Lumen (18 page)

Bora held liquor well, but felt an increasing level of giddy merriment at the thought of what alcohol might be doing to the colonel’s seminal vesicles. He hardly worried about his own, now that the perspective of Dikta’s coming was sure to set him on an edge of perpetual urges for the next three weeks.

The Russians were installed in the Hotel
Patria
at Lvov. The hotel was within walking distance from the museum on the four-fountained Market Square, which the Germans were made to visit for a last-minute aperitif.

“
Dobro pozhalovat!
” A dapper colonel in steel-grey tunic welcomed the guests in the venerable carpeted lobby. Inevitably he was flanked by a commissar, identifiable by the red star on his sleeve. Bora couldn’t help comparing these to the shabby uniforms of the privates outside, standing under their long-eared cloth helmets.

Schenck frowned. “Tell him I’d like to start the talks right after lunch, Bora. I don’t want to be stuck with another tour of the city or propaganda sales talk.”

Bora translated throughout the reception. The commissar was seated across the table from him, and observed him closely. He said at one point, “You speak Russian well. How is it that you studied it so zealously?”

Bora answered with some polite generality. What Schenck had whispered to him on the way to the table was probably closer to the truth. “Mark my words, Bora, we’re going to take back this town. We surely haven’t entered Poland to leave half of it to the Reds.”

In the afternoon, the church of the Dominicans in Lvov reminded Bora of the church of Our Lady of Seven Sorrows in Cracow. The same Roman baroque volumes multiplied into cupolas and side chapels, although the open square gave this building more relevance than the convent had along the narrow street in Cracow.

Schenck had succeeded in obtaining a first round of talks immediately after lunch, primarily matters of common intelligence, the preliminary draft of an agreement to collaborate against local resistance by open exchange of communiqués and issues of border protocol.

The Russians took their revenge by dragging the visitors through a sight-seeing tour of the city. Benignantly, the commissar turned to Bora. “You see how adversary propaganda has done Marxism wrong, Captain. The churches are intact, open and useable.”

Bora had been glancing at the street signs in the Cyrillic alphabet, aware that they carried the same signs of temporariness of the German ones in the west.

“Yes,” he spoke back, and smiling came easy. “But there’s a nursery rhyme in English that goes, ‘Here’s the church / and here’s the steeple…’ Today is Sunday, and I wonder where all the people might be.”

With news about Helenka in mind, Kasia almost forgot she was carrying a small piece of margarine in her pocket. When she pulled out a coin for the streetcar, her fingers met with the paper wrapper. Luckily it was cold enough for the margarine to stay solid. She stood through the short ride, holding on to the hand strap with an anxious eye to the names of the streets.

This was the stop for Święty Krzyża. Kasia got off in the slushy remnant of snow at the edge of the sidewalk, careless of wetting her shoes. Her toes were soaked in the time it took her to go from the corner of the street to Ewa’s door.

“I’m a friend of
Pana
Kowalska,” she explained to the porter. Ewa had told her the house management was strict, and the war had made it even more suspicious. It was easy to see, Kasia told herself while the porter kept her waiting, why Ewa didn’t take Richard Retz home.

“What is your name?”

Kasia answered.

“Why are you in such a hurry, young lady? What is the matter?”

A malicious desire to gossip about Helenka and to see Ewa’s reactions nearly caused her to snap back at the porter, but still Kasia controlled her temper. An idea came to her. “I have urgent need to see Ewa Kowalska,” she said, all the while unwrapping the margarine and pushing it into the narrow window of the porter’s cubbyhole. “Will you let me go up?”

The porter reached for the margarine, sniffed it and gave it back. “She lives on the fourth floor, first door to the right. ‘Going up’ is just what you’ll have to do: the elevator’s out of order.”

 

It was nearly five o’clock in the evening when Father Malecki awoke from his nap in the parlour’s armchair.
He’d slept soundly, and could not remember his dreams except for the last one, which was bizarre enough to stick in his memory.

He’d dreamed that he was getting ready for mass. From the wardrobe where his vestments were kept, the bleary-eyed, moustached man who wanted the relics leaped out, holding hands with one of the nuns.

The nun’s face was nondescript, no one that Malecki could identify. She was wearing an oversized portrait of Mother Kazimierza around her neck. It looked like an ancient medallion with the abbess’s profile at the centre, surrounded by the letters
L.C.A.N
. From the depth of the wardrobe, a bright light came forth like a beacon.

“What’s that light?” Malecki remembered asking the nun in his dream.

“Why, Father, don’t you know? It’s what killed the abbess, and what made her a saint.”

Shielding his eyes from the light, Malecki had reached for his surplice, unable to see it but feeling for it by touch. There was a spray of bloodstains at the cuffs, on the side and at the lower hem.

“Now you too have a relic,
Ojciec
!” the moustached man had shouted, skipping out of the sacristy with the nun. “Just make sure you tell the German that you know where the repairmen went!”

Mister Logan had come out of the wardrobe last, clearing his throat. “The consul thinks you should return the relic of the surplice, Father Malecki. It’s against American policy for you to become a saint outside of the country.”

This is what happens when one has a bad cold and receives foreign-service officers
, Malecki told himself. Sneezing into his plaid handkerchief, he left the parlour and climbed the stairs to his room.

7

“She’s a dear girl,” Sister Irenka asserted, hands clasped in her ample sleeves as in a muff. “Her dreams may be no more than that, but then perhaps they’re worth your enquiring about them.”

Father Malecki savoured the mint drop as its coolness coated his tongue and began to rise to his nostrils. He was regaining some of his sense of smell. The odour of onions frying in the convent kitchen floated, though faintly, to his nose. He said, “How long has she been at the convent?”

