Free In Paradise: A Novel by Peter Matthiessen

that hair in the museum.
    She watches intently as he reads. And he is intrigued, despite himself, because she, too, has already been swarmed by those imaginary multitudes.
    “Those feet passed right in front of me,” he whispers. “Some in ripped shoes, as you say, but many naked!”
    But she seems uninterested in any bond their visions of naked feet might create between them. Her expression says,
Never mind those feet, get on with it.
    Her hazel eyes search his face until he finishes. It’s those brows that curve down around the eyes that bring a wistful cast to her expression, a shadow of sadness, he decides. He extends the diary again, nodding judiciously. “Well said, Sister Catherine. Rather beautiful, I think.” Braving that gaze, he insists, “And please believe me, Sister, I do not feel hostile. I’m just troubled by the whole idea of papal infallibility—”
    She snatches back her notebook, sets his empty bowl in hers, and returns both to the tailgate of the food truck on her way to the tunnel, Sister Ann-Marie stumping behind. Not until she nears the meditation circle on the platform does she turn to face him. She takes a deep breath. “Sir, His Holiness . . .” She is unable to finish.
    At the circle bundled figures turn toward the burr of their low voices. He must clear things up quickly, put this bad start behind them.

    B Y MIDAFTERNOON soft snow is falling, muffling four voices that rise from the cardinal points around the circle, north, south, east, and west, intoning names from registration lists obtained by Rainer from museum archives in Berlin—long lists that represent but tiny fractions of that fraction of new prisoners who survived, however briefly, the first selections on this platform and were tattooed with small blue numbers. The impeccable lists include city and country of origin, arrival date, and date of death, not infrequently on that same day or the next.
    Column after column, page after page, of the more common family names ascend softly from the circle of still figures to be borne away on gusts of wind-whirled snow.
Schwartz, Herschel; Schwartz, Isaac A.; Schwartz, Isaac D.; Schwartz, Isidor—
Who? Isidor? You too?
The voices are all but inaudible as befits snuffed-out identities that exist only on lists, with no more reality than forgotten faces in old photo albums—
Who’s this bald guy in the back?
Stray faces of no more significance than wind fragments of these names of long ago, of no more substance than this snowflake poised one moment on his pen before dissolving into voids beyond all knowing.

    M ENTION OF NAME-CHANTING that evening sends one German, Horst, off on another rant. To speak seriously of murder facilities with impeccable registration lists is utterly insane, the man is yelling, because death camps themselves are beyond all sane discussion, even by those few who survived. So how could mere visitors hope to grasp something unrecognizable even as pathology to anybody who is not insane himself?
    Ben Lama nods. “There’s no space left on that platform for interpretation. It’s just there,” he says. “It just
is
.”

    T OWARD TWILIGHT, the sharp-winged silhouette of a small falcon crosses the no-man’s-land of charred black chimneys—the only wild thing he has seen besides rooks in raucous flight over the snow-patched fields between the great dead camp and the world out there on the horizon, no farther from the platform than those faint church bells, that far rumbling of trains.
    Olin? You’re right here in the region. Why do you wait?
He must at least try to locate some old inhabitant with a dim memory of the burned manor house or even, possibly, a clue as to the fate of that other family. He will go make inquiries, of course. Perhaps tomorrow.

    A S A LANDED ARISTOCRAT, ill-read and a bit obtuse, the Anglophile old Baron in his cuff-scuffed suits from Jermyn Street, his Lock hat and Lobb shoes from St. James’s, had been by his own comfortable