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Summary
Summary
The bestselling final novel by a writer of incomparable range, power, and achievement, a three-time winner of the National Book Award.
Peter Matthiessen was a literary legend, the author of more than thirty acclaimed books. In this, his final novel, he confronts the legacy of evil, and our unquenchable desire to wrest good from it.
One week in late autumn of 1996, a group gathers at the site of a former death camp. They offer prayer at the crematoria and meditate in all weathers on the selection platform. They eat and sleep in the sparse quarters of the Nazi officers who, half a century before, sent more than a million Jews in this camp to their deaths. Clements Olin has joined them, in order to complete his research on the strange suicide of a survivor. As the days pass, tensions both political and personal surface among the participants, stripping away any easy pretense to resolution or healing. Caught in the grip of emotions and impulses of bewildering intensity, Olin is forced to abandon his observer's role and to bear witness, not only to his family's ambiguous history but to his own.
Profoundly thought-provoking, In Paradise is a fitting coda to the luminous career of a writer who was "for all readers. He was for the world" ( National Geographic ).
Author Notes
Peter Matthiessen was born in Manhattan, New York on May 22, 1927. He served in the Navy at Pearl Harbor. He graduated with a degree in English from Yale University in 1950. It was around this time that he was recruited by the CIA and traveled to Paris, where he became acquainted with several young expatriate American writers. In the postwar years the CIA covertly financed magazines and cultural programs to counter the spread of Communism. While in Paris, he helped found The Paris Review in 1953.
After returning to the United States, he worked as a commercial fisherman and the captain of a charter fishing boat. His first novel, Race Rock, was published in 1954. His other fiction works include Partisans, Raditzer, Far Tortuga, and In Paradise. His novel, Shadow Country, won a National Book Award. His novel, At Play in the Fields of the Lord, was made into a movie.
He started writing nonfiction after divorcing his first wife. An assignment for Sports Illustrated to report on American endangered species led to the book Wildlife in America, which was published in 1959. His travels took him to Asia, Australia, South America, Africa, New Guinea, the Florida swamps, and beneath the ocean. These travels led to articles in The New Yorker as well as numerous nonfiction books including The Cloud Forest: A Chronicle of the South American Wilderness, Under the Mountain Wall: A Chronicle of Two Seasons of Stone Age New Guinea, Blue Meridian: The Search for the Great White Shark, The Tree Where Man Was Born, and Men's Lives. The Snow Leopard won the 1979 National Book Award for nonfiction. He died from leukemia on April 5, 2014 at the age of 86.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Early in this novel by Matthiessen (Shadow Country), which follows a meditative retreat at Auschwitz, main character Clements Olin thinks, "Nobody knows whom to be angry with in such a place." Indeed, the story centers on the search for understanding on the part of the retreaters, and their attempt to spiritually confront the evil that occurred at the site. What makes Matthiessen's latest stand out from the scores of other Holocaust books is that Olin, a non-Jewish academic of Polish descent, is aware of the vast Holocaust literature ("You got some new angle on mass murder, maybe, that ain't been written up yet in maybe ten thousand fucking books?" someone asks him)-and feels self-doubt to the point of defeat about what he's doing in Auschwitz in the first place. More concretely, Olin is there for two reasons: one is "personal" and "too sentimental" and isn't revealed until later in the book; the other is to figure out why Polish author Tadeusz Borowski, who survived the death camp, later committed suicide at the peak of his fame, three days after the birth of his daughter. The strongest sections relate to these more concrete missions-passages about Olin's family history, in particular, stand out. But the novel focuses mainly on the abstract: what it feels like to spend days on end at the death camp-the frustration, alienation, and otherworldliness of it. Throughout, there's a hum of absurdity underneath ("Who sets out winter food for little birds in such a place?"), and at times it comes to the surface in the form of directionless bickering among the retreaters, only to fade back again into the landscape, which, it seems to Olin, is always in winter. Agent: Neil Olson, Donadio & Olson, Inc. