Isn’t it at least conceivable, Olin proposes to Earwig and Anders, that days of strong meditation in the cold by so many sincere pilgrims might actually generate some sort of—well, you know—power?
“Power? Oh, come on, Olin.” These two very different men, the one caustic and the other antic, refuse to dignify such nonsense with debate. Yet since the Dancing, Olin has noticed, Georgie Earwig has mostly kept that savage tongue of his under control. He even joins some of the meditation periods on the selection platform, where in his determination to sit cross-legged and remain as still as “those stupid-ass Zen monks,” he is rigid in infuriated agony.
TWELVE
Catherine comes down the convent path next morning as Olin is leaving for the camp. Seeing him, she smiles a little—She must think I’ve lain in wait for her all night!—and joining him, she no longer looks behind her for the other novice. It turns out that Sister Ann-Marie, in nervous collapse, has withdrawn from the retreat and will be sent for. And their chaplain (she never speaks his name) has intimated that Catherine should leave, too, since with the other novice gone, she will be “unprotected,” by which, of course, he means unchaperoned.
Don’t go, thinks Olin. Just refuse to go. Has Father Mikal any authority over her, he asks, besides the threat of a negative report?
“He is ordained,” she says, as if this settles the matter. To question the Church’s wartime entropy by seeking forgiveness from the Jews as she had done was not her place. “Poverty, chastity, obedience”—she recites these like a catechism—“that is my place.” Is she being ironic? He cannot be sure. (Is she a virgin? The question slips furtively across his consciousness, all but unnoticed.) Her “keeper” had no choice, she says, but to report an unruly novice already on probation who won’t go to him for guidance, far less Confession. And inevitably it will be decided that this disrespectful person is quite unsuitable for holy orders. “‘This one we dismiss from her novitiate,’” she rules in stern diocesan voice. “‘She is a troublemaker. She is unworth it.’”
“Unworthy?” He tries not to smile. “What nonsense.”
You will have your life back! Wonderful!—that is his first reaction. He has no idea what he is talking about, yet even so, he is convinced from their discussions that this passionate young woman is too intelligent to accept the archaic strictures of the Vatican, too independent to pursue the narrow path defined for nuns by decadent male hierarchies in a corrupt structure that in the Western world, in Olin’s view, is nearing the point of historical irrelevance, collapsing slowly into its own garish remains like that golden pumpkin in the autumn field.
She says nothing. In trying to comfort her and calm his heart, he talks too fast, and what he tries to say sounds irresponsible even to him. “Catherine? When you said, ‘that priest’—?”
“Church business!” She is close to tears.
Retreating, he asks how she feels now about the Dancing. She looks wary, then she says, “It made me very happy.” And yes, it must have been authentic: in her opinion, those who joined in with an open heart had been those most open to this whole experience of the death camp, transported by compassion to the same degree that they were truly penetrated by the horror.
She seems uneasy about walking further with him unescorted. When he moves aside to let Adina catch up and take his place, she looks relieved.
“WHY ARE YOU MESSING with her?” rasps Earwig, coming up behind. “Shame on ya.” On a so-called spiritual retreat? In fucking Ausch-witz? In a goddamn death camp?—that’s what he means, this unshaven, scowling Georgie, erstwhile scourge of nuns.
Adina, too, looks askance at his association with Catherine, and presumably Becca as well. What ails these people? Any unseemly dalliance in such a place would be unthinkable! He knows that, goddamnit. In no mood for rebuke, he snaps at Earwig: what makes him think this is any of his business?
The other rounds on him, enraged. “None of my business? That what you’re saying, shithead?”
“You’re very quick to jeer at others, I’ve noticed. Why are you always so pissed off? How come you don’t tell us your own story?”
“Bear my own witness, you mean? What’s that got to do with you and your little nun?” He snarls in disgust. “I never came here to bear no goddamned witness and I’m not some spiritual type like all you ecumenicals or whatever the hell you people call yourselves. You want to bear witness? Go bear witness, then. Because they haven’t heard one peep out of you either. Snotty Polack from the U.S.A., my sob story, coming right up.”
