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.
DANCING AT AUSCHWITZ
ELEVEN
This 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.
THIS 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?”
FOR 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. B
ut 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.
OLIN 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”?
DANCING AT AUSCHWITZ! A diabolical idea, insists Jim Glock, the very phrase a profaning of the martyrs. Any moment now those holy ghosts at Birkenau might come thronging down around the heads of the intruders, hissing bitter prophecies and imprecations.
Dancing at Auschwitz! One hardly dares speak it aloud, Anders slyly agrees, for fear of being incinerated in one’s tracks. Since the Dancing, Olin’s roommate looks half-crazed, ice-blue eyes fired by his northern lights, his aurora borealis. What portent can this be?
Precisely what has taken place? Something occurred, as all who took part are eager to attest, but to call it “the Dancing” seems self-conscious and a bit trivial at the same time. In the absence of any sensible definition, “the Dancing” is inevitably reduced to “It,” and reverberations of this “It” are all around them, inside, outside, everywhere.
Clements Olin is relieved that so many others will testify to “something not known to anyone at all but wild in our breast for centuries” (a favorite line from an Akhmatova poem that when quoted to Sister Catherine had evoked a gasp of enchantment, a girlish skip and clapping of the hands.
With the advent of this something-not-known (which he scarcely dares consider lest it vanish), the metastasizing animosities among the witness bearers are dissolving, as if the Dancing were sealing their acceptance of all woebegone humankind in all its greed and cruelties as the only creature capable of evil and the only one—surely these two are connected—aware that it must die.
IF ONLY IT WERE SO SIMPLE! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
Evil as a piece of every heart—a truism no less true, he thinks, for being disputed by the righteous. When he shows Solzhenitsyn’s observation to one of the Buddhist teachers, the man dismisses it as romantic or incomplete or both. “What a blessing spiritual insight is,” he sighs a bit too comfortably, “which cuts through all self-lacerating partial truths while good and evil fall away.” Well, yes, one could say that. But surely that old gulag survivor wrote those words not as a man blessed with spiritual insight but as the cry of a tormented being whose insight had been hard-wrung from dire suffering. How many of these humble penitents braving the weather every day all day out on that platform have been blessed with the leisure or the means to pursue a so-called “spiritual practice”? And how long would such delicate attainments have withstood the death camp’s horrors?
Yes, something has happened here, is happening, will happen. Even those sophisticated Poles, who did not dance and are rather snide about the epiphanies of those who did, seem less disgruntled and even a bit humbled. And most astonishing of all, perhaps, the guilt Olin thought certain participants might suffer in the aftermath has not emerged. Is that because this phenomenon sprang forth of its own accord? He thinks so. “It” simply was. And those who had been open to this “It,” including a few of the Orthodox Jews who might have been expected to condemn it most severely, seem not in the least plagued by doubt but on the contrary, in this atmosphere of aimless gratitude, look sort of goofily transcendent.
“Horror penetrates our bones but at the same time there is joy,” says the daughter of an SS doctor. “Who would have expected joy at Auschwitz?” Her more cautious companions rush to hush such an unthinkable idea while others nod and smile in affirmation.
Or is this “joy,” as Earwig and Glock and other naysayers insist, not transcendence at all but mere wishful thinking? “Superficial, unear
ned, irresponsible,” complains Rabbi Jim, who from the outset has been self-appointed spokesman for the indignant and uneasy. That foolish Dancing, he asserts, was no more than mass hysteria born of that residue of death and darkness in the hall. Rabbi Jim’s carping is so vehement that it risks being dismissed as envy of Rabbi Dan, who in his new eminence as the Rebbe Who Danced at Auschwitz is the gracious recipient of awe and deference from every side.
What had happened was no miracle, of course; nobody dares claim any such thing. But by next morning, even so, the words “miraculous” and “mystical experience” start cropping up. Together with Ben Lama and Adina, Olin worries that the force of the event will be weakened or dispersed by facile labeling, much as a rare bird might be put to flight out of the back side of a thicket by enthusiasts out front, crowding it too close for a better look.
“What the hell is ‘mystical experience’?” scoffs Earwig, who had stood with his arms folded tight, refusing to join the Dancing, or turn his back on it, either one. “Olin? Don’t be an idiot, okay?” His voice is urgent. “I was watching the whole time and nothing happened. There was no event.” What galls him most is the emotion on display among the more awestruck and devout—the “spiritual groupies,” as he calls them, “soft and runny as one-minute eggs.” He derides any notion of the Dancing as “transformative,” far less “a blessing” that banished “the trauma” of those first few days. Less still was it a “healing” or a “closure” of the wounds—he spits all these New Age terms with contempt. “Hey, nothing happened, folks, okay? That wasn’t ‘dancing,’ for Christ sake, that was goddamn ring-around-the-rosie!” Yet even Earwig can’t quite deny the shift in atmosphere, which he ascribes to barometric pressure, negative ions or whatever, the mistral or something.