“Remember that movie about the young Polish mother on the platform who was ordered to choose between her two young kids?” Anders is saying. “We heard that your Jews in the U.S. complained that a Polish heroine had no business in an Auschwitz story, no, no, no! Auschwitz was a sacred shrine of the Jewish people.”
Anders says he has always been embarrassed by Jews who insist that their suffering was more terrible than other people’s. Sitting motionless on that platform all day long in winter weather, it has seemed to him more and more idle to judge whose ordeal had been worst. Or whose guilt, for that matter. Germans, Poles, Romanians, Croats, Ukrainians—are these ethnicities intrinsically more cruel, historically “worse” human beings than the racists and torturers in other lands? If so, does “worse” signify “inferior”? And if so, do these peoples remain inferior in perpetuity? Or should all Homo sapiens be given the benefit of the doubt by reason of incurable insanity? “Accept that we can’t help ourselves, we’re ‘only human,’” Anders sneers, “and that even the most vicious Nazis started out as little children, sweet and innocent as you or me—”
“Born ‘good Germans,’ I suppose you mean,” Olin agrees, “cute little tykes gradually corrupted through no fault of their own by state-mandated cruelties, first in small steps and then more fatally as greed took over, until the dread morning when those poor devils woke up as brand-new Nazis, right? In an evil world they never made—?”
Anders, laughing, wigwags both hands before his face to ward off all such sophistry. “Woke up in the wrong beer hall, is more like it!” he shouts gleefully.
UNABLE TO SLEEP, Olin lies unsmiling in the dark. He is thinking about his father. The onetime cavalry lieutenant’s proud bearing had been sadly frayed by a loss of self-respect which on occasion would erupt in long-nursed grievance at his parents’ failure to acknowledge his sacrifice in quitting his regiment on the eve of war to escort them in their flight from their homeland. Oh, how bitterly he had come to regret his deference to their appeals! Once they were safe, their gratitude was soon eroded by their disappointment in his subsequent behavior; they had simply chosen to forget how shamelessly they had coerced him, then denied him credit for the filial loyalty that was his sole excuse for betraying his soldier’s honor. They’d even dared insinuate that Alexei had fled Poland out of cowardice, “abandoning our beloved homeland in its darkest hour,” as the old Baron liked to phrase it, gazing east toward the Atlantic, in the general direction of Olinski honor.
AS A POSTWAR SCHOOLBOY, Clements had been fascinated by reports of the Nazi death camps—morbidly, according to his grandmother. Nobody at home so much as mentioned that the dread name in the news was only the German pronunciation of Oswiecim, the old provincial town near the family estate in Silesia. Nor was it revealed to him until years later that in the first months after his family’s escape to America, word had come from the estate agent in Oswiecim that Clements’s maternal grandmother, Emilie Adam, had been reported to the authorities as an “individual of Hebrew descent.” Detained, then arrested, so the story went, she and her two daughters had been removed to the Cracow ghetto. In the stress of this emergency, her husband, Dr. Allgeier, had so strenuously objected that a kinswoman of the Count Potocki, a lady of the ancient Pilawa lineage, should be shouted at and pushed about like some shtetl dweller from Galicia, that he, too, was shouted at and pushed about, knocked down and shot.
In the boy’s presence, this story was dismissed as vicious rumor and the estate agent denounced as an opportunist who had doubtless lied to the Gestapo in the honest hope of acquiring that fine house for himself. To all this, the boy listened and said nothing. But one of those Allgeier daughters, after all, had been his mother, and noting his peculiar expression, the old Baroness explained that the family had spared him this whole scurrilous story for fear it might upset him. Third- or fourth-hand rumors out of Occupied Poland could not be verified, of course, but neither could they be discounted out of hand.
