City of God (33 page)

That's the scene. Ex-
Times
guy makes it to the mall a few blocks away, throws the bike into a dumpster behind the A&P, and drives back to his hotel. He should have called for help, seen to the old man—but how could he explain himself, or what had brought him to this place? Sickened, pulse racing, he lies down, fearful of a heart attack. Instead he dozes off. Wakes hours later disgusted with himself and determined to forget the whole thing. He checks out and goes to the airport to wait for a flight back to New York. Picks up an evening paper and sits at the bar. Reads that a hit-and-run bike killer is at large. Some kid saw the whole thing from his window. Imprecise description of biker, a heavyset white man. The victim an elderly refugee, age eighty-one, of such and such a number on such and such a street, who had some years ago been accused of gaining entry to the United States by hiding his wartime role as a machine-gun platoon sergeant in charge of mass executions of Jews from the Kovno, Lithuania, ghetto, a charge that was later dismissed for lack of evidence. Neighbors say. . . he was a good kind man. . . who lived alone since the death of his wife. . . had something of an old world elegance about him. . . tipped his hat to women in the street. . . came to his porch on Halloween with handfuls of candy for the trick-or-treaters.

—Of great songs, standards, composers will tell you the basic principle of their composition: Keep it simple. The simpler, the better. You want untrained voices to handle it in the shower, in the kitchen. Try to keep the tune in one octave. Stick with the four basic chords and avoid tricky rhythms. These composers may not know that this is the aesthetic of the church hymn. They may not know that hymns were the first hits. But they know that hymns and their realm of discourse ennoble or idealize life, express its pieties, and are in themselves totally proper and appropriate for all ears. And so most popular ballads are, in their characteristic romanticism, secularized hymns.

The principle of keeping it simple suggests why many standards sound alike. One might even say a song can't become a standard unless it is reminiscent of existing standards. Maybe this is why we feel a new good song has the characteristic of seeming, on first hearing,
always to have existed. In a sense it has. Just as we in our own minds seem to have always existed regardless of the date of our birth, a standard suggests itself as having been around all along, God-given, and waiting only for the proper historical moment in which to make itself available for our singing.

—Finding the ghetto archive seems to have transformed Pem. Eastern Europe has slimmed him down, he is still substantial, but his bulk seems more contained if not exactly muscled, he moves more fluidly and looks put together, washed and groomed, perhaps because he's cut his hair, rid himself of the ponytail, and now that his stomach is somewhat flattened his trousers don't droop over his shoe tops. Is there renewed vitality, mimetic elation moving through him? I'm persuaded that setting off on a quest, a self-appointed mission, and succeeding can surprise a fellow out of his usual humors. That he's actually done something! I won't mention this to either of them, but there is a literary template here, call it Christian knighthood, and the fact that his lady is Sarah Blumenthal, a rabbi, a widow who lives with her two children on the Upper West Side, is what makes it possible.

Also, something darker here, something he wouldn't allow himself to feel, a successful competition with a dead man.

He had only the names in Joshua Gruen's notebook. Vilnius, once Vilna, is a heavily rebuilt city, given World War II and the Soviet taste for high-rises. A picturesque river with grassy banks winding through it. The Neris. Same river my little runner Yehoshua speaks of.

What did it feel like to be in this town of history architecturally erased, but still there in the buried bones, and in the brains of the children, their ethnic resolve booming like the football they kicked through the schoolyard? He took the streetcar that stopped outside his hotel door, and the bell rang and the car swung around corners and the pantograph flashed like lightning and Pem felt the menace lurking under the town's modernity, the old historic demons with their sharpened pitchforks riding around in the latest-model cars and taking their business lunches in the fine restaurants.

He hunted down every name listed in Joshua's notebook—people
Joshua had seen and not yet seen—and made no headway. The church had long since disappeared in which the priest Father Petrauskas had agreed to hide the ghetto diary. The father himself was no longer alive. The site of the church was now given over to a six-story apartment house with terraces.

The chargé d'affaires at the American embassy remembered Pem and arranged an appointment for him with a priest at the office of the Vilna diocese, but that too yielded nothing. The Russians had torn up the city and its German defenders in 1944 and not much was left after that but rubble.

One afternoon—he didn't know what it could possibly accomplish—Pem took a cab to that little burned-out synagogue in the poor part of town in front of whose doors Sarah's husband was fatally beaten. The synagogue was being preserved by the city as a ruin. Pem talked to the caretaker, an elderly Lithuanian woman, who spoke a broken English, and he paid twelve litas to stand inside the doors and see the remnants of dark wood reading desks and pews arranged in a square around a central table. A wrought-iron frame with sconces hung over the room. Sunlight pouring through the fallen-in roof lit up the dust suspended there, motionless, as if set in place permanently by the conflagration of years before.

