In Paradise: A Novel (9 page)

Jaroslav, Becca’s companion, a violinist with long black hair (that he probably slaps over his brow during performances, decides Olin, who dislikes him), speaks so rarely that first he must excavate his throat at unpleasant length. “That Jew prayer at the Black Wall the first morning? For the Dead? Why no mention of the Polish martyrs?” After all, he says, it was mostly Poles who were executed at that wall; the great majority of Jews came later and were taken straight to Birkenau. “Today these Israelis fly their big blue flag here, and Israel didn’t even
exist
yet, for God’s sake!”

“Why raise a flag at all? Who’d want to claim this place?” Rebecca broods. “Sure, those Nazi pigs disgraced themselves. They soiled themselves. Disgustingly.” She looks frankly at the Germans. “Yet in some way,” she continues, “all those centuries of pogroms, then the Shoah—hasn’t all this suffering soiled the Jews, too?

“Who can we be as a people,” she demands, “when century after century our fellow men despise us, cast us out? What is so hateful about Jews that others need to demonize and kill us? Bulldoze piles of our naked bodies into pits like so much offal? What
is
this curse the so-called Chosen People suffer? Can persecution be the fate that we were chosen for? And if so, why? What did we do?”

She tosses her hands high—
“Aach!”
—to return that old question to the rabbis. “These good kind Christians,” she tells Olin, indicating her friends, “rebuilt my city, all but—can you guess?—the Jewish quarter! Is that because there was nobody to put in it?”

“
I
AM FROM THE OTHER SIDE.”
Thrashing to her feet, a large raw-boned Polish woman with coarse hair tied back hard, baring her ears, speaks with defiance. The faces stare.
The other side?
What can that mean? Who is she? Why has she come? She does not say. She simply stands there, apparently on the point of another utterance, but when the cameraman turns his lens her way, she sits back down. Professor Schreier complains peevishly to Olin about losing their first local witness to that damned camera, which Adina sees as Ben Lama’s hunger for publicity as well as an inexcusable intrusion. She intends to return to Israel on the very first flight out of Cracow day after tomorrow.

T
HE IDEA THAT A GENOCIDE
far greater and more terrible had already occurred in eastern Europe has rankled many Jews from Europe and the United States, who are accustomed to having the Holocaust all to themselves. Anders parodies the sullen mutterings he pretends to have heard outside the hall:
“
Filthy potato-eaters. Oy! Good riddance!”

Olin smiles carefully, having learned long ago not to show too much amusement when Jews are being funny about Jews, not even when hilarious tales are told among his closest Jewish friends. Also, he wishes to be sure that his empathy with the people killed here is authentic, visceral, not merely an idea. As an American, he is embarrassed by loud Miriam, therefore a bit worried about the latent anti-Semitism in his own background: Would her crude manner be sufficient provocation, were he Jewish, to make him a genteel bigot like Kafka and Appelfeld and Bruno Schulz—all of them admirable Jewish writers whose cultured bourgeois families had been careful to avoid spas and public places infested by such people?

“Infested,” Olin? You sure that’s the word you want? Be very careful.

“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.

U
NABLE 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.

A
S 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.”