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* After participating in three Zen retreats at Auschwitz, Matthiessen addresses that experience with what, at 86, may very well be his final novel. With In Paradise, the two-time National Book Award-winner doesn't shy away from boldly tackling the most profound of subjects. And as protagonist Clements Olin wonders, what fresh insights into the horror of the camps remain to be had, especially from someone without direct experience of the camp? Olin, a Polish-born American scholar and Holocaust authority, joins an ecumenical group that includes Germans, Poles, Israelis, Jews, Catholic nuns, and Zen Buddhists at the death camp for a fortnight of homage, prayer, and silent meditation . . . to bear witness lest the world forget man's depthless capacity for evil. Some attend to alleviate shame or guilt, while others are tourists and Holocaust voyeurs and still others are looking for some sort of closure or healing. But earnestness is overrun with grievances as, Olin observes, behind all the good will, there are so many old hates. Arguments, accusations, and old resentments erupt, disrupting any silent meditation. Olin's motivations for attending are initially obscure, but we learn that his family might not all have escaped to the U.S. when the Nazis came to power in Poland. Matthiessen expertly raises the challenges and the difficulties inherent in addressing this subject matter, proving, as the muralist Malan says, that the creation of art is the only path that might lead toward the apprehension of that ultimate evil . . . that the only way to understand such evil is to reimagine it. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The world-renowned naturalist and author Peter Matthiessen, in his first work of fiction since the 2008 National Book Award winner, Shadow Country, pens what may be the 86-year-old author's last word in this powerful novel about the Holocaust.--Segedin, Ben Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
"THE TALL YOUNG MEN" Was Irwin Shaw's name for the squad of just-graduated Ivy Leaguers who showed up at his Paris apartment in the American arrondissement in the early 1950s to beat him in tennis, drink his booze and bask in the afterglow of Hemingway and Stein. One of these urbane aspiring writers was 24-year-old Peter Matthiessen, fresh out of Yale and wrestling with his first novel, who, along with George Plimpton, William Styron, Harold Humes, Thomas Guinzburg and a few other hard-partying expats, would go on to start The Paris Review in 1953. Matthiessen, who died earlier this month at the age of 86, was one of the first of the tall young men to return to the United States after their Gallic idyll had ended. In the long career that followed, he remained above all a voyager, bestriding the world as a novelist, journalist and naturalist with an epic degree of freedom to explore his far-flung passions, which included environmental activism, Zen Buddhism and the sufferings of indigenous people. From Matthiessen's travels sprang more than 30 books of nonfiction and fiction. Among the best, and best known, are "The Snow Leopard," a 1978 account of his trek through the Himalayas with the wildlife biologist George Schaller, and "Shadow Country" (2008), a meticulous single-volume revision of his 1990s fiction trilogy about Edgar Watson, a real-life Everglades plantation owner who was murdered by neighbors around the turn of the 20th century. Matthiessen's final novel, "In Paradise," was inspired by his treks through a different wilderness. Beginning in 1996, he participated in three Zen retreats on the grounds of the death camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland. In a news release for the book, Matthiessen noted with a characteristic mix of diffidence and determination that he had long wanted to write about Auschwitz, but felt unqualified, "as a non-Jewish American journalist," to do so in a work of nonfiction. A novel, for him, was more defensible. "Only fiction," he said, "would allow me to probe from a variety of viewpoints the great strangeness of what I had felt." Yet the advantages of fiction hardly guarantee easy access into this thorniest of subjects. In fact, "In Paradise" is itself a kind of symposium on the many ways Auschwitz defies our contemporary attempts to approach it. Foremost among the novel's viewpoints is that of its protagonist, D. Clements Olin, a Massachusetts literature professor in his mid-50s who travels to Auschwitz in December 1996 to research a monograph on the Polish story writer and former inmate Tadeusz Borowski. Though "experienced in meditation practice," Olin is not officially enrolled in the weeklong Zen retreat taking place among the crematories. He has informally attached himself to the event only to pursue his research, intending to come and go on his own. As he hovers around its periphery, Olin balks at the retreat's aim of "bearing witness," through prayer and personal testimony, to the atrocities that took place there. The phrase itself seems to him outdated and irrelevant. He doubts that anyone other than an elderly survivor could possibly