But then, abruptly, Earwig interrupts himself. “Okay, okay,” he says in a low voice. “Here’s all I know. The Jew list in our Romanian village was turned in to the police by the local priest, probably with Vatican approval. These are dark times, Father, play it safe, don’t get the Church in trouble. See why I’m so hard on the Church? So these Jews got the hell downriver to Constanta on the Black Sea coast, leased an old river scow, sailed for Palestine one jump ahead of the fascisti.” He coughs. “Only thing, one dumb kid got left behind.”
“That’s you? That’s terrible!”
“I was mouthy, never wrong no matter what. Must have snuck out past the pier guard, gone exploring down along the docks. I kind of remember running back, running all the way out that empty pier. ‘Wait, Mama. It’s me!’” Earwig’s voice has thickened oddly and his head looks skewed.
“You never seen emptiness,” he says, “until you seen all that harbor water in the space where your ship should be. Darkness coming, nobody to call out to, nothing to eat, nowhere to go. And Mama out there on that ship, staring back north, maybe weeping in the dark. I see those red pinch marks yet today.” He raises thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose. Though he lost her face over the years, he has never forgotten those marks made by cheap glasses.
“Crept into a cargo shed, whimpered all night, almost froze to death. Scared of big wharf rats. First light these Roma people came out of hiding, took me with ’em. They wanted to escape on the same ship—the Struma—but those nice Jews refused ’em. Dirty Gypsies! Can’t even help pay the freight unless they rob us first! He pauses. What he can’t remember was where his Roma band had wandered, which borders had been crossed, which countries. He mainly recalls being on the run after his band was arrested and a scorched summer day somewhere in eastern Europe, and a dead silent cattle car stranded on a siding, and an old belt lowered through the floor and drawn back up over and over only to be dropped and left behind in a puddle between rails when the transport jolted forward. Earwig clears his throat. “Very generous people, shared any food they could scrape up, always joked no matter what. Taught the little Jew boy how to steal,” he adds. “Came in handy all my life.”
“So you’re here to honor them.”
“Pay my respects anyway,” he grumps, uncomfortable.
Olin nods. “And that’s Gyorgi Earwig’s story?”
“No such Jew, man. I made him up.”
Earwig has no interest in going up on stage and bearing witness to that nightfall on the docks, far less what became of him after Constanta, or how he wound up in the U.S., one of thousands of refugee children, all desperate to locate their lost families. In later years, he tried to track that ship on his makeshift income as a merchant seaman, cabdriver, and part-time thief. He returned to Europe regularly, he says, and speaks five languages, all of them poorly.
Earwig’s youth and middle age and all his savings have been used up in futile attempts to trace the Struma in the Old World ports; he found no record of that ship or her arrival in Palestine or anywhere else. As for her passengers, nothing but false leads and dead ends, like this damned place. “But coming from back of nowhere, see, with nothing to my name—no rightful name, even—it seemed like this search was all there was. Who could believe such a stupid story? What makes it even more ridiculous was not knowing the name of the people I was looking for, my own damn family. I just
hoped to run across somebody who might have heard about an old Danube River scow lugging refugees to Palestine, and maybe even a young couple gone half crazy because their stupid kid got left back on the dock.”
Scowling, he resumes walking. “So anyway, how can I bear witness to their story? I don’t know their story, not how it ended.
“That guy Rainer, he’s getting wartime records checked in the archives in Berlin. Same guy who dug up those name lists you people recite while you freeze your butts off out on the platform. I never stick around for that, because even if my family’s name popped up, I’d never recognize it.”
“Probably not,” says Olin. “Certain common names take up whole columns, page after page.”
“Still, I figure I must have heard it as a little kid, so maybe I would kind of feel it if I heard it read out loud with the right first name. Feel the good fit of it, see what I mean?” He looks embarrassed. “Don’t say it, man. Even if I stumbled over the whole story, what do I do with it after all these years?” His voice is pitiless. “Who needs it? Nobody, right? Not even me.”
