In Paradise: A Novel (2 page)

“It’s all right, miss, I’m not Jewish,” he smiles. With his wheaten hair and pale blue eyes and broad high cheekbones, he looks more Slav than they do. “How can she know,” hoots Mirek, “if she never seen one?”

Scraping chairs back, all three laugh a bit too long. Over their protests, the stranger pays the bill and tips the waiter. With his father’s unwieldy leather suitcase (making its first return journey to the old country) he is stuffed into the back of Mirek’s little auto, sitting sideways, knees up to his chin. “Have a nice day, mister,” the waiter calls, smirking for some reason. “A nice Polish day.”

T
he road follows the Vistula upriver westward across the frozen landscape; blue-gray hills of the Tatra Mountains and Slovakia rise in the south. Here and there along the way stand stone houses with steep roofs to shed the snows, most of them guarded by spiked iron fences (wolves and brigands?). These dwellings crowd the road in seeming dread of those dark ranks of evergreens that march down the white faces of the hills beyond like Prussian regiments (or Austro-Hungarian or Russian) crossing some hinterland of Bloody Poland, which has no natural boundaries against invaders.

Toward twilight, the tires
thud-thud-thud
across old rails embedded in the asphalt; traversing the road, the railway disappears into the forest. Presumably those tracks were already in use before the war when Oswiecim, just northeast of the frontier, was a hub for seasonal harvest labor transported across northern Europe—one reason, he supposes, for the town’s selection as a terminus. Closing his eyes, he imagines he can feel the vibrations of slow trains that might have jolted across flat country for a fortnight, even hear the creak and shriek of iron couplings; he wonders what was passing through the min
ds of those train engineers of a half century ago, peering down night corridors of forest—rough soot-faced men, as he envisions them, gnawing black crusts.

Beyond the river bridge, at dusk, roadside sheds draw close to the hunched dwellings; soon all congeal as a provincial town. Leaning forward to be heard over the auto’s clatter, he asks Mirek and Wanda if they knew that prewar Oswiecim had been a mostly Jewish community renowned for its hospitality: its name, he has read, may derive from a Yiddish word meaning “guests.”

“Yittish.” Tasting the word, the girl gazes about her, lips parted. “Near this Oshpitzin I am borned.” He cannot resist saying, “I was too,” and divulging his surname when they press him. “That is a name well-known in these parts,” says Mirek, sensing his passenger’s reluctance. Distracting Wanda, he says nobody warned him that his girlfriend was a “Yittish.” She tickles his ribs as he twists away in raucous protest, swerving the car with one hand off the wheel. “
Not
a Yittish!” she cries. “Borned in old Yittish
house
!”

He is rattled by their noise and dangerous horseplay. But these kids have been generous and he curbs his agitation, subduing their racket by inquiring about Mirek’s life ambitions. It seems the boy had originally intended to study for the priesthood at the Cracow seminary where His Holiness—“first Poland Holiness!” the girl assures him—had trained secretly during the war. But these days . . . Mirek hesitates: his parents no longer seem so set on that commitment.

Wanda grins, stroking Mirek’s brush-cropped hair. “Know what his Papa say? He say, ‘Better maybe that foolish Wanda than some dirty priest!’” Mirek looks unhappy. “Papa is always jokes,” he says.

N
IGHT IS FALLING,
the main street is almost dark. A dim-lit sign reading
HOTEL GLOB
is watery in the cold rain. Could this dreary-looking hostelry have been the hospitable inn of Old Oshpitzin? (It suits his mood to pretend that its glottal name does not signify “World Hotel” but instead commemorates some bloody-minded “Glob the Ogre” of medieval folktales.)

When Mirek halts to ask directions, a townsman sidles up to the car window and peers in, hand brimming close-set eyes; asked directions, he looks them over past the point of curiosity or mere ill manners. Why is this cretin so damned nosy? But before he can be challenged, the man straightens, turns, and points, barking harsh syllables over his shoulder as he hurries off down the night street.

A
FTER
O
SWIECIM’S
J
EWS
were transported to the Cracow ghetto, their houses were occupied by Christians, that snoop’s forebears doubtless among them. And the girl’s family, too, perhaps, in their old “Yittish” house. Were you young people never told, he says, that after the war, when those few returning refugees made their way back home to Poland to reclaim their lives, they were reviled and driven off and sometimes bludgeoned and occasionally, when too persistent, killed? “Nearly two thousand Jews were murdered in this country
after
the war,” he says. “Didn’t you know that?”

“Murtered?” They have stopped their fooling. They look shocked—less by the statistic, he suspects, than by their passenger’s intensity. “No, sir! Sorry! We were never learned such things!”

“Why sorry? You weren’t born yet.” His tone is too dismissive: the boy’s regret had been sincere. “At home, at school is what I meant.”

