Lumen Read Free Page B

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