bear witness to anything so many years after the war. What can these earnest pilgrims hope to experience, he wonders, "beyond unearned gratification of shallow spiritual ambition? Their mission here, however well intended, is little more than a wave of parting to a ghostly horror already withdrawing into myth." Nor does Olin have much faith in the value of his own study of Borowski, a non-Jewish survivor of Auschwitz and Dachau who committed suicide a few years after the war at the age of 28, and whose harsh tales of prisoners' lives in "This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen" (1959) denied any possibility of heroism. Olin asks himself, "What could his research possibly contribute that has not, long since, with lacerating eloquence, been flayed upon the page?" In counterpoint to Olin's private misgivings are the fervent and quarrelsome beliefs of the retreat's 140 participants, among them several rabbis, two nuns, a former monk, an evolutionary biologist, a Palestinian, a few elderly survivors, some apologetic young Germans and the group's Buddhist leader, a bearded and balding "ex-hippie ex-Orthodox Jew" nicknamed Ben Lama. At evening gatherings, after the daily prayer vigils and recitations of names of the dead have concluded, there are Arendtian debates about the nature of evil, questions about the wartime culpability of the church, discussions of Holocaust fatigue, Holocaust denial, Holocaust exceptionalism. Much is analyzed; nothing is resolved. After such knowledge, what consensus? The noisiest voice in this hubbub belongs to a pugnacious character who calls himself G. Earwig, and who scuttles around the retreat shouting furious denunciations against just about everybody. Rude to his fellow Jews, violently anti-Catholic, scornful of the busloads of tour groups that in his view have made Auschwitz into a theme park, Earwig is the Mickey Sabbath of this crowd, a bitter provocateur whose energy provides a welcome contrast to the fretful hand-wringing of Olin and the other witness-bearers. It's easy to imagine that Earwig might have served as the central figure in a similar narrative by Philip Roth, or by authors of anger-fueled satires such as Tova Reich ("My Holocaust") and Francine Prose ("Guided Tours of Hell"). Yet Matthiessen chose to train his attention on Olin, a pale and waffling figure who seems to have wandered over from an Anita Brookner novel. Olin's signature characteristic is his inability to engage. He's affiliated with a meditation group back home in Cambridge, but describes himself as "a lifelong nonbeliever," prodded more, it appears, by skepticism than by faith. In the wake of a failed early marriage, he has drifted into "passive liaisons" with one unsuitable woman after another; here, among the ashes, he finds himself attracted to an insubordinate young nun, in an ungainly plot development that seems less transgressive than inert. Even his discovery of some murky family secrets - his lineage of landowning Polish Lutheran aristocrats, originally named Olinski, may not be as impeccable as he's been encouraged to believe - plays out with a weariness that rebuffs the reader's sympathies. There are some powerful episodes in the novel despite the enervation at its center. At one point, in a break from their tense meditation sessions and fraught dialogues, the retreat participants slip into a spontaneous moment of unity expressed through singing and dancing. While some remain appalled by the impropriety of this "unholy exaltation," most are delighted by the rare unmediated experience; even Olin professes to be moved. In another strong scene, an elderly former prisoner, who was silent for decades about his internment until a stroke liberated his memory, shows off a mural he's created in a nearby abandoned chapel whose completion, he hopes, will allow him to die in peace. On the whole, however, "In Paradise," like its protagonist, is so suffused with qualms about its legitimacy that it stifles its own anguish. Overwhelmed by the weight of history and commentary, it's a postlapsarian tour of a once-real place, reduced now to "a gray scene with harsh black outlines as in old news clips." What will happen to Auschwitz's strange power, Olin wonders, when "the last barracks, the last guard post, all that barbed wire and broken brick, will be stripped off and scavenged"? And might the tall young author ever have thought that his last imaginative voyage would finish at this railway terminus with such pallid bafflement? To his credit, as a novelist Matthiessen never stopped attempting to navigate through the hardest questions and the least forgiving terrain his large world had to offer. But a novel narrated with such exhaustion can't hope to provoke much more than exhaustion from its readers, even when its creator was as expansive and rigorous as Peter Matthiessen. DONNA RIFKIND is writing a book about the screenwriter Salka Viertel and her Hollywood émigré salon.