In the end, the estate agent was paid much more than the family could afford to effect the abduction of the infant “David”—with the tearful cooperation of his mother, went the story—and his delivery into good hands at Gdansk for the ship voyage to London and the U.S.A., where he was speedily baptized in the Episcopal church and christened David Clements. Thenceforth and throughout his youth, the boy had been strictly discouraged from inquiring about his mother lest his curiosity upset “poor Alexei,” who was so heartbroken by the disappearance of his great love in Poland that he wore a black armband in her memory year after year. And on many nights the boy was scared awake by a dream in which a mysterious young woman, whose face he had never seen even in photographs, had gone missing. His dread upon awakening, that she might have been exterminated, seemed so inevitable an explanation of her absence that the nightmare sickened him. Yet he never asked about her, not until years later, one afternoon at teatime when he was home from boarding school and his father was absent from the house. The Baroness dismissed his nightmare as some evil fume that had issued from some old rumor out of Poland. “It was in the air here, David. You might have picked up those morbid ideas of yours without quite knowing it.”
That evening, his father, in his cups, related tearfully to his son how his noble Emi urged him to flee, he could send for her later if he wished, and so forth. The brave girl had insisted on staying behind, Alexei mourned, out of worry for her parents in the coming war and also lest they be deprived of the joy of their first grandchild. “You, my boy!”
“Father? Did you know before you left that she was pregant?”
“What’s that? I’ll thank you to speak more respectfully of your mother!”
His father vowed he would go find his Emi as soon as the Cold War was over and travel to Poland became possible, but when that time came, no effort was made by anybody in the family to determine the lost Emi’s whereabouts (“if any,” muttered the old lady). Instead, Alexei consoled himself by marrying his wealthy mistress, a “vulgar American as greedy for his title as he is for her money,” said the Baroness. “She might even fit into his little red boots.”
AFTER HIS MARRIAGE, Alexei almost retired the black armband. His new wife, however, approved the look of it, at least when worn with his dark worsteds in the winter and pale linen suits in summer. And of course he donned it dutifully again to honor one parent then the other at their funerals a few years later, the bitterly disappointed mother and the father who never liked him much and eventually shunted him out of the lineage in favor of the grandson Clements, now a graduate student at university.
Once the old people were gone, Alexei’s Lily, apprised of Poland’s multitudes of counts and barons, was able to persuade her “Sasha” to ignore his father’s edict in regard to the baronetcy and award himself a higher rank while he was at it. (“Who gives a damn in America, my darling? I mean, there are so many of you!”) A bit sheepish, the new Count Alexei assured his son that the landed aristocracy in old Poland would never have bothered their heads about such trifles.
Had his father been rather a silly fellow, Clements wondered? Sometimes it seemed so. But he must have been a very sad fellow as well, for not two years after the death of his parents, Count Alexei Olinski wandered out onto weak ice on the town pond in early spring, the canvas pockets of his hunting jacket stuffed with lead weights cut from the anchor lines of his old wood decoy ducks.
Putting on that armband for his father’s funeral, Clements supposed that in wearing it, he was accepting a family responsibility for his mother, long neglected.
After the funeral, the Countess Lily had presented him with his grandfather’s gold cuff links and also a stray photograph (“Yours now, I should think”) that had turned up in his father’s dresser drawer. In the creased snapshot, a laughing girl with wind-danced curls and a comical air leaned far out a thatched ground-floor window to hail a goose passing by along the street. How pretty she was! Could this black-haired girl
have been his mother? And the photographer his father? They assumed so.
“Why did he never show this to me, then?”
“Nor to me. Nor to his parents, either, I shouldn’t imagine.” She contemplated the photo. “No, no, this girl belonged exclusively to Alexei, goose and all.”
Really? he thought. Their son had no claim on her? But, stoic and reserved out of long habit, he kept these feelings to himself, where they belonged.
The sense of what she’d said overtook the Countess Lily a bit late. “Oh Christ,” she complained, less cross with herself than with him. Her tone turned harsh and her manner coarse, for she was drunk. “Don’t you ever complain, Clements? I mean, it can’t be good for you, bottling things up the way you do. It’s a little scary.”
“Please, Lily. It’s not important.”
Deep in her armchair, steeped in whiskey, she considered her stepson, nodding as if to say, Yes, this may hurt. “Skipped out on all of us, even himself,” she muttered. His stepmother was not unkind and nor was she quite bright, but she was straightforward and he trusted her. “Prettier than I ever was,” she said, “and a lot more fun than he was, from the look of her.”
