The Trial of Fallen Angels (16 page)

PART III

19

C
ity Hall in Buffalo, New York, rises thirty-two stories from the eastern shore of Lake Erie, like a great art deco frigate making a port of call. So prominent is the thick spire at the top of the building that lake pilots, navigating their barges laden with Midwestern grain and ore, use it to reckon their courses from twenty miles out. Inside the sturdy office tower, however, a different form of reckoning takes place.

As if by some tasteless architectural joke, both the Marriage License Office and the chambers of the Divorce Court are located adjacent to each other on the third floor of the building, either making a commentary on the impermanence of marriage or, perhaps more benignly, affording one-stop convenience to people entering into and departing from life’s most important voluntary relationship. The irony of this curious placement of governmental services is not lost on Amina Rabun Meinert while walking past the doors of the former, which she first visited with her fiancé four years earlier at the age of twenty-two, and now through the doors of the latter, where she intends to be rid of him. The crisp
clip-clip
of her heels echoing from the vaulted ceiling telegraphs news of her return and rouses the sleepy young clerk. He denies Amina entry into the courtroom because at that moment the court is sitting in closed session—something about abuse of a minor and confidentiality. He explains that the case of
Meinert v. Meinert
will not be called before ten-thirty. And, no, her attorney has not signed in yet.

“When the weather is nice,” the clerk says, trying to be helpful, “folks go up to the observation deck to wait.”

And the weather is indeed nice, surprisingly so for early March. A confused mass of warm southern air has raced up the coast, blessing cities as far north as Montreal with three consecutive sixty-degree days.

“Where is observation deck?” Amina asks in her broken English with a heavy German accent.

The clerk looks puzzled for a moment. “On the roof,” he says, pointing upward. “You can see the lake from the top of the building. Take that elevator over there to the twenty-fifth floor and then walk up three floors to the deck.”

“Danke,”
she says. “I mean, thank you.”

Amina tucks her handbag under her arm and walks back down the hall, past the Marriage License Office and into the restroom to check her makeup. The reflection is reassuring.

George will be fine,
she tells herself.
He understands. You cannot be with him in that way, with any man in that way. You encouraged him to go to other women, which was generous. And you thanked him by giving him money to establish a business. You owe him nothing. You are doing the right thing.

Amina touches up her lipstick.

But you have seen him cry, and you did not know that men could cry.

This plea comes from a different side of Amina Rabun, the Nurturing Amina who consoled Barratte with whispered lullabies after the Russian soldiers left the house in Kamenz. Nurturing Amina made only rare appearances and was always meek and supplicating. Survivor Amina—the dominant side of Amina—detested Nurturing Amina.

It was Survivor Amina who carried Barratte five miles to the hospital at Kamenz and then returned to the manor to bury her mother, grandfather, aunt, and cousins. One month later, Survivor Amina identified the bloodied bodies of her father and uncle in a Berlin morgue and buried them too. Survivor Amina also located her father’s trusted advisor, Hanz Stössel, the Swiss lawyer who, at Amina’s direction and in exchange for twenty percent, liquidated Jos. A. Rabun & Sons, A.G., and all the Rabun wealth—landholdings, equipment, automobiles, art collections, gold, and the Schriebergs’ home and theaters—and moved the fortune to a secure Swiss bank account. It was Survivor Amina who later bribed the Russian officers into allowing her and Barratte to board a train pulled by a Soviet zone locomotive out of Berlin on May 13, 1949, the day after the blockade was lifted. And it was Survivor Amina, not Nurturing Amina, who seduced Captain George Meinert of the U.S. Army into a bed at the Hotel Heidelberg, and then onto an ocean liner with Barratte, and, ultimately, into the Marriage License Office on the third floor of City Hall in Buffalo, New York.

But now in the mirror where Amina applies her makeup appear the brown shoulders and arms of another man. He wears a helmet with the red star of the Russian army but he has no face. Amina Rabun knows this man well. She has been living unfaithfully with him for years, and he accompanies her wherever she goes. He is a jealous, harsh man, but she gave up trying to escape him long ago, and she has grown accustomed to his presence and his demands. She can deceive him, but only for short periods.

