Mother Kazimierza’s favourite words came to his mind: “…but if the light in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness.”
The mystery of what
Lumen
meant might very well be a light shining through the dark of unsolved crime and unspoken hostility. Malecki thought that if no solution ever came, he’d learned meanwhile how much more there was to nuns, to saints, to patriots and to German officers.
With less than nine days to the deadline, the Curia was considering acceptance of Sister Irenka as a new abbess at Our Lady of Sorrows. Malecki had heard from the archbishop’s secretary that anyone but a mystic was what the convent needed now.
But things were not through with Mother Kazimierza, not quite: the archbishop wanted recommendations about her from him, Malecki. Pressure would begin building soon in the Polish Church to recommend her beatification, and proven miracles would be needed. Malecki would have to express in writing whether the stigmata and fulfilled prophecies qualified for the name.
As the morning sun moved, the spear of light changed angle and began to widen, flatten, fade. Malecki sat up scratching his neck and yawning, with a lazy mind to open the window and do his weight-lifting.
When he went downstairs for breakfast,
Pana
Klara first complained apologetically that there was no milk and the bread was stale, and then pointed out to him a sealed envelope on the lacy tablecloth.
“A German orderly left it an hour ago. You were sleeping so well, Father, I didn’t think you should be roused on account of him.”
The note was handwritten, and from Bora.
“
We must proceed with the investigation. I’ll meet you on Thursday at the convent, eighteen hundred hours sharp.
”
3 January
The group of stray Polish soldiers had been gathered in the next room. Bora had slept poorly, and chain-smoked while he prepared to interrogate them. Salle-Weber’s words hadn’t left his mind for one moment, but their impact was seemingly not enough to keep him from feeling drowsy now.
So he smoked, and the room began smelling like the apartment after Retz and Ewa had spent the night in it, a stale odour of cigarettes. Bora opened the window to let the hazy air flow out of the office.
If sleeping poorly weren’t enough, he’d even dreamed about Retz towards morning. The
mode of his death
, Father Malecki had said. Bora had awakened with the damnable doubt that Retz’s death troubled him because he didn’t understand it. He wanted to tell more about it to Malecki, and if all went well by Thursday evening he’d have had a chance to speak to the cleaning woman again and to one of the medics who had worked on Retz’s body.
His stepfather left late that afternoon. True to form, he insisted on walking to the station from the Francuski, so he and Bora passed under St Florian’s gate, where a side altar
was carved in the wall, protected by shutters now open. A nun was praying in front of it.
“What should I tell your wife?”
Bora looked at the drab curtain of government buildings lining the other side of the street past the round red-brick ring of the Barbican wall. “I wrote her a letter.”
“Did you send it, or shall I hand-carry it?”
“I’d appreciate your giving it to her.”
With the envelope, a small package came out of Bora’s pocket.
“I sure as hell wouldn’t send her gifts,” Sickingen blurted out. “You ought to send a gift to your mother instead.”
“I have one for her also. Here.”
Sickingen wanted to pass by the square where the monument to the victory against the Germans at Grünwald had been dynamited and lay now in a scattered heap of stone blocks. “I want you to take a picture of it and send it to me,” he told Bora. “It’ll serve me as a reminder of the idiocy of your political choice. You do have a camera, don’t you?”
Bora only said that he’d send the photograph.
After seeing the general’s train off, he drove to the hospital. Doctor Nowotny was not in, but in the emergency room he found one of the medics who’d retrieved Retz’s body.
The medic didn’t mind talking. “I remember it well - my first suicide. The major was kneeling on the kitchen floor with his head in the gas oven, slumped forwards. What was he wearing? Uniform breeches, boots and shirt. No tunic. Had there been a towel lying around in the kitchen, I’d have used it, because I smeared my hand on the inside of the oven. There were no towels around, so I ended up using a dishcloth.”
“Was anything out of order in the kitchen, that you can tell?”
“I don’t know how orderly it usually was, Captain. There was no food out, if that’s what the captain means, no drinks, nothing. It really looked as if he just up and put his head into the stove.”