The old woman remembered the incident of the American who was beaten. It was dark, she was in her cottage behind the synagogue, and she heard shouts and screams. It was she who found Joshua bleeding in front of the doors. She called the police.

Before that she had heard someone knocking on the synagogue doors, and if the knocking had continued she would with some irritation have gone out and around to the front of the museum—that is what she called the synagogue, the Jewish museum—and told whoever it was that it was closed. But then she heard the shouts.

Pem realized at this point that Joshua had never talked to the old woman, that he hadn't had the chance. He now said to her that the American who'd been beaten was a rabbi and had come to Vilna to seek journals from the ghetto that had been held for safekeeping by a priest in Vilna. Yes, the woman said immediately, that would have been Father Petrauskas, my own priest from the Church of St. Theresa on Kaunas Street, and she crossed herself. We all knew what he had
done, she said. And that wasn't the only thing. Not at all. Sometimes he hid people. Oh yes, he was a Jew lover. He thought the business with the Jews was not right, he said it was not right what was being done to them. Nobody told on him, he was a good man and meant well, he was a better priest than most. The father lived through the war, but the war destroyed his church and he was never the same. I used to cook him a meal now and then when he lived in the home they have for them and Josip would bring it to him.

Who is Josip, Pem asked.

He is my son, he is my only surviving child, my youngest, the others were all killed in the war. He was too young. He was an altar boy for the father.

Where is Josip now, Pem asked.

Where would you think at this hour, at his business, he is a tile setter, if you want to know, the best in Vilna.

And so Pem tracked down this Josip, a man in his fifties, who told him that the Russians had come to loot Father Petrauskas's church and discovered a battered wooden chest that the father kept in the closet of his own room in the rectory, where he slept. The chest was padlocked, Josip said, it was sealed with tape and wrapped around with thick rope. The soldiers, with their arms full of candlesticks and silver, called for an officer. When the officer arrived he was unlike the men, he seemed very civilized. He smoked a cigarette with a holder and his uniform was quite clean. Josip was afraid the father would be taken away, but the officer questioned the father politely and the father told the truth—that what was in the chest were writings of Jews. The officer, with a black crayon, wrote a description of the contents in Russian, then signed his name and serial number right there on the top of the chest and then ordered the soldiers to remove it without disturbing the seal and that was the end of the matter.

“My training as the Divinity Detective stood me in good stead,” Pem told me. “Clearly that had been an intelligence officer questioning the father. The Russians swept up anything that might conceivably be of importance, even though ninety-nine times out of a hundred they would never look at it again. Moscow is a really interesting place right now. The vaults of the KGB are like a flea market. It took some time, but they'll sell you anything if the price is
right.”

—The chest is impounded at JFK until, at Pem's request, he can get in touch with the Justice Department and have one of their attorneys present when it is cracked open, as customs has insisted it must be. If the archive includes documentary proof of the identity of the ghetto commander, S.S. Major Schmitz, it will have to resist a challenge in court, and so the circumstances of the unsealing of the material have to be irreproachable.

And now, the arrangements having taken the better part of two weeks, the day has come. Pem and Sarah ride out to JFK in a taxi. It is a late weekday morning, it is raining. They do not speak. Sarah uses her cell phone to remind her helper, Angelina, that the boys have half a day of school because of a teachers' conference and will have to be picked up at lunchtime. Sarah's raincoat has fallen open, she is wearing a suit, and Pem notices how well shaped her pantleg is above the knee. The observation directs him to an intent reading through the rain streaks of the color-coded directions along the airport highway.

Pem's new triumphalist self-regard is on this morning absent. Rising behind his eyes is the old familiar bleakness. It is not that Sarah isn't tremendously impressed by what he's done. On the contrary, she seems to have awakened to him in some way, she seems to have moved with him into an acceptance of their growing intimacy. But he wonders about his own motives—if he is incapable of an act that does not contain its own corruption. Could this have been at heart no more than a seductive stunt? He had flown into Moscow, he had made calls, spoken as a priest to the fathers, a diplomat to the attachés, a con man to the hustlers, he had flashed his roll, laid on a lot of attitude, and fearlessly penetrated the KGB. Of course they were all like beggars with their hands out, but he didn't know that, did he?

Certainly, as an act of contrition, it hardly qualified. It was an adventurer's act of contrition.

In his gloom, the curves and forks and ramps of the airport road system, and the various terminals on the horizon, seem to constitute another kind of city, a city of unearthly scale whose denizens are huge flying machines, one of which suddenly emerges from the overcast and roars over them, its landing gear like talons.