Mirek is silent. The two heads in the front seat, facing forward, seem hypnotized by the
thwack-wack-wack-thwack
of ragged windshield wipers dragged across cold muddied glass.

Why challenge them that way, idiot? What did you expect?
He scowls in the same instant that his scowl is caught by the boy’s scared eyes in the rearview mirror, reading the stranger’s expression the wrong way.

F
AR FROM BEING ISOLATED
in some grim landscape, as postwar newsreels led one to imagine, the high-fenced compound, now a state museum, is located between thoroughfares at the edge of town. Though night has come, the gate into its forecourt is untended, open to the street, and the black wrought ironwork of the gate arch, gleaming in the rain, is still in place a half century later.

Frantic to be of use, the girl pieces out the sign: “Is meaning, ‘Verk Make Frei’!” And the boy hushes her. “You are okay, mister?”

Mirek has slowed to a near stop as the little car approaches the gate, but his passenger waves him on through. All three look back over their shoulders, as if that portal, left unwatched, might close silently behind.

The night court is empty. A two-story building on the far side of the court is outlined by the glare of prison light; its few windows appear lightless. Pulling up short of the entrance, Mirek keeps the motor running. They stare about them, making no move to get out.

In a voice gone hoarse, the passenger inquires, “How do you feel? Being here, I mean? How does it feel to come to such a place? In your own country?” The young Poles exchange looks of alarm. Why would their guest ask them such a thing so many years after those shrouded times that even the old people claim they can scarcely remember?

He presses them. Hadn’t they noticed that old railway embedded in the road? Surely they knew that before those first transports of Jews arrived from western Europe, thousands of Polish prisoners had already been exterminated in this place—
your
own
damned
people,
boys
and
girls
, he wants to yell,
right
here
behind
these
walls!
Wake
up!

When they answer at last, they speak in whispers. They say, It was too long ago. They say, We cannot even imagine it. They say, We don’t know how to think about something so incredible—not, he notes, “so terrible” but “so incredible,” so far beyond belief, as if no sane intelligence could comprehend, far less accept, that such enormous horror could take place in this quiet neighborhood of the girl’s hometown.

She is sniffling. Mirek jumps out, wrenches open the door, yanks out the scuffed valise by its leather straps. They want him gone. He tries in vain to compensate them for the petrol, entreats the girl to at least accept with his sincere best wishes this bit of amber she had liked so much in Cracow. “Please, please, sir,” she whispers, tears in her eyes. “Is beauty gift for Mama!”

They depart at once, leaving him alone with his father’s suitcase, his spurned amber. When the little car scoots through the gate, the petal of the girl’s pale face appears in her blurred window, and he lifts his hand in a half wave—all there is time for. The little auto flees up the empty avenue, tires whistling on the wet pavement. Couldn’t those kids have waited long enough to make sure the guest of Poland had been let in?

Not that he’d deserved much courtesy. They had been kind to lug him thirty miles on a winter road to this
cloaca maxima
, and he had repaid them with pedantic hectoring and pried at them with an irritable meanness that he cannot blame on jet lag or fatigue, or not entirely.
What is it, then? You damn well better pull yourself together.

Hearing something, or perhaps not, he whirls to confront the dark building behind him, relieved to find the heavy door outlined with light. Eventually it opens at his rapping and a woman, finger to her lips, urges his silence. This is the former admissions building, yes. He’d been expected earlier.

He eats a plate of leftover cold fare alone in the SS mess hall, windowless and tomb-walled as a subway station; he follows big red arrows up a steep sharp-cornered stair to an SS dormitory converted to cramped quarters for those few visitors with reason to stay the night fifty years later. A corridor with scaling paint leads to a narrow room where a man occupying one of the twin cots rolls over and feigns sleep to spare them both the toil of introductions.

A casement window overlooks the inner compound. Shards of fractured light expose silhouettes of regimented barracks, hard-edged as a prison on a stage set. At the far end of this street—or so he is presently advised by a voice that erupts in phlegmy coughs behind him—stands the former residence of the late commandant of SS Konzentrationlager Auschwitz I, handy to the gallows site of his postwar hanging.

His informant has twitched his sheet aside, baring a mouth red as a wound that splits the stubble on a long Scandinavian face. “Why do you stare, if I may ask? You never see a Nordic Jew before?” Upon which this visage with its crafty leer is withdrawn under the blanket, together with a muffled snort he thinks might have been laughter.

He lies there travel-spent, unable to sleep, much closer than he likes to that alien male body on the other cot. The oppression seeping from these walls, he thinks, can only be deepened by his own misgivings as to why he has come here in the first place, together with his dread of the next days. His fault, of course. But what has he gotten himself into?

“You really have no choice about it, do you?” his stepmother had said. “No,” he’d said, still gazing at that photo. “Not anymore
.
” Then, very quietly, she’d said, “Your father had no choice about it either, yet he never went. Why do I suspect that’s the reason the poor guy did it?”