Yes, you are doing the right thing,
says Survivor Amina.
You are doing the right thing for George and Barratte, for Bette and your mother, for your grandfather, your aunt, your father, and your uncle. For all the Hetzels and Rabuns. You will not betray them.

—

FROM THE OBSERVATION DECK
atop City Hall, Amina Rabun looks out across the vast blinding expanse of white that is Lake Erie in late winter under a cloudless blue sky. The sudden thaw brought on by the warm front has caused the thick crust of ice and snow on the lake to heave, sending huge ice floes down the Niagara River into the massive concrete supports of the Peace Bridge between the United States and Canada. If the ice refuses to break up and move downriver soon, the Coast Guard will detonate explosive charges to clear the jam. Amina can see men with ropes cinched around their waists walking on the floating slabs, jabbing long poles into the crevices to set them free.

Two men stand on the observation deck opposite Amina, smoking cigarettes. The men’s faces are in shadow, but the sun touches the top of the taller man’s hat, turning it into a gray flannel torch. The men appear animated in their discussion. One of them points at a newspaper folded in half on the ledge. Amina draws closer.

“Good-bye, comrade,” Amina hears the larger man say, flicking his cigarette over the rail.

Amina is startled by this term,
comrade
. It is a word used only by communists. Suddenly the rendezvous seems clandestine and dangerous. Perhaps she has stumbled across spies.

“Yeah, good riddance,” says the smaller man.

They both laugh and turn inside for the elevator.

Amina picks up the newspaper. The date on the front page is March 6, 1953. It is the morning edition of the
Buffalo Courier-Express
, and the headline reads “Stalin Dead.” A seemingly benign black-and-white photograph of the dictator looks up at Amina from the paper. She smiles at the news of his death. But her smile quickly fades when she learns the cause of death.

A stroke in the middle of the night? For the leader of the troops who destroyed my family and my nation? It should have been a bullet. A thousand bullets. He should have died the slowest and most painful death in the history of the world. But the news is good just the same. Very good. And the air is crisp and warm, the sky blue, the sun bright, the day hopeful. Stalin’s death is certain to emancipate me from the nightmares, and twenty-five stories below, a judge will soon emancipate me from the strains of a marriage of convenience.

And here, Amina thinks, is an interesting coincidence. Two weeks earlier, George had asked her to attend Ash Wednesday services with him. She had said yes, but she still did not understand why she agreed. Could there be a connection to the death of evil and a change of fortune? Certainly one had been hoped for. Amina had not been inside a church since the funeral of her father, and not once with George, making him all the more bitter. George Meinert wanted all the trappings of a family, including his beautiful wife sitting in the pew beside him every Sunday in the church where he had been baptized. Amina denied him not only the physical intimacies of marriage but also these tiny morsels of relationship and respect.

Yet for some strange reason, on the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday, just two weeks before their divorce would become final, Amina relented. Perhaps in apology for the times her absence had caused George such pain? Perhaps to disprove his conviction that kneeling before an altar would somehow make her a different person and save their marriage? Or perhaps she had begun to forgive God for all that had gone wrong?

But Ash Wednesday had such a strange liturgy, the most primitive and ghoulish of all the Christian holy days. How bone-chilling she found it for a priest to whisper those terrifying words: “Remember that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return.” And then, to be certain his grim message was not soon forgotten, to feel his thumb coated with the ashes of last year’s palms smearing an ugly black cross upon her forehead as a badge of mortification.

Yet to Amina’s surprise, a miracle of sorts had taken place during the service. She heard a far more subversive message that afternoon than she had ever heard in a church before.

“In ancient days,” the priest had said during his homily, “Lent was observed as a time when notorious sinners and criminals who had been excluded from the church were reconciled with the congregation and God.”

As the priest spoke these words, Amina believed she could actually hear the cries of all the penitents daring to ask for forgiveness, and the joyful weeping when open hands rather than fists were extended. At that instant, Amina Rabun Meinert wondered whether this is what Christianity offered the world—not sacred marks and secret words, but reconciliation.