Guardian Review
Peter Matthiessen, who died at the age of 86 on 5 April, was an adventurous and contradictory man. His 11 novels and 22 works of non-fiction explored the many worlds we live in to a greater degree than perhaps any other author. He wrote about Siberia, Antarctica, the Himalayas, tropical rainforests, the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota - pretty much every exotic location he could get to. In Paradise is set in Oswiecim, Poland, a spot both more and less civilised than all of the above. Matthiessen, a Zen Buddhist, participated in three contemplative retreats at Auschwitz, and In Paradise is a fictional account of a week-long retreat that takes place in the late 1990s. Dr D Clements Olin at first seems to have no personal reason for joining the retreat. He is a prominent poet and academic from Massachusetts, a single man in late middle age, a scholar of the Shoah who specialises in Slavic poets (the novel's epigraph is a poem by Anna Akhmatova). He has a particular fondness for the writings of Tadeusz Borowski, who was imprisoned in and wrote about Auschwitz. His companions on retreat are a mixed bunch, including nuns and priests, a female academic from Israel, a Zen master who is an "ex-hippie ex-Orthodox Jew", several Poles and Germans, and a brutish loudmouth named Earwig. Olin keeps to himself, and his connections to Poland and to the Holocaust emerge slowly, as he admits them to himself. Clements is appealing, but Matthiessen's larger subject is whether any group of people, including you and me, the readers, can come to terms with the profound cruelty of the history that transpired right here where his protagonist is walking, talking and looking around. It emerges that Clements' original name is Olinski, and that his grandfather, Baron Olinski, his British-born wife, and their son, Alexei, then in the Polish cavalry, fled the family estate near Oswiecim in 1939, landed in New York, and thereafter "had extolled the glories of the ancien regime, all the way back to the old Kingdom of Poland and its grand traditions of religious tolerance, individual freedoms, literature, and music". Among the motley crew that constitute his retreat companions, Clements is as reticent about his background as he is about everything else. He explores on his own and, bit by bit, he admits to the reader, and possibly to himself, his reason for doing so: he has a small photograph of the young woman his father was forced to leave behind when he escaped to America, "a laughing girl with wind-danced hair and a comical air". His grandparents, who were distant, and his father, who was secretive, have not told him about this; his stepmother found the picture in a drawer after his father's suicide. She observes that the girl is "Prettier than I ever was, and a lot more fun than he was, from the look of her," which prods Clements to solve the mystery that his family has never even acknowledged. The other participants in the retreat all have their own reasons for being there, including Earwig. Feelings and opinions about the Holocaust turn out to be raw and unpredictable; everyone responds to the immediacy of the slaughter in ways they had not expected, and it becomes evident that, whatever the purpose of the retreat, reconciliation is not a likely outcome. The retreat does not just open them up; it dangles them over an abyss of evil that most cannot understand or process. And Clements, always bad at love, does what he should have known he would do: he falls in love. In this short book, Matthiessen's juggling of Clements' story with the stories of the others is skilful, and his exploration of their outbursts of feeling affecting and powerful. Truly, such horror cannot be processed, he seems to be saying, and yet it must be. Contradiction is his subject, and In Paradise gets at the heart of the defining tragic enigma of the 20th century. We should not be surprised that Matthiessen was willing to go there. A former CIA agent who protested against the Vietnam war by refusing to pay taxes, a white American who explored America's crimes against Native Americans and was sued for doing so, a human being who had deep insights into natural landscapes and their animal inhabitants, a child of the elite who was endlessly eager to learn - such a man might indeed be the one to take up the subject of the Holocaust and add something to that literature. In Paradise is Matthiessen's complex and worthy adieu. Jane Smiley's new novel, Some Luck, will be published in October. To order In Paradise for pounds 10.39 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk. - Jane Smiley It emerges that [D Clements]' original name is Olinski, and that his grandfather, Baron Olinski, his British-born wife, and their son, Alexei, then in the Polish cavalry, fled the family estate near Oswiecim in 1939, landed in New York, and thereafter "had extolled the glories of the ancien regime, all the way back to the old Kingdom of Poland and its grand traditions of religious tolerance, individual freedoms, literature, and music". Among the motley crew that constitute his retreat companions, Clements is as reticent about his background as he is about everything else. He explores on his own and, bit by bit, he admits to the reader, and possibly to himself, his reason for doing so: he has a small photograph of the young woman his father was forced to leave behind when he escaped to America, "a laughing girl with wind-danced hair and a comical air". His grandparents, who were distant, and his father, who was secretive, have not told him about this; his stepmother found the picture in a drawer after his father's suicide. She observes that the girl is "Prettier than I ever was, and a lot more fun than he was, from the look of her," which prods Clements to solve the mystery that his family has never even acknowledged. - Jane Smiley.