She confessed she’d been jealous of Emi Allgeier before she understood how much Alexei had needed the disappearance of his great love in Poland, which affirmed the tragedy of war and loss that had given his life whatever resonance it had. She sometimes feared he’d only married his “American meal ticket” to avoid having to go abroad after the war to look for Emi and learn a painful truth he knew already, not that she was gone—surely the Olinskis had assumed that from the start?—but that she had been left behind through his weakness or betrayal or some failure of nerve that he could never face.
Had Alexei casually seduced and carelessly “knocked up” that little teacher, asked the Countess Lily, then snuck away to America without a word? And had he omitted this detail from his legend and lied about it ever since, first to his family and later to himself? “We might as well be honest, Clements. If I’m correct, the great love of his life became his lifelong shame. You never sensed this?
“No,” she continued, seeing his expression, “I’m not imagining things, love.” And out of guilt, her Alexei had let himself be bullied half to death by his dreadful parents. “And those old European snobs are tough! If I hadn’t come along to rescue the poor guy and move him over here to my place, he might have died without ever leaving home.”
As the last Olinski, Clements cropped that family name to “Olin,” his school nickname all his life. With no ache of Poland in his heart, indifferent to the schlachta title, he tossed out those rat-gnawed red boots, which had always seemed to him faintly ridiculous.
He kept a copy of Emi’s photo in his billfold, the original safe in his desk. His dreams were still visited by a long-lost girl who wandered the snowbound streets of a winter city somewhere in Hapsburg Europe—not the same, of course, but not altogether different from that girl leaning out her window to regale a goose.
Sometimes as in espionage films she awaited him at dusk under a streetlight on the corner—“the girl in the raincoat,” as he thought of her, high-pointed French collar turned up against the wind and cold, and war and fate, no doubt, into the bargain. In some fire-bright café, sipping golden cognac from fine crystal glasses, they explored each other’s eyes and hearts without a word. And awakening during the night, he would cling to her fleeting image long enough to trace its thread back down the tunnels of sweet sleep into his dream.
Where had they gone, those lovers? Out into the snow, of course, and onward into the night city; he saw them from afar in passage down snow-silenced streets to a thatched cottage. And he was welcomed into her fresh bed, where an oddly unerotic episode commenced as he awoke.
EIGHT
Next morning at the Christian service, upset because she has forgotten to bring the small crucifix for the token altar, Sister Ann-Marie grabs up a charred scrap of plywood from the railbed and gouges a crude cross into the platform gravel, then slings her tool aside in a rough gesture that seems disrespectful not only of the Cross but of this small shivering congregation and perhaps even the martyrs they are here to honor. Her gouged symbol desecrates the last steps of those prisoners who were herded up this platform toward the Golgotha of those waiting woods—or so, Olin suspects, Sister Catherine might be thinking.
“Please take more care, Sister,” Catherine reproves her in an undertone. In response, the culprit wrenches the silver crucifix from her own throat, snapping its chain, then thrusts crucifix and prayer book at the other before plunging her face into her hands and sinking to her knees with a torn sobbing.
Bending to murmur into her ear, Sister Catherine urges her to rise at once. The girl only blubbers, face twisted, inconsolable, and despite his pity, Olin finds himself repelled by the heavy moles on her pasty skin, the unpowdered acne and moustache, the red eyes puffy with self-pity.
The lot of very plain young women has always struck him as monstrously unjust. What spark missing from the eyes, the smile, what scent or fleshly chemistry, could make such a fatal difference in two faces whose cast of feature, to a blind man’s touch, might be identical? The two might share similar natures, biologies, desires, capabilities, the same urgent drive to be passionately wanted and to love and procreate. Yet one will be set aside by a mere gene, some minute strand of protoplasm undetectable by the known senses, that condemns her to an unfulfilled existence—unless, that is, she should happen to be spared by an unusual intelligence or wit or lively manner of the sort so lacking in poor Ann-Marie.
Like most men, he has carelessly assumed that such misfortune is what impels a young woman to commit heart and mind and yearning body to the nun’s barren calling, with only the love of poor emaciated Christ to see her through. He pities this girl truly. Yet at this moment, even so, he is annoyed that this creature has embarrassed Sister Catherine. When Ann-Marie can’t be coaxed onto her feet, he steps behind her, reaches down and locates her soft armpits and with a great surge of distaste heaves the dead weight of her up off the gravel.
