Lumen Read online

  “Don’t give me that, Hannes. Remember what’s up there.”

  Bora’s men had killed two Polish stragglers a little way up from the farm, as they ran up the mild rise after firing a few shots at the patrol.

  From the arid pasture north of the house, one of the soldiers now walked back pulling a red cow by the rope around its neck. Hoofs and marching boots raised a low wake of silt on their trail, blurring the hilly horizon behind them.

  The farm wife heard the sound of hoofs. She lifted her face from the apron and came running, hands outstretched, to Bora. “Nie, nie, panie oficerze!”

  Bora pushed her back, annoyed. They were killing farmers elsewhere in Poland. She ought to be grateful that he only had these orders.

  “It’s a nice cow,” Hannes added, to Bora’s irritation.

  Bora turned to the soldier. “Kill it, Private.”

  “Yes, sir. It’s a shame, though.”

  Bora took his Walther out and shot the cow in the ear.

  “Now burn the hay.”

  As the fires were set, Bora stepped away from the threshing floor. He was resentful not for the farmers, but for himself. This job was beneath soldiers: beneath him, at any rate; beneath soldiers like him. Quickly he climbed the incline to the place where the bodies of the two stragglers lay.

  They still wore the dirt-coloured baggy clothes of the Polish army, but were barefooted. Had they flung off their ill-fitting boots in order to ease their escape? Bora thought so, by the bruised and pinched appearance of their toes. Flies clustered on the dead men’s long, drawn faces, and their pale eyes seemed to have cloudy water in them. The blue collar patches identified them as infantrymen.

  Bora crouched to search their tunics for papers. He hadn’t handled dead bodies since his volunteer days in Spain - the past, victorious spring of Teruel. The weight, the coldness of death surprised him anew. The flies took off from the bloody clothes, landed again. Far away, artillery shots were being fired, perhaps as far as Chrzanów. It’s hot, he thought. It’s hot and these men no more feel it than they’ll ever feel anything again, until God raises them.

  Bora found no identification disks, no documents, surely all disposed of along the way. But there was a folded photograph in one of the men’s breast pockets. When Bora took it out and unfolded it, it broke in half.

  By the signature, he recognized that it was a black-and-white portrait of Mother Kazimierza, standing with hands clasped in prayer. Bandages were wrapped around her hands, and dark stains were visible through the gauze padding. In the upper right corner, a crude photomontage showed an engraved heart surmounted by a flame. Around the heart a crown of thorns squeezed it until drops of blood oozed from it. A crown surmounted the heart, and from the crown a tongue of flame rose. The letters L.C.A.N. were printed over the flame in a semi-circle. Bora looked at the back of the photograph, and read that the letters stood for Lumen Christi, Adiuva Nos.

  Light of Christ, succour us, indeed. Some good it’d done to the man carrying it.

  Rifle shots at the foot of the incline startled him, but it was only a soldier firing in the air to keep the woman away from the burning haystack. Bora stood up, slipped the photograph into his map case and walked down.

  Light of Christ. Really.

  He had no sooner reached the threshing floor, than a wild, close burst of machine-gun fire sent the soldiers scattering. Bora himself dodged at random, because smoke from the haystack obstructed the view. “Watch out!” a soldier shouted, and it was seconds, fractions of seconds: shooting, smoke, dodging, the soldier’s cry. Suddenly Bora made out a man’s ghostly figure surging through the smoke, and fired. “Shoot!” He called out. “Shoot, men!”

  Ghost-like, the armed man turned to him from the flames of collapsing hay, but Bora was quicker. Quicker than his soldiers, even. Two, three times more he shot into the smoke.

  The machine gun let out a last burst, skywards. The man dropped on his knees as if a great weight had felled him, crumpling into the scented cradle of hay fire.

