.”

Lack of an answer hinted at some unspoken doubt in the younger man. Retz felt it. He added, “I’ll reciprocate, don’t worry.”

“I have no difficulty staying out, Major. It’s the matter of security.”

“‘Security?’”

“Fraternization.”

Retz laughed. In his mid-forties at least, strongly built, he was handsome in a coarse way, self-assured in excess of any certainty Bora felt right now.

“Because I take to bed a Polish woman? Loosen up, Captain. I know what fraternizing is, I don’t need Intelligence to remind me.” After gulping the drink down, Retz put his glass away, and corked the brandy flask. “By the way, how’s your Polish?”

“Not good. I only know a few sentences.”

“Well, you’re doing better than I. Call this number and schedule me an appointment with Dr Franz Margolin, here. Of course I ‘know he’s Jewish’, what do you think? Now that he and his kind have been brought back to Poland, I might as well take advantage of it. Jew and all, he used to be the best dentist in Potsdam.”

“Won’t he speak German, then?”

“I wouldn’t be asking if he did, would I? Polish is what he speaks. Unless your Yiddish is better than your Polish, stick to Polish. Tell him I have a cavity or two to take care of.”

Bora had no idea what the Polish word for cavity might be. He dialled the operator, and managed to ask for the dentist’s office. The phone rang long and empty. Bora was about to hang up when finally a woman’s voice answered.

“
Margolin? Jego niema w domu. Kiedy on wraca? Nie, nie moge odpowiedzéc na to pytanie. Nie wiem kiedy.
”

“
Nie rozumiem
,” Bora said in return, because he hadn’t understood a thing except that Margolin wasn’t in. It took ten minutes of mutual explanation for him to realize that Margolin was not expected back at his house or office ever.

“Just my fucking luck.” Retz disappointedly slapped his knee. “Now I’ll have to go to one of our military hacks. Do
you realize how inconvenient it is to walk around with two cavities?”

Bora, who had no cavities, didn’t think it was the time to say so.

In his rented room on Karmelicka Street, Father Malecki awoke from his afternoon nap with the anxious impression that he shouldn’t have fallen asleep. Heart pounding, his eyes opened on the green striped rectangle of the shuttered window and he could tell by the amount of light filtering through the slats that it was past four o’clock.

Holding his breath, he tried to control the palpitation in his chest. It wasn’t like him to wake up in a cold sweat, especially when he hadn’t even had a nightmare. He sat up, reaching for his wristwatch on the bedstand.

Four thirty-five. He yawned, slipped the metal band around his wrist and stretched. Why did he feel that he was late for something? There wasn’t much for him to do until this evening, when he’d join the sisters at the convent for vespers.

The sting of anxiety made no sense. Malecki drank a sip of water to wet his dry mouth. He hadn’t felt such discomfort since the arrival of the Germans in Poland. Sure, news every day managed to make him sad and appalled in turn, impotent before the excess of violence, but this was no vicarious anguish.

The room was quiet. The ticking of a clock just outside his door was all that broke the silence until Malecki left the bed and the springs moaned under the mattress. His heart no longer pounded, and maybe it was just a matter of giving up coffee, or going back to a decent brand of American cigarettes if he could find them on the market.

He went to open the window, and looked down the narrow old street. There was no traffic. A German army truck slowly rode in from the centre of town. Malecki turned his back to the sill, frowning. It was no use blaming coffee or cigarettes. The anxiety was still here, noxiously lodged at the pit of his stomach.

In the armchair, as in a fat lady’s lap, his clergyman’s vestments lay limp. Malecki put them on and began buttoning them. The idea of calling the convent bobbed up in him and he discounted it at once. How could he even think of it? There was no telephone there, and at any rate he had nothing to tell the sisters.

Disturbed by the movement of cloth, dust motes danced around him in the light that sliced across his room.

He sat at the narrow desk by the bed and tried to read his breviary. Words skipped about under his eyes, confusing the lines until he closed the book. He then began writing a letter to his sister in Carbondale, but didn’t even get halfway through that. Finally he opened the door of his room and called out to the landlady.

“
Pana
Klara, is there anything in the news?”

Just then, in the east end of the Old City, Bora knew he’d have trouble parking in front of the convent. He’d barely stopped by the kerb to let Hofer out, when a growing din of steel chains and engines filled the opposite end of the street. With the car still running in idle, he craned his neck out of the window to see.

Tanks. Could anyone be as dim-witted as to do this? There was no room in this narrow street for tanks to operate. Still, jangling and rumbling on cobblestones, panzers blundered towards him from the curve ahead, where the front steps of a Jesuit church further reduced the sidewalk. Dinosaur-like, they emerged in a stench of fuel, rattling lamp posts and windows and the rear-view
mirror in Bora’s car. Whatever asinine thinking had made them choose this route, on they came, blind and dumb as all machines appear when their drivers are invisible, seemingly unaware that the sharp corner facing them would pose an obstacle.

Judiciously Bora drove the car onto the sidewalk, and for the next five minutes he was as much part of the deafening manoeuvring, backing up and squeezing past as the tanks themselves.

The last cumbersome vehicle was still churning the corner with its mammoth flank when Hofer unexpectedly stumbled out of the convent door. Seeing him stagger on the sidewalk caused Bora to rush from the car, sure of a partisan attack. By the time the grey-faced Hofer made some frantic gesture for help, Bora was already by him. Pistol in hand, he straddled in a protective stance, turned to the street as if the unseen danger should come from there.