Taken aback by Olin’s intervention, Sister Catherine waves away another man who has stepped forward to help; she does this so brusquely that the man raises his eyebrows, then permits himself a sort of smile when a moment later, as she attempts to assist Olin from the other side, the two bump foreheads in the act of lifting.
“I’ve never bumped heads with a nun before,” Olin whispers. He laughs quietly and she bites her lip, then gives in to a bright peal of girlish mirth that charms him—that in fact delights him, though he senses how close her laughter comes to the frantic laughter of an overtired child up past its bedtime that may shatter in wails from one moment to the next: for whatever reason, this young Catherine is in despair. Observing them, Ann-Marie decides she is being mocked—“Oh!”—and is instantly up there on the Cross with Jesus; twisting free, she rushes off the ramp and on across the snowy tracks, bound for the fence and the nearest gate that might lead to a place of refuge in the women’s compound.
Sister Catherine does not call after her. She considers the misshapen cross—“the wound,” she murmurs in a small queer voice—then distances herself from it a little before leading a bare service with no altar.
Just as well Priest Mikal is absent, Olin supposes, exchanging a wry look with the man who tried to help. He had not recognized the ex-monk Stefan, whose fur hat conceals the monk’s tonsure encircling his scalp like a fallen halo.
Sister Catherine whispers to her group that under ordinary circumstances, Sister Ann-Marie would never permit herself to behave in such a manner. As an unsophisticated peasant girl taught by country priests, she is naturally upset by the shock of her first exposure to a death camp and also certain anti-papist rants which have made a painful situation that much worse. She does not have to say that for a devout novice, the discovery that failed Catholics were prominent among those responsi
ble for Auschwitz-Birkenau has been excruciating.
Catherine herself looks harried, as if at any moment she might sink into a heap as the other girl had done, simply unravel. “Yet you have borne it,” he reminds her.
“Yes,” she says, looking around to see if the missing sister might have reappeared. “These days we must persevere, try to see clearly. There are decisions.”
What sort of decisions? For Sister Catherine? For the Church? Surely something more urgent than Earwig’s abuse is badly troubling her. Even if she won’t confide in him, he wants to engage her in some way, tease her a little, to lighten the atmosphere between them. Stop inspecting her! Where are your manners? But really, how alive she looks in her distress, almost pretty in her way, even in heavy black habit. He checks an absurd impulse to reach out and lightly touch her cheek. Want to bless her or something? You’re ridiculous!
Olin says, “I was just wondering why Priest Mikal doesn’t attend your services.” “He is not our priest,” she says too sharply, “and anyway, he can’t be everywhere: no doubt he has duties to attend to at the church.”
“I’ll just go have a look for Ann-Marie,” he tells her. “Sister Ann-Marie,” she says, plainly regretting the entire unsuitable exchange.
When Sister Catherine and the others return to the circle, Olin stays behind to kick at the mutilated cross with his boot toe, trying to smooth it. Stefan has lingered, too, apparently entertained by his frustration, but Olin soon quits, in a hurry to catch up, nodding to Stefan curtly as he passes. When he glances back a minute later, the man has already set off in the opposite direction, toward the tunnel.
OLIN LEAVES THE CIRCLE after the first meditation period and makes his way across the tracks and through the fence into the women’s compound. (By what warped code were the sexes kept strictly separate while awaiting death?) In one of these preserved barracks lived Tadeusz Borowski’s beloved fiancée Maria, arrested with him. In another, Dr. Mengele performed his hideous experiments on twin children. And somewhere here—this haunts him—a wistful child scrawled on the wall: “No butterflies live here.” This river lowland must have breathed mosquito clouds in warmer weather when every last butterfly, beetle, worm, and spider was devoured on sight by the famished prisoners, and the root of the poorest weed. Once the grass was gone and the river rose in rain and flood, mud oozed over these floors; in the dry summer, the prisoners choked on the hot dust, hallucinating in the dream of water.