Free In Paradise: A Novel by Peter Matthiessen Page B

suspicion?
” Rainer yelps. “What nonsense! My country of Germany was guilty! Guilty, guilty, guilty! We admit this freely! Our own historians were already documenting every horrible detail in the very first days after the war!
A thousand years will pass and still Germany’s guilt will not have been erased.
Hans Frank, the head Nazi in Cracow, wrote that in his death cell memoir!”
    (Borowski said it better, Olin thinks:
In German cities the store windows are filled with books and religious objects but the smoke from the crematoria still hovers above the forests.
)
    “Well, that’s
something
to our credit, at least,” sighs a German woman sitting nearby. Already offended by Earwig at her own table, she is taking refuge in their conversation.
    “Bullshit.” Earwig’s voice is low and hard. “Give credit? To Kraut butchers mopping up the blood after they finish? Postwar Germany is crawling with old Nazis and fucking skinheads. Does this
hausfrau
”—he points his full fork at her face—“honestly believe that under the covers it’s any less anti-Semitic than it was before?”
    “
Ja, ja!
I don’t only belief it, sir, I
know
it—!”
    “Or Poland? Or anywhere in Europe?” He turns back to his food. “In your dreams, Fräulein.”
    There’s no bottom to this sonofabitch,
Olin thinks. But rather than provoke another scene, he turns his back on Earwig with a loud scrape of his chair and changes the subject. What sort of Shoah education is received these days by Polish youth? he asks the table: he is thinking of Wanda and Mirek. All unhappily agree with Earwig that anti-Semitism, deep in the European grain, is probably ineradicable. “Polish kids made dreadful signs to passing cattle cars,” Eva recalls, drawing a weak finger across her throat. Anders says that his fellow Swedes, despite their bland and neutral reputation, are just as prejudiced as all the rest. He doubts that bringing schoolchildren here on field trips as a cautionary lesson would accomplish much.
    “Besides giving ’em some good ideas for next time, maybe,” Earwig calls, the words dripping from his tongue like cold drops from the tip of a dirty icicle.
    Anders brays and others snicker and the coven of Warsaw intelligentsia looks sardonically amused to hear the youth of Poland being jeered at. And Olin, amused, too, but determined not to show it, wonders aloud if even in this camp’s darkest days—or in those darkest days perhaps especially—there weren’t little eruptions of black humor.
    “In the extermination camps? Never,” old Eva whispers with a palsied shaking of the balding skull of airy white hair that perches atop her spine like a worn-out duster. “Not ever. Never.” She cannot recall seeing an inmate smile in all her long years in the camps, not even the
Kapos
: that expression those brutes wore, she moans, could never be mistaken for a smile. And she recalled once more how
Kapos
greeted the new prisoners by pointing at the smoke: “The only way you will ever leave this place is up those chimneys”—that was
Kapo
humor. Poor Eva is so shaken that when Olin apologizes for being insensitive, she chooses not to hear him, and when the conversation turns in a new direction, the old woman falls aside in a kind of trance.
    Dr. Anders Stern commandeers a stilted silence, warming instantly to his own favorite subject. Auschwitz-Birkenau, he pontificates, is all the proof needed that as a species, the human animal has never lost the most primitive traits of the primate predator-scavenger on the savanna, the incipient killer. Morally, man’s consciousness has made no progress in all the millennia since his graffiti first defaced cave walls. “We regress, in fact,” he says, as Adina Schreier, attracted by any opportunity to debate her fellow academic, draws up a chair. “Our man-ape ancestors, being merely animal,” he is saying, “were surely less sadistic than the
Homo
species we call ‘
sapiens
’—”
    “Yes,