“She took her vows two years ago on Easter Sunday. She’s originally from Biała, south of here. She’s also a convert from a very strict Jewish family, which says much for her.”

“Was she close to the abbess?”

Sister Irenka wrinkled her nose like a spiteful girl. “I associated with the abbess more than anyone else in the convent, as I’m sure you noticed. Not even
I
was close to the abbess. However, Sister Barbara entered this order because of Mother Kazimierza. She was converted on Easter Sunday seven years ago after a bout with infantile paralysis.” Father Malecki now remembered the pudgy young nun with a stoop. “A medal from Mother Kazimierza is credited with her conversion and, according to Sister Barbara, with her healing as well.”

Had he not dreamed of the nun wearing a medallion? Malecki thought so, but made nothing of the coincidence at this point.

“Would it be better for me to speak to Sister Barbara in confession?”

“It will be up to you, Father. Why don’t you meet her meanwhile? She’s been unwell since the abbess’s death. The doctor thinks it’s nerves, but the doctor doesn’t truly understand women
or
nuns.”

Sister Barbara worked in the kitchen. She came to meet the priest in the waiting room with high windows, cold and spotless and under the sad watch of the crucifix.

“Praised be Jesus Christ,” she greeted him.

“Always, Sister.”

“Sister Irenka told me I should meet you.”

Unlike the other nuns, she was very dark of features. Sister Irenka had bluntly said that she knew the first time she’d set eyes on her that she must be a gypsy or a Jewess. Malecki had seen Spanish and Italian nuns in Chicago looking like her, with mournful black eyes that seemed to well up from the soul.

Her skin had no colour. Although she was no more than thirty, flesh hung about her cheeks as in one who has lost a lot of weight too quickly. A veil-like onion skin hung from the hem of her sleeve, and her nearness still smelled of onions.

Malecki had planned a direct approach, but now it didn’t seem easy to say anything to her. She kept an expectant, quiet defensiveness, which he might have to circumvent before trying to enter.

“Sister Barbara, you’re aware of my months of study here in relation to the abbess. Given Mother Kazimierza’s role in your life choice, I wonder if you’d care to tell me about your conversion.”

“I will, Father.”

To Malecki, ever since the abbess’s death, the convent was as though under a spell of silence. Even Sister Barbara’s
voice-adeep monotone, a teacher’s voice - seemed unable to break the spell, and sounded dull, muted.

She was saying, “It’s always like the first dream. There are some variations, some details that reflect things that happened during the day, but the essence is the same.” Holding a black rosary in her hands, mechanically she rolled each bead of the chain. “I am in my father’s house at Biała. There is
tsholnt
on the table, so I think maybe it’s Friday, because that’s when that dish is prepared. My father is outside. I can hear him chopping through meat with his cleaver. It seems to me that every time the blade goes down, a voice next to me is saying, ‘Body of Christ. Body of Christ.’”

“Whose voice is it?”

“I don’t know. A man’s voice, but then I know it’s Mother Kazimierza’s voice, too. I feel that I have to get out of the house, but won’t be able to do so until my father leaves. My mother is in the back of the house, reciting the Kaddish for some relative who has died. I call out to her and ask who is it that died, and she says, ‘You,
Bubele.
How can you not know I’m reciting it for you?’” Sister Barbara glanced up, as if fearful of having said too much already. “Sometimes the dream stops here, but most often it goes on to the end.”

Malecki was interested in the end, of course, but didn’t pressure her. He sat with his right elbow on the knee, resting his aching forehead in the open hand. His cold was not gone, by any means. It throbbed in his sinuses and made him less alert than he needed to be.

The nun let out a small sigh. “When the dream continues, I have somehow got out of the house. My father seems to be very distant. I am standing on a brick platform and Mother Kazimierza is with me. She has her arms outstretched.” Sister Barbara’s eyes stole to the crucifix on the wall. “Like
Him
. Blood drips from her hands and feet, but she is
smiling. She asks me if I would like to come with her. My legs feel bound, and I tell her that I would love to follow her, but I don’t think I’m worthy or even able. She simply takes my hand and starts walking. I had a dream similar to this part seven years ago, which is when I became well again. We walk and walk and walk. The platform follows us wherever we go. At one point Mother Kazimierza asks me if I want to be a saint. I say, yes, and she says that if I want to be like Christ they will come to take me away as they did with Christ. ‘Will you come also?’ I ask her. She opens her arms again and lies down on the platform. The same voice I heard in my father’s house I hear now, saying, ‘No one but my name.’”

From the nun’s silence, Malecki understood she had finished her story. “‘No one but my name,’ Sister.” He opened his eyes. “What does that mean?”

“I don’t know. I wake up in tears every time, not because of what happens in the dream but because I am reminded that she is dead, and even though I know I should rejoice that she is with Christ, it is so difficult to accept her absence.”

 

Two days into her stay in Retz’s apartment, Ewa felt triumphant.

Brushing her hair in front of the sink, she watched him bathing in the tub. His fleshy knees rose from the suds, bald as his chest was shaggy, with tufts of wet hair that clustered and curled like blond shavings of wood. He’d been lounging in the bath for the past ten minutes, now and then adding hot water to the tub.

She said, “What happened to your wedding ring?”

Retz opened his eyes.

“I took it off.”

“I can see that. Why?”

Retz smiled. He liked looking at her nakedness. “I didn’t feel like wearing it any more.” Ewa was big-breasted, though her breasts were still quite pert for her age. Only the once-perfect line of her buttocks had changed noticeably; her arms had always been rounded, dimpled at the elbows. Now that she reached for the back of her head with the brush, the yellow sprig of hair under her right arm showed. The right breast rose with the motion. “Doesn’t it tell you the ring means nothing to me, Ewusia?”