On that Ash Wednesday in 1953, Amina Rabun Meinert accepted this impossible offer—on behalf of herself, yes, but, more important to her, on behalf of her father and uncle, whose sins committed during the war were unspeakable and who could not ask for forgiveness themselves. Indeed, on that miraculous Ash Wednesday, Amina Rabun sought forgiveness for all things done and left undone. And for this momentous act of contrition, she expected nothing less of God than an end to the punishment of her family. For she had long believed that the murders and rapes in Kamenz were a punishment for the sins of her father and uncle.

Now Amina looks again at the newspaper, and then out across the vast sparkling expanse of the lake. The fresh air and promise of the coming spring fill her lungs. She smiles inwardly. Yes, the death of Joseph Stalin was as fine a symbol of a new covenant with God as were the billions of tiny rainbows sealed into ice crystals across the frozen surface of Lake Erie.

20

W
hen the High Jurisconsult of Shemaya deemed that I had spent sufficient time digesting the life of Amina Rabun, he summoned me back to his office in the infinite corridor. The hallway seemed even more cheerless and institutional than during my first visit—a sort of department of motor vehicles for souls. I figured Luas was the chief technocrat, although after everything I had seen so far in Shemaya, I began wondering whether the bureaucrat, or the bureaucracy itself, was corrupted.

I was furious with Luas for not informing me of Elymas and the possibility of seeing Bo and Sarah. He would know I had gone, of course, as he knew everything about me without me saying a word. I expected the scolding that Elymas had warned me would come, but instead Luas smiled benignly from across his desk and said: “So, how shall we present Ms. Rabun?”

We were both playing the same game of evasion. “Just as she is,” I replied.

“Naturally,” he said. He was dressed in the same sport coat, trousers, and open-collared shirt he had been wearing when he found me bleeding and naked in the train station. I wore blue jeans, a T-shirt, and sneakers—the outfit I typically had worn to my office on weekends to catch up on paperwork. He rocked back in his chair. Three thin ribbons of smoke rose into the stale air from the two candles on the desk and the pipe he held in his left hand. “But which part of her?” he asked. “We can’t replay every moment of her life. That would serve no purpose. Our role as presenters is more selective. We must present the choices she made.”

Choices. The same word Haissem had used in the Courtroom to begin the presentation of Toby Bowles: “He has chosen!” Chosen what? To wait in a train shed with thousands of other souls while bureaucrats work the algorithms of their eternities?

“What choices are those?” I asked.

“The choices Yahweh promised Noah we would make,” Luas replied, gripping the pipe between his teeth and talking between them. He was obsessed with Noah and the Great Flood. All his metaphors eventually ended there.

“Did you get here by drowning?” I asked with a smirk.

“No. I was decapitated, actually.”

I looked at him skeptically. “You seem to have a head,” I said.

Luas smiled. “Yes, well, you put it there, so I suppose I do. But during my lifetime, I looked nothing like you now see me. There are no bodies in Shemaya, Brek, only thoughts. You’re free to dress me up any way you like. When the thought of me as a combination of the mentors you respected during your life no longer serves you, my appearance will change.” This reminder of the irrevocability of my death was painful. Most of the time, Shemaya seemed like life, a Disney World sort of place filled with wonder and surprises—and sometimes terrors, but, nevertheless, life. The idea that none of this was real—the candles, the desk, the office, the train station, even our bodies—was not only difficult to comprehend but still deeply upsetting to accept.

“How did it happen?” I asked, preferring to discuss Luas’s death over my own. “I mean, how were you decapitated? Were you in an accident?”

Luas puffed thoughtfully on his pipe. “One must begin at the beginning to answer such a question. Why did Yahweh promise not to destroy the earth after having just destroyed it?”

Like I said, he was obsessed. “I think we went through all this when I got here,” I reminded him.

“Did we . . . ? Oh, yes, you’re right. Sorry. I’ve confused you with one of the other new presenters. Let’s pick up where we left off, then. What if Noah had disobeyed?”

“Asked and answered, your honor,” I said impatiently, invoking my courtroom training for protecting witnesses from badgering.

“He’d have been killed with the others,” Luas said, answering his own question. “The price of disobedience was exceptionally high, don’t you think?”