ADINA AWAITS HIM at the cave entrance. Watching the novice passing through the tunnel, she declares without turning to look at him that “trying to undermine a devout young person’s calling is a grave responsibility, whatever one’s opinion of the Church. All her old doubts have been stirred awake under the influence of certain older people she respects.” She eyes him coldly. “The point is, Clements, you risk doing her great harm, you and our detestable ewige Jude—”
“Hold on a minute, damn it! What gives you the right to lecture me like this?” For all her irritating ways, he respects Adina and her disapproval bothers him, but having watched her hover over Catherine, he has to wonder if this overbearing lady might feel possessive, even jealous.
“I just thought I should warn you,” she is saying. “Catherine’s intelligence and a brave spirit do not necessarily protect that girl from the sort of sophisticated older man who might stoop to the careless theft of a human heart.”
“And you suspect I may be that sort of ‘older man,’ is that it? A stooper, so to speak?”
“Are you assuring me you’re not? I’m delighted to hear that, Clements.” She smiles then, warmly, hastening to mend things before he can protest further.
Well? Why should this woman trust you when you don’t quite trust yourself?
Olin’s brief marriage ended in divorce on grounds of what his wife’s attorney cited as “alienation of the affections.” In the years since, more than one lover has complained that Clements Olin can be quick to anger, remote, moody, ever ready to withdraw without offering himself fully in the first place: he is spoiled, they say, too accustomed to being courted. “Successful with women” is how his male friends might describe him, yet he feels just the reverse—he feels hollowed out by loneliness, in fact, that sense of something missing that is said to haunt his more distinguished poetry.
Although he fantasizes about remarrying, he tends to wander into passive liaisons with women already married or hopelessly enmeshed by their life dramas. One beautiful creature, said to be wasting away of a rare terminal disease, must have been misdiagnosed, he decided, since on intimate occasions, there always seemed to be plenty of her left. Another was certifiably unstable, and at least one was socially unacceptable—“quite out of the question,” ruled his grandmother. He’d ignored the old lady’s snobbishness, of course (or had he?), but the girl hadn’t worked out anyway except in bed—the one lover, in fact, he had ever encouraged to stay with him overnight. In short, it was commonly agreed that Clements Olin was incapable of true commitment to one woman, a judgment he resisted for a time but has reluctantly come to share. Certainly he is not a man who should try to deflect a devout novice from the path of holy orders, even when convinced that she has no business on that path in the first place.
DURING THE VISIT to the Auschwitz museum on the first day, someone asked the guide why he made no mention of the murdered homosexuals. Well, they were not so many, the guide muttered. Not true, said the questioner. Speaking as a homosexual, he was outraged that even in the death camp these despised men had to wear pink triangles as badges of shame.
Last evening, a basket of pink flannel triangles had turned up by the mess hall door. This morning, at an ecumenical service on the memorial terrace, a number of people wear pink triangles under their coats. But the only ones besides the gay man and Olin who display them in full view on their parkas are young Rainer from Berlin and that earnest rabbinical student who blows the shofar. (Perhaps Sister Catherine has noticed his gesture; he takes her small nod as approval.) But when the cameraman draws near and points his camera, Olin waves him off, hoping that Catherine (who no longer stiffens when he calls her plain “Catherine”) won’t think him a hypocrite because of his reluctance to be recorded on film wearing that badge.
Rainer is chortling, much amused because those younger German women who are forever gushing that Herr Doktor Olin is such a gentleman, so mannerly, so handsome, are shocked by his pink badge. Mein Gott! Him? But these sturdy ladies are not nearly as offended as the gang of laborers tramping past on the public path across the Lager.
Olin wonders if he exaggerates—if he only imagines—the hostility in those stubbled lumpy faces cramped with cold. No, he does not, it’s unmistakable. But what stops his heart is something he glimpsed while waving off that camera. Scanning the rows, he rediscovers the pink triangle pinned on the lapel of the black overcoat worn by Priest Mikal.