4 January
In the morning, Schenck called Bora into his office.
He had an expression of indefinable contempt on his leathery face, and for a stressful moment Bora thought he might have been approached by Salle-Weber.
Schenck said, “Sit down.”
Bora sat.
“I understand your wife has not come. What will you do about it?”
Bora checked himself. “There isn’t much I can do about it, Colonel.”
“Well, you must intend to do something with the germ plasma built up while waiting for her.”
Bora didn’t want to say that his germ plasma was now being laundered off his clothes.
Schenck added, flint-faced, “There are German women in Cracow.”
“I don’t think they’d be the proper receptacle.”
“And why not?”
“Because I do not love them.”
“Love?” Schenck’s disdain went to his mouth, turning it downwards in a grimace. “I thought we agreed that love is a bourgeois expression, having nothing to do with propagating the race. Being inherently opposed to the waste of masturbation, I cannot envision anything else for a German man to do in your circumstance but to find a
racially compatible female. Clearly your wife has no sense of the demographic needs of the Country.” From the top of his desk, Schenck lifted a typewritten sheet which he handed to Bora. “These are the names of racially certified local women. I advise you to select from the list as soon as possible. As open-minded men, we can distinguish between profligacy and sexual health, can’t we?”
Bora ran his eyes down the list. Before leaving, his stepfather had struck him a blow from which he was still reeling. “They say,” he’d leaned out of the train window to inform him, “that she had an abortion before she met you.”
A veiled redness had stretched in front of Bora’s eyes then, as when the SS had nearly shot him. “
That’s a bold lie!
” he remembered shouting, and how he’d banged the side of the train with his gloved fist. “Take it back at once, it’s a bold lie!”
“Don’t get hot under the collar,” his stepfather had only added. “Nothing about the Coennewitz girls would surprise
me
.”
His numbness now was the only thing that kept him from overreacting to Schenck’s advice. Bora found himself looking, guiltily, for Ewa’s and Helenka’s name on the list, but of course they were not there.
Seated next to Bora’s army cap on the bench of the waiting room, Father Malecki looked disappointed. “Was that all Frau Hofer had to say to you?”
“Yes.” Bora was restless, but realized how irritating it was to watch someone pace back and forth, so he forced himself to stand still. “The phone connection was bad. She said their son has died, and she doesn’t wish to remind her husband of Poland at this time. He’s been very ill, and stays at a convalescent home. She expects him back in a week, at
which time she’ll inform him of my call. So I’ll call again in a week. Meanwhile we’ll keep looking for our missing worker here in Cracow. The contractor supplied us with an accurate description of him, and I’m very hopeful in that regard.”
“But what if the colonel has nothing to add, and you don’t find the missing worker?”
“Miracles aren’t my province, Father. You know perfectly well I don’t even have a shell casing to go by. You and I were not in the convent when the abbess died, so it’s neither one of us who killed her. Everything else is dreams and half-baked prophecies.”
“Hardly what you can report to your commander.”
“Unless we’re enlightened between now and then, that’s exactly what I’ll report.” Bora reached for his cap on the bench. “Do you have time for dinner at the Wierzynek tonight?” When Malecki hesitated to answer, he couldn’t help himself. “That is, if the American consulate lets you.”
Malecki actually laughed. “I’ll come.”
When Bora arrived home to freshen up before dinner, the cleaning woman was washing the floors.
She looked at him, and he knew what was on her mind. “Forget about the towel.” He prevented her. “I said I’ll pay for it. Tell me something else, instead.” He gestured for her to let go of the mop, and come forwards. “Sit.” He pointed to a fancy chair, adding to her confusion. “Just tell me in what state was the apartment when you were called in to clean after the major’s death. Yes, of course it smelled like gas. What else? Was anything out of place, or was it as always? Think carefully.”
The cleaning woman sat uneasily, neck stretched forwards. “It was as always,
panie kapitanie
.”
“All right. What about the bed? Was the bed - did it seem as though the bed had been made love in?”
The woman’s alarm grew and abated under Bora’s impassive stare. “No, sir.”
