In Paradise: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

their impressions of this scene of heinous crime? Too late, too late. There had been so many such scenes, so many million crimes. Anyway, as he teaches in his classes, humankind has known forever what needed to be done to bring its own propensities under control, yet whole millennia of civilizations and religions and ever more complex scientific knowledge, all that striving with its high purpose and beautiful accomplishment, has not sufficed to tame the inner beast even a little. On the contrary, the first half of this century was surely the most villainous in recorded history, if only in sheer numbers of human lives systematically destroyed by human beings. Surely the time, means, and good will of would-be “witness bearers” might be better spent out in the world, helping the hordes of refugees and other sufferers for whom some sort of existence might yet be salvaged. The point of life is to help others through it—who said that? We must help the living while we can, since the dead have no more need of us.
    In this empty place then, in winter, 1996, what was left to be illuminated? What could the “witness” of warm, well-fed visitors possibly signify? How could such “witness” matter and to whom? No one was listening.

    L ACKING WINDOWS, the mess hall is oppressive, and the noon meal is mostly silent; in the aftershock of the first morning, the crash of heavy white crockery in the steel sinks subdues the few feeble conversations, all but one insistent female voice. Over her cold hard sausage, hard potato, stiff black bread, an American woman in a fur-lined leather coat is complaining that nothing had prepared her for anything so terrible as this morning, not even that movie about the kind German enamel manufacturer in Cracow who saved his whole list of productive employees, a team of lovable Jews. “It made me want to run right out,” she cried, “and
do
something for those people!”
    At a nearby table, Earwig rounds on her like a poked badger. “
Do
something, lady?” he snarls. “Like what? Take a Jew to lunch?”
    “You’re horrible!” she protests. “You don’t belong on a spiritual retreat!”
    Her antagonist stabs an underboiled potato and hoists and inspects it on his fork, thereby somehow conveying his opinion that her damned movie was exploitative and her distress irrelevant. When Ben Lama sighs and rises slowly to approach his table, Earwig is already on his feet on his way out of the room.

    T HAT NEED TO EXPERIENCE the silence of the death camp undistracted still unsatisfied, Olin sets out for Birkenau again directly after the noon meal. This time, knowing others will be coming, he enters the cavernous mouth of the arched gate—the Ogre’s cave, he thinks oddly, the cave of Glob the Ogre—and passes quickly through the tunnel, raising his hood to fend off a cold wind as he emerges in the camp and sets out toward the crematoria.
    He has not gone far when, despite himself, he glances back toward the tunnel. No one. What he sees instead, emerging slow as a horse turd from that orifice, is the snout of a locomotive and with it the shriek of iron he’d first heard crossing the Cracow road, as if that phantom transport through the forest were just now arriving, a half century late.
    Far down the platform, a figure stands facing the woods. Leaving the mess hall before the meal was finished, that scold of the young nuns had come straight here. When Olin approaches and attempts to pass, the man barks
“Hey!”
in mocking imitation of Olin’s shout earlier this morning, then steps into his path, hiking a bristled chin at him in a street challenge.
    The unshaven G. Earwig is squat, round-shouldered, compact—a build Olin associates with city cabbies and cigar store proprietors, thickset short men with loud hoarse ballpark voices. His mouth is hard-set in a short sardonic smile that never widens, and his eyes stay all but hidden by thick lids. Black leather cap, black pants, black leather jacket