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.
TO 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.)
DURING 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?
NEXT 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.
“And the girl? The novice?”
“Penance, prayer, probation. Her order has been testing her sincerity by exposing her to the ordeal of the death camp under the guidance of the same priest who had been obliged to report that episode with Stefan.” He nods at Olin’s astonishment. “Catherine, yes,” he says. “It amused the bishop to assign me as her chaplain. Not that my report would make a difference,” he added. “No postulant in favor of women in the priesthood could ever be permitted to complete her novitiate, not without public repentance.”
“Somehow I don’t think she will do that,” says Olin, oddly proud of her.
“No,” says the priest. “No, I don’t believe she will.”
Catherine is over-educated for a novice, he tells Olin, and a little willful—a bit deficient in Christian humility, some would say. And when she discovers that advocacy of women’s ordination may be reclassified as delicta graviora, “a grave sin against the Church,” in the same category as the rape of children—
“My God,” says Olin. “That’s grotesque! Insane!”
“Yes, it is,” says the priest. “The Vatican has gone insane.”
Olin follows him outside, wishes him luck. Priest Mikal says, “Our calling is becoming impossible for men like me. Though we are a majority in the priesthood, people associate us with those predators, you see, and we are told to stay away from the parish children.” He speaks with deep sadness but without malice. “Anyway, I appreciate your concern. Perhaps some agency for refugees abroad can find a use for me.”
AT THE MUSEUM, Cecilia Gallerani emerges from the dark of her own alcove upstairs. No one else is present. Even the custodian has vanished, leaving Olin alone with her in the dead quiet.
Indirect lighting illuminates the pallor of this young Milanese of the Renaissance who holds a tense white winter weasel on her lap. Bought in Italy two centuries ago and presented to her by her son Prince Adam, Young Woman with Ermine had been little appreciated and in fact disliked, so he has read, by the museum’s founder, Princess Izabela Czartoryski (who, of the ermine, is said to have observed, “If that is a dog, it is a very ugly one”). The princess had its luminous night blue background repainted a funereal black, removing all depth of perspective, and rechristened the portrait La Belle Ferronnière, the name already attached to the celebrated Leonardo in the Louvre. Still, the portrait is elegant, the girl pensive and demure in brown wimple and a gray-blue smock worn over her lustrous chestnut robe. The waxy hand that restrains the ermine looks oddly elongated—a consequence, he assumes, of liberties taken with a masterwork by a spoiled princess.
He turns when light footsteps on the stair slow and fall silent.
She stands there in the alcove entrance, gazing past him at Cecilia. She looks somehow not herself.
When he opens his mouth and no sound comes, both take refuge in the painting, as if Count Sforza’s child mistress might offer sage advice out of her hard experience of the past. Finally, Catherine says, “So, Clements Olin, you have found her, your young woman with her weasel.” And he mutters, froggish, “Do you like her, Catherine?”
“Like?” And still she looks past him, past his gaze. At length she says quietly, “Why I would not like a nice Catholic girl like me?”
With n
o idea how he should be feeling, far less what he should say, he points out the empty frame still awaiting the missing Raphael. “Never recovered, sadly . . .” But this is just chatter as of course she knows, and she touches his forearm to hush him. “Clements, I, too, I wish to say so much. Everything! I feel we are . . . we were . . .”
“Brother and sister in Christ, I believe you said,” he reminds her, feeling—what? Weak? Overjoyed? A little cruel? But most of all, afraid—afraid for her, afraid for both of them. His heart pounds as he takes her hands, which she permits without resistance. The hands are inert, so damp and cold that his own hands flinch, faintly repelled.
She senses this: the color leaves her face. In a moment, she looks frightened. Knowing he must give her up right now, once and for all, he tells her stiffly how ashamed he is that he has behaved foolishly; no doubt he has complicated things, caused difficulties. But even his sincerity feels artificial, his smile hideously false. “It’s been wonderful to know you. I am truly grateful”—a lame finish fit for the occasion. And only now does he notice why she looks different—that faint blood shading on her lips like the last cool touch of the mortician, that tiny crimson fleck on her front tooth.
Reading his eyes, Catherine knows she has been seen and frees her hands. “So,” she murmurs in a strange drowned voice, “I begin again.” She moves swiftly to the stairwell, where she pauses with one foot on the first step down. Searching his face as he moves toward her, she is fighting for composure. “You say to me you will come here so I come here, too. To say good-bye. Where you invited me.” Her face is pale, her voice a tattered whisper. “So now I say to you, good-bye, Mr. Olin, may God be with you.”
“Please, Catherine. Please listen.” Listen to what? What can he tell her that makes sense? Nothing comes. Just when he must be resolute, he is struck dumb.