  Right arm still extended, Bora released the trigger. “He almost did us in! Didn’t you see him?” He was angry at his men, but other than that, the danger had jarred him back into a state of tight control. He even felt better because of it, as if his task here were somehow redeemed by risk. “Search the other stacks,” he ordered, and for the next five minutes closely supervised the jabbing of bayonets into the smouldering hay.

  Loud weeping came from the farm wife, crouched on the doorstep. Head buried in the fold of her arms, her disconsolate heap of clothes shook with fear and grief.

  “Hannes, tell her to shut the hell up,” Bora said. He kept his back obstinately turned to her as the soldiers went poking into the deep sluice behind the barn, behind and into a pile of manure, chasing horseflies.

  At headquarters in Cracow, Colonel Hofer had a headache. He hid the letter from home under an orderly pile of maps, only so that he wouldn’t be tempted to read it again, when it did no good. Again and again his eyes went to the wall clock. He tasted a surge of resentment at the thought that Army General Blaskowitz would visit at four this afternoon, when the abbess had granted him an appointment at four thirty.

  He’d uselessly tried to negotiate the hour with Blaskowitz’s aide, who had informed him the commander-in-chief might spend the whole afternoon in Cracow.

  “You must pray much,” Mother Kazimierza had warned the day before, speaking in her precise, book-learned German. “Your wife must pray much more than she does. How can Christ listen to you if you don’t pray? Only uninterrupted prayer opens God’s doors.”

  Hofer reached into the top drawer of his desk, where a booklet on spiritual exercises written by the abbess - useless to him in Polish - contained as a bookmark a small square of surgical gauze sealed in hard transparent plastic. At the centre of the gauze stood a perfectly round bloodstain.

  Hofer could weep in frustration. “You may only come see me during next week, and then no more,” Mother Kazimierza had told him on his way out the day before.

  His heart had cringed at the words. “Why only one more week?” he’d cried out to her. “I need your prayers - why only one more week?”

  The nun wanted to say no more about it. “Laudetur Jesus Christus.” She’d signalled to Sister Irenka to escort the visitor out, and he’d had to leave. Hofer sighed deeply at the recollection, and tears welled in his eyes. It was becoming more and more difficult to hide his emotions. Luckily, Captain Bora was naive, and hadn’t noticed.

  Like most men of his political generation, Bora was hard to figure out, but at least there was some traditional solidity in him, a trustworthiness that had little to do with party allegiance. He knew how to keep things to himself. The only trouble with Bora, Hofer glumly considered, was that fortune treated him well.

  Out in the country, the smell of charring flesh came from the haystack, where the flames continued to smoulder and the fermenting core of the stack burned around the body in black compact clumps like peat.

  Bora looked up from his map and called to the soldiers squatting near the threshold of the farmhouse.

  “For Christ’s sake, pull him away from there! Can’t you see the poor bastard’s starting to cook?”

  16 October

  Bora didn’t return to Cracow until Monday. He met Retz at Army Headquarters - Retz was in the Supply Service, and was now cursing over the phone about some late shipment of bedsheets - and at the end of day they drove to their apartment together.

  It was a fine three-storey house on the Podzamcze, directly below the formidable bastion of the Wawel Castle. Against the pale yellow stucco, freshly painted shutters and wrought-iron balconies stood out, and from what Bora could tell, a narrow garden of evergreens lined the back of the building.

  He followed Retz up two flights of stairs, to a door which the major opened on an elegant interior.

  “Just our luck that we’d billet here.” Retz disparagingly said, pulling back the key from the lock with an ill-hu
moured jerk. They’d been talking of Colonel Hofer on the way to the house, but now the very act of walking into the apartment seemed to renew his contempt for the assigned quarters. Entering ahead of Bora, he added, “Did you see what’s on the door frame outside?” He referred to a small, half-torn metallic container which Bora had already noticed. It seemed to have been pried open with the point of a knife, and right now it resembled nothing but torn metal. “Do you know what that’s supposed to be?”

  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?”

  20 October

  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.

  21 October

  “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.”