Crazy bastard! You’re preaching at their church! To divert attention from the priest, he waves his fingers at the laborers, feigning good fellowship. Spotting his pink triangle, they stop short on the path, they back and fill, jeering at this homo and his motley gang of troublemaking foreigners. Inevitably Mikal’s badge is spotted, too. The new priest at the church! Even when they move on, they continue to turn, walk backward, pointing, spitting, as the filmmaker, recording the whole episode, taunts Olin with a pantomime of those waggled fingers that, far from distracting the local men, had first drawn their attention to the priest.
THIRTEEN
Uneasy and restless throughout meditation, he soon leaves the Lager and, following Malan’s directions, locates the winding road downriver toward the artist’s deconsecrated chapel on the bluff. He has not gone far when he is hailed by Father Mikal. That he resents this priest as a threat to Sister Catherine is no excuse to hurt his feelings by being rude or cold, and even less so is the fact that Mikal may be the suspect priest mentioned by Earwig that first day on the platform. In any event, he’s stuck with him and they go on together.
Father Mikal, out of shape and out of breath, says he understands that Dr. Olin had been present yesterday at the Christian service on the platform which Sister Ann-Marie had fled; he’d be grateful for Dr. Olin’s recollections of the episode and any observations he might care to make.
Perhaps he should ask the novices themselves, Olin says curtly. “I have,” says the priest. Clearly his inquiry has gone nowhere and he does not care to say why. Instead, he, too, expresses reservations about Dr. Olin’s “friendship” with Sister Catherine, whose spiritual guidance here is his assigned responsibility. To an impressionable young woman who has already suffered abuse on this retreat, an agnostic influence could be disturbing, he suggests, as would careless exposure to secular poetry leading to discussions of Church doctrine for which—“if you will permit me, sir?”—neither party would seem qualified.
Father Mikal, nervous and unprepossessing, with unprepossessing breath, is nonetheless civil and soft-spoken, and Olin wishes to be civil, too. He inquires brusquely how the priest happens to know so much, since he never seems to associate with his charges or attend their services. “No,” says Mikal. “I am unwelcome.”
“Unwelcome?”
With fingertips, the priest crosses himself minutely at the collar. “Forgive me,” Olin says. “I know you can
’t reveal—”
“I have offered to hear Confession, you see. Give absolution. Twice. They have never come. Perhaps Sister Catherine has mentioned this?” Olin shakes his head, more and more unhappy. Like him or not, the man’s isolation is painful. “But you have heard something, no doubt?” the priest insists. “Rumors, perhaps? From the convent?” It seems he’s been warned by the mother superior that Sister Ann-Marie had brought malicious gossip from their diocese. “I wished to caution you, sir, that’s all. For Sister Catherine’s sake.”
“And the good of my own soul?”
“That, too,” the priest says wryly, for which Olin almost likes him.
At the bend in the river road ahead, the shuttered chapel sits stranded on its knoll. As if anticipating Olin’s arrival, the old artist stands waiting in the doorway.
“Sister Catherine need not be afraid I will submit a negative report,” Father Mikal says quietly, observing the old artist before turning to start back. “I won’t. I admire her courage, and, if circumstances permitted, I would generally support her views.” Clearly he wishes Olin to transmit this message, if only to ease Catherine’s mind, and this is kind of him, Olin reflects, no matter what. Probably those convent rumors are no more than hearsay, cruel as well as false, but if so, why has this wretched Mikal gone so far out of his way to invite trouble?
“Why did you do that?” he calls after him, exasperated. “Wear that damn triangle, I mean,” he adds when the man turns. And the priest calls back, “Perhaps because you did, Dr. Olin. Reminding me of my duty as a Christian. And anyway, as the person who prepared those triangles, I had no choice.” He seems to be trying to smile but cannot quite manage it. Setting off once more, he stumbles while blowing his nose—an uncoordinated man thrown off-balance when he tries to wave the wrong hand over his shoulder.