“Well, the death penalty
is
the ultimate punishment,” I said. I was in a foul mood. I wanted him to know I was upset.

“But this was the ultimate death penalty, Brek. Not only Noah’s life but the lives of his family and the entire human race. The animal kingdom as well. Disobedience meant the end of everything, not just the end of Noah. The stakes could not have been higher.”

“You’re all about choices,” I said. “What choice did Noah have? Build an ark or everybody dies? People make him out to be some kind of hero for doing God’s bidding. But he had the biggest gun in the world pressed against his head. Who wouldn’t build an ark? He was just doing what anybody else would have done to save their own neck.”

Luas placed his pipe in an ashtray on his desk and stood up.

“Precisely. Now we’re getting somewhere,” he said. “So, how shall we present Ms. Rabun?”

“Precisely
what
?” I asked.

“What’s the first thing Noah did after the Flood?”

“I don’t know.”

“He made a burnt offering.”

I shrugged. “If you say so.”

“That’s what the Bible says,” Luas replied. “Why make a burnt offering?”

“I don’t know, to give thanks?”

Luas began pacing the small room. “Correct, and what was it worth, this offering?”

“I guess what all offerings are worth.”

“Really?” Luas said. “This man, Noah, had just witnessed the mass murder of millions of people and animals. As you said about building the ark, who wouldn’t have been grateful for having been spared after all that? But look at it from God’s perspective, Brek. What did God really want in all this?”

A good question. What did God really want? Why even bother with us? “Respect, I guess,” I said finally. “Respect. Love. The same things everybody wants.”

“Precisely. Now, is that what billowed up from Noah’s burnt offering? Respect and love? Or was it something else. The stench of fear, perhaps? The fear of instant death and annihilation—”

“But—”

“Throughout history, the tendency has always been to read the story of the Great Flood from mankind’s perspective, from the perspective of the accused:
man’s
fall,
man’s
destruction,
one man’s
obedience,
one man’s
deliverance,
one man’s
thanksgiving,
mankind’s
guaranteed survival. But perhaps the story is told not so we understand the condition of man, which we know all too well. Perhaps it is told so we understand the condition of
God
.

“Noah built the ark because the price of disobedience was intolerable. He offered the sacrifice because he wanted to appease God. He didn’t do these things out of love for God. Not that we should criticize Noah . . . he did exactly what was his to do. But if we look more closely, we see that it was divinity itself, entangled in the greatest of all ironies, that cheapened the gestures, desecrating both Noah’s obedience and sacrifice. The story of Noah is the story of God’s need for man, Brek, not man’s need for God. It also explains why, because of that divine need, the possibility of evil must be permitted to exist for there to be any possibility of love. It explains why a serpent inhabited the Garden at the beginning of time, and why it will continue to coil around our feet until the end of the age.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Look,” Luas said, “what changed in those forty days was the very essence of God’s relationship to man, not man’s relationship to God. God changed
His
ways. We didn’t change ours. Think about that. Humanity paid a terrible price but we won. Yahweh recognized the problem instantly, the moment the waters receded and the sacrificial fire was lit. By punishing man for disobeying and turning away, the Flood had destroyed love itself. It is essential that you understand this, Brek. For true love to exist, the option not to love must also exist. When love is demanded and extorted, it becomes fear, and fear is the opposite of love.

“So, Yahweh had a fateful
choice
: He could accept the possibility of sin to achieve the greater prize of love, or He could endure the false praises of creatures too terrified to do anything else. He chose the former, gifting to humanity the freedom to choose. So critical is our understanding of this act that Yahweh selected the refraction of sunlight into the many colors of a rainbow as the eternal symbol of our freedom to follow many different paths. No matter how far we may stray, no matter how much it hurts—God or us.”

Luas returned to his chair behind the desk.

“We are all heirs to that promise, Brek. All of us, including Amina Rabun. But that promise is both a gift and a curse. With the freedom to choose comes the responsibility for one’s choices. The Courtroom is the place where those choices and responsibilities are reckoned. So, I ask you again: How shall we present the case of Amina Rabun?”