Quick footsteps scatter down the stairwell. The heavy door creaks open and thuds to. He jumps down the stair, bangs through the door. Wait, wait! Knowing he must not, he wants to shout her name, run after her, he wants to claim her before all the world, knowing he must not. Her turning up this way means nothing, she’d only come to say good-bye just as she’d said; all he had noticed, after all, was a trace of somebody’s old lipstick, no doubt dabbed on for the journey home. For her own sake, he must send her on her way, wasn’t that what he’d decided?
She is still moving away.
Her walk is tilted, pulled off-balance by the stiff black valise that she must have left at the entrance. She’s brought her things then! Has she abandoned her novitiate? Been suspended? Or—oh Christ!—has she come on some wild impulse, only to be scared off by his recognition that he’d been a fool?
She is going, soon she will be gone. He does not call. What if he calls and she should stop? Stand there awaiting him? What can he say then?
A cold rain, fitful.
He is running, calling. He overtakes her, reaching for her bag. She will not let go—no protest, simply won’t let go, and the strength of her determination awes him. “What’s happened, Catherine?” he pleads. “Where are you going?”
She seems not to hear him. In profile, her face looks neither stubborn nor upset. She crosses the great Market Square, blind to the traffic and the rain. Trying to stay abreast, he hurries and stumbles. Panting, he tells her they must stop somewhere and talk a little—that café on this side of the church, okay? “That’s the old church Malan told me about, the one with that stained glass—”
But she does not slow as she passes the café, then the church entrance, nor does she look back until he shouts, “Amalia!”
Startled, she pauses. But she does not turn, does not set down the bag, nor does he move forward to take it. He has stopped, too. Yards apart, they stand transfixed for moment after moment. Then something gives way, their time is past, and she sets out again, leaving him torn in half.
Among the precipitous roof peaks, the gray heavens rumble in a distant thunder like cannonades in the grand old Polish wars of long ago. Sheltered from the rain in the church entrance, he watches the blue beret until it disappears around a corner.
THE CHURCH IS EMPTY, the high altar far away. Vaguely, inadvertently, he crosses himself before retreating into a side aisle and taking refuge in a narrow pew. Where a shaft of light warms the faded rose-brown of the narrow cushion, he kneels for a long time in aimless penitence and longing, forehead touched to the dark wood, trying not to think at all, or rather, to feel nothing.
Somewhere on high and out of view, an invisible organist torments the limits of the pipes with loud discordant variations on a Bach chorale. Wachet Auf, Ruft uns die Stimme—is that the one? No matter. It cannot distract him from that last sight of her rounding the corner.
Lifting his gaze, he eventually locates Malan’s stained-glass window. A thunderous Jehovah brow, a torrent of white beard, cascading downward from on high; the white is soon lost among the livid greens and blues of sun-filled Eden emerging out of chaos. And there it sits, crouched in the swirl of colors—a gray claw with long stiletto nails and carmine veins like lethal wires under the rotting skin, the dead hand of an aghast Almighty withdrawn from His Creation.
In the high windows, ice blues of the firmament pierce wild blood reds; all Heaven has been murdered, set afire. All is impending. The winter sunlight comes and goes, shadows sweep past; the burning panes are lashed by sheets of rain. In that instant, as a sun shaft reignites the colors, the fire blood, the organ shriek, bind his mortal senses hard and tight as a pennant whipped by wind around its pole.
THE LIGHT HAS VANISHED. With time gone dead, he cannot know how long he may have been there. But in a while, as space and time regather, awareness comes that imminence is gone. Of those wild colors, only tints remain; the old church is left in medieval stillness to get on with its decay.
A scary bang as the storm doors are thrown wide and wind and rain rush in on gusts of weather. In the surging entranceway, amorphous figures in dark clothing mill and push, pale faces blurred, half-hidden.
There you are again, he thinks. The missing. The near-forgotten.
In the wavering of candles he sits motionless, broken-brained and wholly brokenhearted.
A number of friends deserve full, warm acknowledgment of their kind support throughout the completion of this book, my beloved children and senior Zen students foremost among them. In the pages of such a book, however, a profusion of names and acknowledgments seems intrusive, and so, with regret, most were finally set aside. In a scene of such emptiness and silence, a blank page would be far more to the point.
Even so, a few people must not be left unmentioned. I am grateful as ever to my dear wife, Maria, master chef and gifted closet poet, for her good critical sense and strong, loyal presence; also, my hilarious fishing partner, dry martini virtuoso, and all-around consigliere, the writer and editor Stephen Byers, who kept us laughing; and finally, my exceptional assistant, the writer Laurel Berger, whose kind honesty, intelligence, and sharp editorial eye contributed so much to keeping this strange book coherent. The generosity of spirit shown by all three in a hard year has been astonishing.
Peter Matthiessen, In Paradise
Thank you for reading books on BookFrom.Net Share this book with friends