Kirkus Review
The peripatetic Matthiessen (Shadow Country, 2008, etc.) ponders Auschwitz decades after the Holocaust, in a novel that's philosophical, mordant and surprisingly romantic. Clements Olin is a 55-year-old professor of Slavic literature with a specialty in works by Holocaust survivors. That interest has been an abstraction for him for much of his career, but as he visits the Nazi camp for a two-week spiritual retreat in 1996, his understanding becomes more emotionally concrete. Clements is one of 140 pilgrims there, and the agenda includes a mix of tourism, meditation, and evening dinner discussions that inevitably turn into heated arguments about God, anti-Semitism, patriotism and man's capacity for evil. Chief among the instigators is Earwig, who rains contempt upon the visitors, whom he considers "soft and runny as one-minute eggs." Clements is tolerant of the man's profane reprimandshe's the necessary point of entry for Matthiessen's musings, after allbut the professor has other things on his mind. First of these is learning what happened to his mother, who lived near the camps and may have been sent there; second is Sister Catherine, a young nun whose spiritual unsteadiness serves as a magnet for Clements' own spiritual and romantic anxieties. Matthiessen handles these threads gracefully and without a studious reverence for his novel's difficult subject; Earwig is the book's comic relief as well as its angry id. Even so, In Paradise as a whole feels overly formal; the framing device of the retreat makes the philosophizing feel potted (today, the perils of patriotism, tomorrow, the complicity of the Catholic Church, and so on) and Clements' emotional longings, constricted. A burst of spontaneous dancing on the retreat gives the book a similarly surprising lift, but it's quickly back to hand-wringing and self-loathing. An admirable, if muted, minor-key study of the meaning of survivorship.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In Matthiessen's final book (he died in 2014), writer and English professor Clements Olin spends a week in Auschwitz's Nazi officers' quarters along with a group of 140 people who have come to pray and bear witness in an attempt to find closure and healing. Participants come from all over the world and include rabbis, nuns, survivors, and perpetrators. As Clements participates in the tours and discussions, he discovers new, painful, and shocking information about his family and his past. Although Mark Bramhall does an excellent job reading the book and articulating the various accents, it is sometimes difficult to recognize who is speaking. Verdict Recommended for libraries with Holocaust collections, though the print version might be easier to follow than the audiobook. ["Not a mere recounting but a persuasive meditation on Auschwitz's history and mythology, this novel from three-time National Book Award winner Matthiessen uses scenes of confrontation, recollection, bitterness, and self-examination to trace aspects of culture that led to the Holocaust and that still reverberate today," read the starred review of the Riverhead hc, LJ 3/15/14.]-Ilka Gordon, Aaron Garber Lib., Beachwood, OH (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
IN PARADISE One He has flown all night over the ocean from the New World, descending from moon stare and the rigid stars into the murk and tumult of inversion shrouding winter Poland. From the airport, a cab takes him to the city and sets him down in an empty square where a row of buses, closely parked, stand side by side facing a wall; the cab is gone by the time he discovers they are locked. (The imprisoned air inside, he thinks, must be even colder than this outside weather.) At the corner café he is informed that buses to that destination won't be available before spring, and that he has missed the morning train he would have caught had he been driven to the depot; there will be no other until evening. At a loss, he drinks black coffee at the counter, scowling at the unshaven traveler reflected in the dirty mirror. His antiquated Polish is eked out by the primitive English of a young couple who have overheard his inquiries about hiring a car and boisterously endorse the waiter's protest that the cost would be far too high. Concerned that a visitor to their fair land has been inconvenienced, they offer to escort him to that small museum he had mentioned: the waiter will keep an eye on his old suitcase. On the way he can ad- mire the Royal Palace and cathedral on Wawel Hill and the St. Mary's Basilica destroyed in the thirteenth century by Asian Tatars and rebuilt in the fourteenth with that strange crowned tower. "Like black icicles!" the girl cries. Thus their guest can at least enjoy the historic center of Poland's oldest city, still so beautiful, they say, because Cracow, like Paris, had been spared bomb and fire in the war. Pardon? Oh no, sir, they giggle, they have never been to Paris! Exhausted, he trails his merry guides past the medieval Cloth House on the Market Square. Mirek and his love- struck Wanda will not let him visit this city he knows more about than they do without dragging him into a shop to find a souvenir of Poland "for delight your sweetheart in America." Wanda supervises the selection of a silken lozenge of transparent amber. "Beauty gift for Mama!" This golden drop encasing flecks of ancient insects is the very essence of his ancestral earth, yet its acquisition further sinks his spirits. He knows no one who would have much interest in this scrap of fossil tree sap, never mind "delight." He has no sweetheart, only a married lover he does not much miss--in fact, is rather glad to get a rest from--and no surviving family in the New World. Were they still alive, his father and paternal grandparents would have disapproved this trip, having always warned him against returning