“What about the bathroom, could you tell if the major had been shaving?”
“He’d taken a bath. The bath towel was still wet.”
“Was the sink clean, or did it have shaving soap in it?”
“It was rinsed clean.”
“Now tell me about the kitchen. Anything out of place there?”
“No, sir. Only thing is, two drinking glasses had been washed. The major always left plates and glasses in the sink.”
Retz had probably had a drink with Ewa the night before, and she’d washed the glasses. Bora found none of the information useful. He dismissed the cleaning woman. Leisurely he shaved, changed, and although it was still early he had Hannes drive him to the fine old restaurant on the square, where he was to meet Father Malecki for dinner. Hannes was talkative, having just run into another veteran of the Spanish campaign. He jabbered about it all the way to the restaurant, and then asked for permission to have the evening off. What a fine land Spain was, and what an adventure! How young we all were! Who knows how many fine memories the captain has brought back, eh? Bora had grown thoughtful at the recollection, and had to be asked twice before dismissing him.
At the table, Malecki let him talk at length about Retz. So much so, in fact, that Bora caught himself, clumsily. “Am I not boring you, Father?”
“No, no. Keep talking.”
Behind Bora’s head, the large painting of a sun-bathed mountain scene seemed like a window on a remote world. Sipping his wine, Malecki heedfully listened to all Bora had to say - how he’d asked Helenka if she thought she
was pregnant by Retz (not so, luckily), but hadn’t had time to ask Ewa for all the information he thought she could give him; how it bothered him not to be able to let Retz’s death rest. Then he commented, “It’s strange.”
“What’s strange?”
“That you notice details with such clarity, and yet have a blind spot.”
Bora said he didn’t understand.
“Well, you say that one of the towels disappeared on the day your colleague died. How do you know that it wasn’t taken away by the medics?”
“I checked with one of the medics. He told me no towel was found in the kitchen, and they used none. And anyway, why would anyone steal a towel from inside the bathroom shelf when there was one hanging from the rack?” Bora put fork and knife down, impatiently. “Why did you say I have a blind spot?”
“Because in your heart you don’t believe that Retz committed suicide, yet something keeps you from going the distance to admit that you think someone killed him.”
Bora felt blood rising to his face, as on the night he’d sat across from his stepfather and his stepfather had seen through him.
“After all, Captain, Retz had already quartered in Cracow years ago, and might have had old enemies. Is it such an impossibility?”
Bora wondered where Ewa’s first husband could be now. He replied, just for the sake of argument, “The only people I can associate with him with some certainty were busy elsewhere on the morning he died.”
“You mean his woman friend and her daughter.”
“Yes. They were both rehearsing.”
“I see,” Malecki said amiably. “And what is the play?”
“Aeschylus’
Eumenides
. Not that it makes a difference.”
“And have you gone to see it?”
“No.”
“Have you read it, then?”
“No, I haven’t.”
Malecki nodded to the waiter, who’d come by to refill his glass. “You should.”
After dinner, Bora was relieved that Malecki had said he’d walk home, and that Hannes was gone. He wanted to be alone.
Although it was entirely out of his way, he drove in a circuitous manner north of the Old City to Święty Krzyża, where Ewa’s lit window on the grey stucco wall distinguished itself from the others by its trim of lacy curtains.
At the corner, he stopped the car. It would take less than a minute to walk to the doorway of her house and tell the porter he was here to see Frau Kowalska. She’d receive him, of course.
His distress resulted from a nearly untenable desire to ask Ewa to kiss him and make love to him, of which he was ashamed but no less desirous for it. In the crude dark, how different would her body be from Dikta’s, except that Dikta was younger?
He remembered stripping off his uniform at the foot of the hotel bed on their wedding night, when every button and lacing had been an enemy to his haste. They had made up for it by not bothering to get up on the following day, at the end of which he had to phone his parents to say that he’d got married. Now Ewa would do the same with him, blond like Dikta but wiser, more appreciative of a young man’s worth, of how the man she’d kissed in the theatre would perform with a racially compatible female.