to this region of southwest Poland just because he happened to be born there. "You have no memory of that place, and our own memories are sad," his father said. The one thing he will make sure he sees in Cracow is the Leonardo da Vinci portrait of a Renaissance girl holding a white winter weasel in her lap. Long ago, his father had shown him a faded reproduction clipped from an art magazine ("She reminds me so of your dear mother!"). Alas, on this cold Sunday of 1996, Young Woman with Ermine is locked away behind the small museum's obdurate wood door. His guides stare at the notice as if hoping that at any moment it might change its mind. Disappointed for their guest and sensing his annoyance, the poor things are looking a bit desperate. On the return, in an effort to intrigue them, he relates how over the centuries this portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, Count Ludovico Sforza's adolescent mistress, had wandered in times of war and conquest--sealed up in castle cellars, stolen, sold, and finally recovered, only to be confiscated by Hans Frank (crony and former lawyer of the Leader in Berlin, now Governor General of Occupied Poland) and displayed in his office in the Royal Palace-- "Is up there!" Eager to contribute, the girl is pointing at the fortress castle looming in the mist on its rock hill over the river. "We can visit!" shouts Mirek, eager, too. Damn it, can't they see I've had it? Inside, they are shown the empty office where the Leonardo--and perhaps also a Raphael, never recovered-- might have illumined these drab walls, doubtless vaunted as trophies, spoils of war, by hausfrau Brigitte Frank, she who styled herself "a Queen of Poland" as fit title for so grand a personage as the new lady of the Royal Palace. And perhaps it was this Nazi queen (said to have been detested by her husband) who had seen to the theft of "the Cecilia" in early 1945, when this awful family fled the Red Army rumbling across Poland from the east and installed her in their chalet in Bavaria, from where, eventually, she would be rescued by Allied soldiers rumbling across Poland from the west. "I have always been a student of that period," he ex- plains, embarrassed by their awe of so much knowledge. But as they make their way outside again into the city, he tells his rapt young friends that rather wonderfully, the masterpiece--one of but four known Leonardo portraits of women, including the Mona Lisa and La Belle Ferronnière , both in the Louvre--turned up in Paris and was eventually restored, thank God, to Cracow. "Thanks God!" the lovers agree fervently, at the same time confessing prior ignorance of its existence and their amazement that a treasure so renowned might ever have been found anywhere in their battered land. They head for the warmth of that café in Kasimierz, the old Jewish quarter named after King Kasimierz of the sixteenth century--a "Golden Age," he mentions, of be- nevolence toward Jews, who were fleeing to Poland from pogroms and persecutions all over Europe. However, his companions, though they nod and smile, cannot come up with a response to all his information, which he'd hoped might stoke a faltering conversation. He tries to mend his pedantic tone but soon falls back on his research for want of a better antidote to their blithe ignorance, instructing them that in former times, their city was a cultural center of this country's Jewish population. After September 1939, when southwest Poland was seized by the Third Reich, the Jews were driven from their houses into a ghetto over near the river, permitting Obergruppenführer Frank to boast that Cracow was the first Juden-frei city in the Occupied Territory. The girl looks at her companion. Juden-frei? What can he be telling us? "But of course you know your own history much better than some foreigner who has never been here." They share his rueful smile. "Not even to Cracow?" the girl entreats him, hand circling to summon up its fabled spell. "But you are speak okay Polish," Mirek says, urging their guest to tell them more about this " Juden-frei ": how amusing that in all their lives they have never met a single Jew, not one! He watches them chortle at the idea of knowing Jews. "I suppose that's not so strange, under the circumstances," he says. "Very few survived the war and scarcely any have returned even today. Small wonder." "Is small wonder!" Mirek agrees fervently. "Is small wonder!" the girl says. Uneasy, the lovers peer about them for some trace of missing Jews as if these buildings dark with centuries of soot were rife with Hebrew secrets. In coal fog and December rain, the thousand-year-old city lies steeped in his own weariness and melancholy. He has no wish to visit the Old Synagogue, built in the Renaissance. Thank you, he says, but he is too tired from his night of travel. "Okay, no problem," Mirek laughs. "Tired is natural." And Wanda smiles, "Okay, tired is natural, no problem exactly." The lovers hug in celebration of their juicy life (and perhaps also to warm themselves: Mirek wears only a thin white turtleneck under his light leather-type jacket and Wanda a denim jacket with over-bold white stitching and an orange faux-fox collar). So delighted are these lovers with their rare opportunity to practice English that they offer to drive their captive stranger all the way to his destination "just for the fun." Don't be silly, he protests, it is much too far, they will have to return on icy roads in the winter dark-- "No, no, sir, please, sir, you are the guest of Poland!" If he insists, the guest of Poland can help pay the petrol, is okay? "Yes, it is okay exactly," the girl laughs. Anyway her parents live in a nearby town and maybe her boyfriend can stay over, too, if Papa will permit. Excerpted from In Paradise by Peter Matthiessen All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
